Which comes first - space expansion or end of human race?

[HCL]

So yesterday, I was beginning to think about the universe and despite how obvious it is, it didn't really 'hit' me until thinking about it that space is infinite; and if it's not, it will just keep leading on and on and on into something never-ending. Now keeping this in mind, there is so much space in the universe that makes earth look like a dust spec in the big picture, which would theoretically mean that sooner or later, we will end up expanding into space - or will we?

See, I heard an interview from Joe Rogan who related the human species to that of mold. He said that like mold, you don't look at each human individually, but rather as an entire group progressing towards the same goal (you can argue that we have minds that can change that, but that's another topic). He said that as an observer from a birds eye view, if you saw all of the mountains, trees, grass, flowers, etc and then saw these huge factories giving out all of this smoke and smog, you would think those factories were some kind of cancer to the earth, meaning what we're doing is 'unnatural'. But as with mold, we are simply doing what is in our nature, which is to expand on open and uncharted areas.

But here is where this all gets interesting. If you notice with mold, once it has no more surface area to cover, it no long grows, but instead collapses into itself. And when you relate that to all of the similarities to humans, you have got to wonder if humans will end up the same fate, which realistically it will once we can't expand on earth anymore. So my question to you blades is this:

Will humans successfully begin to explore and expand out into space, or will we crumble into ourselves before we have the chance?

[k.smith904]

expansion.

For no other reason than I think that deep down everyone is good, and its just a matter of time before we quit with our petty bullshit and appreciate each other.

[followurblyss]

Honestly, it's not my favorite choice, but im gunna say the end of the human race..
I see the human race dying out VERY soon, because we're a bunch of idiots. Really... Do you see what we've done to this planet in the last 200 years?! If somone from the 1800s saw what the world was like today they would be disgusted. But anyway, i also feel it would take us FOREVER to figure out space expansion.. Most of us can't even figure out how this life is supposed to be lived, they let the government tell them how it is supposed to be lived.. Which in my opinion is going to ruin this earth.

tweeking hard on 100mg of adderall and i go t pretty pissed at the world ahahah...
Can't blame me..

Edit : However, I can be wrong... oh, how i'd love for everything to turn around, and all of us humans realize what we've been doing to our "lives". I just don't see that happening, based on the pure fact that we dug ourselves too deep.. We deserve it. hehe

[Medicine Al]

Ask the people in the ISS, what they think.

If someone from the 1800's saw the world today, they would be amazed, not disgusted.

I'd like to show Ludwig Van Beethoven my Ipod.

What miracles would a Christ figure have to perform to even get noticed in today's world?

Raising the dead goes on all the time, in every emergency room. As long as Lazarus has health insurance, he can get a new heart, and if he so desires,bigger boobs, or a sex change, or if he's lost a leg, he can get a fitting and a prosthetic leg that is so well designed, it actually makes him run faster than his real one did.

Tell me the name of another species of cognizant beings assimilating the knowledge of performing miracles? Only humans do that.

For reasons of our own, thank you.

[HCL]

Since I never gave my thoughts, I'll give them now...

I constantly think about what's going to happen 100, 200, 300 years into the future, what life will be like, but I feel like even predicting another 200 years of human life is foolish. There are so many smart individuals on this planet, but sadly they don't make up the majority and the smart ones that eventually gain power either abuse it or are controlled.

I just feel that with every positive we have, we have two more negatives surrounding it. I mean, I can never really see the people of earth uniting together to focus on the same agenda. We are constantly fighting each other, killing each other, stealing from each other, backstabbing each other, and it never stops.

I really hope we can survive, but look at how wasteful we are. I mean, look at the things people do because they have 'money', not realizing that money is simply just a piece of paper within our government saying we're allowed to obtain things with it. In theory, it's such a silly thing yet some people live and die by money like having it will keep them immortal. It's a sad thing to see and even more sad to think about, really.

[Thunderstruck]

keep hope my friends. Sure humans are a bunch of greedy, stingy mfer's but think about all the big things that have changed us as a whole. Exploring new places, inventing/discovering new theories and idea's, implementing those idea's. Each time the minority smart people grasp a huge idea, it changes us as a whole. Like the people said before, think about the invention of the transister and how it has impacted the planet as a whole. Sure some things have gotten much worse but as a whole we continue to get better. I like to think of it as the smart ones are dragging the other people along as they make new discoveries. When they are dragged along, they are forced to confront some opinion that they have that doesn't vibe with the rest of what we know and are forced to change.

I know this is a crappy way to say it but it's the best way i can describe it atm. Our desire to experience new things and places eventually leads us to view the world from a new perspective that no one can escape from, but in a good way. I can't think of one person that's been on the ISS or into space and is an atheist or at the very least comes back a little more humble.

edit: lol to answer the OP's question, space expantion. sure many of us will die off but we will get there, barring some major event that does the work for us.

[420Haze]

As much as I'd like to say expansion, there is a good chance that we will kill each other off first. No matter what we create, it is inevitably used for the wrong purposes. If someone created a source of perpetual energy you think it would first be used to power everyone's cars and homes? How about a way to easily and cheaply put objects in space? Not likely, it would probably be used to make a missile or other weapon. So many things have been created for benign purposes only to be taken by the military and used to kill people or assert their power. Just look at nuclear energy, it has the potential to power the whole planet, but it just isn't feasible because of the people that would try to use it to create destruction.

Perhaps though we will get to space before this happens. Our nature to want to conquer seemingly insurmountable challenges might lead us to venture up into space and beyond. Just like we climb mountains like Mt. Everest just to see that we can beat it, we too might expand into space just to prove that we can. It's just fundamentally human to do things simply because we can, and we want to prove to ourselves and everyone else that it can be done.

[sikander]

What I envision being much more likely is that our society will collapse first. What I can see is something like this: we, after some false starts, come to the point where we finally set up some colonies on Mars.

But they're not just there because can put them there. They're there for a really, really good reason: As a pitstop to the Asteroid Belt, where there's more resources (ore, precious metals, things that could make fuel) than I know how to describe literally just floating out there.

But then, after a few centuries, the population's resource consumption jumps to meet the available resources like it always has and we exhaust the Belt on stupid wasteful things. I don't know what but we'll do it somehow. Maybe we'll take all the ore out there and refine it into steel alloys to turn Earth into one giant city. I don't know.

Then there'll be another scramble to find another source for all our Earthly needs, and us shortsighted humans will establish some colonies on the Jovian moons for to provide a shipping/refining base for the next phase of human expansion: eating Jupiter.

We'll eventually exhaust Jupiter and move on until we've gobbled up the whole System this way and we're stuck out at the Kuiper Belt, fighting over frozen little lumps of methane and ice. Back on Earth society will collapse utterly, if we don't go extinct, and even if we wanted to work our way back into complex civilization there simply wouldn't be the free resources. All the ore will have been turned to steel for use in skyscrapers and rusted over the millennia. All the free hydrogen burned and dissipated. And so on, and we'll be stuck on our destroyed little Earth, too powerless to ever do anything big ever again.

But look on the upside: we won't pose a threat to anything but ourselves!

This, of course, assuming that climate change doesn't lead to a catastrophic extinction event that pulls the rug out from under us, or we don't destroy ourselves in a nuclear holocaust.

[Chronny215]

Originally Posted by sikander

What I envision being much more likely is that our society will collapse first. What I can see is something like this: we, after some false starts, come to the point where we finally set up some colonies on Mars.

But they're not just there because can put them there. They're there for a really, really good reason: As a pitstop to the Asteroid Belt, where there's more resources (ore, precious metals, things that could make fuel) than I know how to describe literally just floating out there.

But then, after a few centuries, the population's resource consumption jumps to meet the available resources like it always has and we exhaust the Belt on stupid wasteful things. I don't know what but we'll do it somehow. Maybe we'll take all the ore out there and refine it into steel alloys to turn Earth into one giant city. I don't know.

Then there'll be another scramble to find another source for all our Earthly needs, and us shortsighted humans will establish some colonies on the Jovian moons for to provide a shipping/refining base for the next phase of human expansion: eating Jupiter.

We'll eventually exhaust Jupiter and move on until we've gobbled up the whole System this way and we're stuck out at the Kuiper Belt, fighting over frozen little lumps of methane and ice. Back on Earth society will collapse utterly, if we don't go extinct, and even if we wanted to work our way back into complex civilization there simply wouldn't be the free resources. All the ore will have been turned to steel for use in skyscrapers and rusted over the millennia. All the free hydrogen burned and dissipated. And so on, and we'll be stuck on our destroyed little Earth, too powerless to ever do anything big ever again.

But look on the upside: we won't pose a threat to anything but ourselves!

This, of course, assuming that climate change doesn't lead to a catastrophic extinction event that pulls the rug out from under us, or we don't destroy ourselves in a nuclear holocaust.

Eh, it makes more sense to me that we'd generate energy from the sun before we traveled to the astroid belt. I think as far as the mold metaphor is concerned, seeing as we've already entered space, that should mean that there is a virtually unlimited amount of space for expansion, I don't see us being restricted by Earth's drainage of natural resources. It's all about the timing of technological advancement vs. population growth.

[sikander]

Originally Posted by Chronny215

Eh, it makes more sense to me that we'd generate energy from the sun before we traveled to the astroid belt. I think as far as the mold metaphor is concerned, seeing as we've already entered space, that should mean that there is a virtually unlimited amount of space for expansion, I don't see us being restricted by Earth's drainage of natural resources. It's all about the timing of technological advancement vs. population growth.

PV only takes you so far. It'll power your television set but that shit won't get you into space. And it certainly doesn't make a good building material. I'm not just talking about electricity generation here. There's so much more that civilization runs on, and the Belt's full of it.

And how on Earth could we not be restricted by the drainage of Earth's natural resources? Think about it for a second. In the scenario I've presented, we've pretty much pillaged the Earth because when we were doing it, we had the Belt/Jupiter/everything else to leverage and we really don't think that far ahead (we weren't even going two centuries ahead when we all switched to petrol, and for most people 50 years from now is some imponderably long time where we'll somehow end up having beautiful green women and flying across space in the USS Enterprise with Mr. Spock aboard when in the last 50 years the major accomplishment has been the development of a way to cheaply deliver porn to the privacy of lonely people's homes).

So there's not much left on Earth that we could use, if, say, some sort of horrible collapse might happen, like what you might experience once the Solar System's exploitable resources have been used up. So whoever's stuck here on Earth would need to build up again from what they had at hand. You don't think space-ships just come out of nowhere, do you? And if there's nothing at hand... then it follows that they can't build up.

And you can't just assume some mad scientist will invent a faster-than-light engine before we hit that point, because right now physicists are pretty damn sure it's not even possible.

At that comment, I'm certain someone who believes in the infinite power of science to make the impossible possible will point out other things we used to think were impossible - like spaceflight in the first place - were in fact possible. I'll just say that there are also tons of things that we thought were impossible, and were in fact just not possible, like perpetual motion. It's not a safe assumption that just because we believe it to be impossible today means that someday we'll work around it, because some shit just ain't possible.