Future Earth

[druiaghtagh]

Many thousands of years from now and Humanity has left our home and moved out to the stars, does anyone think all traces of us will disapear, and the Earth will heal itsel and be 'vIRGIN' again as it was millions of years ago

[JustSia]

Who says Humanity would leave or even be around to leave in thousands of years. So far we've been here for less than the dinosaurs and look what happened to them. And yes Nature would find the way, what do you think Global Warming is?

[jake-the-peg]

I really think there's very little chance of humanity ever moving out to the stars. The distances are just too great.

JustSia's point is interesting! You might want to consider that the earth is already starting to heal itself.

The first step of healing is to irradicate the disease

[druiaghtagh]

Thankyou both for replying. Yes the distances are great but who knows what advances science will make in technology,maybe faster than light travel, i know all about relativity, but thats only for KNOWN science

[JustSia]

The distance/speed is not the only hurdle in space travel, there is also the question of solar-particles� effect on human body, fuel, food, water, and our own destructive nature. But before that there are a few possible extinction level scenarios one has to consider. There is Yellowstone�s pending eruption, Ice Age, asteroids, plagues, cold war� And what�s the point of conquering another planet when we can conquer our own?

Actually this has always bothered me, we make a mess and rather than fixing it look elsewhere to ruin. It�s like we all want to find intelligence out �there� yet ignore the one here. How on Earth are we going to live in peace with alien life when we can�t accept our own?

[Nummy]

it's a lovely thought... that we journey to the stars...spreading our intelligence and humanity throughtout the universe. it just wouldn't happen like that...we'd just destroy whatever was out there!

i think jake put it very well...first step of healing is irradicatting the disease!

i do think nature keeps coming up with diseases to try and naturally 'cull' us. We just keep fighting it!

but no matter what we do to the earth...nature will win in the end!

[curlyfilm]

how do we know we are not the first civilisation on this planet, it may have happened already

[druiaghtagh]

Exactly my thought curly film, maybe muman race evolved before and got to a stage where we almost destroyed ourselves and went back to a pre historic state

[jake-the-peg]

I think if humanity has evolved to this level before and made such an impact then we'd see more than a trace of it in the fossil record!

As for faster than light travel, it's not just that you cannot go faster than light it's the fact that even if you get close to it the energy requirement would devour planets! and the damage from dust particles would make a night during the blitz look like a picnic

If you want to warp space a la Star Trek you need to bear in mind that even the gravitational force of the entire sun is sufficient just to curve space-time enough for a stars light to be deflected by 1/2000 of a degree

You can always say "look at what we've accomplished in the past from bicycles to space flight in 100 years who knows what the future holds" - but I think we'll probably look back at the 20th Century when the great strides were made, and not repeated. Concorde is out of service, we never returned to the moon the focus now is on information and nanotechnology

We might make it to Mars, especially if something like a fossil turned up there but I think that's likely to be pretty much your lot for manned space flight

[qapmoc]

I think that if a previous race had got to this technological level before there would be no oil left in the earth for us to find and use for creating our own societies and technology advances.

It would also seem that as we are at ''peak oil'' about....NOW, the human race will never again have enough energy resources to waste on such things as space travel.

No I don't think that space travel is a total waste of resources in human terms but it must be in energy resource terms.