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I think tools 1 trillion years from now that stumble across that headline will wonder what humanity was.
by a3n 8y ago
I think tools 1 trillion years from now that stumble across that headline will wonder what humanity was.
- krapp 8y agoI think that, a trillion years from now, any trace of humanity's existence will have long since vanished from the universe, and nothing that comes after us will know that we were ever here, there or anywhere.
- ryandrake 8y agoChances are we'll have self-annihilated or been beaten by disease within 10K years. After that, it will only take millions of years for all traces of humanity's existence to vanish. Cement structures, plastics, garbage, etc. will mostly be gone in tens of thousands of years.
- ben_w 8y agoDiseases have evolutionary pressure to not wipe out their hosts. While it’s not impossible, I literally don’t expect anything that bad in a million years.
- mrgill 8y agoMore on this?
- ben_w 8y agoIf a disease wipes out their hosts, they usually go extinct as a direct consequence because species jumping is a rare trait. Rare, but not unheard of. With only one exception that I am aware of, really nasty human diseases are those which only infect humans by accident and have a different main host. The exception, HIV, is already evolving into a various strains, at least one of which is much less dangerous than the original. However, if we ever consider a disease to be an existential threat, wiping out the other host species isn’t something we would have much practical difficulty with these days. We’re already considering that with Malaria, and that’s not an existential threat.
- oooooof 8y agoOr indeed why any sentient alien should care. “Apes became conscious, heated up and destroyed their environment, forced back to wilderness, evolved out. Meh... who cares.”
- oldcynic 8y agoThey'll probably wonder why all the fragments they find seem to indicate we preferred damaging technologies over benign. Then like archaeologists everywhere will conclude it was of religious significance.
- 21 8y agoAre you saying that we shouldn't have had the industrial revolution, because burning coal and oil was very polluting?
- fullstackchris 8y agoYeah I'm getting huge nihlistic vibes from a few comments in this thread...
- oldcynic 8y agoNot at all. A little glibness aside, I do think we should have replaced many things with better or less polluting alternatives far, far earlier than we do. The market is the wrong tool for many of these choices as shown by some of the current global issues. At such a vast time distance there's likely nothing whatsoever left of us - except in the geological record as a few rare fossilised artefacts and environmental clues. We have a hard enough time understanding life a couple of thousand years back and religion is all too often trotted out as easy explanation for "we don't know why".
- cabaalis 8y agoI suppose sibling comments were downvoted because they didn't address (a) the probable truth of the parent and (b) it's comedic nature. I'm curious if any natural being could ever last so long. To stand that sort of test of time would require an environmental design to withstand everything the cosmos can throw at a species. Humans won't last that long, but if they did it would be because they augmented themselves.
- some_account 8y ago> I think tools 1 trillion years from now that stumble across that headline will wonder what humanity was. We will be lucky to still be here in 100 years.
- practice9 8y agoWe've already come this far, we probably will be here for a while longer
- Paperweight 8y agoWe're kind of like rats.