(July 4, 2017 at 11:20 pm)Puke Skywalker Wrote: What're your thoughts on mankind's long-term prospects? Are we destined to become a spacefaring, planet-colonizing race? Are we headed for a Malthusian collapse? Might we be wiped out by a catastropic war or disease? Will artificial intelligence take over? How about a zombie apocalypse? And how long before any of these things happen?
I could post this in Philosophy or General Science, but I light light-hearted responses as much as serious ones.
I have found this a very interesting question for a while, but I'm not much of a researcher.
I think we'll go extinct fairly soon, but not, like, 1,000 years like some global warming extremists think. Maybe a couple million years, and yes, it will be by global warming. I don't fear war quite as much. Not sure why. I guess I feel everybody is too afraid to use nukes to the extent that their own country would be in peril by their nuking another one.
Colonization is a fascinating idea, but there are so many questions that go with that. Fire and rescue themes, up to and including disaster management. Cultural themes of various types: what would language law be? What would law in general be, and how would it be enforced? What political structures and concerns would we have? How would we socialize? That alone eats up lots of infrastructural space. Or would Major League Baseball on July 4th be replaced by Connect Four Premiership or Pente League?
And on, and on, and on. This might have been a good research paper in college.
"For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring." - Carl Sagan
