[Closed] Quick question re the future of the human race

There is a 14 yr old girl hoping to do just that ^^

No need for population control as Kimbers has said. It will naturally level out at 10bn BECAUSE the world is progressing and more and more people are coming out of poverty therefore having less kids.

There are always going to be specific concerns and problems around the world. 30 years ago it was the cold war where we were convinced we would all end up in a nuclear armageddon, but in actual fact it all worked out just fine and in the end all because of David Hasselhoff (who'd have guessed that) and now when we look back it was all an big exercise in muscle flexing and posturing and paranoia with neither side actually willing to press the button. And as dire as today's problems are, in 50 years time they'll be sorted, and sorted for the better and we'll look back on it and comment on how we were all predicting the end of the world.

So calm down and carry on. Don't believe me? You don't have to. I know it is very unpopular at the moment to point to experts who have actually looked at facts and drawn conclusions from facts, but here goes:-

[url= https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/15/post-truth-named-word-of-the-year-by-oxford-dictionaries ]Sums up the year I think[/url]

It's easy to get dragged into a "festival of doom" mindset, but I am sure once the current fad for empowering stupid people is done with, things will pick up...

Even Stephen Hawkin believes the human race will be extinct within 1000 years.. ok, so that's quite a long time to kill ourselves to death. But he's not the only one to think that way.

Money can't buy immortality, it may prolong death, but death is the only outcome. Even advances in science and biometrics will only replace worn out bits. Money or power will never replace spirit, that's the only thing humans have, and that isn't strong enough I feel for humans to progress.

There are too many people here on this planet, we've been very lucky not have been blasted by an asteroid or radiation. But I think extinction will come from within, not from above. Humans have a propensity to kill or be killed, the flight or fight instinct in some is stronger than in others. We already have humans in places in society willing to be the first to poke the stick, we see it daily. Take away basic human needs and society fails, factions gather and with that we only need a despot or desperate power driven looney to provoke retaliation.

Sadly, we're doomed to fail, but I'll be long gone by then..thankfully.

If we're going to have a cull let's start with the useless eaters.
Urrghh. Perhaps not.

It's all BS anyway. The more I think about it we're all brains in a bucket somewhere Matrix style. Once we crack the human brain and can download ourselves onto an SD card and live our lives plugged into a Raspberry Pi then what's the point in having actual bodies and living an actual life? Consciousness is just how our minds experience and makes sense of all the senses that we're bombarded with therefore our bodies are nothing but transducers sensing the outside world so our brains can survive. Once we have the technology to transfer our conciseness onto an SD card then our bodies have no further use and we can all live together in a virtual world forever. Constantly living different lives over and over again.

This is all very possible and probably from a technology perspective, so who's to say it didn't happen long ago?

I look at people like Putin and Assad (I know that no government is completely squeaky clean), knowingly bombing innocent civilians and wonder how they are the same species as me? the answer is that they're just like the bosses of a level in a video game and the lives being lost are more like being re-booted and they'll be 're-incarnated' elsewhere in the matrix. It's the only way I can make sense of it anyway.

Wobbliscott- are you serious??

Wobbliscot - you should read the Altered Carbon trilogy by Richard Morgan. Covers some aspects of what you said, but with noir and violence added in!

As to the future
[img] [/img]

100,000,000 bits of space junk floating around the earth..
Considering we've only been chucking stuff up there since the 50's, that's one helluva lotta crap we've just discarded.. but it's a human trait, we build, we ravage, we harvest, we shit, we throw away without a care.

[img] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cxj3V_NUQAAngU6?format=jpg&name=large [/img]

I miss Cressers

I'm sure that before long there's going to be a chuffing great rock drop into the middle of one of our oceans, or maybe Siberia, Tunguska being a dry run, or else the Yosemite super-volcano will finally come to the boil, and there'll be bugger-all we can do about it.
Then the cycle will start again, just another mass-extinction.

km79 - Member
If you could get put into a deep freeze sleep just now and be brought back to life in 1K, 2K whatever years time to see what it would be like, would you?

No

Either because some time in the not so distant future, the cryogenics Co will be bought by an interplanetary mining Corp who as back payment for your storage have you tied into a thousand year contract working on a rock the other side of Jupiter. Or you don't have a contract because you were certified dead hundreds of years ago and you're a non existant slave on a rock the other side of Jupiter...

Theres plenty of room for people, we just need to stop the congragating in a few areas. That'll buy is another 200 years then we need another planet or less people.

Fermi Paradox. The solution to which I propose is intelligent life eventually kills itself off either through war or man made disaster.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

It's just a question of when...

We'll be extinct within 500 years, along with most of the other current species. We aren't going to stop climate change in time. The only question is whether it is bad enough to get completely out of control and end up like Venus, with no life possible, or whether some species can cling on.

I look at people like Putin and Assad (I know that no government is completely squeaky clean), knowingly bombing innocent civilians and wonder how they are the same species as me?

There's a quote which says 3 days without food and society will break down. I think the wheels could come off very quickly and people will absolutely kill each other for food and/or for access to water.

I think the wheels could come off very quickly and people will absolutely kill each other for food and/or for access to water.

[img] [/img]

Waterworld?

nickc - Member
see also Fermi's Paradox...

There's also the idea that we might be in a simulation. If we ever get to the point where we can simulate a universe, we can be certain we are, because it's mathematically improbable we're at the top of the stack, so to speak.

In which case, the rest of the observable universe we're in might simply be decorative 😀

I might watch you dance a little longer before I press the off button.

I'm with Prof Cox.."we are clever but perhaps not clever enough to run a planet".

The human race definitely isn't smart enough to outrun what Planet Earth/The Universe is going to chuck at us.

If our selfishness doesn't cook the planet (and the resultant melt half drown the planet) then there's the next Ice Age to battle (don't they occur every 40-100k?).

Maybe when the antibiotic resistant superbug finally arrives the population cull might be enough to let the human race continue a while longer.

Don't all populations crash when they're unsustainable? And let's face it, our current western lifstylee is unsustainable in the long term (growth cannot exceed finite resources).

Where are all the aliens? Well, why assume there are civilisations out there more advanced that ours? We might be the oldest. Someone has to be.

Yep - I prefer the alien option.
Ones that look like 25yr old female Olympic volleyball players; who wipe out everybody on earth with their laser guns ... except the 5'8" white men with bald heads and bad knees, who they choose to breed with to repopulate the earth.

Ps.
They have the technology to reverse vasectomies too.

Where are all the aliens? Well, why assume there are civilisations out there more advanced that ours? We might be the oldest. Someone has to be.

we might be, it's a valid assumption. But: our star is pretty young as the universe goes, there should be civilisations that have been skidding round a star for billions more years than us. It might be that when civilisations get to the point where they can make WMD, they can't stop themselves using them...If we ever find bugs on another planet, then that pretty much confirms the idea that life is common, and we might just doomed to kill each other.

Outlook for the longevity of the human race - bleak at best though I won't pin a timescale on it.

Outlook for planet Earth - very good for the next 12 billion years, even allowing for the next million or so getting over the impact of the human race.

Where's the issue?

Our forecasts of the future oddly coincide with our personal outlook and personal politics.

We are barely capable of objective thought informed by verifiable data, especially, I might add, if this data is discomforting.

I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.

-Susan B. Anthony