How long do we have left?

[Tjur]

How long do we have left as a species to survive? Will it be a natural event that kills us or will we obliterate ourselves?

Edgelords incoming

[Powerogue]

I'd say attack from space like a giant moon-sized rock that we can't really defend against.

All the more reason to get our butts off searching for ripe new planets to terraform and colonize I'd say! Our planet's death is as inevitable as our own individual ones.

[May90]

There will be 2 camps, the Genetically enhanced, and the cybernetically enhanced in my opinion.

I think both will be developing at the same time. Which will become dominant, say, in 200 years is everybody's guess.

[Drekker17]

I think we have a least a couple million years to go. I think most likely we will go extinct do to a huge mass extinction like the Permian extinction. I think a nuclear war wouldn't make humans extinct, it would certainly devestate civilization, but not make us go extinct.

[Cosmophile]

I doubt we'll ever be able to obliterate ourselves. Bombing ourselves back to the "stone age"? Yeah, we might do that.
It seems more likely that an asteroid would hit earth or that our sun would swollow us/burn out and that's what will kill us.

That any of this will happen anytime soon seems very unlikely however.

I feel like you're underestimating the lethality of nuclear radiation.

[Drekker17]

I think both will be developing at the same time. Which will become dominant, say, in 200 years is everybody's guess.

Which means really 400 years from now.

[xChurch]

I think we have a least a couple million years to go. I think most likely we will go extinct do to a huge mass extinction like the Permian extinction. I think a nuclear war wouldn't make humans extinct, it would certainly devestate civilization, but not make us go extinct.

I've played enough Fallout to know where this is going, and I'm so ready!

[Gemini Soul]

I doubt it will be a result of a violent war, as some futurists predict. More likely we will slowly integrate technology into our physiology, and at some point we will start resembling more highly technological machines than organic species.

I wouldn't be surprised if the technology we see in some movies does actually exist but its not common knowledge.

Star Trek had it right thou with data pads(tablets) and now we are getting close to having a computer like they did with voice activation and commands. Although if i were to design it i would build it so it would auto activate when we say computer or some other preset activation command word set by the user. We have that tech now with the google app but you need to press the button to activate it, its just a stepping stone to the next version OS's that can be run via physical user interface or simple voice commands.

Still waiting for the day we get holodecks to play Pokemon or WoW.

[Daedius]

I'd say attack from space like a giant moon-sized rock that we can't really defend against.

Just send a senior Bruce Willis up to take care of it.

- - - Updated - - -

I think we have a least a couple million years to go. I think most likely we will go extinct do to a huge mass extinction like the Permian extinction. I think a nuclear war wouldn't make humans extinct, it would certainly devestate civilization, but not make us go extinct.

'Modern' humans have only been around for the past 200 thousand years.

Wonder what we'll look like in a couple million years with how technologically dependent we've become?

Like this:



Sexy!

[Vash The Stampede]

Only if the morons who invent said AI never seen Terminator or the other movies out there and give the AI a connection to the internet lol.

What you see in movies doesn't translate well into reality. AI today is not the same thing as terminator AI. We're far away from reaching that point where AI can think like humans. But I wouldn't expect someone without a computer science degree to understand this.

So far TV and science fiction hasn't touched on the idea that in the near future we could no longer age, and therefore die. Even when Star Trek Next Generation was on TV, they had no idea of the internet. Then afterwards when Voyager and Deep Space Nine was released after the internet age, they then began to introduce the concept of the internet to the show, and they do so very poorly.

Humanity isn't going anywhere, unless the Sun suddenly turns into a red giant. Until then, we have plenty of time to survive the suns death by building ships and very slowly floating towards our new home. We aren't going to kill ourselves either, as so many people here hope we do.

[Rudkobing]

We're about to die in...

5....
4....
3....
2....
1....

5 seconds from now.

[Surfd]

We will endure forever. Even if atomic fire burns the sky, there will still be humans left to rebuild on the ashes. At one point in our history our species was brought down to only 2000 people, and yet here we are.

Umm, what? I dont even....

[Deletedaccount1]

The only things which could completely annihilate the human race are asteroid impacts and nuclear war. If that doesn't happen, I would expect probably tens to hundreds of thousands of years. The quality of life may not be consistent and there could be another dark age but once things have been discovered, it is relatively easy to rediscover them.

[Deleted]

I'm expecting some sort of setback for humanity this century.

Maybe a new Dark Ages after a large war.

[Rudkobing]

In the year 2525, if man is still alive
If woman can survive, they may find
In the year 3535
Ain't gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lie
Everything you think, do and say
Is in the pill you took today
In the year 4545
You ain't gonna need your teeth, won't need your eyes
You won't find a thing to chew
Nobody's gonna look at you
In the year 5555
Your arms hangin' limp at your sides
Your legs got nothin' to do
Some machine's doin' that for you
In the year 6565
You won't need no husband, won't need no wife
You'll pick your son, pick your daughter too
From the bottom of a long glass tube

In the year 7510
If God's a coming, He oughta make it by then
Maybe He'll look around Himself and say
Guess it's time for the judgment day
In the year 8510
God is gonna shake His mighty head
He'll either say I'm pleased where man has been
Or tear it down, and start again

In the year 9595
I'm kinda wonderin' if man is gonna be alive
He's taken everything this old earth can give
And he ain't put back nothing

Now it's been ten thousand years
Man has cried a billion tears
For what, he never knew, now man's reign is through
But through eternal night, the twinkling of starlight
So very far away, maybe it's only yesterday

[Surfd]

What you see in movies doesn't translate well into reality. AI today is not the same thing as terminator AI. We're far away from reaching that point where AI can think like humans. But I wouldn't expect someone without a computer science degree to understand this. .

That's the problem though. They dont have to think like humans. They just have to think. The thing that makes us unique as humans is our ability to LEARN ona higher scale then all of our other biological buddies on the planet. Gather information, reach a conclusion with said information, solve a problem. As soon as the first AI manages to begin to independantly learn, that is when the real shit hits the fan. Modern AI is basicly a very clever flowchart, but it is still essentially limited by what the flowchart allows. Once the AI is capable of autonomously adding information to the flowchart, we are fucked, because nobody on the face of the planet can really predict how it will start to "think" from that point on.

[Spase Peepole]

Soon. We are watching.

[D Luniz]

Only if the morons who invent said AI never seen Terminator or the other movies out there and give the AI a connection to the internet lol.

Seeing damn near everything connects to the internet, that would be a given

- - - Updated - - -

Umm, what? I dont even....

I think he's talking about the Late Pleistocene bottleneck that was supposedly caused by the Toba eruption
short version, massive volcano that killed most of humanity leaving a few thousand survivors
http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/22/163397584/how-human-beings-almost-vanished-from-earth-in-70-000-b-c

[Deleted]

I bet for some kind of biological war that will wipe hole humanity at the same time, giving the earth back to animals and plants... but not sure how long 'till that happend, maybe we still have a couple of thousand years before that. Woho! Optimist attitude!

[Budong]

A man much smarter than me said it best.