RE: Seven temperate terrestrial planets around the nearby ultracool dwarf star TRAPPIST-1
February 24, 2017 at 8:18 am
(February 24, 2017 at 7:51 am)Jehanne Wrote:(February 24, 2017 at 7:38 am)ignoramus Wrote: We're never gonna leave this rock! Let's just embrace that simple fact!
If by some chance we do, it'll be so far into the future, we probably couldn't even be called homo sapiens by them.
Eventually, our World is going to die, and so, if we want to survive as a species, even if we evolve in an entirely different direction over time, we'll need to pack-up and move on. Mars may have enough water to be habitable for a short period of time (500 million years at most), but it will take millennia of effort to colonize it. Inevitably, small interstellar spaceships will have to be constructed to ferry some groups (100 or so) of human beings to other stars, as they pass close by ours. The only way that I could see this happening would be to construct some sort of high-speed sling-shot device that would rapidly accelerate a spacecraft beyond the escape velocity of the Sun; after that, it could perform course corrections, and finally, use its on-board rockets to slow itself down. This may be technologically impossible to do, of course. It all depends on whether our species will start cooperating with itself.
It's been estimated, based on fossil records from just after past mass extinctions, the biosphere of the earth would require about 10 million years to fully recover from the Holocene mass extinction currently being perpetrated by men. It has also been estimated the earth would require about 50 million years to replenish the fossil fuel besides coal that we've consumed. It has further been estimated that substantial remains of our civilization, mostly in the form of underground structures of major cities, should remain uneradicated by geology for about 100 million years. Also, complex multicellular life probably has about 500 million more years before earth can no longer support fundamental photosynthesis required for their continued survival.
So this implies if we were to go extinct, the earth has enough time to regroup many more time to come up with another technic specie and civilization. Furthermore there is also time for more than one technic specie to arise while the remains of our civilization yet survive and hopefully be able to informed a future intelligent specie on earth and help them make a better show of.
So I have much higher hopes for life on earth finding a technic solution to the death of earth and solar system than I have that our own trump electing "sapiens" would.
