> Even if the vast majority of us die in the process and we're left with a global population of just 1B or 500M, then that is still enough for a decent civiliza

> Even if the vast majority of us die in the process and we're left with a global population of just 1B or 500M, then that is still enough for a decent civilization capable of supporting space flight This is a side note, but I was actually just looking at population growth over time, and it kinda blew my mind that the estimated global population was only 310m 1000 years ago, and 879m 200 years ago. The idea of losing ~93% of the world's population sounds catastrophic, but given our current medical technology (and a post-apocalyptic "mandate" to reproduce and repopulate the earth) I don't think it would take us very long (relatively speaking) to recover. Kinda crazy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population