Imagine an astronomical event that will kill all life on Earth in exactly 100 years. The precise method of annihilation is not important, but the conditions include:
The news is given authoritatively to everyone and believed to be true by nearly 100% of the population, including you, and quickly becomes part of our collective consciousness; There is no chance to avoid the extinction nor any chance to escape to a habitual environment within the 100 year time-frame; Until the last day, Earth will remain essentially unchanged and as habitable as it is now; on the last day, scientists predict the event will cause between 1 and 2 hours of extreme physical suffering before life is extinguished.
Therefore, the event will not effect you directly, but possibly your kids and probably your grand-kids and their progeny, if you have/will have them.
Questions: Will this knowledge significantly change your lifestyle (e.g. no more recycling; no more throwing back undersized Giant Tuna, etc.), or change your psychological/emotional outlook (e.g. chronic malaise)? If so, how? Would you decide to not have children, or advise your kids to not have children, based solely on this knowledge? Would today’s society change significantly? If so, how? Do you predict a greatly reduced human population by ~6 months before T-0 (e.g. due to reduced birthrate of that generation; mass suicide/homicide, poor living conditions via apathy/negligence, etc.).
Bonus Question: If scientists predicted (and again, they are believed) that there was a ~25% chance that ~25% of the population (chosen by lottery, possibly your progeny) could be transported to a pleasant, terraformed planet by 100 years, but it would take an immediate and continued investment of enormous global resources to reach that possible goal, such that everyone’s standard of living was reduced by 25%, would you vote to give it a try?
100 years is a long,long time, and we can expect a lot of technological changes. So whatever the nature of you hypothetical “astronomical event” we might develop technology to deal with it ; say, to deflect an incoming asteroid, or put up a force field to protect the earth from deadly radiation, or whatever is necessary.
So, I predict no major change in society at first.
But for the grandkids 85-90 years later: if there’s still no technical solution in sight…it’s party time!!!
HELL YES. My most optimistic conclusions would be that a few thousand people might be able to flee to Mars, but if there’s any chance of any number of people of escaping we have to devote every resource to it-treat it like a total war.
BTW its not impossible a few of the younger Dopers might be around for the End-considering the maximum human life-span in modern times is 122 years.
I don’t think the first scenario is humanly possible. People will always believe there is a way out. If nothing else, by religion.
Bonus question: yes. The species is more important than the individual. The human race may well be the only intelligent life in the Universe, making us the most important thing in existence.
In the relatively short period of time necessary to find a way to stop something that appears to be unstoppable according to all known physical laws, we will expend enormous resources dedicated to saving mankind from extinction, and almost all of it will be wasted. The population will run amok leading entirely selfish lives without regard to others, taking anything they carry, keeping what they can hold. Wars and riots will drive the world economy down leading to more violence and chaos and mass death. With a few years left before armageddon a dedicated group scientists will find a way to avery disaster, either by transporting the dwindled population away, moving the earth out of the path of destruction, or stopping the event entirely. Mankind will toil tirelessly in the remaining years to implement the plan, however greed and selfishness will overcome the effort and we will be a day late and a dollar short and at least spend the 1 or 2 hours in hell that a few deserved and caused for the rest.
Before this could happen, there would have to be a major change to political institutions and/or human nature. Some sort of extreme non-democratic world government would have be in place to make people much more prone to believing in experts. And, since political brainwashing is never fully effective, people would have to become more gullible.
Some scientists might say this, but they wouldn’t really be acting as scientists, but as soothsayers. How could someone know that one these 100 year projection percents wasn’t ~1% or ~99% rather than ~25%? They couldn’t. They’d have to guess.
As stated above, the premise – that almost everyone thinks the same about a question with enormous emotional raminfications – requires dictatorship. So there’s no voting involved.
If the premise is changed to one where the bad outcome comes much more gradually, and there isn’t a dictatorship, here’s how public opinion might appear:
If the bad effects won’t start for a century, you can count on people being more skeptical than today with global warming.
As for spending 25 percent of global GNP on a widely believed hypothetical, no matter how ominous, that’s way too expensive. You’d have to come up with something cheaper.
There was recently a TV show discussing this scenario, but with a 75 year timeline. Evacuate earth.
I don’t think it would affect most people. In the real world, it wouldn’t be 100% of people who accepted this fate. Something like 40-60% of Americans think Jesus will come back in the next 50 years, and it hasn’t changed how we interact with the world in any meaningful way. Apocolyptical thinking seems fairly common among humans, but civilization goes on. I don’t think this event would change our culture much since it would be theoretical until the very end.
I’m curious what this accepted knowledge will do to the economy.
Certainly, after 71 years nobody is going to be able to get a 30 year mortgage, but I imagine that an end date to the money-making game is going to wreak havoc with the way we are used to our economy working.
Environmentalism and saving resources would stop being major concerns. I think the new priority would be getting back into space and developing extra-planetary colonies before the big extinction. Of course, there’s no way everyone will be able to evacuate - or even a significant fraction. You have to wonder if there would be a backlash among the billions being left behind against the few tens of thousands that might be able to get out.
What do most scientist believe will be the state if the earth in 100 years if greenhouse gases are produced at the expected rate? Not world ending, but if the prediction is dire, then that gives you something of a real world example.
I would imagine that in the begaining everyone would be glued to their TV sets looking for the government to give them answers. The best possible solution might be to go on as if nothing is about to happen and then as the event starts to actually unfold have a mass suicide option allready in place. Our unborn great grandchildren would actualy be the ones to die. As a species we are likely one of millions of life forms that will come and go within our universe. Our planet is really not that significant in the scheme of things.
Would we have to go to the trouble of colonizing another planet? If it’s an asteriod, all we might have to do is just hang out somewhere (like the moon) and wait a while for conditions to become favorable for life again.
And we wouldn’t have to save that many people, as long as we froze enough embryos. The selection process for ambulatory humans would be so fraught with politics that I’m thinking we’d want to put more energy into preserving our genetic diversity as much as possible.
I know the OP doesn’t think the mode of destruction is important, but I disagree. If the knowledge comes to us via collective consciousness, then this implies a supernatural/spiritual element. For lots of people, this will be a reason for hope and celebration (and perhaps vindication). People will try to reconnect with their religious roots and shape up their behavior, thinking maybe if they pass the “test” they will be rescued somehow… So there may actually be pockets of increased order and diligence, at least initially.
And then some people will exploit the situation to aggrandize their religious belief, telling others that the world is ending because of Them. And if Them were removed from the picture, then everything would go back to normal. If we have enough of these people, we will see all kinds of destruction way before God’s Hammer strikes.
Given a supernatural/spiritual element, there will be a lot of resistance to a scientific/technologically-based solution. Frozen embryos in space pods will be seen as a defilement of God’s will. And respectful disagreement won’t be sufficient. There will be so many acts of sabotage that it will be a miracle if anything is successfully launched.
There’ll likely be all the rioting and looting associated with any breakdown in civilization.
But the way you phrase it here, implies either that we’ll all lead entirely selfish lives or that it would be rational to behave that way.
If oblivion was excuse for that then why do more people not behave like that now? I’m neither immortal nor a parent, yet I have concern for others.
I don’t think there’s any need to fight the hypothetical. Imagine it is a freak astronomical event that everyone can see, spectacularly, in the sky, and that visibly is getting bigger/nearer/brighter.
I’m saying many people will lose all hope and optimism. They’ll see no reason for conditions to improve because no matter what it will be for naught. As time passes and the event draws closer people will have less and less motivation to act selflessly so there’s no reason to consider times to ever be better.
That is the darkest possible portrayal of the situation though. As you point out humans tend to care about others even without specific motivations, but societies invest a great deal in maintaining social order because many people are unable to ignore their selfish impulses. The purpose of this is to avoid the chaos which those as cynical as myself would consider inevitable.
Ok. The point I thought you were hinting towards is a common, and annoying one. That if we didn’t think there’d be a tomorrow we’d all gangrape kittens. Theists sometimes argue that the only reason anyone behaves well is because of the potential for an afterlife…
Now you’ve clarified your point I agree completely.
I think that humans are naturally altruistic, caring etc, but also naturally aggressive, callous. Exactly how those impulses play out depends on the feedback from society.
If there is a perception, accurate or not, that everyone else is behaving selfishly then we are inclined to do the same. Come the end of the world this may be what many will do.
What could one do, given the fact that there is nothing that can be done to halt the end, just continue living.
? # 2 : since there is a negative chance of any of my peers being selected to carry on the race , i guess i would have to say; NERTZ.
Honestly, I don’t really see how it would affect much at all. Assuming it were well accepted by science, we’d probably see a redirection of research toward either how to stop whatever it is, or developing some sort of escape plan or at the very least a space ark that would perhaps hold some DNA samples, and a sum of all of our greatest knowledge and achievements for whoever may come across it.
From a personal level, it wouldn’t impact me at all. Really, short of major advancements in medical technology and a lot of luck, it’s highly unlikely I’d be alive. Even any children I might have would be quite old by then. I think a lot of people would bet even money that we’d self-annihilate, the Biblical Armageddon, or some other natural disaster would probably happen first. I’d keep living trying to make the most of my life.
Hell, even if the time frame were a lot shorter, I’d change very little. Tell me the world ends for sure in 10 years? I’d probably be less inclined to have kids then, but really until maybe the last couple of years, I don’t see much changing, and the last couple would be hell. Either people start deciding to just live on what they have or not care about consequences and we fall into a miserable anarchy, or to just try to keep order because we depend so much on eachother, we end up in a police state, I’d just try to beat the punch of that and go find a nice reprieve from however society breaks down.
What’s the expiration date on a frozen embryo? If it takes two or three years (or more) for the earth to get back to something resembling normal, how many of those embryos will still be viable?