The end of man.

What do you mean by the end?

Of the solar system? Galaxy? Universe?

Hate to be pessimistic but seems inevitable that we'll be wiped out at some stage given the vast swathes of time involved. Hope it's later rather than sooner though.

Maybe we'll die out but creatures that have DNA like ours will live on for a bit longer. Not a great comfort, though!

It's very weird thinking about this sort of thing - imagining a world with no Monday mornings, no Coca Cola, no boards.ie (or equivalents given advances/ regresses in technology). Even weirder when you think of all the thought produced, all the knowledge discovered, all the concepts formed by human beings down through the centuries - it could all disappear so easily(yeah, so maybe aliens on far-distant planets will pick up tv signals someday but it's doubtful they'd be able to make any sense of most of it, plus given the typical standards of tv programming, they wouldn't get such a great view of us:)) Or trying to imagine settlements of a new, distantly-related but extremely different, intelligent species in the places we call Berlin, Connemara, whatever!

I know I'm being philosophical rather than scientific here but it's that kind of topic - on a rational level, it's possible to imagine a world with no humans as was the case recently if you look at things on a geological timescale but on the other hand, on a more visceral level, it's hard enough imagining your own death, let alone that of the species as a whole. As if our brains had evolved to bypass that thorny little issue to some extent... I guess it's so, I mean a species that spent days moping about death or thinking about the distant future instead of foraging wouldn't get too far.


Sykeirl, looking forward to #3 of your happy fact sigs, so far they've been interesting if somewhat depressing:)

Man is very adept at adapting to situations, when we reach the stage of involvment with heavanly bodies for our own survival (sucessful involvement) then maybe we might just keep going till andromeda crashes into our galaxy in a few thousand billion years time....who knows...

There's a thing.

What's the point, really, of trying to survive, when everything will end with the heat death of the universe? Even if we survive till then, we're eventually doomed as all the matter will disintigrate into random kinetic energy so diluted throughout space that none of it can be used.

Unless someone manages to find another universe near the start of its life? Assuming other universes exist, of course.

Just to get back on Terra Firma we'll proberly wiped out by a virus rather than anything spectacular - something like SARS
or a hospital superbug which beats any isolation or potion...

Mike.

Originally posted by sykeirl
Given the fact that nearly every species that has ever existed is now extinct (we're talking about 99% of species that have lived on earth) can we say that we won't go that way.

While there's obviously an interesting (if entirely speculative) discussion to be had on mankind's prospects for the future, it's worth pointing out that there's a bit of a flaw in the reasoning of the original post.

99% of species that have ever existed no longer exist, certainly; however, this isn't necessarily due to an extinction-level event. Evolution dictates that older models disappear and are replaced by newer models - so for example, Homo Erectus would be counted as one of your extinct species, and yet I'd contend that this was a highly successful species which specialised further down the line in order to become Homo Sapiens a few generations of speciation later.

A lot of lifeforms have been wiped out by climate change (the primary cause of extinction), but those that have survived have generally thrived. It's not all doom and gloom for life on Earth


As to my own thoughts about the topic; I agree wholeheartedly with those who say that it's important for us to escape the cradle. There are probably not a lot of things on Earth which could drive the human race to extinction right now, but it's still a bit scary that all our eggs - encompassing tens of thousands of years of development - are in one basket. The human race has the ability to survive anything that's thrown at us; it's just a shame that all too often, our astonishing capacity for self-preservation and self-advancement cripples our pursuit of the goals of species-preservation and species-advancement. Witness the disparity between the budgets of the US Military and NASA...

Depends on what level you're considering it, Sarky. Multiple different species of man did exist alongside each other at the same time, as is usually the case with any form of speciation (interesting piece by Ian Stewart from Warwick about the mathematical reasons behind this in New Scientist last week, actually), and eventually the dominant form (in our generation of evolution, Homo Sapiens) wins out. However, at some point prior to the development of Homo Sapiens, our genetic code evolved from another species of homonid (the fossil record isn't complete enough to say what the exact event sequence was). That species is now extinct, we now exist in its place - but that species could quite certainly be said to have been a success.

Yeah - most natural disasters are Poisson distribution (meteors, for example; whenever you hear someone in a newspaper saying we're "long overdue" for a major meteor strike, feel free to shake your head and cluck at his ignorance, since there's no such thing under Poisson distribution), but those relating to earthquakes and volcanoes generally aren't. Plates continue to move and magma continues to flow at fairly constant rates; these build up pressure on faultlines or magma chambers, and at a certain amount of pressure, something gives and you get an earthquake or an eruption.

Unlike standard Poisson distribution, here there are certain steadily mounting pressures on the probability, so it's possible to make a measurement for when it's most probable that an event will occur - albeit a rough estimate, since the number of external factors affecting events like this is huge.

In Yellowstone the margin for error is tens of thousands of years, and even if the current interesting stuff happening there DOES telegraph an eruption on the way, the eruption itself may be hundreds of years off. On the Pacific Rim faults around California, however, the margin for error is a bit lower - probably down in the decades rather than the centuries. Poisson distribution is no comfort for anyone living in LA...