Likely fate of human race?

WEST wrote: »

I agree in the next 100 or so years we will get a foot hold in space, once that happens we can mine other planets for resources or maybe we will have developed true alternate sources of energy. 100 or 400 years is nothing compared to the lenght of time humans have been on the planet so we just have a bit more to go. I know it sounds like Sci Fi, but thats where we are heading.

Maybe. maybe not. It could just as easily happen that space travel at least human space travel is a fad that will pass. At least for a while. Think that's a bit out there? Well if you were a Roman citizen back in the day, you wouldn't think concrete, pottery making, sewage systems, large scale government etc were a fad, yet with a subtle change and the fall fo that culture many of those things took hundreds, sometimes many hundreds of years to get reborn.

The moon shots were a PR exercise for the cold war. That's it in a nutshell. Today? There's no need for it and little impetus to spend those resources to do it. If Osama Bin Laden as his mates were heading to the moon the yanks would have a moonshot within 5 or 6 years. Tops. The original moonshots were in that time bracket.

seamus wrote:

I don't agree with Wibbs's idea that we'd be reduced to roaming bands of scavengers, but a prolonged war would certainly collapse every notion that we have of society. We would probably maintain the knowledge and the technology to rebuild our infrastructures, but in a much more tribal way. Without a government, I would imagine that most countries would split into townships or provinces with their own rules and governance.

The roman example(and there are others) would make me worry though. I'm sure roman knowledge didn't just stop overnight, yet stop it did and they had a much less complex society with much less reliance on technology. Now many geeks will say the web will save us all and keep that repository of knowledge. Cool, but without electricity that's gone. Bye bye baby. Technologies themselves can change where old data storage devices go out of fashion and data contained on them may be lost. You could have the meaning of life itself on an original floppy disk(that were floppy:)), yet useless if you don't have an original drive and the electricity to drive it. So it would be back to books and rebuilding old tech. A lot of technology now is beyond the ken of most when compared to the past. Look at cars. Our grandfathers would do simple(and complex) maintenance that most now wouldn't have a clue to do or be allowed to do by the manufacturers.

As I said before I reckon disease may get us and throw us back into the middle ages before a war by itself would. Wars tend to drive technology more than destroy it..

We have a reliance and a trust in medical technology and hope they would save us. The medical types themselves wouldnt be so blase. They know pathogens adapt at a raid rate even with our best efforts. Penicillin was one of the greatest advances in medicine and live extending in general. Clean water and immunisation would be only two I can think of in the same bracket, yet those same antibiotics are losing their effectiveness over time. Can you imagine a world where they were utterly useless and alternatives weren't found? Antivirals may help in a pandemic(as vaccines would be likely a way off(look how long AIDS has been with us), but would we be able to make enough, how effective would they be and even if they were effective if only one in ten were incapacitated and had to be cared for by others the strain on society would be huge. Damn near as bad in real terms as a war. If it went up to 30% incapacitation/death then it's pretty much game over for society as we know it.