How would world culture, politics, etc., change if there were truly a certain date for the end of the world?
Suppose astronomers discovered some object out in space that was sure to pulverize the Earth in 5000 years. Accept this as an immutable fact. It is clear to everyone that the world will end on June 24, 7011. Everyone, for the most part, accepts the astronomers’ proof that this is going to happen. There is no serious controversy on this issue. Everyone also accepts that there is nothing to be done about the problem. June 24, 7011 is the end of the world. Set your TiVo.
How would the world change with the dissemination of this information? Five thousand years is so far into the future that no one alive today will see it happen and nor will anyone alive today know anyone who will be alive in 5000 years. What subtle or profound changes in the world might we notice?
For me, I would be quite disappointed that the whole journey of our world and people would be ending so soon. I would be more active in supporting efforts to explore space. I suspect that others would be more supportive of space exploration. For one, people might advocate looking for space-borne objects that might smack the Earth sooner than 5000 years. If that thing is out there, perhaps there is something else.
However, humans being what they are, people might just ignore the issue until the time frame became closer. Five thousand years is beyond any time people are likely to care about. Even the time of Christ was only two thousand years ago. We have no idea what the world will look like in five thousand years any more than humans could have predicted the twenty-first century world even one thousand years ago.
So, what do you think? What if the time were shorter? Instead of the end of the world in 5000 years, what about just five hundred years?
I guess we start looking at colonisation. I don’t know what we’d achieve in 5000 years, but it’s a long, long time. Just look at what we’ve done in the last 300 years. Heck, just in the last century we discovered relativity and quantum physics, went to the moon, and created the computer.
Where in the OP did it say asteroid? Assume it’s a black hole. In fact, assume we discover that every star in the galaxy is going to go supernova in exactly five thousand years and flood the galaxy with lethal radiation.
Yeah, my premise wasn’t really that people would work the problem itself. Let’s assume that the problem is unsolvable. Maybe 5000 years is too far in the future to be meaningful. What about 250 years? That is much longer than a lifetime, but not so long that it is unimaginable. The sun may go nova in billions of years, but that time frame is so far distant as to be completely meaningless.
If Earth but only Earth is doomed (say we discover Planet X, and calculate that in 5,000 years its orbit will smack it right into Earth), I would expect a major boost in interest in space travel. Five millennia to colonize Mars, guys!
If the whole Solar System is doomed (a rogue star will crash into the Sun), same as above, although the challenge is obviously more daunting. Now it’s five millennia to make it to the stars.
If the whole galaxy is somehow doomed–in a subtle way, at least, that might be pretty demoralizing. Sure, given enough billions of years, everything is doomed anyway, but having a hard and fast date that’s a long way off, but still sort of comprehensible in a way “5,000,000,000 years” isn’t, and which it really would be hopeless to expect the human race to escape–I think you’d see upticks in nihilistic hedonoism and old-time religion. That might fade some as the generations go by and the news settles back into the collective backs of our minds (although obviously there would be a big surge in A.D. 7010) but I think there’d be some real and lasting effects on the human psyche. To the extent previous generations believed Judgement Day could be just around the corner, kind of a reversion to an older form, perhaps, but now completely universal and affecting even the most secular-minded.
Even if the problem is really, truly, genuinely unsolvable, it’s going to be very hard to get people to actually accept that. I’d expect that we’d spend 5000 years, or 250 years, or whatever, trying very hard to solve it, even if we ultimately failed.
Basically, the human race will dick around expending its eforts and resources upon more immediate concerns, until such time as the demise of the Earth becomes immediate enough, by which time it will be too late to do anything useful.
The folks in generations who do not expect to be alive when the disaster arrives will say inspiring things like “don’t worry! Necessity is the mother of invention! Cavemen couldn’t have imagined the moon landing, so we can’t imagine how the people of the future will solve this problem, but they certainly will!”
The folks who eventually have to face the demise of the planet (either in person, or knowing that it will strike their children or grandchildren) will wail “what do we do now? Why didn’t anyone start working on this problem as soon as they knew of it?”
Although in that case the end of the world in relatively immanent. This actually sound a bit closer to the premise of Niven’s Ringworld, in which an explosion at the center of the galaxy is moving outward at lightspeed and will eventually destroy the galaxy. Basically Mangetout’s assessment is right, the human race is dicking around ignoring the problem, while other races are taking more proactive actions.
I don’t think it would change much, until the people who would experience it get closer to the event. Except I think it would go up, because the frequency of the activity that produces children will skyrocket. Unless that old trope isn’t true.
You underestimate the human will to survive. In 5000 years, we’ll find a way to solve the problem. That’s what we do. Whether we blow up the asteroid, build an artificial sun, sell McDonald’s franchises in the event horizon of the black hole, whatever. Humans are not going to just roll over and die. That’s not in our nature. Look at the progress made in the last thousand years. Multiply that 5 times, and throw in a couple of exponents and such, and that’s where technology will be by the time this “world ender” gets here.