All the ‘heat’ in the Universe will be spread out across the Universe. Consider our sun…pretty hot. Move a light year away from it and it’ll be pretty damn cold. That’s with 100 billion stars in our galaxy running not to mention a hundred billion other galaxies.
Now snuff out all those stars so none are left burning. Colder still and it will continue getting colder forever (always approaching but never quite reaching absolute zero). Eventually the stellar remnants will evaporate (and planets and asteroids and everything). Way, way, WAY down the road individual atoms will be spread roughly evenly across the Universe. The Universe being as big as it is that’ll mean one atom per cubic…I don’t know, say mile.
There will literally be no energy left you can do work with (or so little and so spread out as to be practically zero).
To me that’s a rather depressing end to the Universe…I’d much prefer a Big Crunch but no one consulted me before creating Everything.
The most depressingly real possibility is that we simply won’t be here in 1 billion years time. If you look at the average lifespan for species on earth, you have to do something pretty extraordinary to last for that long. Especially for large mammals like us.
Uhm, you guys are forgetting that we are not like any other species that died out, or that is living now. We have vastly superior intellect and knowledge. Unlike non human animals that have to adapt to our environment, we make our environment adapt to us. Yes, there are catastrophes that can wipe out large populations at a time, but wiping out the entire human race, I may be overly optimistic, but I just don’t see that as happening. With all our weather satellites, and other ways to predict weather patterns, if something like an ice age was coming, chances are we would be able to predict it, and prepare for it. I could be wrong, but, that’s my opinion anyway.
Bingo- Joel hit it on the head. We aren’t like other mammals. You cannot say the apples will be wiped out by the cold, because oranges are. I think our line will continue- as in intelligence that sprang from humankind. Wether this be our biological ancestors, our uploaded intelligences, augmented humans, AI, or what have you. Will we be human? Dunno. Are you the same person you were 10 years ago? 20? How much of the “original you” is left? A few brain cells, fat cells and muscle cells? Just about everything else replaces itself. How about your personality. Probably not. We change- so will we as a species. We adapt.
On a different note- I think a much more viable mode of space travel, baring FTL would be to cargo some sturdy biomass- mold or something. Upload all of the crews personalities, perhaps several times and with many redunancies in the systems, and when you get close to the system or arrive in said system, set the ship to grow a bunch of fresh bodies. This will prevent severe damage to the genes that might occur in a ship without some sort of magical or super technological advanced shielding system. It will also allow the original crew members to be alive upon reaching their destination…
I think given a hundred more years or so will will have sufficent technology to do this.
Personally I- or what could be called epimetheus- plan on being around in 5 billion years. Perhaps just not in this system Scientists Find What Type Of Genes Affect Longevity <— with this coming up so soon, the next 10-30 years, double my lifespan? I may just be around when the technology for uploading or augmenting myself for longevity is available. I certainly plan for it and look forward to it. (if it takes longer, so be it- I take care of my health and mind so that I can live as long as is genetically possible for myself- 80-100 years perhaps, of course medicine helps that)
A. The Last Question by Isaac Asimov
B. Bigger than Worlds and Ringworld by Larry Niven
C. The Time Machine by H. G. Wells (the movies don’t cut it in this discussion)
Former hominid races have survived up to 1 million years. We have the technical capability right now of creating Homo Superior, but we won’t (this week, anyway) because…well, for various reasons.
The technological singularity is coming (search the web for that one) so the answer is: someone smarter than us will take care of it.
Possible answers:
Control the processes in the sun so it doesn’t go to the red giant phase.
Move the earth outward so that everyone is comfy.
Move humanity to some other place (or places)–see “Ringworld.”
Give everybody a protective suit and sit back to enjoy the show.
Build a Dyson Sphere–see “Larger than Worlds”.
Nothing–see “The Last Question” and “Time Machine.”
Oops, The Last Question is the end of the universe, not the end of the world. Oh well, read it anyway.
Special or not, every quarter billion years or so a big honkin’ asteroid slams into the planet and wipes out half or more of the species on it, including substantially anything that’s had the opportunity to get big and resource-needy.
If the next one hits before we’ve found a way off this rock, we’re done. Intelligence or no.
Answers to 1, 2, 4 and 5 at best do nothing more than delay the inevitable. Sooner or later our sun will quit working. If you want to keep it working longer you need to import fuel (hydrogen) to the star in VAST quantities. Further, just droping hydrogen on the sun doesn’t help…hydrogen in the core doesn’t mix with hydrogen in the rest of the star. You need to find a way to inject hydrogen into the core as well as removing helium that is building up as waste in the core. Considering the effort, if even possible, it’d be FAR easier to just go find a new planet to live on.
I don’t think that’s necessarily true. It’s not as if every species in existance is wiped out in situations like that, only the ones that can’t survive. And humans are survivors. Sure, we’d lose a lot of technology, but we’d we can redeveop technology, and having been there once, and having many things preserved in written form, we’d get back up to speed a lot faster, I think.
Extinctions in the event of asteriod collisions are most likely caused by environmental and ecological alterations. For one, there’s the temperature change as a result of suspended dust from the impact. However, humans have already shown that they can survive an ice age.
No, I don’t think an asteroid impact would kill off the human race. It’s just set us back a few thousands of years.
It probably would wipe us out if it were large enough. It is estimated that in the K-T impact, believed to have resulted in the extinction of the dinosaurs, that 90% of the Earth’s biomass was burned up. We may be survivors, but even we can’t make food out of rocks.
Strangely enough, that is not what you want to do at all. The more massive the star, the faster it burns.
A better idea is to take hydrogen away from the sun - or from any star - using the total output of the star in energy it is possible to lift hot hydrogen from the photosphere and store it in orbit, for later use…
this process is called Star Lifting… if you reduce every star to the luminosity of a red dwarf, you will be able to prolong the life of most stars by billions of years.
The difference that I see is that dinosaurs didn’t understand things like farming. Even with most of the biomass gone, it seems reasonable that humans would be able to cultivate some sort of crop (if anything edible were left).
Depending on the circumstances, human may not be able to stay alive long enough to rebuild civilization, but we stand a better chance than most other species.
I would think that if we don’t destroy ourselves in the next few hundred years, we will be able to devise technological solutions to the asteroid problem, and to begin colonizing our solar system and beyond. In fact, there’s probably little in terms of technological problems keeping us from having a rudimentary asteroid/comet shield in place in the next 20 years, if the political will existed for it.
I would suspect that exploring deep space, and even the oceans, will eventually lead to artificial evolution of our bodies to adapt to weightlessness, high pressures, long spans of time, new planets, etc. Much of this may also use or even require cybernetic adaptions. If the more fringe end of sci-fi involving uploading of minds and self-replicating nano technology prove valid, all the more quickly this will happen.
I would expect that in no more than a few hundred years, we may begin creating new evolutionary branches from the homo sapien main trunk. I’d be surprised if any species recognizable as people as we know them were to exist within half a million years or so. If we can live longer, and engineer out insufficenties to the basic homo sapien form, we’d have a pretty different looking animal in general. And there may be some changes made simply for cosmetic, fashion, or other such purposes
I’m sure if some remnant of humanity is still around billions of years from now, there will be plenty of technology for Earth to be spared it’s destruction, if we choose to. Or again, if we don’t hasten such a scenario before then.
Except that galaxies don’t “collide” like a couple of meteors do. The space between stars is enormous. Andromeda and the Milky Way could pass right through each other. The process would take millions if not billions of years and shapes of both galaxies would be unrecognizable, but don’t expect a gigantic explosion.
I remember reading once that if two galaxies collide, chances are very good that none of the individual stars will collide. The galaxies would be massively reconfigured, shape-wise, but it wouldn’t be anything like an asteroid impacting a planet. … and on preview, this point has already been made. Oh well.
I know bigger stars burn faster but if you look at my proposal more closely you’d see that wouldn’t happen. If all you did was dump hydrogen (a LOT of it) on the star then you’d get the effect you are talking about. However, only 10% of what you drop will get fused…the other 90% will just add to the star’s mass thus increasing the core pressure and end up fusing hydrogen faster. If you somehow stick your hydrogen directly into the core you need less hydrogen and and don’t add as significantly to the mass of the star while increasing the available fuel. I also mentioned getting the helium that is there out thus balancing the mass issue.
Of course that whole idea is probably nutty to the point of impossibility but if we’re postulating Dyson Spheres why not this?
The simple fact that we know it is coming and have the intelligence to grasp that fact and figure out a way to survive it is huge advantage. As if that isn’t an understatement.
All those other arguments other posters have suggested as well. Farming is a good one- Even if that asteroid hits us in the next 10 years, we are sufficently advanced enough we could survive quite a bit. Pull water from the atmosphere, the ocean, or underground rivers and filter if necessary. Food we can grow, genetically alter so they are hardier and can survive harsher temperatures, we can store food- loads of perservatives can cause cancer, but as long as we procreate first…who cares.
The explosion might cause quite a drop in biomass and human life, but if only 5% of mankind survives, we will make it.
By the same logic I think that a signifigant portion of humankind will surive a nuclear war if it were to occur. I know the general population believes we have enough nukes to wipe life off the planet or blow it to smithereens, but all estimates I have seen suggest we couldn’t even wipe clean a small country. (I.e North Korea) I believe a signifigant portion of humans would survive a deadly virus- out of 6 billion, I would imagine at least 500,000 people would be immune. That is enough to jumpstart civilization again.
Everybody seems to posit the worst possible scenario without considering the hardiness of the human race. Look at Ethiopia, look at those that live in the desert. For gods’ sake, look at the freaking eskimos.
Not only has evolution produced a powerhouse when mankind got his brain, by default it produced a creature that will be VERY hard to kill off. Damn near impossible. (other than say, supernovae, quasar blast, or some other cosmic event that has no chance of survival for any life)
Oh please. We are not invincible. We are very fragile beings. A fall from only 6 feet can kill you if you land wrong.
Look, if a sufficiently large asteroid impacts the Earth so as to allow only 5-10% of the population to survive, there’s a good bet the survivors will follow fairly quickly. For one thing, in an event that devastating, our technological infrastructure upon which we rely so heavily will be destroyed. We’ll have only weeks to establish a food source, and given that after the Chixulub impact, the sun was blocked out by suspended dust for 3-5 years, I don’t see that happening. Gro-Lites™ don’t work without electricity, and I doubt the power grid will remain operational after the impact. Considering the average person knows jack squat about power generation, agriculture or even general survival skills, it’s not looking good. Remember that the people who do know about such things make up a very small percentage of the population. I think the optimists are failing to realize just how devastating such an event would actually be.
