I call Jupiter!

[Trilby]

You might want to figure out where you're going to go.

Stephen Hawking has a few words to say about our planet and our genetic code.

"Our population and our use of the finite resources of planet Earth are growing exponentially, along with our technical ability to change the environment for good or ill. But our genetic code still carries the selfish and aggressive instincts that were of survival advantage in the past. It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand or million.

Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain lurking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space."

Pretty grim stuff but also fascinating.
What do you think will happen?

[Griff]

I think tw will get his way and man will die-off on Earth. Is that baiting?

[Undertoad]

Hawking is ill-informed, and speaking outside of his area of expertise.

[Trilby]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Hawking is ill-informed, and speaking outside of his area of expertise.

As he is wont to do.





Listen, Tony Soprano didn't want to believe it, either, but everything comes to an end.

Everything.

[Spexxvet]

Hopefully, all the selfish agressive people will kill each other off, leaving those able to cooperate to inhabit the Earth. We just have to stop them from reproducing.

[Griff]

I'm pretty sure cultural stagnation with a resultant collapse of civilization is what you'd get if everyone were "cooperative". No risks would be taken and no progress would be made. We'd have a nice little world for bureaucrats and government approved academics. Everyone else would be subjected to failing prospects and falling incomes, much like we're getting now with the corporate government complex, but with more hopelessness.

[Sundae]

But what has progress really achieved?
The poor still starve, still die, still suffer from diseases that can be cured with a few pennies.

It's just that they happen in different countries now, or at least out of sight.

Our world has progressed.
That's all.
And even that is shaky. Europe is on the verge of economic collapse.
Middle class/ professional Greeks are finding it hard to meet utility bills/ taxes/ food bills.
And when I say hard, I mean literally having NO money even for essentials, not "Christmas is a bit smaller this year"

Italy seems to be heading the same way.

The construction industry in Ireland has stagnated meaning that "children" are living at home (with their wives or husbands and children) into their thirties.

My Grandad would have understood this world.
Where you raised animals for slaughter in an urban environment.
Where you lived with family, even after your first child.
Where you left school early to work for your family and turned over the whole of your wages just to keep the rentman from the door. And hid when he came. And did a moonlight flit when it became impossible to hide any more.

There was no NHS when Grandad had whooping cough as a child.
His mother was advised by the kindly (but expensive) doctor to take him to the coast for sea air. Might as well have suggested he went to the moon.
Instead Nanny Doyle loaded up the old pram with assorted children and took them to Tower Bridge.
The Thames is a tidal river. They took deep breaths.
It was the best she could do.
She had five children that I know of - you didn't talk about miscarriages in those days. They all lived into their eighties and two are still going.

[Spexxvet]

Originally Posted by Griff

I'm pretty sure cultural stagnation with a resultant collapse of civilization is what you'd get if everyone were "cooperative". No risks would be taken and no progress would be made. We'd have a nice little world for bureaucrats and government approved academics. Everyone else would be subjected to failing prospects and falling incomes, much like we're getting now with the corporate government complex, but with more hopelessness.

So it would be as though everyone were stoned, but sad?

[Urbane Guerrilla]

That, and that nothing could work. That woman talking to John Reed in Ten Days That Shook The World had it right: "Nothing works!" she said.

[ZenGum]

In this regard, I think our current civilisation is screwed.

As Hawkings points out, our impact on this planet is increasing rapidly. Each year, the earth's natural systems produce a certain amount of "bounty" - goods that can be gathered without harming the productive system. Each year we exceed that amount, currently by about 30 to 40%. We make it up by nibbling at the biological capital, which gets us through this year but makes future bounties smaller. Like many other civilisations before us, we can keep doing this until the final crash when there is no more bio-capital to nibble.

There is no other habitable planet in our solar system. "Terraforming" Mars would take an enormous amount of effort and resources, which would be better spent preserving Earth. Indeed, making Mars into a second-rate copy of Earth would probably exhaust Earth entirely.

Other star systems are so far away they cannot be reached in less than many lifetimes by any technology we currently belive to be possible, let alone possess.

IMHO, the only hope for our civilisation is to transfer it to non-human technology. That *could* go and exist on Mars, or make the trek through deep space. Our ideas might spread through the galaxy, but our bodies won't.

[SamIam]

A basic tenet of ecology is "carrying capacity." This is the maximum population of any given species which can be sustained by the ecosystem in which it resides. Malthus predicted it back in the 1700's. Human population growth is rapidly reaching the point where the planet's resources can no longer sustain it - if it hasn't been surpassed already.

In addition, the "green revolution" has come at the expense of loss of much diversity in our grain crops. Mega-agriculture plants zillions of acres of the same mono-species which often can't even reproduce themselves using the seeds from the harvest. You have to buy special seed grains from big ag. This is nice for them, but a loss of genetic diversity will sooner or later prove fatal. Let a single plant virus mutate (which viruses do all the time) get loose in those fields, and everything will go because our crops have lost the benefit of what is called "hybrid vigor."

Ultimately the problem of carrying capacity and/or loss of genetic diversity in our grain crops will cause a major human population crash. It's been observed time after time with other different organisms and nature is not going to do us any special favors just because we think we're such a wonderful species - especially when we working against nature and know this, but continue to do it anyway.

But who knows? Maybe the remaining members of our species will evolve into a much more fit and adaptable homo common sensus in another 2 million years from now. Members of the new species will regard us the way we now do the neanderthals.

[Undertoad]

In all of recorded human history, armageddon is always predicted and has never happened.

Didn't I call you hand-wringers out in the 7 billion people thread? Your win-loss record is like 0 and infinity.

Can't you see what's right before your eyes? The agricultural history of the last century includes such massive gains that poor people are now obese!

[piercehawkeye45]

Depends on your definition UT. Just because the human race isn't wiped out by an event doesn't mean it won't extremely hurt the global society.

If you look at the last 5000 years there is a trend of empires expanding to their limits, then collapsing and taking down all the societies around them with them. Another society, usually a backwards society at the time, then slowly takes over the niche of the old power and the pattern continues.

[Spexxvet]

Originally Posted by Griff

I'm pretty sure cultural stagnation with a resultant collapse of civilization is what you'd get if everyone were "cooperative". No risks would be taken and no progress would be made. We'd have a nice little world for bureaucrats and government approved academics. Everyone else would be subjected to failing prospects and falling incomes, much like we're getting now with the corporate government complex, but with more hopelessness.

Seriously, though, cooperation does not mean the absence of aggression and selfishness, just a willingness to strive for a win/win solution.

Originally Posted by Undertoad

In all of recorded human history, armageddon is always predicted and has never happened.

YET!

[jimhelm]

Originally Posted by ZenGum

IMHO, the only hope for our civilisation is to transfer it to non-human technology. That *could* go and exist on Mars, or make the trek through deep space. Our ideas might spread through the galaxy, but our bodies won't.

That's a scary and strangely alluring angle.

Our robot-progeny. Our electric, self aware children of the mind. Able to switch to stasis mode for long inter or intra stellar voyages.

Now, if we were to program them to go and find us a new home, carrying with them cryogenic-ally preserved genetic materials with which to recreate us.

and of course we would need other robots to raise us and teach us what we taught them.

lets do it!