• Question: How long do you think the human race will survive for?

    Asked by stuff to Chris, Josh, Rebecca, Rob, Susan on 15 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Rebecca Dewey

      Rebecca Dewey answered on 15 Jun 2015:

      DISCLAIMER: I am not the right sort of scientist to be answering this question! I am a medical physicist, you need an astrobiologist or something!

      I would like to think now that nothing can wipe us out. We’re pretty intelligent as a species and I don’t think we’re stupid enough to get wiped out. Pretty soon we will have ways of making a human body last forever. So people can be cryogenically treated so that the ageing process is so slow that it almost doesn’t happen at all. If we do irreparable damage to planet earth, or release some highly contagious disease or toxin, or a nuclear world war breaks out, I think we’ve got the resources to preserve a few thousand (or probably a few hundred thousand) people to keep the human race going until we can leave and populate Mars or Europa or wherever! I think we will definitely have colonised other planets/moons before the sun expands large enough to consume the Earth.

      I guess the only I forgot to add to this is that at some point we may choose to stop referring to ourselves as “human” if we are mostly cybernetic or robotic or preserved or whatever, we may feel that we have ceased to be “human” and call ourselves something different.

    • Photo: Chris Armstrong

      Chris Armstrong answered on 15 Jun 2015:

      “stuff” asking the big questions.

      I think we’re good for a while, there’s the idea of the Big Crunch that will ultimately take out the universe some gargantuan period of time in the future, that’ll wipe us out pretty effectively. There’s the end of the suns lifetime, where it will turn into a red giant and engulf the Earth in its new radius, thats 5.4billion years away though so humanity may have made it off Earth by then… There’s concerns of us over populating the world beyond a critical point and we simply run ourselves dry, but I doubt that would finish us off.

      We shrugged off a disease that wiped out 50% of the population, we’ve endured countless wars, conquered entire species that by right should be at the top of the food chain, and made savage killers our household pets.

      As Rebecca said I think the only time the human race will end is when they stop referring to themselves as human. A homonovus if you will.

    • Photo: Susan Cartwright

      Susan Cartwright answered on 15 Jun 2015:

      This is a tricky one, because a lot depends on how our technology evolves in the future. Right now, we could certainly be wiped out by a mass extinction event like the dinosaur killer, which did in pretty much every large animal species (anything over 25 kg didn’t make it – which includes adult humans). However, it wouldn’t take a large advance in technology to be able to divert an asteroid the size of the dinosaur killer just enough to turn a hit into a near miss, so that particular danger might be on the way out. (On the other hand, if the minority opinion is right and it was the Deccan Traps supervolcano eruption that caused the K-T extinction, and not the asteroid, we are in worse shape: we don’t know any way of stopping one of those.)

      The Sun is getting more luminous as it ages, and this will eventually cause global warming on a scale that dwarfs our current problems: in two or three billion years the Earth will be uninhabitably hot. By then, of course, it’s reasonable to hope that our technology will have advanced to the point where we can evacuate at least to another planet in the solar system, if not to another star system altogether.

      A more interesting possibility is that computers might advance to the point where you could translate your brain activity, i.e. your personality and individuality, into a program running on a computer. This might not appeal to you right now – I’m sure that you do lots of things that would not be possible if you were a computer program – but would become much more attractive if you developed a serious illness, or simply as you got older. Human minds translated to computer programs would be much more appropriate for exploring interstellar space than biological humans – as the science-fiction writer Charlie Stross has said, space is not designed for canned monkeys. If the entire human race opted to abandon physical bodies for existence as computer programs, is it still the human race?

    • Photo: Josh Meyers

      Josh Meyers answered on 15 Jun 2015:

      The way things are at the moment, it is difficult to imagine the human race being wiped out. We are intelligent creatures of necessity. I have no doubt that once our natural resource supply becomes so diminished that no-one can afford a plastic bag, some clever person will invent a new resource.

      So it’s probable that our demise will be geological or astrological. A meteor would do it. Allow me to give you a random number for when I think this meteor will hit. 10866 years from today. You’re welcome.

      We can call it, the ‘stuff off’ meteor.

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