Poll: The End of the Universe

[DefunctTheory]

Recently, I've watched a few 'End of the World' shows on Netflix. All very interesting, though a bit unimaginative (5 shows and only one mention of the Gray Blob possibility? Please!). But in almost all of them, they mentioned the big one: the Sun failing.

And it is indeed the big one. One day, our star will indeed shift from one stage of life to another, becoming completely hostile to life. Eventually our very planet will be engulfed into the flesh of that burning behemoth, and all life as we know it will perish.

But what I thought was interesting was that every scientist that was interviewed on this event said we'd be dead by the time the Sun could get to us. That Humanity would end, our genetic legacy ended, before the damned burning orb even got a chance to finish us off. Every single one said that. And it blows my mind.

Now, normally, I'm a 'realist' (Most people say pessimist. I suppose thats true enough). But even I find it hard to swallow that the most superior species we know of will just die off before our solar system sputters and dies. Sure, their are many dangers that we, as a species, face. And most of us recognize that natures game of selection marches onward, even if we want to believe that we are entirely above it (Hell, isn't that why we're still working on bigger and better science?). But I still would like to believe that, one day, when out Sun begins to die, we'll be off in some other part of space, toasting with glasses of space wine while we high five our 10th discovered sentient species.

Hell, I'd like to think that we can beat thermodynamics, if only by a few minutes. I like to imagine that one day, when the Universe has finally succumbed to thermal death (yes, trillions of trillions of trillions of years from now), that at least one son of humanity will remain. He may not be a human as we know it, and most likely his genetic code, let alone his physical appearance, will not resemble us in the least. But all the same, a son of humanity he will be. And I imagine him floating at the edge of the mass filled universe, watching the last of everything descend into nothing but heat, smoking one last cigarette and flipping the universe whatever his equivalent to a middle finger would be in one last act of defiance.

Am I the only one who thinks we can make this happen?

 

[Nihilm]

No your not the only one, i pretty much 100 % agree and want this to happen, it's funny how all the optimists i know, have no faith in humanity surviving, while me a self-proclaimed realist and a pessimist to most people, believe we will endure til the end of time and be able to spread our destructive ways to end of the universe

 

[Nihilm]

fundamental rule of humanity: We fuck something up very bad, but since it was us who fucked up, we can fix it when it gets too bad and grow in the process, then we repeat even worse, until we are capable of everything

 

[Esotera]

I'd like it to happen but it doesn't seem very feasible with our current standard model. Then again, something might crop up in later experiments that mean thermal death doesn't have to be a certainty, so there's still hope whilst our understanding of the universe is incomplete.

 

[legion431]

I really, really hope we wake up and realise we need to get the most out of our space programs as soon as possible. I know people say we should try to fix our problems here first but I say fuck that. If we start now and venture outwards and eventually populate another planet or moon somewhere in the universe we could use all of the shit here as a guideline of what not to do.

I am also a huge pessimist.

 

[Deschamps]

This is why it's so important that we colonize Mars. Not that Mars will last any longer than Earth does, but because we need to know how to colonize another planet before we head out to another solar system.

It all seems far fetched now, and it is. But we have a lot of time to figure this out, and look how much our species has achieved in the last fifty years.

The first step is to elect Neil deGrasse Tyson for president, and then give Robert Zubrin a big pile of money. He's had the whole Mars mission planned for years.

 

[Joey Wonton]

I like to believe that the human race is very good at not dying.
Firstly, there's evolution making us able to survive our environment.
Then there's the evolution of logical thinking, making us able to see a problem and determine a solution, even if it requires such radical thinking as mathematics.
Soon, there will be bionic improvements to the human system, and with it the ability to keep a human alive way past regular conditions.

Hopefully humans can cling onto existence with our smarty-panty-ness until our foothold in the universe is absolutely assured.

 

[enzilewulf]

Fuck it lets go further than that!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Were going to create a new universe!!

 

[Da Orky Man]

Although I REALLY hope htat will happen, the thermodynamics problem would be, well, problematic. They go something like this:
You can't win; you can only break even.
You can only break even at absolute zero.
You can't reach absolute zero.

 

[OmniscientOstrich]

Basically to avoid being melted/swallowed up in the sun's Red Giant phase, we'd need to not develop some way to sustain the lives of millions of people in space, but also find a planet with suitably hospitable conditions to call our new home. Now, this will likely entail having to find a planet outside of the Milky Way as Mars by this point will not be an option and the nearest galaxy to ours is Andromeda. Even if Andromeda does happen to contain planets suitable for colonisation, it is 2 milllion lightyears away. It would take 2 million years to reach Andromeda even whilst travelling at the speed of light. Now granted, 5 billion years is a long time for technological and epistemological evolution to occur, but still the question becomes do I think in that time we can develop the thousands/millions of space craft's necessary that can travel at the speed of light millions of times over whislt simultaneously keeping the passengers and cargo in safe condition? Not a fucking chance.

 

[AnarchistFish]

I find it weird that it's a fact that one day, humans will reach their end and there will be an apocalypse.

If you think about it, if humanity does reach the end of the solar system's life, it will be so far in the future that at our current stage, we are still in an extremely primitive stage in comparison. So if we do reach that time, we may even have the means of moving out and spreading to new homeworlds.

Of course, one day the universe will die out anyway due to the laws of physics. Unless even that can be broken. I mean, only last week scientists apparently proved that particles can go faster than the speed of light, despite what was previously believed.

 

[IamQ]

I actually talked about this with a friend. I too like to think that we can survive long after this planet dies, or our sun destroys us. I mean, we've technically already beaten nature at it's own game. We have structures built with nature in mind, meaning that even with earthquakes, they are meant to still stand. The only reason Japan got F-ed in the bum was because there were two large nature catastrophes at the same time, and one of them (The Earthquake) was the 5th biggest one that's ever happened in recorded human history.

We will always have our issues, humans are imperfect beings, but we'll always slowly evolve and grow stronger, taking on bigger adversaries, always proving to be victorious in the end.

 

[Redingold]

You think we can last for another five billion years? When it tooks less time than that for all the life on earth to come about? I'm pretty sure that's crazy. Even if some descendants of ours make it that far (which is extremely unlikely) they could not be considered to be human by any stretch of the word.

 

[IamLEAM1983]

Being a pessimist, I'd say we're fucked. We recently dropped the ball on NASA, leaving China and Russia as the only remaining nations who bother to try and push the boundaries of space travel. That isn't enough, not by a long shot.

We'll need to leave this dirt ball long before the sun burns out, based on the fact that we're tampering with the Earth's atmosphere at exponential rates, and I doubt we'll have the technology we need to make that transition in due time.

Look at what happens when a species of predators is allowed to overrun an area. Wolves occasionally need to be culled for their own good, because they've grown to be far too populous to be able to be sustained by their environment. Thanks to our oh-so-beneficial industries, we're heading towards the same problem on a much larger scale.

We'll run out of oil first. No oil means no petroleum-based means of transportation. It also means no plastics, which have become the building blocks of our modern civilization. Then, we're likely to run out of food, if our population numbers keep growing. Then what?

We're capable of a great many things, but Humanity has always excelled at fucking itself or ruining its own chances at survival in the sacrosanct name of Progress. My take on things is we'll either choke or nuke ourselves to death long before the issue of the Sun being in its death throes even becomes crucial.

If, by some miraculous convergence of events, we do manage to leave our solar system and head for some place like Epsilon Eridani (which is one of the recently discovered and supposedly habitable solar systems), odds are only the wealthy and privileged are going to make the trip. There's no way in Hell our current economic models could sustain something like Ark-type vessels or supercruisers schlepping all of Humanity to another point.

 

[Grospoliner]

Should our species survive to see the end of time, then we will be nothing like we are today. After trillions of years our decedents will have become something altogether different.

 

[philosophicalbastard]

Fuck it lets go further than that!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Were going to create a new universe!!

That is pretty much the only way to survive universal heat-death, go to a new universe or create your own. If you stick around this universe you would just slowly die from a lack of energy.

 

[Whateveralot]

It can happen and it's not that hard to do. Humanity needs to find a way to build a spaceship and send it into space that remains self-sustaining for hundreds of generations. Doing this will guarantee escape from the inevitable death of our sun, and exploration of other starsystems that might allow for sustainable life on a planets surface, planting colonies and / or gathering resources along the way. Because the length of time the ship flies, taking 2-3 generations to gather resources isn't anything strange or unusual. That also leaves time enough to deploy pre-fabricated colony buildings, space stations, probes, communication towers, etc.

 

[Tanakh]

Hell, I'd like to think that we can beat thermodynamics, if only by a few minutes.

You have a better chance beating a concrete wall with your forehead, a much better chance actually.