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<Insert wise statement here>
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Human Expansion
I thought this might deserve another thread, since it was way off topic from the one it was in.
What are everyones views towards where the human race will be in the future, any where from a hundred years in the future to the End of the Universe(Where you can eat at Milliways).
The link to the other topic has a little bit of a start for this, but I'll post the relative stuff:
Me:
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we are still a long way from even making it to Mars, much less spreading throughout our own galaxy, and even doing that would be a piece of cake compared to spreading to other galaxies. I believe a close comparison of the difference in diffuculty would be roughly the same, as jumping two feet forward, compared to, say, jumping straight up and landing on a planet at the opposite end of our galaxy in about 2 hours.
We will eventually die out, just like all the other life forms on earth and, eventually, no one will ever have any idea that we ever existed. Because even if we do find or are found by other intelligent life, those species will die out eventually also and all memory of us shall be forgotten. Kinda depressing, isn't it?
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Yakk:
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I see you don't truely understand the concept of 'exponential growth'.The visible universe is less than 20 billion light years in radius.
That is less than 4*10^26 meters.
If you start with a 1 m long stick, and have it double in length every month, the meter stick would stretch accross the entire universe in less than 8 years.
If you started with a 1 m cube, and had it double in volume every month, it would take 22 years to exceed the volume of the visible universe.
Now this is ridiculous, really. The speed of light gets in the way.
However, for a truely exponential process, the barrier slowing it down is, in the end, the speed of light. An exponential civilization is a relatavistic phenomina.
Exponentially growing phenomina are not all that common in physics. I can't think of one that operates even on a planitary scale, other than life.
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We will eventually die out, just like all the other life forms on earth and, eventually, no one will ever have any idea that we ever existed.
That is the most likely result, I agree.
Unlike the whale, there is a small chance that we, in and of ourselves, can beat the odds.
It is a small chance. And quite possibly that which beats the odds won't be recognizably human, or even organic. But it is an interesting chance!
That is your belief.
"Where is Everybody?" Enrico Fermi. A question that nobody has provided a final answer to yet -- why is the universe so quiet?
Quantum Immortality
There isn't proof, but there is the possiblity that
A> you will never die
and
B> the human race will be the first interstellar civilization
If that doesn't make the universe seem more interesting...
Like I have said, these things aren't certain. They are even unlikely. But they are interesting, and possible. Some would even say reasonable, but I personally wouldn't go that far.
Intelligence can be viewed as a particularly 'interesting' form of information processing. And it is a form that, quite possibly, can be carried by many mediums, and spread exponentially. And, quite possibly, Earth could be the only local source of this self-replicating thingy.
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So to sum up my view, the human race will eventually die off due to an inability to continually expand. I doubt we'll leave the solar system and just plain don't believe that we'll ever be able to travel outside our galaxy.
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Apathy: The best outlook this side of I don't give a damn.
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