Why shouldn't humanity last for billions of years?

[itstimaifool]

NOTE ABOUT THE POLL: "Humanity" was a poor choice of words. I should have said "Life, intelligence, or civilization descended from humanity."

Call me an optimist, but I think that human civilization (or at least a descendant of us) has a strong chance of lasting billions of years into the future. That is, if we maintain a strong space program.

And by "human civilization" I mean whatever species or civilization evolves from us. Since it would be unlikely for any species to last a billion year without evolving to be almost unrecognizable, and even less likely for a culture to last a thousand without such radical changes.

Now I know this sounds kind of absurd. Billions of years? That's a lot. But look at it this way: Why not? The obvious answers are things like huge asteroid impacts, horrible climate change, disease, nuclear war, etc. But all of those things only affect one planet at a time. If we get some extraterrestrial colonies going, then there will always be a few people left after these sorts of disasters. And I think it would be entirely feasible to put a colony on Mars within a few decades, if only there was enough funding for the space program.

So here's my question: Assuming that all of the space programs around the world get an arbitrarily large boost in funding, why would humanity not last for a billion years?

Edited May 11, 2015 by itstimaifool

[Ralathon]

There are several possible extinction scenarios even if we get colonies on nearby planets. We could get hit by a gamma ray burst. Contact with an advanced and unfriendly alien species would be an extinction event. If we manage to make superintelligent AI but screw up the "BecomeSkynet.Cost = 9999999999" we're toast. A vacuum metastability event would wipe out the entire universe, regardless of how many planets we colonize.

But yea. Once we get a few colonies running our chances of long term survival increase dramatically. That's the reason many people are in favor of manned spaceflight, even though robots are much more cost effective.

[H2O.]

Because of evolution: our grand-grand-...-grand children won't be from the same specie. The human race will go extinct, whatever happens (and I'm not talking about nuclear Armageddon, climate change, etc.)

[Frozen_Heart]

Well a species tends to become another species every 2 million years or so. So humanity isn't going to last much longer than that.

However I believe our descendant species will last a very long time indeed.

I voted depends. As in do you count species evolved from us as the same.

[Ralathon]

Because of evolution: our grand-grand-...-grand children won't be from the same specie. The human race will go extinct, whatever happens (and I'm not talking about nuclear Armageddon, climate change, etc.)

We're talking about human civilization here. Not biological humans. Even if we all decide to upload ourselves into computers, or warp our bodies into space octopi, we're still part of humanity.

[Wanderfound]

On present trajectory, I wouldn't bet on human technological civilisation lasting 200 years. Humans yes, advanced society no.

Climate change -> famine -> war.

[RexProcer]

On present trajectory, I wouldn't bet on human technological civilisation lasting 200 years. Humans yes, advanced society no.

Climate change -> famine -> war.

I'm curious. What exactly about "climate change" do you think would be an extinction event? I mean, are you talking the stuff we are supposedly "causing", or just Earth changing as it has for billions of years?

Anyway, it depends on us in the end. If we can colonize, as others have said, our chances are pretty good. The fact is, while there are hundreds if not thousands of scenarios out of our control that could cause our extinction, they are ALL quite unlikely to occur in any amount of time that would affect us. After all, the universe is 14.3 billion years old. It works a whole lot slower than humans, who have been around for less than 500,000. That is to say, geological clocks run much slower than biological clocks. If we don't destroy ourselves (nuclear war, virus, etc), I am optimistic. However, knowing how predictably unpredictable humans are, I am not optimistic that we won't destroy ourselves. Sorry to say, but WW3 will be nuclear, and if it doesn't kill us all, then we'll be fine.

EDIT: If it doesn't kill us all AND we get off the planet in say, 100-500 years or so (very, very, very rough estimate according to scientists, some even speculate we could last 1000 years more here. Not because of anything the Earth does, but population and food mostly).

Edited May 10, 2015 by RexProcer

[maccollo]

Because of evolution: our grand-grand-...-grand children won't be from the same specie. The human race will go extinct, whatever happens (and I'm not talking about nuclear Armageddon, climate change, etc.)

You cannot grow out of your lineage. They might no longer be the same species as us, but as we are still eukaryotes, vertebrates, synapsids, mammals, apes (and so on), they will be homo sapiens ... something something.

[YNM]

No. Interstellar (and intergalactic) travel will be a very valuable thing, if you live to a huge fraction of the age of the Universe. Stars will explode, galaxies will collide. If you can't get somewhere safe, you are pretty much the same as any other non-mobile dust (of the scale of the Universe). And those two thing were, are, and will be very, very hard to achieve without huge consequences (like time dilation etc), I believe.

Or, you could just uncover more of spacetime, then get safe by manipulating it. But that's hard either !

Edited May 10, 2015 by YNM

[windows_x_seven]

Someone mentioned unfriendly aliens, but what if we become the "unfriendly aliens"?

Seeing as we fought many wars throughout history, that's bound to happen sometime in the future.

[H2O.]

You cannot grow out of your lineage. They might no longer be the same species as us, but as we are still eukaryotes, vertebrates, synapsids, mammals, apes (and so on), they will be homo sapiens ... something something.

True, but a different species nevertheless. And when we talk about humanity, I believe we are talking about the ensemble of all homo sapiens. Homo sapiens will not be able to reproduce with homo sapiens descendant.

Even if we talk about culture and civilization, everything will be forgotten given enough time.

Edited May 10, 2015 by H2O.

[Wanderfound]

I'm curious. What exactly about "climate change" do you think would be an extinction event? I mean, are you talking the stuff we are supposedly "causing", or just Earth changing as it has for billions of years?

Given enough time, a runaway greenhouse could potentially lead to total extinction, but that's not what I'm talking about. That's the long-term threat, but we're in deep trouble long before we have to deal with that.

The short-term threat of climate change is that it is a risk multiplier: it makes all of the existing problems worse. Famine, pestilence, war; the danger of all of these is enhanced by climate change, and they all feed into each other.

Food crops are both location and climate dependent. As the US rain band shifts north to the defrosting Canadian tundra, you can't just shift the crops with it; the recently-thawed mud needs time to develop into proper agricultural soil. Shifting climate also trashes pollination mechanisms for wild flora and drives extinction of endangered species. Changing watercourses exacerbate already-dangerous shortages of potable water. Expanding tropical zones bring tropical diseases with them; you can already track the march of Dengue fever etc. southwards along the north Queensland coast.

For the most obvious example: almost all of Bangladesh is within spitting distance of sea level. On current rates, the country is likely to be largely uninhabitable (without Dutch-style water management, which the Bangladeshis don't have the resources to implement) within a century. Bangladesh's neighbours (India, China, Pakistan etc.) are all nuclear armed and have a history of military conflict. How do you think they're going to react when 100 million Bangladeshi refugees land on their doorstep? What will India do if China attempt to divert all of the Bangladeshis to the south and vice-versa?

That's just one example, but similar scenarios recur again and again across the world. Throughout history, most military conflict has ultimately been caused by competition over resources. Climate change, in the near future, is going to substantially damage the global food supply and the already-running-short supply of potable water. Desperate people do desperate things, and there's nothing like hunger and thirst to drive desperation. Historically, starvation leads to revolution.

If you go talk to the academics who specialise in conflict studies, they'll tell you that we're already seeing the first climate-driven wars. So will the people in charge of medium-term planning for the militaries of the industrialised world. Marginal environments like northern Africa are the first to go, but it will spread beyond that with time. We live in an interconnected world; everything affects everything else.

The situation we are seeing now is not "the climate changing as it always has". Yes, climates change over geological timescales; the slow pace has historically given the biosphere time to adapt (and, in the rare cases of sudden change like Chicxulub, the slow pace afterwards has provided time to recover). What we're doing to the place is unprecedented in both its suddenness and its momentum. We're driving the change way too fast, and there is enough momentum built up (warmed oceans, melted permafrost, defrosted methane clathrates) that it's either too late to stop it or very close to that point.

If you aren't frightened by climate change, you don't understand the situation.

Edited May 10, 2015 by Wanderfound

[Ralathon]

Someone mentioned unfriendly aliens, but what if we become the "unfriendly aliens"?

Seeing as we fought many wars throughout history, that's bound to happen sometime in the future.

Actually, there is cautious optimism that our most violent days are behind us.

that explains the basics. Both the cost of war and the profit from peace are skyrocketing. In addition, nowadays knowledge is much more valuable than the actual land. In ye olde days value came from gold mines etc, so conquering land was a good way to earn money. Now most money is generated by companies, and companies aren't stuck in one place. If China invades California to capture silicon valley, all the people that make silicon valley an economic powerhouse will flee east. So the land is nearly worthless for the chinese invaders. Without an economic incentive it becomes much harder to start a war.

True, but a different species nevertheless. And when we talk about humanity, I believe with are talking about the ensemble of all homo sapiens. Homo sapiens will not be able to reproduce with homo sapiens descendant.

Even if we talk about culture and civilization, everything will be forgotten given enough time.

Let's define it as intelligent life that can be traced back to homo sapiens. Just like we can be traced back to eukaryotes, even if we are much more nowadays.

[Kibble]

Once life happened on Earth, it couldn't bee defeated. Life is unique, a complex version of nonliving chemical interactions that actively self-persists. Civilization is an even more complex, even more self-aware entity, and I don't think now that it's happened it will go away any time soon.

[Karriz]

We're a fairly persistent species, so unless Earth gets destroyed while we're still stuck here, I don't see how we could go extinct. We will evolve to different species (plural). Even some sort of AI could be seen as our offspring.

[Nibb31]

you only need to look at our history by going back a few thousand years to figure out this one. In a few million years (not even a billion), neither civilization nor the human species will be recognizable to someone from our era. Any moral values, social markers, or even morphological features will be as alien to you as an australopithecus.

And your "civilization" (whatever that means) will either have mutated into something completely different or been replace by something else in less than a few thousand years.

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Once life happened on Earth, it couldn't bee defeated. Life is unique, a complex version of nonliving chemical interactions that actively self-persists. Civilization is an even more complex, even more self-aware entity, and I don't think now that it's happened it will go away any time soon.

Define "civilization".

[_Augustus_]

We will find red dwarf and brown dwarf star systems that are much more stable than our own (I.e. a binary system where the asteroids are kept in line by a brown dwarf) and live for at least 300 trillion years.

[Torquemadus]

Humanity is faced with a fundamental intelligence test: The challenge to become a spacefaring species.

There were many great civilisations of the past that became convinced that they ruled "all the world that mattered" and that nothing of consequence lay beyond their borders. Such societies become static, and in turn stagnant. Their technology base becomes fixed, and therefore so do their resources. This leads to a "zero sum game", where resources are strictly controlled to protect the status quo.

Our present civilisation has fortunately not yet become static. We are able to invent new technologies and find new ways to exploit resources. As demand for apparently non-renewable resources increases, supply also increases, as new ways to obtain them are found.

In a closed "zero sum" world, population growth should be a threat to global food supply. However, in our world, this has not been the case. This is because humans are not merely consumers, they are net contributors. More people means better economies of scale and division of labour. Better education and technology increase this effect further. When humans are net contributors to their economy, every birth is a blessing, not a curse.

There are those who harbour extreme political views who don't see it this way. In their worldview, humans are doomed to compete against each other over fixed or diminishing resources. When other human beings are seen as a curse and not a blessing, the worst forms of human behaviour are seen as a necessary evil. In their view, the rise of human technological civilisation is a threat to the natural order and will lead either to a natural catastrophe, war, or a combination of both. This fate can, they say, be avoided by enforcing Orwellian restrictions that place strict limits on energy usage (and therefore economic activity), as well as "reducing" the global population to "safe" levels by unspecified methods.

Our civilisation has already begun expanding it's economic influence into space. Satellite imagery and remote sensing is used to identify new resources on the ground and make better use of available land. The effects of pollution can be monitored and mitigated. Weather satellites are vital to many industries, as are satellite navigation and positioning systems. The importance of global communications cannot be understated. Access to space allows us to make better use of and take better care of the Earth.

When new lands such as North America and Australia were first discovered, they were seen by many in Europe as worthless wilderness. They were too far away, undeveloped, and seemed to lack any resources that could readily be exploited. The West Indies and the Spice Islands did have resources that were of value, so the European powers readily fought over these, while vast tracts of "worthless" land in North America were being bought and sold for a pittance.

The importance of human expansion into space is not understood by all, but there is a growing body of people who do. Entrepreneurs and visionaries have been working since the beginning of this century to break the stagnation that has existed since the demise of the Apollo Program and the Cold War Space Race. There are those who see these new developments as a threat to the status quo. There are those who say that the new worlds that await humanity are a worthless wilderness. That such worlds are too far, underdeveloped, and have nothing to offer us. We often hear stories about how the challenges of exploring new worlds are supposedly insurmountable, and should be abandoned in favour of go nowhere programs that cost a lot of money but achieve little.

Once humanity has overcome the current inertia, the first step will be to develop the resources of the inner solar system. The resources of the main Asteroid Belt are effectively inexhaustible. While the main belt is hard to get to from Earth, it is within easy reach of Mars, which has the resources needed to support a major industrial and technological civilisation. Anything the asteroid miners can't produce for themselves at their relatively small outposts can be imported from Mars.

Later, the outer solar system will be settled to bring it's effectively inexhaustible reserves of helium3 fusion fuel into play. There are many ways to get sustainable energy on Earth, but since the energy needs of an advanced civilisation will be vastly greater than the present day, fusion will quickly become the cheapest game in town. The outer solar system will not only give us unlimited energy, it gives us the energy needed to propel starships. For a mature civilisation that had developed the resources of the home solar system, starflight would be the next step.

From that point onward, humanity should be able to expand indefinitely, evolving onto a galactic civilisation. On the other hand, if we remain confined to the Earth, we will last as long as it takes for the next dinosaur killer asteroid to come along and wipe us out. Given this imperative, the claims that space exploration is a "waste of money" that would be better spent elsewhere needs to be understood in it's proper context!

[magnemoe]

Someone mentioned unfriendly aliens, but what if we become the "unfriendly aliens"?

Seeing as we fought many wars throughout history, that's bound to happen sometime in the future.

An real danger, something like the cold war could go wrong, also has plenty of death cults or groups who wanted to end the world if they loose, spreading out will decrease the danger, interstellar war is very unpractical.

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We're a fairly persistent species, so unless Earth gets destroyed while we're still stuck here, I don't see how we could go extinct. We will evolve to different species (plural). Even some sort of AI could be seen as our offspring.

This, most catastrophic events will have some humans surviving. We colonized everywhere from rain forests to dessert and the arctic during the stone age. Today its plenty of caches, remote places with loads of food who would survive an dinosaur killer.

Easiest way would be to drop the oxygen level too low for us, option two would be to melt the surface, last will kill the cockroach too.

Just read Baxter's evolution. Fun read but the future part made no sense, if things go serious bad few things within a week walk from any city would be alive. The surviors would be issolated groups with lots of food like stranded trains or grain storage.

[m4v]

Any colonies in space are going to depend on a stable Earth for quite a while, so if we don't get our sh*t together in Earth I doubt for the prospect of any permanent colonies. Rushing towards space isn't going to help at all if you aren't standing in a firm place.

[GoSlash27]

At our present technology level permanent, self- sustaining human colonies are unworkable and there are no habitable rocks within our range.

Unless something changes radically, humanity's fortunes are tied to Earth.

Best,

-Slashy

[Bill Phil]

We will last for millions, but once we get too spread out we won't be human anymore.

[CptRichardson]

No. Mostly because I have a sneaking suspicion that we're too dumb to live through the next 100, let alone the next million.

[Fel]

And by "human civilization" I mean whatever species or civilization evolves from us. Since it would be unlikely for any species to last a billion year without evolving to be almost unrecognizable.

If we're defining evolution as such, then say hello to your mom and dad.

Since we all evolved from simple single celled organisms, the question shouldn't be about humans but life in general.

Also, understanding evolution is purely a "whomever produces the most viable offspring and sustains them to adulthood" instead of a mystical force advancing creation. I ask, what do humans selectively breed for? Intelligence? Compassion? Or is it looks? Do we breed more in poverty than we do in wealth (social darwinism)? Do we develop techniques to prolong the lives of those who are the least "worthy" of procreating while mocking those who do their best to stay healthy?

I think human "evolution" will be our demise as we breed to create a race that cares only about physical beauty and hence uses valuable resources that should go to brain matter to emphasis one's "beauty" over another.

[Xannari Ferrows]

19% probability of human extinction before 2021. That can only rise.