Discussion
ash73 said:
Eric Mc said:
Does it?
Of course, let's say you throw a dice once a day, the probability of throwing a 6 on the first day is 1/6 = 0.17, whereas the probability of throwing a 6 during the first week is 1-(1-1/6)^7 = 0.72It very much depends also on the event. Something like a the mega volcano under yellowstne, goes off about once every 600k yrs, so the longer you leave it, the greater the chance, as the pressure builds. But a meteor strike which is a completely random event, the chances don't increase the longer you go without. It might average every 50K yrs, but you might get nothing for 100m yrs, and then 2 in a day.
Hugo a Gogo said:
there are no races, arbitrary social constructs only 
any two random unrelated 'black' men are just as different genetically as any other two unrelated men (more so even - far wider spread of genetic material within africa than outside)
Both those statements may be true but the second doesn't support the first (if indeed it was supposed to; perhaps it wasn't).any two random unrelated 'black' men are just as different genetically as any other two unrelated men (more so even - far wider spread of genetic material within africa than outside)
Simpo Two said:
Hugo a Gogo said:
there are no races, arbitrary social constructs only
any two random unrelated 'black' men are just as different genetically as any other two unrelated men (more so even - far wider spread of genetic material within africa than outside)
Both those statements may be true but the second doesn't support the first (if indeed it was supposed to; perhaps it wasn't).any two random unrelated 'black' men are just as different genetically as any other two unrelated men (more so even - far wider spread of genetic material within africa than outside)
Hugo a Gogo said:
there are no races, arbitrary social constructs only
any two random unrelated 'black' men are just as different genetically as any other two unrelated men (more so even - far wider spread of genetic material within africa than outside)
anyway, massive asteroid/comet strike could easily wipe out all life, all 'big' creatures anyway
We'd probably call them "varieties" in any other organism. Homo sapiens var. Caucasion. Or maybe a subspecies, taxonomy is a minefield.any two random unrelated 'black' men are just as different genetically as any other two unrelated men (more so even - far wider spread of genetic material within africa than outside)
anyway, massive asteroid/comet strike could easily wipe out all life, all 'big' creatures anyway
Simpo Two said:
Hugo a Gogo said:
there are no races, arbitrary social constructs only
any two random unrelated 'black' men are just as different genetically as any other two unrelated men (more so even - far wider spread of genetic material within africa than outside)
Both those statements may be true but the second doesn't support the first (if indeed it was supposed to; perhaps it wasn't).any two random unrelated 'black' men are just as different genetically as any other two unrelated men (more so even - far wider spread of genetic material within africa than outside)
Ayahuasca said:
OK, what I mean is that the 'arbitrary social constructs' commonly known as race will probably vanish.
we'll make up some new ones, probablySimpo Two said:
HRL said:
I think you must mean nation as we're already one race.
We're one species (we can all interbreed) but several races (Caucasian, Asiatic, Negroid etc). If we were all one race no-one could play the race card when they wanted something.HRL said:
Religion will eventually die off over the next few hundred years as the hypocrites realise that according to their holy books modern technology and science shouldn't exist. Yet they are already embracing it on a daily basis. I'm sure it will dawn on them eventually.
I'd like to think so but there will always be people who prefer mumbo-jumbo to facts. On a specific, look at the anti-GM brigade. They don't understand something so they are fearful and try to destroy it trough ignorance, suspicion or both.HRL said:
Nature has kept humanity in check in the past, inevitably it will do so again at some point. Perhaps we will destroy ourselves with some misjudged nanotechnology. Something we create for our benefit that spirals out of control maybe. Or a pandemic on a scale never before seen. Both are real possibilities don't you think?
It keeps humanity in check with plague and famine but has not destroyed it. Inventing something that kills all 8 billion humans down to the last breeding pair in a cave in the Andes is science fiction I think.HRL said:
I'm not talking extinction but I am talking an 80-90% population reduction in an incredibly short time scale, by historic measurements.
That contradicts your last paragraph but it would make the M25 nicer 
Eric Mc said:
No they don't. The last large meteorite DID strike 65 million years ago. The next one could be tomorrow - or 100 million years in the future - or even never.
It's an interesting logic fail though: 'The last one was 65M years ago so they happen every 65M years' OR 'must be due any day now'.I'd also venture that one day the internet will be gone and for the bulk of mankind at least, life will revert to a simpler mode.
A pandemic that mutates could quite easily reduce the population by 80-90%, that's hardly reducing the population to the last breeding pair, is it. A billion plus would still survive unless my maths has failed me completely.
Personally, I just don't understand why some people still believe in pseudoscience.
HRL said:
A pandemic that mutates could quite easily reduce the population by 80-90%, that's hardly reducing the population to the last breeding pair, is it. A billion plus would still survive unless my maths has failed me completely.
Exactly. It's like adverts for disinfectant that 'kill 99.9% of germs'. Sound great until you realise there are 100,000,000 of them to start with. HRL said:
Personally, I just don't understand why some people still believe in pseudoscience.
Because, of the 8-9 billion people in the world, very few are decently educated, and of those who are, many prefer to watch EastEnders. Because like science is really boring and hard and dull? The amount of science (or any other facts) the average Joe knows is frighteningly small. They might reply 'Well I can Google it'. And they can, but it's not the same.s p a c e m a n said:
The world as we know it revolves around money and possessions, if there was no longer any need for this what would we all do? That would be the biggest change that could possibly happen, we need someone to invent replicators and then we can really infest the universe.
Replicators, it's already happening 3d printers
Give it another 100 years and we'll be their I reckon.
The real thing limiting our expansion at the moment is energy. Once we crack the cheap, renewable energy chestnut we'll see a massive expansion probably to the stars which will almost guarantee the survival of the human race. The question is whether we'll get to that point before we destroy ourselves (yes I know full destruction is not really possible but we could certainly do enough damage to set us back 100's of years).
The problem is human nature would also have to change at the same time to enable us to exploit all the energy in a productive manner, we might solve the energy problem in the next 10 years but I think humans have a good few hundred or more years to mature to a point where can responsibly use all that energy (if we ever do)
BIANCO said:
Personally I think its only a matter of time before we wipe ourselves out.
That's always the cop out approach, it's difficult to predict the long term future so it's easier to imagine that there probably won't be one, however there's no real reason to assume that total destruction would be likely.It wouldn't be too far fetched for a major war or natural disaster to significantly impede our technical knowledge and mastery of this planet, the percentage of people that really know how everything works is very small, everyone else is just a consumer/user. But even then I doubt such an event would be successful in killing us all off, if we're knocked back to the stone-age then we'd just crack on like last time. Protecting our amassed knowledge is vital, wouldn't want to ever allow the modern equivalent of the destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria to happen again.
However I think Humans will be fine and will be around in some form on this planet when the Sun starts to get a bit too spicy and kills off everything that's here. Even though it has about 4 billion years left before it'll swallow the Earth it'll be at least a billion years before then that the oceans will have boiled away. As Mars and the outer moons will have nicely defrosted, we'd likely to have moved away from the Sun and colonised them, that would extend our lease of the Solar System a few million years.
Beyond the Solar System would require some fundamental discoveries to happen, maybe if we found a remote planet that was suitable to colonise we could send a ship/Arc full of frozen embryos to it that could be thawed out and grown upon arrival. Robot tutors could then deal with raising these new people and equipping them with the knowledge and skill they'd need to survive, and hopefully they'd be successful in settling on the new world.
Single celled organisms can't post on forums. Or go to the moon or build aeroplanes. No other species apart from humans can talk; the closest any come to tool-making is a stick with termites on it. Humans are pretty special. The time they've been around for is not a relevant fact, other than to see what they have achieved in that time - whilst all other species have done nothing.
ash73 said:
qube_TA said:
I think Humans will be fine and will be around in some form on this planet when the Sun starts to get a bit too spicy and kills off everything that's here.
That's an amazing assertion, given humans have only been around for what about 150K years and we already almost died out completely halfway along that timeline. The only life that survived a billion years were single-celled organisms; unless you consider us to be that same life "in some form"...?ash73 said:
Simpo Two said:
...all other species have done nothing.
D Adams said:
Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.
ash73 said:
qube_TA said:
Humans are too established now that something fundamental would have to happen to 100% wipe us off the planet.
Well it's happened before, and the probability of a similarly catastrophic asteroid impact in the next 50 million years is about the same as the chances of rolling a 6 with six throws of a dice... and there are examples of diseases causing extinctions too.I wonder how humans will cope with the next ice age, it may not wipe us out but it's going to have a hell of an impact on the population.
Meteoric impact is bound to happen, I question the notion that one was responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs as they still took 100,000 years to die out after the 'event'. I think there was an event but the climate change it brought about was more subtle and those big lunks simply found their food supply slowly dwindle favouring the smaller mammals instead. Our technology should hopefully improve this century sufficiently so that such an impact would be particularly unlikely.
Ice Ages do happen, their cause isn't exactly understood but the ice never covered the entire planet, far from it, again I'm sure if there was a repeat of such an event it wouldn't kill us off or be something we wouldn't be able to combat. Yes it would be a struggle, but the end, no. None of them were able to wipe out our predecessors who were much fewer in number or had the means to do much about it.
a bacterial issue could cause massive problems but if such an issue appeared then it's unlikely it would be able to cause sufficient damage before counter protection was implemented to stop it in its tracks.
I still think it's just easy to assume we'll all die as it's simpler to conceive than us lasting for ever. If over the next 1000 years we don't get knocked back to the stone age then populating the rest of the Solar System will be more likely and also help secure our future. That would then raise the interesting prospect that populations of humans that are born and live of different rocks will start to evolve differently to each other, ultimately resulting in different species of humanoids all with a common ancestry but no longer the same.
qube_TA said:
The planet isn't old enough yet to know whether complex life can survive that long. Humans are too established now that something fundamental would have to happen to 100% wipe us off the planet. A human descendant in 3Bn years time would possibly be unrecognisable to us now, the environment and atmospheric conditions by then may be so different that if you went forward in time you'd not be able to breathe, just as you woudln't be able to if you went back the same distance.
Not on Earth. Sun is getting hotter and in 1bn years will have boiled away all our water = dead Earth.TX.
WeirdNeville said:
Deep Space travel: I think we'll actually give up on it, unless we find some kind of hyperdrive/time travel/wormhole exploitation mechanism. Mass Colonising the Moon or Mars is too low reward, too dangerous, and too expensive. We'll learn to make do with what we have on Earth.this though...
I do wish people would stop limiting our horizons like this 'only one world...limited resources...blah blah blah' - it's been the same story ever since the 'Club of Rome' issued their doom&gloom report in the '60sThere's a s
tload more resources floating around in the sky than we'd ever get out of the earth, in a place where reliable solar power is available 24/7, and there are no threats to wildlife/environment from mining activities.And that's before you consider the 'all our eggs in one basket' aspect of a killer meteorite impact on the earth.
Get your blinkers off chaps
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