originally posted in:Secular Sevens
You don't need to be Hawking to figure this out. By applying high school mathematics you can see that, at the present rate of human population growth and resource use, we're going to run out of room in less than a thousand years' time.
English
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and thats why there will be a war, the biggest war
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Edited by Bucket of Tears: 4/17/2013 8:49:23 PMYour answer is full of ignorance. As other nations develop, population increase declines. As technology gets better, we more efficiently use resources and find new ones.
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>implying human population growth and resource use is constant
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[i][quote]at the present rate[/quote][/i] Implying that the present rate is going to stay the same, seriously, if we start running out of resources, we'll be backed into a corner, and, guess what! Humanity will be forced to invent its way out of the situation once again because that's what we did with crops and genetic modifications. We [i]always[/i] bounce back.
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It's that kind of cloying optimism that sinks us even deeper into the mire. Especially now, with the rise of empires in the East - as wealth trickles down and Chinese and Indian middle classes demand more resources and breed even more, we're going to need to exercise a lot of caution on our total ecological impact. There isn't any magic wand we can wave to solve the problem as you seem to think.
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Yes there is, it's cuz there's a magic wand called [i]technology. Because 'MURRICA! -blam!- yeah![/i]
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I'm afraid it's naive to simply assume that we'll be able to meet any challenges we might face in the future. There is a very real chance that we could come up against a problem we can't solve before it's too late, or that a disaster might strike without warning before we can even react. All species go extinct eventually, and in the end, we will be no exception. It's not a question of if, it's a question of when. But if we're smart and vigilant, we can make sure that that day doesn't come for a very long time.
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I sure hope the end of the human race comes about because we evolve into a group of less moronic species.
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Well, if we escape this planet, it would be pretty bloody hard for us to go extinct... Something would have to destroy the entire galaxy, or even the entire universe.
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Edited by Ric_Adbur: 4/15/2013 2:31:16 AMThat's my point, though. No matter how successful we are, eventually the universe will end. At lot can happen between then and now, but nothing lasts forever.
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We do not know for certain that the universe will end, that stuff is all theory, is it not?
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Ric explained himself perfectly, but if you want to understand some of the more complex reasons that life will be impossible in the later universe, you can browse [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future]this.[/url] Life is doomed, one way or another.
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Major mind blown moment. When I saw that picture of the black hole in the page you listed, I thought to myself "well, maybe when the entire universe is consumed into a black hole there will be another big bang for some reason that we do not know. Maybe there's some kind of point when a black hole cannot contain itself anymore and there is some kind of explosion to start it all over again." Did I just think of something ingenious?
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I think that hypothesis exists somewhere, but I don't know if it has any sufficient merit. An infinitely massive object would curve space-time back onto itself completely, which could, I suppose, give rise to the conditions similar to those prior to the Big Bang, but considering the nature of metric space-time expansion and the distribution of matter, I can't see how that would happen. This is all assuming that the universe is flat and extends indefinitely, by the way.
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Edited by Ric_Adbur: 4/15/2013 3:23:11 AMActually, according to that timeline, planets, stars, and galaxies will still exist even 100 trillion years from now. I was under the impression that 30 billion years was the estimated limit for the universe's continued existence. It seems I wasn't even close. I don't remember where I got that idea from...
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Some of the estimates are still under question due to the recent confirmations about the Higgs field, which [i]drastically[/i] reduce the time that the universe will still be habitable. The Big Freeze is the most accepted theory, and most of those dates are calculated based on such, but if the newer theories regarding the Higgs Field hold up, [url=http://www.livescience.com/27218-higgs-boson-universe-future.html]the universe will end [b]much[/b] sooner.[/url]
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Edited by Ric_Adbur: 4/15/2013 5:28:54 AMTheoretically, all matter and energy in the universe will, by approximately 100 trillion years from now, have dispersed to the point where there are no celestial structures left other than black holes; galaxies, stars, and planets will all have followed nature's natural trend toward a maximally entropic state by that time. But also theoretically, if the quantum mechanical view holds true, spacetime is permanent and within that space quantum fluctuations are taking place, so that every few aeons or so what we think of as 'a universe' could potentially spontaneously manifest from such a fluctuation, possibly though another 'big bang' scenario. Neither theory allows for the possibility of Humanity surviving beyond the point where the known universe no longer contains any stars, planets, or sufficient matter close enough together for those to form, however. Even if quantum fluctuations do eventually reproduce a 'universe' similar to what we know, the wait between the death of ours and the birth of that new one would likely be untold trillions of years or more. It's difficult to imagine any living beings ever having sufficient technology to survive in an energyless, matterless void for any significant amount of time, much less undetermined aeons. And even if we did, could we also survive a subsequent 'new big bang,' assuming such a phenomenon even occurred anywhere near where the survivors were? Who knows what we might accomplish if we manage to avoid killing ourselves off?
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Now going seriously off topic here and all that, but I couldn't help it. This theory reminds me about the Precursor's origins that were revealed in Silentium. You can go back to your business now folks.
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What if by then we have the ability to create suns? Couldn't we then be sustained indefinitely by the energy of artificial suns?
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Edited by Ric_Adbur: 4/15/2013 5:32:07 AMIt would depend on the method, I suppose. Presumably you'd need the appropriate matter in the appropriate amounts to artificially create a star, and though there is a lot of matter in space, it's not an infinite supply, and much if not most of it is already going toward natural star production anyway even without Human interference. At some point, we'd have no material left with which to artificially create a star. This is all highly speculative, of course, because we don't know anything about what sorts of technologies might be possible in the future with what sorts of scientific breakthroughs. Perhaps there might be a way to manipulate, trigger, and/or guide quantum fluctuations themselves into creating what we want. Perhaps when we finally understand the nature of dark matter and dark energy some other avenue will become available to us. Who knows? In any event, we still need to be smart enough to avoid destroying ourselves in our time so that Humanity has a future in which to discover the answers to those questions.