Good News, Bad News: Humans Will Live Another 100,000 Years
All of this doomsday talk is nonsense, says the New Scientist:
In 2008, researchers attending the Global Catastrophic Risk Conference in Oxford, UK, took part in aninformal survey of what they thought were the risks to humanity. They gave humans only a 19 per cent chance of surviving until 2100. Yet when you look more closely, such extreme pessimism is unfounded. Not only will we survive to 2100, it's overwhelmingly likely that we'll survive for at least the next 100,000 years.
Take calculations by J. Richard Gott, an astrophysicist at Princeton University. Based on 200,000 years of human existence, he estimates we will likely last anywhere from another 5100 to 7.8 million years (New Scientist, 5 September 2007, p 51).
According to most rational calculations, human beings will outsmart the various threats to their existence -- runaway technology, killer viruses, supervolcanoes, that sort of thing. There will be fewer of us, sure, if any of that stuff happens -- death toll estimates in the case of a supervocano eruption that clouds the atmosphere with deadly ash are in the billions -- but a hardy billion or two will still be writing television comedy or working the drive-thru window.
In other words, civilization will survive.
Other stuff, though, is more worrisome:
The biggest extinction threats of all come from space. Solar flares, asteroid strikes and bursts of gamma rays from supernova explosions or collapsing stars are what we really need to get through. "Every 300 million years we would expect a gamma-ray burst or a severe supernova explosion that wipes out most of the ozone layer," says Brian Thomas, an expert on intergalactic hazards based at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas. The result would be a massive increase in harmful radiation at the Earth's surface and an increased incidence of life-threatening cancers during the decades it would take for the ozone layer to recover. It's impossible to know when such an event might occur.
Yet these things are so rare that the chance of an extinction event in the next 100,000 years is effectively zero....Which leaves the poster child of disaster movies: the asteroid strike.
This one will take some luck to avoid. Space is full of rocky debris that acts as an occasional threat to Earth. It is widely believed that the impact of a 15-kilometre-wide asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. In any 100,000 year period we can reasonably expect an impact from a 400-metre asteroid that will cause damage equivalent to 10,000 megatonnes of TNT. "Not enough to do in the whole civilisation, but certainly destroy an entire small country like France," says former astronaut Thomas Jones, who co-chairs NASA's Task Force on Planetary Defence.
So we'll lose France. Which I know may not seem like a tragedy to some of you, but as someone who loves and admires the French people and culture, I'd certainly miss it. From my basement shelter.
The real question is, for those of us who make it to 100,000 years in the future, what will we look like? What will we be like?
THERE'S a famous thought experiment about kidnapping a Cro-Magnon man, bathing and shaving him, dressing him in a suit and putting him on the New York subway. Would anybody bat an eyelid?
Probably not. Though Cro-Magnons lived about 30,000 years ago, they were to all intents and purposes modern humans. Physically they were perhaps a little more robust, but behaviourally they were indistinguishable from us, give or take the effects of thousands of years of technological progress on our lives.
Whatever we turn out to be, I'm sure we'll all be having a good laugh at this, from Al Gore in the NYTimes, about one year ago:
It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.
Apparently, we've got another 100,000 years, no problem.
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Comments:
Dec '10
Re: Good News, Bad News: Humans Will Live Another 100,000 Years
"A famous thought experiment"?!? Try a famous series of GEICO commercials and an ill-fated sitcom.
Dec '10
Re: Good News, Bad News: Humans Will Live Another 100,000 Years
The time frame may be indeterminate, but the fact remains that humankind's home on this planet and in this Solar System will be gone someday. Something to ponder: in the long run, not only are we all dead, but so is our planet and our Sun.
Re: Good News, Bad News: Humans Will Live Another 100,000 Years
In related news: scientists believe "COPS" and "The Simpsons" will run for 101,00 years.
As for Stuart's point: I hope we figure out a fast cheap way to get out there, eventually, and sooner rather than later. But 100K years from now, the things we believe are imperishable in our culture might be footnotes or curiosities. You hope that Beethoven and the Preamble survive, but who knows.
If not, and the sun balloons out and the seas boil and the earth is consumed and it all winks out into a neutron star, we will still have sent a craft into the inky beyond - and it has a CD with Chuck Berry and Beethoven. If there's no one to find it, and this empty universe is deaf to joyful noise, well, hell: maybe the universe didn't deserve us after all.
BTW, even if we get out there and colonize this galaxy, it'll smash into Andromeda eventually. But let's cross that galactic superstructure when we get to it.
Sep '10
Re: Good News, Bad News: Humans Will Live Another 100,000 Years
If that 400 meter asteroid lands in the ocean near California, a basement won't keep out the resulting tsunami, which will make Japan's recent event look like a pond ripple in comparison. But cheer up--if it's close enough the superheated steam will kill you first...
Sep '10
Re: Good News, Bad News: Humans Will Live Another 100,000 Years
And while we're speaking of what humanity may be like in 100,000 years or so, allow me to recommend the astonishingly good novel The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. A long novel set in the far future--yes, it's science fiction and it's long but well, well worth the time. Wolfe wrote it thinking about what would happen if, instead of colonizing the stars, we just stayed here "until the money ran out".
Edited on March 13, 2012 at 8:41amMay '10
Re: Good News, Bad News: Humans Will Live Another 100,000 Years
Rob Long: THERE'S a famous thought experiment about kidnapping a Cro-Magnon man, bathing and shaving him, dressing him in a suit and putting him on the New York subway. Would anybody bat an eyelid?
Don't know about New York, but here in Chicago the bathing and shaving part would be unnecessary.
Nov '10
Re: Good News, Bad News: Humans Will Live Another 100,000 Years
I remember feeling a physical sense of relief while watching The Man That Could See Tomorrow and learned we would make it through the year 3797. This makes me feel even better!
Nov '11
Re: Good News, Bad News: Humans Will Live Another 100,000 Years
You know, Rob, between you and Claire, you really know how to bum a guy out at 9am.
Oct '10
Re: Good News, Bad News: Humans Will Live Another 100,000 Years
Rob, where does any of this factor in civilizational suicide? The idea that humanity will be recognizable to us even a hundred years from now is itself no longer that likely.
The biological being will last many millenia, but of what importance is that?
Jun '10
Re: Good News, Bad News: Humans Will Live Another 100,000 Years
Hey, I got a good night's sleep and had a nice breakfast. I don't know if 100,000 years is enough for me.
Maybe I should work my way through the drawer where I throw the bills.
Apr '11
Re: Good News, Bad News: Humans Will Live Another 100,000 Years
James Lileks:
BTW, even if we get out there and colonize this galaxy, it'll smash into Andromeda eventually. But let's cross that galactic superstructure when we get to it. · 9 hours ago
Well its not like any actual bodies will hit when the two galaxies meet James. It is not like galaxies are two plates smashing into each other. The vast majority of their volume is emptiness. They only have shape because of gravitational forces. So I wouldn't worry about that either.
raycon: Rob, where does any of this factor in civilizational suicide? The idea that humanity will be recognizable to us even a hundred years from now is itself no longer that likely.
The biological being will last many millenia, but of what importance is that? · 2 hours ago
Humanity is the biological being Raycon. If you have human beings they will have a society and culture which though different from our own will still be recognizable. There aren't any examples today or historically of any human population whose culture is completely devoid of recognizable patterns.
Feb '11
Re: Good News, Bad News: Humans Will Live Another 100,000 Years
They're Neandertahls, and your statements are hurtful.
Feb '11
Re: Good News, Bad News: Humans Will Live Another 100,000 Years
When Paul Ehrlich says we have another 100,000 years, the end will be nigh.
Dec '10
Re: Good News, Bad News: Humans Will Live Another 100,000 Years
James, my eldest daughter was assigned a paper in her UC Santa Cruz freshman class on Religion and Psychology: write a story (fiction or non-fiction) about your relationship to belief. Hers was a fable about what would happen if humankind learned that it had 10 years and then its number was up (the Solar System would be annihilated).
In her fable, as she watches the world around her deal with the news in different ways - traditional faith, abandonment of faith, end-times cultism, hedonism, denial - she decides to hijack a spacecraft from NASA's abortive effort to save some remnant of humankind and head it to the edge of the physical Universe. She hopes there to find God -- the Deity Himself -- and ask Him why the world had to end. She called it "The Last Earth Girl Went To Space To Find God."
I adapted it into a feature-length screenplay. It's quite a story.
May '10
Re: Good News, Bad News: Humans Will Live Another 100,000 Years
Oh, whew. 100,000 years. For a minute there I was worried. I thought you said only 10,000 years.
May '10
Re: Good News, Bad News: Humans Will Live Another 100,000 Years
Valiuth
.... There aren't any examples today or historically of any human population whose culture is completely devoid of recognizable patterns. · 5 hours ago
Are you sure? Maybe they were there but we just don't recognize the patterns. How would we know?
Apr '11
Re: Good News, Bad News: Humans Will Live Another 100,000 Years
Tom: Such a culture would be compleatly alien. If we discovered such a culture we would know we would have to. That is the point I wanted to make. All human cultures have a minimum of recognizable aspects to their culture that seem consistent with all other human cultures. Thus if you have humans you will have culture and the culture though different will be recognizable as human.
Raycon seems to be worried that we will culturaly morph into something so new and distinct as to be unrecognizable by modern humans as human. I say that is impossible as along as we remain the same species. It may in fact also be impossible as long as we remain sentient. I say a non-insignificant part of our societal setup and culture is dictated by our biology. Thus similar biology will lead to similar cultural patterns. We see this with apes, who have societal structures reminiscent of ones also seen in humans.
Dec '10
Re: Good News, Bad News: Humans Will Live Another 100,000 Years
You mean, we see this with humans, who have societal structures reminiscent of ones seen in in the other Great Apes.