This is very, very cool and funny (and I'm not just saying that because I think she's hot and we happen to be in the same WoW guild):
Of course, Felicia fails to point out what makes worrying about the Milky Way colliding with Andromeda in three billion years truly silly. Homo sapiens will have long-since become extinct, if not by our own hand, simply through the inexorable cycles of biological and planetary evolution. We will be long, long, long gone. To put this in perspective, the oldest ancient fossil microbe-like objects are dated to be 3.5 billion years old, just a few hundred million years younger than Earth itself. That's the timescale we're working with here.
Of course, there are the grotesquely optimistic idiots who imagine all the galaxy as our future suburban sprawl...
Of course, Felicia fails to point out what makes worrying about the Milky Way colliding with Andromeda in three billion years truly silly. Homo sapiens will have long-since become extinct, if not by our own hand, simply through the inexorable cycles of biological and planetary evolution. We will be long, long, long gone. To put this in perspective, the oldest ancient fossil microbe-like objects are dated to be 3.5 billion years old, just a few hundred million years younger than Earth itself. That's the timescale we're working with here.
Of course, there are the grotesquely optimistic idiots who imagine all the galaxy as our future suburban sprawl...
- Current Location:Achar Crater
- Current Mood:
frazzled - Current Music:Wolfshiem, "Annie" (Long Version)
Page Summary
edwarddain : (no subject) [+1] - dipsomaniac : (no subject) [+0]
- (Anonymous) : (no subject) [+1]
- ardiril : (no subject) [+2]
- slothman : (no subject) [+3]
- abbadie : (no subject) [+0]
- elialshadowpine : (no subject) [+1]
Comments
Only if by "grotesquely optimistic idiots" you mean "delusional to the point of an imminent psychotic break"...
Edited at 2009-10-27 12:26 am (UTC)
Bingo.
Edited at 2009-10-27 12:30 am (UTC)
It has nothing to do with altruism. It's just common sense.
Edited at 2009-10-27 04:04 am (UTC)
Surprisingly, many very intelligent people do not realize that homo sapiens could evolve into a new genus in the relatively near future, possibly as early as 200k years. This leads to some wildly speculative conversations, particularly when one tosses sexual selection into the fray. A couple joints don't hurt either.
Surprisingly, many very intelligent people do not realize that homo sapiens could evolve into a new genus in the relatively near future, possibly as early as 200k years. This leads to some wildly speculative conversations, particularly when one tosses sexual selection into the fray. A couple joints don't hurt either.
Thing is, even if humanity survives long enough to speciate, even if this is not an evolutionary dead end (as I tend to think), it is beyond unlikely that any mammals, much less humans, will still exist in three billion years. Life will have perished in some cataclysm, or will have assumed forms we can only begin to imagine. There may be some other species' civilization, there may not.
I think there’s a chance we might have some form of descendants around in 3 billion years, but if so, they would be unrecognizable to us now. Given that the galaxy is not already someone else’s suburb, I doubt we would ever attain galactic sprawl; too few people would ever want to move beyond significant speed-of-light lag from the rest of civilization. Being mere light-hours away would be the boondocks and meditation retreats of a solar system.
My own theory is that there are civilizations all over the place, but we can’t tell they’re present. Any mature civilization will have used up all of their electromagnetic communications bandwidth at maximal efficiency, and maximally compressed information is indistinguishable from noise. While our radio and television signals radiating across the universe are currently intelligible, that’s just because of our crude technology; less than 200 years from the development of radio, we’ll look like just another stellar noise source.
I don't think you grasp the profundity, deep-timewise, of 3 billion years. It may be that, if humanity gets a clue, and is very lucky in the bargain, "there’s a chance we might have some form of descendants around" in 30 million years, "but if so, they would be unrecognizable to us now." But even that is extraordinarily unlikely.
but if we get to the point that we can adapt ourselves consciously to changing conditions, we might very well become like cosmic mildew, always coming back even after getting hosed down by a gamma-ray burster.
This is my nightmare, humans that will not become extinct, no matter what.
Ah, human ridiculousness never ceases to appall me.
You're in the same guild as Felicia?
Yep.