How long will the human race survive and why?

[paranoid marvin]

Any branch of technology with a military application develops incredibly fast during warfare: aircraft during WW1 and missiles during WW2 as two examples.

I think part of it is down to more people and more money being pumped into the industry, but also because the safety aspects that might be apply during peace time are more likely to be overlooked. Without the 'space race' in the 1960s, I'm not sure that NASA would have attempted to send men to the Moon so soon.

 

[BAYLOR]

Here's an optimistic scenario:

The world population reaches a climax and starts dropping, then dropping faster and faster. The medical system becomes overburdened and once beyond a certain age you receive only basic medical care. Any expensive diseases and you die, simple. At the same time the cheap energy sources start to dry up: oil, coal, natural gas, uranium. Green energy is found not to work. Thorium however is in plentiful supply and it powers thorium reactors that keep the electricity grid functional for a long, long time. But humanity discovers that the infrastructure for an entirely electricity-driven economy is big and burdensome, and gradually begins to de-industrialise: motorcars become the privilege of the rich; commercial air travel disappears. Ships appear with sails to supplement their electric motors, and so on.

As the population declines the de-industrialisation results in a return to the land: growing food and raising lifestock increasingly become the only viable occupations for most people as factories shrink and the whole administrative apparatus shrinks with them. Cities contract into towns, towns into villages. Finally, once the thorium runs out, the human race reverts almost completely to a pre-industrial state, with some - but not much - technology and industry kept up by the wealthy few. Things like pollution, climate change, world wars and the like recede into history and humanity carries on as it had done for thousands of years previously. And they lived more-or-less contentedly enough ever after. The End.

Until a global event like Ice Ball Earth, the Permian Triassic or an asteroid takes us out.

Seriously , I think we make to the stars long before our resources exhaust and we mine and terraform some the other planets in the systems , Mars ,Venus, possible The Moon Titan and Triton , launch sleeper ships to the stars , discover FTL drive technology or wormhole travel and make it to the stars and beyond.

 

[Vince W]

Until a global event like Ice Ball Earth, the Permian Triassic or an asteroid takes us out.

Seriously , I think we make to the stars long before our resources exhaust and we mine and terraform some the other planets in the systems , Mars ,Venus, possible The Moon Titan and Triton , launch sleeper ships to the stars , discover FTL drive technology or wormhole travel and make it to the stars and beyond.

I like the cut of your jib. This is my hope as well.

 

[Rodders]

Space has to be profitable before we can start to exploit it.

Personally, i think we're on the cusp of something awful.

 

[Harpo]

Space has to be profitable before we can start to exploit it.

Personally, i think we're on the cusp of something awful.

Once we have mining stations near/in the main asteroid belt, it will indeed be profitable.
But the profits won’t come back to earth, they’ll be used to expand and improved asteroid mining, Mars (and moons) colonies, and further space exploration.

 

[BAYLOR]

Space has to be profitable before we can start to exploit it.

Personally, i think we're on the cusp of something awful.

Like, discovering that the the South Park Episode Cancelled in fact be might true?

 

[Swank]

Preventing asteroid strikes and maintaining a functioning ecosystem are both much easier than terraforming planets. Building space stations with functioning earth-like ecosystems would also be much easier than terraforming. There aren't going to be planets ready to settle around other stars.

The difference between a space station and a starship is having a drive. If you don't have a drive, you have to stay near our sun and benefit from its solar power. If you develop a drive, than you can go 'safer' places in the galaxy and probably have plenty of left over energy to run your on board ecosystem. Unless your drive is incredibly fast so you can keep returning home, any starship worth traveling in has to be able to sustain a crew large enough to do whatever it is you want to accomplish for however long that is going to take.


Let's say you come up with a very powerful drive and energy source. What would be the safest thing to do? Use it to transport construction materials well away from all stars and future galactic close calls to build a self powered space station. Not only would this protect you from the death of stars and impacts, it also isolates you from belligerent aliens.

 

[Justin Swanton]

Seriously , I think we make to the stars long before our resources exhaust and we mine and terraform some the other planets in the systems , Mars ,Venus, possible The Moon Titan and Triton , launch sleeper ships to the stars , discover FTL drive technology or wormhole travel and make it to the stars and beyond.

Somehow I doubt this. Technology advanced by leaps and bounds in the 19th and first half of the 20 centuries as our ability to exploit physics and chemistry was able to keep pace with our theoretical advances in those disciplines. But for decades now we've made advances in our theoretical understanding of these fields that we can't exploit in any useful way. We know what antimatter is and can even - at great expense - make a few atoms of it, but we can't harness it as a power source.

I posit that in the fields at least of transportation and power technology we reached brick walls about 50 years ago. In transportation we can't go any further any faster any cheaper. Cars reached their ceiling in performance for cost by the 70s, so did aircraft and so did spacecraft. A Russian Proton is no more expensive per launch than a Falcon, despite all the hype over the Falcon's reusability. All the technological means we use to generate energy were developed by the 1960s: coal, oil, HEP, nuclear. Even solar. Any developments since then have been incremental or ancillary.

It would cost us as much to put a man on the moon now as it did in 1969 - perhaps a little less but not much. It would cost a monumental amount of money to put a man on Mars (the most realistic estimates I've seen float around a trillion dollars). We can't make manned spaceflight orders of magnitude cheaper no matter what we do, and so we can't colonise the solar system, never mind the galaxy.

FTL and wormholes are nice to imagine but they're just the SF version of magic.

 

[Astro Pen]

Somebody will ask AI to design a viable singularity. Seeded with earths available resources. Then we are stuffed

 

[Cthulhu.Science]

2-3 billion years from now, more or less, the sun will begin changing into a white dwarf. At some point along that timeline the surface of the Earth will become uninhabitable.

The interesting question is whether the human species will have evolved genetically enough by then to be called something else. It seems likely that whatever the species is called will be able to, and will create habitats throughout the solar system by then.

 

[BAYLOR]

2-3 billion years from now, more or less, the sun will begin changing into a white dwarf. At some point along that timeline the surface of the Earth will become uninhabitable.

The interesting question is whether the human species will have evolved genetically enough by then to be called something else. It seems likely that whatever the species is called will be able to, and will create habitats throughout the solar system by then.

About 1 billion years from the sun will be about 20 percent hotter than it its now and as a consequence of this increased solar output , The Earths surface will rendered lifeless. It could be that It all start a runway greenhouse effect which will turn the Earth into another Venus. This very nearly happened 250 million years ago during the Permian /Triassic extinction event . Global temperatures in many places went up to 170 degrees. If the temperature had gone up a few more degrees beyond that , we wouldn't be here now because Earth would have become just like Venus.

Now as for present timeline , in about 5 billion years , our sun will have exhaust all of it's Hydrogen and , will expand and turn red becoming a red giant. This will result in the destruction of all of the inner planets up to and including Mars because the expanding sun will envelop them. The red giant phase will last about billion years or so and then, the sun swill shrink and become a black hole.

 

[Cthulhu.Science]

About 1 billion years from the sun will be about 20 percent hotter than it its now ans as result of the increased solar output , The Earth surface will rendered lifeless. It could be that It start a runway greenhouse effect which will turn the Earth into another Venus. This very nearly happened 250 million years ago during the Permian /Triassic extinction event . Global temperatures in many places went up to 170 degrees, If the temperature had gone up a few more degrees beyond that , we wouldn't be here now because Earth would become just like Venus.

No as for present timelines , in about 5 billion year our sun will have exhausted all of it Hydrogen and it will expand and turn red boom in red giant. This result in the destruction of all the inner planets up to ans including mars because the expelling sun will envelop them. The red giant phase will last about billion years and the n the sun swill shrink and boom a black hole.

Thanks for updating my data on the future of our sun.

So, if FTL and travel to other stars is ultimately never practical for humans, but we are able to migrate within the solar system, could mankind survive past those billion years? 10 billion years from know might we be living on the non-planet Pluto, or perhaps on Saturn's moon Titan?
Circling a red giant or black hole?

 

[BAYLOR]

Thanks for updating my data on the future of our sun.

So, if FTL and travel to other stars is ultimately never practical for humans, but we are able to migrate within the solar system, could mankind survive past those billion years? 10 billion years from know might we be living on the non-planet Pluto, or perhaps on Saturn's moon Titan?
Circling a red giant or black hole?

Or be living on multi generational stars ships traveling between solar systems which, is probably not as far fetched as it sounds.

 

[BAYLOR]

I don't think we'd have worry about the Sun going Nova because , our sun is a yellow dwarf and that type of star , doesn't go Nova .

 

[paranoid marvin]

Within a billion years the Earth will almost certainly have been hit by several asteroids, some which will destroy large areas and others that will wipe out most of whatever lifeforms inhabit the surface. That is unless/until we develop instruments to detect them early enough and weapons to destroy or divert them.

More than anything else this is what we should be doing first and foremost before we consider pressing further out into space.

 

[BAYLOR]

Within a billion years the Earth will almost certainly have been hit by several asteroids, some which will destroy large areas and others that will wipe out most of whatever lifeforms inhabit the surface. That is unless/until we develop instruments to detect them early enough and weapons to destroy or divert them.

More than anything else this is what we should be doing first and foremost before we consider pressing further out into space.

In the film The Wandering Earth , mankind knows the Sun is about dies , stars gigantic engine on around toe globe so as move the earth out harms way and go on a journey to find a new place to live.


Maybe in the future we develop technology that can enable us to Move the Earth?

 

[Cthulhu.Science]

Somehow I doubt this. Technology advanced by leaps and bounds in the 19th and first half of the 20 centuries as our ability to exploit physics and chemistry was able to keep pace with our theoretical advances in those disciplines. But for decades now we've made advances in our theoretical understanding of these fields that we can't exploit in any useful way. We know what antimatter is and can even - at great expense - make a few atoms of it, but we can't harness it as a power source.

I posit that in the fields at least of transportation and power technology we reached brick walls about 50 years ago. In transportation we can't go any further any faster any cheaper. Cars reached their ceiling in performance for cost by the 70s, so did aircraft and so did spacecraft. A Russian Proton is no more expensive per launch than a Falcon, despite all the hype over the Falcon's reusability. All the technological means we use to generate energy were developed by the 1960s: coal, oil, HEP, nuclear. Even solar. Any developments since then have been incremental or ancillary.

It would cost us as much to put a man on the moon now as it did in 1969 - perhaps a little less but not much. It would cost a monumental amount of money to put a man on Mars (the most realistic estimates I've seen float around a trillion dollars). We can't make manned spaceflight orders of magnitude cheaper no matter what we do, and so we can't colonise the solar system, never mind the galaxy.

FTL and wormholes are nice to imagine but they're just the SF version of magic.

We are on a Science Fiction and Fantasy blog, so bleak is the word of the day.

But I disagree with your story. In fact, I'll go so far as to say that by conflating 150 years of energy and transportation development into a single phrase, "by the 1960s," you use a rhetorical device meant to obscure the value of the continued progress over that time period and since that time period.

Coal, oil, dam technologies were in "incremental growth" phase by the early 20th century. The difference between solar technology of the 1960s and today is night and day. Concentrated solar farms are the absolute cheapest way to produce electricity on an industrial scale on this planet today. But this technology wasn't practical until the late 90s. That is an amazingly fast development cycle. Photovoltaics are extremely practical and efficient, with the greatest barrier to their use being political and the local rules that put limits on installation. That too, is due to rapid development over that last 30 years. And batteries. WOW. Not much progress until this millennium, and yet the growth in battery tech since 2000 is phenomenal.

And I have no idea what you mean by

Cars reached their ceiling in performance for cost by the 70s

As a Cynic I expect that technology will continue rolling along as it has, broadly speaking along Moore's law. And not just transistors. And distribution of wealth and power will also continue as it has for the last hundreds of years, tiny incremental growth among 99% of the population and unbelievably staggering growth among everyone else.

 

[Cthulhu.Science]

In the film The Wandering Earth , mankind knows the Sun is about dies , stars gigantic engine on around toe globe so as move the earth out harms way and go on a journey to find a new place to live.


Maybe in the future we develop technology that can enable us to Move the Earth?

That movie is super, super silly. But fun!

 

[BAYLOR]

That movie is super, super silly. But fun!

We need more films like that.

Isn't there suppose to be a sequel ?

 

[Swank]

About 1 billion years from the sun will be about 20 percent hotter than it its now and as a consequence of this increased solar output , The Earths surface will rendered lifeless. It could be that It all start a runway greenhouse effect which will turn the Earth into another Venus. This very nearly happened 250 million years ago during the Permian /Triassic extinction event . Global temperatures in many places went up to 170 degrees. If the temperature had gone up a few more degrees beyond that , we wouldn't be here now because Earth would have become just like Venus.

Now as for present timeline , in about 5 billion years , our sun will have exhaust all of it's Hydrogen and , will expand and turn red becoming a red giant. This will result in the destruction of all of the inner planets up to and including Mars because the expanding sun will envelop them. The red giant phase will last about billion years or so and then, the sun swill shrink and become a black hole.

This presumes that human beings aren't around and have no engineering ability. If the sun gets brighter, we can put a shield up that reflects some of that energy away. If the sun gets dimmer, we can increase the greenhouse effect. If it is too bright, we can move life to other orbits. We aren't just dumb animals.