The End of Humanity - Page 4

[zoenhim]

Time for reflection, a nice subject. Let us remember and be it known to all that everything that has a beginning has and ending. No thing last forever, and that includes the vast universe. When will humanity ends? When our planet earth will melt to pervent heat, will humanity survive? even germs cannot. What do scientists says about their latest discovery on our sun? That will give us a hint...

[woooee]

Hopefully we will evolve and continue the journey at some other "Earth", i.e. the end of humanity on this Earth. Perhaps not even in this time/space single continuum. We should also start a poll on what the next catastrophe will be once 2012 has passed.

[Unbidden Ghost]

>no thing lasts forever.

well humans will outlive earth. i am sure that we will invent faster than light travel before the sun blows up or something. and we will learn to teraform.

and if there are paralel universes we might even outlive this universe.

[jerinjames]

To contemplate the end of humanity based on a quote like "everything that has a beginning has an end" is ridiculous at best. I am not sure that there is or will be an end to humanity as we know it. Humanity will adapt to meet unheard of circumstances and forces (maybe), but no one sees any end in sight (not even close). We may even outlive the earth.

[pritesh2010]

It can be said that humans have a bit of a short term view of things. We're concerned about the end of summer, the next school year, and maybe even retirement. But these are just a blink of an eye in cosmic terms.
i think Humanity is not the top of the food chain for no reason. Indeed it is commonly accepted that reason itself is responsible for the human condition of superiority or advancement. This idea relies on the belief that o other animal possesses reason, or thought processes. And here I object, consequently disagreeing with the theory that reason is what makes us different from all other animals.

There is no, and there cannot be, any evidence for the absence of something. Its utterly absurd to behave and think on such precept of non-existence. And this serves well to reason. Why would it be absent from everywhere else but in us? Foolishness! Reason is not what makes us different. In fact, it is just the opposite. The malfunction of reason is what makes us different. All animals have their reason in perfect order, until humans with the malfunctioning reason get in their way.

[Ghostrider939]

There is no, and there cannot be, any evidence for the absence of something.

The subject of this thread is the end of humanity. Take away the requirements for existence and you take away existence. eg Drop Earths temperature to absolute zero
where nothing can live and evidence for the absence of humanity is established.
Take away atmosphere with the same result....evidence for the absence of something.

[AuburnMathTutor]

Well, unless there are human beings living on some other planet. Star wars, anyone?

[GrimJack]

>greg bear

i dont know. i only ever finished one greg bear novel. i started several but i never finished it. he comes up with great ideas but i dont have the patience to read something where things dont happen quickly or something.

>stop being human.

lol. now that is actually easy. i guess that human refers to Homo sapiens. we will be human as long as we can have sex with the humans on this planet right now ( or if we can if a million years from today we are transported back into the past via time machine or recreate one from dna in a test tube etc etc) and the sexual intercourse produces fertile ofspring. that is how science defines a specie. so no i guess Australopithecus is not human. but cro magnon might be!

Then how about Neanderthals? Some geneticists think they have found pieces of Neanderthal DNA in Human DNA.

In the human body, microbial cells outnumber human cells by a factor of 10 to 1; there is a new field of research called metagenomics.

The source of energy in most animal cells that require their own source of energy are mitochondria - self-contained units of DNA passed from mother to child, essentially a symbiont without which we could not exist and without which we could not even think as the mitochondria fuel our brain cells.

Er, I have digressed to a point where I have lost my point, sigh.

[Kusanagi03]

I think when humanity ends; the end will be at our own hands. Unless a major catastrophe happens like an asteroid hitting the earth, as expressed earlier in this thread a temperature drop.

The end of humanity may not happen in my lifetime however it may just happen in the near future when our scientists discover/make something that can not be stopped; when that happens we'll probably be looking for a way to escape. A bit like the Twelve Monkeys Film, they send Bruce Willis back to discover what caused the outbreak which nearly wiped out all the humans; in the end it was a paradox because would of the virus been released if they hadn't sent Bruce Willis back?

As sending Bruce Willis caused the chain of events to cause the end of humanity, however the humans in the future never caught onto this so kept sending Bruce Willis which in turn.. led to the outcome. A paradox.

[kes166]

This is a fun little thread I happened on, so I'll throw in my 2 cents ...

*Puts on tin foil hat*

You decide if this is true or not ... It's something that I heard on coast to coast, and found it on a web site.

Coast to Coast caller

Video made before the BP spill

[GrimJack]

Heh,heh - Yeah, that methane "clathrate gun" hypothesis is kind of cool but there are problems with limiting it to the Gulf (a science fiction writer Steve Barnes based a disaster novel on it happening world-wide). As you all know, ice floats because when water freezes it crystallizes into hexagonal rings taking up more space than the water so equal amounts have different volumes (or, when the volumes are equal, ice weighs less than water) - well, under extreme pressure water (still liquid) and methane (still a gas) are forced into a crystal-like solid (you probably don't want to know about polar vs non-polar molecules so just believe me) when a crystal is introduced (ie an ice crystal)

Sorry, I got caught up in my research - anyway with world's clathrate reservoir considered to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 - 2500 GtC (Gigatons of carbon), this would seem to be something to worry about. What has set off my early warning tin-foil-hat sensors is that most of the hysteria seems to be on sites like "armedpolitesociety" or have "We the People" prominently displayed (it never ceases to amaze me that WeThePeople sites exclude all the people who disagree with them) so I went off to sites like OckhamsRazor or physicsforum

Damn, side-tracked again - okay, what I am looking for now is the gas hydrate stability zone. It looks like deepwater ghsz is within the intersection of 1200 to 1600 meters below the surface and between 0 and 18 C. The potential clathrate geohazard zone is around 430 to 750 meters because though it is deep enough and cold enough to form the clathrates, large warm-core eddies can trigger a release of methane gas AND, since the clathrate forms in sediments on the floor, the sediments could slump causing a pressure wave that would become a tsunami as it approaches the shore.

A massive shock to the ocean floor in the gas hydrate stability zone could possibly release a significant portion of 500-2500 GtC - this would not only cause everything above the gas bubble to sink immediately, it could also be ignited in a really spectacular fireball - talk about your 'global warming', heh,heh.

Anyway, relax the new television season is starting soon.

[dexter737]

Humanity will dead if somebody start a nuclear war.

[bumsfeld]

It is the Earth's magnetic field that protects its atmosphere from being blown away by solar winds. However the magnetic field has declined by 6% in the last 100 years.

[Ancient Dragon]

>>If not a third world war,t

There will never be another third world war -- USA has enough nuclear stuff to destroy the whole earch all by iteself without help from anyone else. A couple other countries could also do that -- such as China and Russia.

> RE Greg Bear and downloading yourself.

I thought it was Greg Egan and his Gleisner robots.

[jember]

Humanity will come to extinction if the "war freaks" declare war on each other.
Plus, I do not believe that the world will end on exactly 12/12/12. That's too much coincidence, don't you think? Whoever made this up, what the hell are you thinking?

[Ancient Dragon]

>>Plus, I do not believe that the world will end on exactly 12/12/12

I agree -- did the world come to an end on 1/1/11? Noooo. Besides, someone in a tabloid last month claimed it will come to an end in Sep 2011. So you all better get your personal lives in order because you don't have much time left :)

[bumsfeld]

I thought that 12/21/2012 was the time when planetary arrangements made the sun real eager for sun spots.

[Agilemind]

I thought that 12/21/2012 was the time when planetary arrangements made the sun real eager for sun spots.

I think its actually supposed to be a "galactic alignment" where earth the sun and some other galaxy are aligned which means it will have even less effect than a planetary alignment which don't do anything except cause alot of people to stay up late staring at the sky like morons.

[bumsfeld]

Rocks several miles in diameter fly by the Earth as close as 100,000 miles away several times a week. Most of them are not detected until they are way past the Earth.