>We're not going to "kill the planet," or the entire human race. Humans adapt. That's what we do. That's why we won. That is very close to the "fine tuning" ar

>We're not going to "kill the planet," or the entire human race. Humans adapt. That's what we do. That's why we won. That is very close to the "fine tuning" argument often employed by creationists. It is entirely possible that humans have, in fact, merely been phenomenally lucky to have survived so far, and that the fact that we find ourselves as members of such a phenomenally lucky species is easily explained by the anthropic principle. If you take all of the intelligent critters out there in the universe that are capable of discussing their adaptability, a pretty big chunk of those critters are going to be members of civilizations that got very lucky over the ages and managed to produce large cumulative populations, while a very small proportion will be critters from short-lived civilizations. Indeed, holding constant whatever level of adaptability we actually have, it is reasonable to assume that we are among the luckier of the civilizations at that level. So no, we can't just assume that we're going to leap over any hurdle that comes our way.