Don't Panic: Even if asteroid showers cause mass extinctions ... Expect scientists to start arguing about whether there's a match in the long (very long) term between mass extinctions and rising number of comet/asteroid impacts, which, at least according to a new paper, both appear to occur around every 26 million years. Over the years, there have been many attempts to run that hypothesis, …
Only 70,000 years ago a faint binary star system passed very close to Sol. Scholtz's Star actually passed through the Oort cloud and would have perturbed the orbits of innumerable comets, asteroids and other gravelly/icy bits. In about 2 million years our descendants (or their evolutionary successors) will have a target's eye view of an incoming storm of debris. The 26 million year event may be irrelevant.
When you have a species obsessed by the movements of little green pieces of paper ( Cheers Douglas! ) and the fame of celebrities who contribute next to nothing in the grand scheme of things ( Thanks Facebook/Twitter and Simon Cowell ), I reckon we'll be extinct in around 250 years!
I'll have 6 pints and several bags of peanuts please and hurry up, the species is about implode in on itself....
Ok, the only way we are going to survive long term is getting off this mudball, but with enough "stuff" that would allow whoever is not left behind to rebuild after some future catastrophe. (See Seveneves by Neal Stephenson for his take on just this point)
The trouble is, that getting that "stuff" up there, wherever that may be, costs a fortune in energy and keeping it running costs yet more. We've had a massive revolution in information processing but no concurrent revolution in energy storage/production. (The last major step was fission, back in 1939!)
Until such time as it's relatively cheap to do do, we're pretty much screwed.
>Ok, the only way we are going to survive long term is getting off this mudball
Does getting true artificial intelligence off world count? That is probably our best best as being bags of fluid we are real pain in the ass to keep functioning in all but the most special of circumstances.
Absolutely. Every single major advance of human civilization is directly tied to the amount of energy available to the average human being.
Before agriculture, we were hunter-gatherers. Not much time to build when everyone is following herds of wild animals to be able to eat.
Agriculture came along, and that made us sedentary, but agriculture only really took off when we domesticated animals, allowing one man and a pair of oxen to do in one day what many would take several days to do. This freed some people to pursue other activities, notably construction.
Things pretty much stayed the same until steam came about, which launched the Industrial Revolution. Followed closely by electricity, and that was really the thing that set the ball rolling.
With electricity and the internal combustion engine, the average person in our civilization acquired the ability to till entire fields with a tractor in a day, or cover hundreds of miles in a car. This expansion of available energy is why one farmer today can feed thousands of people, who are free to go do all the rest of things our society needs.
Most importantly, our society needs to research other energetic sources. The greatest challenge we face today is energy storage. We still cannot reliably store the excess energy produced by our power plants, which is why they have to be able to vary their power output.
The other issue is, of course, escaping our planetary gravity well. I'm convinced that some form of fusion will, in the future, allow humanity to build ships that can, like in Star Wars or any other sci-fi universe, take off from a planetary surface and reach orbit without losing any significant amount of mass.
When we have achieved that, the colonization of our solar system will be a given, and we will embark upon that path until we find a way to span the unimaginable distances between stars in a hyperspace-like time frame.
So let's get cracking on that fusion thing !
"So let's get cracking on that fusion thing !"
We could all have been energy rich if the carbon cartel hadn't demonised fission. The Nuclear powered warships/submarines are very safe and efficient, so let a quasi-military force run hundreds or thousands of community based reactors, the Toshiba 4S perhaps. The bigger-is-better reactor designs are meant to line the pockets of Big Construction, smaller ones could be mass produced.
GREENIES. Guaranteed. Brainless, techphobe, innumerate, science-illiterate, wooo-soaked greenies. (Note: This rant from a tree-planting, bird-feeding, re-cycling nature lover.) Greenpeace is to Science what Thor the Thundergod is to Meteorology and "why the hell is it raining again???"
The moties had it right. They kept archives. Of *everything*. No one was allowed to touch them. It shortened the evolutionary and technology cycles substantially for them.
<I'll note, we are *starting* that with the seed caches, but we need to go farther with the exercise>
It's easy to survive an asteroid impact... You Just have to be the right sort of animal.
The wrong sort is one at the top of the food chain. Small arthropods and the amoeba have it sorted. No need for noisy rockets!
How to start the valiant descent of Man? Social media and commenting on tech websites perhaps!
First, the obligatory comment...
Large rocks from space delivered to your front door are nature's way of asking, "How's that Space Program coming along?"
And a bit more seriously...
I'd say that we have the technology to get a colony of people off this planet already. The reason we haven't done it yet is we haven't prioritised it highly enough. Christopher Columbus didn't have to research a better ship, or better food-storage methods, he went with what was at hand (both bits of tech, the ships and food-storage, had been around for a while) and the discovery happened because someone... decided to go.
Governments aren't likely to get this done anytime soon but once SpaceX is back on track, and my personal favourite, Skylon, is in service (six years away and counting down...) I think the Private sector will likely get it done.
And the more people/infrastructure we have in space, the more likely we'll be to spot the next rock due to bump into Earth and stop it.
Christopher Columbus [blah blah rubbish] and the discovery happened because someone... decided to go.
Cristobol Colon didn't "discover" anything that wasn't already well-known to the European merchant class. It's just that prior to that particular innumerate idiot's voyage, the aristocracy didn't know about the "New World" - which is just how the merchants liked it. Your analogy only works if we get up there and discover that a bunch of private-sector corporations have been quietly running space colonies for centuries.
"[Cristoforo Colombo, a.k.a. Cristóbal Colón, a.k.a. Cristóvão Colombo] didn't 'discover' anything that wasn't already well-known to the European merchant class."
Known also to the people that had already been living here for tens of thousands of years.
Obviously...
/pendant
The graph gives the impression of containing a lot more data than just 37 data points.
With just 37 data points, you'd expect more of a histogram with clearly obvious discrete steps from the low resolution data in any particular time slice bin.
Something's fishy.
If Guy McPherson (and a range of climate science heavyweights) are correct then the Clathate gun has gone off and we'll be lucky if there are any people left by 2070. And if there are, they'll likely be a few thousand cowering in specially prepared bunkers ( http://survivalcondo.com/ ) waiting for Methane firestorm shockwaves or increased geological activity to crack their flimsy habitats.
http://www.examiner.com/article/climate-change-and-the-methane-crisis-an-interview-with-dr-guy-mcpherson
We WISH we had a few million years in the bank.
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