/sci/ - Science & Math

Life seems like a long, drawn-out movie, but you can't wait to see what happens next. And when it's just about over, I think we'll know. We should have some form of warning, I would hope. And that Final Act will be what the universe remembers about us. Some civilization just starting to develop on the other side of the galaxy will get our radio signals by the time they had come to their equivalent advancement, and maybe they could learn from our mistakes.

Better yet, we could learn from an even more ancient civilization and prolong ourselves a bit more.

Either way, I'm excited for the end of it all. Not just the end of man, or Earth, but the end of the Universe and of Time. I'd love to understand what happens when time just ceases to exist.

Humans will probably war themselves to death or kill off the planetary life support. The earth will be swallowed by the sun, probably long after we are gone. I personally like to think the universe does not have an end, and if it does it will be so far in the future and on such a scale that the human brain is not able to perceive it. Time is a man-made invention, it will end when men do. Why so worried about the end, OP? When you are gone, you're not going to be around to worry, so why worry now?

Humanity is very unlikely to survive as a species outside the next 10 million years. The Earth will be around for billions of years. The universe, even more billions, perhaps trillions. Time, even longer.

Our civilization will essentially collapse in about a century due to all the fighting over disappearing petroleum supplies. A mere 1000 years from now, 99.9% of the surviving Humans (about 100 million people) will live a largely pastoral existence, living much like the commoners of the early 1800s England did. The 0.1% elite will have access to lifestyles experienced by the people of the early 1900s.

10000 years from now, even that won't be true. 99.99% will live a 1600s type of existence, and only 0.01% (1 person in 10000) will see the civilizational advantages of 1800s living.

It's really only downhill from here. Face facts.

Outside of Humans warring upon each other unto near extinction, there are hard points in the timeline of the future:

300 million years: Some photosynthesis will halt due to a carbon-cycle interruption due to solar brightening. Lots of lifeforms will die.

600 million years: Most PS will halt due to even stronger CC interruption. Almost all life on Earth will die off.

1.5 billion years: Solar brightening will finish off all life on Earth.

3.0 billion years: The collision between Andromeda and the Milky Way may have catastrophic effects on the solar system, depending on where we end up during the scattering of stars.

4-5 billion years: The Red Giant stage of the sun will obliterate Mercury and Venus through heat evaporation, and will at least make the surface of the Earth molten. There's a chance it will also evaporate the Earth. The sun will soon start its White Dwarf stage.

15 billion years: The sun becomes a Black Dwarf, dropping below visible heat emission (2000 C).

150 billion years: Stellar encounters will have ejected many of the planets from the solar system. The Black Dwarf will be close to the background temp.

Past that point, anything can happen. In trillions of years, provided there's no "Big Rip" ending, ejections and encounters will eventually subject Sol to being included in the ever-growing black holes that had formed the cores of most galaxies. The universe will be dark by then; no star will shine.

Why is everyone here so fatalist? Is it really so hard to hope that mankind can survive? What if we overcome the oil crisis, what if we overcome war, what if we colonize other planets, then other star systems? What if our understanding grows, so much so that we survive until the very End; and, if our knowledge is great enough, we cheat the ultimate death that we strive so desperately to do on a daily basis?

Is it so hard to hope?

>>4805474
>hope

Did you forget you were on /sci/ for a moment? Everyone on /sci/ is a realist, pessimist, or a pessimist masquerading as a realist. Mostly the latter.

In the next 5,000 years, if we don't blow ourselves up or destroy the planet, humans will achieve some semblance of "singularity".

There are a number of interesting hypothesis regarding the existence of intelligent sentient life (not necessarily carbon based mind you) near "the end". One is that we become artificially embodied "consciousnesses" which have affected their own perception of time such that it becomes nearly infinite. Other fun scifi theories include the ability to manipulate things on stellar or even galactic level. Futures where we become so powerful through the use of as-of-yet unseen (yet imaginable) technologies so as to become nearly omniscient and godlike.

When you are dealing with the OP's question, it's best to have a sense of science fiction, because it is purely speculative. Any scientist can tell you how thing's "should end" but nobody really knows what's actually going to happen.

>>4805352

Fuck that image.

Anyone got the full comic that picture is from?

Two options.

A) Humanity has a large nuclear war, devastates global civilization; surviving nations fight over what's left; billions starve; civilization degrades slowly over thousands of years due to environmental, ecological, and political repercussions of the war and because there are no longer cheaply accessible fossil fuels to reattain the infrastructure needed for past technological innovations; eventually disease or a natural cataclysm will administer the coup de grace.

B) Humanity creates an industrial foothold beyond Earth, and begins an exponentially quickening colonization and exploitation of the solar system. Eventually an Oort cloud mining colony will make the jump to a comet orbiting another star and begin the colonization of another star system. Over the course of millions of years, humanity will spread across the galaxy and evolve and re-engineer itself along the way until it has fractured into countless forms completely alien to what we would consider human. Depending on how one defines humanity, this could either mean humanity has gone extinct or lives on and will live on until every star has died in the universe.

>>4805540
Weeaboo detected.

>>4805540

Agnosticfag here.

It is my firm belief that we should not talk about this subject.
It isn't appropriate to anything humans should talk about.

>>4805665

>>4805683
I'm agnostic because you can't definitively prove the existence of a god, so I use God when ever I can't explain something. Such as the Creation of the universe.
It exists beyond the realm of what anyone is capable of comprehending, and anyone striving to become a god, is only headed in the opposite direction.

Man will wipe itself out somehow - most likely from some kind of nanobot gone rogue kind of situation (think replicators from Stargate). Life on Earth will continue on because it would be too hard to wipe it all out completely. Even severe nuclear war would leave some bacteria/viral life form alive somewhere.

Actually, I change my answer. Then end of humanity will more likely be just a normal fizzling out of the species in favor of the next level of evolution. Despite the fact that we have altered the course of 'natural' evolution a lot with medicine and whatnot, it is sure to continue and a version of us will eventually arise that is different enough to be considered a different race, and more adapted to whatever future conditions to wipe out contemporary humans through competition for resources.

>>4805686
Playing split the sentence.
>It exists
>beyond the realm of what anyone is capable of comprehending
How do you know something exists if you can't comprehend it.
>I use God when ever I can't explain something. Such as the Creation of the universe.
What I do
Fucked if I know. I will go and read up on the big bang and get back to you.
What you do
I don't know so god. - That is called willful ignorance

>>4805683
Factually incorrect.

>>4805533
why 5000 years? Most estimates for the technological singularity put it somewhere within most of our lifetimes. It will start slowly, but once the point of exponential advancement is reached, technology will grow almost instantaneously. Which makes me wonder why the Earth isn't constantly visited by more advanced civilizations - there may be hard limits to certain hurdles (ie: the speed of light), but given quantum physics I find it more likely that we really just aren't worth the trip.

If we don't blow ourselves up somehow in the next couple of centuries, or knock ourselves back to the stone age, we will most likely spread throughout the solar system (and most likely other parts of the galaxy), making the entire race difficult to wipe out.

I stand by my (2nd) hypothesis - we evolve into something different (likely several different species, given the probable spread to extremely remote areas of the galaxy/universe).

>>4805712
>Stop believing what I don't believe.

Not the person you're responding to but nowhere does he imply that he's willing to turn a blind eye from knowing more. The big bang theory does not tell us the origins of the universe rather what came after it; I'd read up a bit more on it cause you still apparently don't know shit about it.

>>4805722

What makes you think we won't be the first of all space-faring "aliens" in the Universe? All probabilities point to us being the only ones in our galaxy who have reached this high a level of technology in any case.

>>4805712
You idiot.
I'm torn between believe and not believe.
I'd like to believe there is a god, and sometimes I fucking do. But other times, it seems like god is an impossibility.

That is true fucking agnosticism you fucking asshole.

>>4805725
What probabilities, other than the fact that we don't have any alien races here turning us into galactic pets? How could anyone of our limited knowledge of the universe make such an estimate? The Drake equation hinges on factors that we just don't have any idea of.

>>4805738
And SETI has only searched something like 0.1% of the sky, for only a few short years. And of course there is the whole Reptilians-rule-the-world thing!

>>4805352
>Do you think we'll be around to see it?
>Time?
No.
>The Universe?
No.
>Earth?
No.

>>4805686
>I'm agnostic because you can't definitively prove the existence of a god
>so I use God when ever I can't explain something

>>4805737
You are using a god of the gaps argument. It sounds like any place that there is a hole in your knowledge you fill it with god. The hole in your knowledge for the creation of the universe may be filled with the square root of -1, Flying blue ass monkeys, or anything but a non retarded person will say - I don't know (FULL STOP). The silly willfully ignorant answer to anything is I don't know so god.

>>4805393
That is utter nonsense. We will be relatively advanced in many fields in just 100 years, and the rate of which we advance will grow exponentially.

Humanity will go extinct on 12/21/2012.
Everybody knows that.

>>4805427
Nvidia calculated the collision of Andromeda and Milky Way believe it or not, we're totally safe.

>>4805959
This.

I mean look at the predictions made in the past.

1950 they looked at population growth and said OH NO BY 2000 we'll have 10 billion people!

But guess what in the fucking 60 past year we did shit 60 years for humans in a very very large amount of time, we went from people usuing abacuses and shitty computers with less then 10 Kilohertz of power to today where a mobile phone for 500$ GPU can compute collisions of galaxies in real time.

Sure we don't know what awaits us in the future. But if things continue by 2200 everyone will be immortal cyborgs and we'll have the whole galaxy to exploit for infinite resources.

Anyone here think we'll be a Type1 civilization within our lifetimes? We're at 0.7 right now (with the Earth overall being at 0.8), but once we learn to utilize antimatter for power and propulsion, it's going to jettison us into the next era of mankind, including unlimited energy and the ability to travel closer to the speed of light.

I think if we can make it to a Type 1 Civilization, there might be hope for us yet.

>>4806139
I think there are enough young multimillionaires who want to live forever that there might actually be hope for humanity.

>>4806144
lol good answer.

>>4806139
>We're at 0.7 right now (with the Earth overall being at 0.8)

Could you explain this bit please? Is "we're" referring to the US?

>>4806153
no, we as in humankind.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale

The good thing about most extinction events is we can see them coming from a long way away. If the worst happened, like a planet-killer asteroid or rogue solar flare that lashes the face of the Earth somehow, most likely we'd load a bunch of people into rockets and shoot them over to the Moon for a short while (assuming the Moon doesn't get rofl-fucked as well.)

>>4805393
Is it fantasy time?

>>4806189
I read somewhere that if a dangerous asteroid that came out of nowhere was heading towards us, it's highly unlikely we'd be able to detect it, and nearly impossible that we'd be able to do anything about it.

But [citation needed].

>>4806189
Also, we'd burrow into the soil like Molemen, and try to reach the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

Unfortunately, it's unlikely we'll ever make it out of the Solar System. I know...it's hard to hear this, but....it's probably true. FTL is probably not going to be possible while humanity inhabits physical bodies.

>>4806195
I don't really think there's a "nowhere" in our local space anymore. We've got the Terran System on lock-down. That's not to say we can't get fucked in the face by an fast-mover; in fact, some parts of our planet are likely to get crushed in the next few hundred years.

>>4806189
If it's a solar flare, how long do you think we'd have to relocate? I thought those traveled quickly. And if it's an asteroid and we relocate to the moon safely, what then?

As of today, right at this very moment, our only hope of survival from such catastrophic events would be to burrow underground and put our heads between our knees.

>>4806215
Scientists can predict solar flares from Solar activity. Usually.

And the point of going to the Moon is: we've been there before. I'm not saying we stay there, but as far as the physics, know-how and power needed to get there and get away safely, we have it down pat. If Earth was rendered uninhabitable, the Moon is a (barely) safe harbor.

However, a planet-killer asteroid (s) slamming into the Earth probably wouldn't net positive results for the Moon.

>>4806217
that's a good point. Either way, if we were forced to find salvation on the moon, we'd get there and say, "erm... now what?"

At that point, though, the elite and rich that would survive would most likely kill themselves if the Earth was found not to be re-inhabitable.

I can't help but reminisce about "Wall-E".

>Will the end of mankind coincide with the end of Earth? The Universe? Time?
That's, like, arrogant, dude.
Except for universe/time, that's just plain retarded.

>>4806250
Explain further.

You Singularity morons need to fuck off /sci/ and go where the children usually go, I dunno, playgrounds or something. You have ZERO consideration in your so-called thinking for energy inputs. NOTHING HAPPENS WITHOUT ENERGY INPUTS. That's one of the most basic facts from Physics, and yet when you think about things economically, you TOTALLY FORGET ABOUT ENERGY. wtf?

>>4807007
From what I understand of their beliefs is that a new form of energy and a new form of information processing is supposed to coincide with the events before the singularity.
tl;dr they have an explanation for any problem you throw at them. Give up.

No beginning and no end. This thread is mere imagination.

man kind can't survive, we have pratically been conditioned from birth to be better then everyone else, that our way of life is right, everyone else's is wrong.
humanity wont survive for ages, it wont conqure the starts, it wont terraform planets, it wont spread accross the solar system. it will die, like someone being sufforcated by a pillow before we shoot ourselves.

i beleive we alread have our head in the pillow and are lifting the gun.

I like the idea of us moving off Earth. We spread so far, and over such a long timespan that we evolve into different sub-sets of humanity, all forming a part of one big clade. Some backwater planets will be rediscovere,d thought to be an alien species, until it's know that they are just a forgotten part of humanity. I got this idea from a great science-fiction short story.
Or else Mass Effect. Mass Effect style expansion would be sweet.

We'll fuck everything up somehow.

Probably sooner than later.

>>4806195
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/06/22/end-may-be-nigh-for-asteroid-disaster-movies/

Funny you say that.

>>4805540

It's cool. The pic in OP has God powers. It's supposed to be more inspiring than depressing.

>>4805635

There are more of them. http://www.kiwisbybeat.com/minusarchive.html

>>4805474

"That Man is the product of causes that had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins — all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built."

>>4805707
>nanobots
No, it'll be something MUCH more retarded.

>>4805474

The world ends with me.

But then, I'll live longer than this universe.

not with a bang but a whimper

>>4807641
We are the hollow men

>>4805474
We are in that civilization stage where we still act like teenagers.
We have been achieving more and more knowledge, childhood ended and we recently started using science, thinking everything is going to be terrible.

It's probablt a phase.

>>4807596
>It's supposed to be more inspiring than depressing.

More like she probably summoned it just to play baseball.

>>4805540
That kid is omnipotent.