The Ultimate Fate of the Human Species

[imlemuel]

Certainly we have to deal with sustainability issues and energy is THE limiting factor, but those are questions for the near term. (and yes I'm considering the next couple of thousand years, near term...at least in the context of the question asked.)

Almost every conversation I've ever been in, concerning the future of mankind gets as far as, "sustainability"...then crashes into the wall. Let's assume for a moment that we ARE clever enough to develop sustainable energy sources...and ARE able to feed the world through bioengineering and increases in productivity and sustainability (or something else we haven't even thought of yet).

If your answer is, "We won't. We're going to fail and go extinct." then go away. This thread isn't for you.

What happens NEXT? Not in the next century, but in the next millennium, the next ten, hundred, or thousand millennium? If the answer is, "We all die."....wel, that's something of a conversation ender, so let's assume we don't.

What THEN?

[Chas]

(01-10-2012 10:01 AM)imlemuel Wrote:  Certainly we have to deal with sustainability issues and energy is THE limiting factor, but those are questions for the near term. (and yes I'm considering the next couple of thousand years, near term...at least in the context of the question asked.)

Almost every conversation I've ever been in, concerning the future of mankind gets as far as, "sustainability"...then crashes into the wall. Let's assume for a moment that we ARE clever enough to develop sustainable energy sources...and ARE able to feed the world through bioengineering and increases in productivity and sustainability (or something else we haven't even thought of yet).

If your answer is, "We won't. We're going to fail and go extinct." then go away. This thread isn't for you.

What happens NEXT? Not in the next century, but in the next millennium, the next ten, hundred, or thousand millennium? If the answer is, "We all die."....wel, that's something of a conversation ender, so let's assume we don't.

What THEN?

Well, 'ultimate' means ultimate. We are going to go extinct along with the infinite thinning of matter due to the expansion of the universe.

If you don't mean ultimate, please rephrase the question.

[imlemuel]

Tsk, tsk, tsk...you're doing the same thing a theist does when they jump straight from the origin of man to the origin of the universe and just blithely skip over the 14 BILLION or so years in between. You can do better, I know you can.

Ok, I'll grant you that we'll probaly end when the stars go out, but what about all that time in the middle? Yeah, he SAID ultimate...but I suspect you're smart enough to know what he meant.

[imlemuel]

...and I wanna have sex in Zero-G too...but I'm afraid at this point in my life if it's gonna happen at all, it'll have to be on a charter flight with http://www.gozerog.com.

All we have to do now, is get an entire plane-full of people with same goal, who don't mind having sex in front of each other and can come up with $5000 apiece.

Each parabola gives you about a minute and a half of weightlessness. That ought to be long enough, hadn't it?

[GabrielSun]

(01-09-2012 04:31 PM)Bucky Ball Wrote:  Ya ok. I agree. So go have sex. I'll stay here and try to figure out how to hop over to a different universe.
BTW, if Dark Energy and Dark Matter are properties which arise from the fabric of space itself, you can stop worrying.

Dark matter is likely just undiscovered matter, like the gigantic halo of gas surrounding the Milky Way that was recently discovered.

[GabrielSun]

I think we have plenty of sustainable energy sources. They just cost more than oil, so they're not viable.

As far as our long term fate, we do know the ultimate fate of the Earth will most likely be a superheated rock with all extra material blown off by the force of the red giant stage of Sol.

By then will we have evolved to the point where we are a stage 2 or even 2.x civilization? The question I think we should be asking is not where our society will be in the future, but whether the cosmic event that a civilization must get past to evolve into an interstellar species is in our future or our past.

[Chas]

(01-10-2012 10:34 AM)imlemuel Wrote:  Tsk, tsk, tsk...you're doing the same thing a theist does when they jump straight from the origin of man to the origin of the universe and just blithely skip over the 14 BILLION or so years in between. You can do better, I know you can.

Ok, I'll grant you that we'll probaly end when the stars go out, but what about all that time in the middle? Yeah, he SAID ultimate...but I suspect you're smart enough to know what he meant.

Your comparison reeks of passive-aggressive.

No, I assume people use words that they understand. If the OP does not mean ultimate, then how am I to know what he means?

[Birdguy1979]

(01-09-2012 12:15 AM)Phaedrus Wrote:  

(01-09-2012 12:12 AM)Bucky Ball Wrote:  A lot of your assumptions are not true. Increasingly, it takes less energy to sustain an individual, not more, as efficiencies, and economies of scale, increase.
You also presume, that there will not be a population crash, which is inevitable. As hoc said, we will be bio-machines. (see Ray Kurzweil). Expanding beyond Earth, is not in the cards, in the foreseeable future. Maybe the universe is cosmic consciousness, already ?

I disagree. Compare more advanced parts of our global society to the less advanced. It takes more resources and energy to maintain a western standard of living that it does to maintain the standard of living in someplace like India, or more dramatically in Ethiopia or Tanzania.

On the timescales I'm talking about a population crash doesn't matter unless it takes us back to the bronze age and we never regain a technological civilization; something I find a dubious proposition itself.

In the event of a huge population crash, people will group together in various ways. First you have the super rich that will obviously have their VIP shelters to hide in until it is safe. You will have people like me that don't really seem to be able to thrive in a world that operates the way ours does, but givein an oportunity to gather or make weapons could be a real threat to the filthy rich when they finally come out of hiding. You will have those that are only thriving now due to taking advantage of the welfare system. They will probably be the first to go, because they are either extremely lazy or are unable to care for themselves. I have many skills, so I could probably ride out whatever is causing people to die off. Given time without rules, I might just thrive.

[imlemuel]

(01-10-2012 04:56 PM)Chas Wrote:  Your comparison reeks of passive-aggressive.

No, I assume people use words that they understand. If the OP does not mean ultimate, then how am I to know what he means?

I've noticed your tendency to dismantle other people's sentences, criticize their choice of words, argue over definitions and terminology, and nitpick over how things are said, while pretending not to understand what was meant.

While in many cases you may indeed be correct, you are in no way advancing the conversation. In fact you are retarding it, by driving away people who's level of literary precision isn't up to your high standards. People like you are exactly the reason that people like my wife and hundreds of others like her won't post to forums.

Let me re-phrase what I was trying to say earlier, in a way that should be very easy to parse, and can't be mistaken for passive-aggression.

You're being a dick. Please stop.

[Phaedrus]

(02-10-2012 10:15 PM)imlemuel Wrote:  In fact you are retarding it, by driving away people who's level of literary precision isn't up to your high standards.

Don't mean to be a dick, but "whose"