How are humans going to become extinct? • Hacker News Board

Re: How are humans going to become extinct?

#21

Post by yen223 » Wed, Apr 24, 2013, 10:10 AM UTC

Nursie wrote: post #20

yen223 wrote: post #13

My take: Humanity will survive for a good long time, but it turns out that the laws of physics means there's no practical way to leave our solar system. We die out once the Sun extinguishes. I'd like to be proven wrong.

Hmm, interesting. I was going to go with our hard-deadline for life on earth, 800 million to 1 billion years in the future the sun will have baked us so hot there's no liquid water left. But you're probably more accurate. It's entirely conceivable that by then the increased solar output and our own tech advances will have made it possible to take up residence in other places in the solar system, which may even have b…

That's possible too. But eventually, even the universe will succumb to entropy. I guess it's just a question of whether we die out in the solar system, or in some other star system.

Re: How are humans going to become extinct?

#22

Post by adrianN » Wed, Apr 24, 2013, 10:14 AM UTC

Udo wrote: post #17

yen223 wrote: post #13

My take: Humanity will survive for a good long time, but it turns out that the laws of physics means there's no practical way to leave our solar system. We die out once the Sun extinguishes. I'd like to be proven wrong.

If we put the financial resources behind it, we (meaning: a very few of us) could leave the solar system right now. It's just that we lack the technology to do it right, with minimal risk and a lot of comfort. This is an engineering problem which we could solve, but choose not to. Putting together a generation ship to leave the system would probably succeed, but it would also utterly consume all our resources. The re…

Yes, the Wikipedia lists a couple of technologically feasible options of leaving our solar system [1], some of which date back to the fifties. Using for example nuclear pulse propulsion we could reach Alpha Centauri in about 150 years.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_travel#Proposed_m...

Re: How are humans going to become extinct?

#23

Post by yen223 » Wed, Apr 24, 2013, 10:18 AM UTC

Udo wrote: post #17

yen223 wrote: post #13

My take: Humanity will survive for a good long time, but it turns out that the laws of physics means there's no practical way to leave our solar system. We die out once the Sun extinguishes. I'd like to be proven wrong.

If we put the financial resources behind it, we (meaning: a very few of us) could leave the solar system right now. It's just that we lack the technology to do it right, with minimal risk and a lot of comfort. This is an engineering problem which we could solve, but choose not to. Putting together a generation ship to leave the system would probably succeed, but it would also utterly consume all our resources. The re…

Energy is possibly the biggest barrier towards future space colonization. It is entirely possible that we discover some new source of energy that allows us to:

1. Send a sustainable human population out of the solar system;

2. Travel to an inhabitable planet which may be millions of light-years away;

3. Geo-engineer that planet to the extent that it can self-sustain a moderate human population.

None of these steps is trivial. The pessimistic side of me thinks that we may actually never overcome any of these challenges.

Re: How are humans going to become extinct?

#24

Post by kamaal » Wed, Apr 24, 2013, 10:27 AM UTC

yen223 wrote: post #13

My take: Humanity will survive for a good long time, but it turns out that the laws of physics means there's no practical way to leave our solar system. We die out once the Sun extinguishes. I'd like to be proven wrong.

>>but it turns out that the laws of physics means there's no practical way to leave our solar system.

Note that at one point of time, laws of physics said lighter than air flying machines were impossible.

Yet here we are, we have the airplane.

The problem is we don't know physics completely to say if something is impossible.

Re: How are humans going to become extinct?

#25

Post by diroussel » Wed, Apr 24, 2013, 1:55 PM UTC

Carwajalca wrote: post #4

bambax wrote: post #3

Everything eventually comes to an end: civilizations, stars, individuals, species. Dinosaurs ruled the earth for a longer time than elapsed since they've been extinct. Almost double, in fact. Humanity is extremely recent; at the most, homo sapiens sapiens is 200,000 years old -- and history goes back 10,000 years. There is no special reason why humanity would (or should!) survive indefinitely.

Disagree about the "should". Why would we not want to survive indefinitely? And when it comes to species, humans are clear outliers. I'm not sure how well one can extrapolate human future from what happened to the dinosaurs.

> humans are clear outliers

In what sense are humans outliers?