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Are Habitable Exoplanets Bad News For Humanity?
An anonymous reader writes "The discovery of Kepler-186f last week has dusted off an interesting theory regarding the fate of humanity and the link between that fate and the possibility of life on other planets. Known as the The Great Filter, this theory attempts to answer the Fermi Paradox (why we haven't found other complex life forms anywhere in our vast galaxy) by introducing the idea of an evolutionary bottleneck which would make the emergence of a life form capable of interstellar colonization statistically rare. As scientists gear up to search for life on Kepler-186f, some people are wondering if humanity has already gone through The Great Filter and miraculously survived or if it's still on our horizon and may lead to our extinction."
But the way the human race is behaving currently, getting off this dirtball in any meaningful way seems exceedingly unlikely.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
answer: Space is really big.
A race could have populate half the galaxy's out there and we still wouldn't know.
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Maybe the inhabitants of those other planets aren't ravening imperialist douchebags. In that case, I'm liking our odds.
Consider Jack Handey's observation:
--Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
There's about 5,000 years of recorded human history. But there's only about 200 years of industrial civilization. It's been just about 200 years since the first time a paying customer got on a train and went someplace. Think of that as the beginning of large-scale deployment of powered technology.
It wasn't until the middle of the 20th century that human activities started making a big dent in planetary resources. By now, we've extracted and used most of the easy-to-get resources. There's argument over how long it will take to run through what's left, but it's not centuries, and certainly not millennia. More difficult and sparser resources can be extracted, but that's a diminishing-returns thing.
It's quite possible that high-power technological civilization only has a lifespan of a few hundred years before the planet is used up. We might be saved by the Next Big Thing in high-power technology, but there hasn't been a major new energy source in 50 years. Nobody can get fusion to work, and fission is riskier than expected.
Incorrect. Evolution is sick, twisted, and blind. We deserve better. I believe we still have time to take control and become a better, post-human species.
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Ours is not one of the early-generation stars, but life as we know it requires some trace heavy metals, so complex organism require later generation stars (so that the older stars can generate heavy elements and nova them out). So we are a young system, but could be the oldest capable of life as we know it.
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Which is why space travel is important, especially colonization. Think of it this way: a herd of animals lives in an area with plenty of food and water. Now, after a while, the food and water starts to dry up. Does the herd just sit around and wait to die, or does it venture out into other areas, expanding its territory. Essentially it is a natural process, and the only hope humanity has of any significantly long term existence.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil