Scientists tell us the Earth only has about 2 billion years left.
What can we as citizens do?
The Mayans tell us we have just over a year. I put about as much faith in one as the other...
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Scientists tell us the Earth only has about 2 billion years left.What can we as citizens do?
1)Promote economic equality.
2)Immediately begin building a substantial sustainable energy infrastructure, primarily wind and solar.3)Move towards a post-scarcity society.
4)Colonize other worlds.
In other words: Star Trek, m%$~@#@~+$!+s!
The corpse I will leave behind when I am quit of this place is nothing much more than so much carbon to be used in the combustion engines of whatever race of sapients has to worry about all that.
The Mayans tell us we have just over a year. I put about as much faith in one as the other...
I'm here to repossess your computers and medicine.
The way things are going with NOBODY caring about over population and ecological collapse, the Earth will probably die a lot sooner.
I never the two of us would come close to seeing eye to eye on anything. This gives me hope.
The Mayans tell us we have just over a year. I put about as much faith in one as the other...I'm here to repossess your computers and medicine.
Good luck with that.
Everyone head to idaho and push towards australia to move us out a little further?
Help the unenlightened to see with their third eye so they are able to realize that time, matter, distance and energy are all just vibrations of quantum being. When everyone has opened their third eye we as a whole can enter second level meditation and create/recreate the next iteration of the universe(s) bringing us nearer to reconstructing god.
The Mayans tell us we have just over a year. I put about as much faith in one as the other...I'm here to repossess your computers and medicine.
Ale and whores.
yes please!
Humanity has existed on the earth for about 200,000 years. Looking ahead a span of time 10,000 times greater than that is pointless. We'll likely be extinct long before then, and thus will have no stake in the Earth's continued existence.
Institute a world politburo that can solve our problems in an efficient manner. Set harsh limits for consumption. Make sure to remove freedom of speech and so on so that efficiency of policymaking is unimpeded. Restrict information on a massive scale. Push for arms race in preparation for war.
Hey, this is what we are doing now. Central planning always works well.
Add another vote to TOZ's category of ale and whores. Two great things that go great together.
Ale and whores.
You got it backward. We want to find a solution to this problem because we want to still be able to enjoy ale and whores after 2 billion years.
While life on Earth has maybe 2 billion years thanks to the sun's expansion boiling first our oceans and then our atmosphere I feel I must point out that the Earth itself has nothing to fear from such trivialties.
Actually destroying the hunk of iron and silicon that is the Earth is hard work. Hard. Work.
FOOLS! My hedge fund manager actually bet against the housing market and was still allowed to assess the value of the mortgage backed securities -- we've been betting against the earth the whole time!
Oh, wait. Damnit I wasn't supposed to unveil the masterplan until I had you all tied up on the death trap.
What's that? You're still actually on earth? Well I guess that's close enough to count as a death trap I suppose.
AND THERE'S NOTHING YOU CAN DO TO STOP ME! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Wow, I realize I'm getting older, but there's NO WAY I could still enjoy ale and whores after 2 billion years.
Quitter
The Mayans tell us we have just over a year. I put about as much faith in one as the other...
Who the f%++'s this, now?!
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The Mayans tell us we have just over a year. I put about as much faith in one as the other...Who the f+~%'s this, now?!
You know, the guys whose civilization ended a thousand years before it was predicted to.
The Mayans tell us we have just over a year...
That, or a people that enjoyed charting the night sky and making calenders got bored of making calenders (or realized how silly it was to create calenders for the hundreds of years ahead of 'em) : /
Scientists tell us the Earth only has about 2 billion years left.
What can we as citizens do?
Please distinguish between your end-times before asking foolish questions without citations.
The planet will get along just fine. It is just that life on the planet may get a little more comfortable for some and a little less comfortable for others.
Thank you.
Because the lump of iron and rock that is Earth? Will be fine for a very very long time.
Barring marauding black holes or proton decay, of course.
Darkwing he didn't say it was U.S.-based, just that there were more Mayans around that there are of any U.S.-based native tribe.
He is comparing the population of the Mayans against the population of tribes that are in the U.S.
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The Mayans tell us we have just over a year...That, or a people that enjoyed charting the night sky and making calenders got bored of making calenders (or realized how silly it was to create calenders for the hundreds of years ahead of 'em) : /
My Farside calendar ends Dec 31st, I'm assuming that's the end of the world.
As a general rule, if Gary Larson is associated in any way with your decision-making or future-predicting processes, you should consider that a warning sign that all is not well. ;)
Odd. The far side has always been more relevant to my life than most things I've learned in school.
You know, the guys whose civilization ended a thousand years before it was predicted to.All the Mayans I met today would be most surprised to hear that their civilization was destroyed in 1011. The culture's still alive - heck, there are more Mayans than there are of any U.S.-based native tribe I can think of offhand. They're not constructing 50-foot ziggurats and dedicating them with the severed heads of enemies anymore, but that's partly because of conquistadors converting by the sword (and partly because they discovered that you don't have to build an entire complex of pyramids to determine when to plant and harvest: you can just buy a farmer's almanac.)
OK, sorry, back to the actual thread topic. What all of you seem to have forgotten is that by the time this comes up, it won't be Earth anymore - it'll be the Planet of the Apes! In other words, not humanity's problem! Yay, I think.
You mean the Mayan culture that has been so influenced by Spanish culture that it has taken anthropologists over 50 years to sort out what is truly Mayan and what isn't.
Hate to break it to you, but the magic number is more like 500 million years. The ongoing increase in the solar temperature will cause our little planet to roast by then, with surface temperatures that will look more like modern day Mercury or Venus. Two billion years? Very different world. Though last I checked, it was more like 4.5 billion as the magic number for solar expansion based on the sun's age and position on the main sequence.
You mean the Mayan culture that has been so influenced by Spanish culture that it has taken anthropologists over 50 years to sort out what is truly Mayan and what isn't.Yep, that's the one! The impressive part being that they've managed to maintain a substantial bit of that culture. Compare that to how many Iroquois or Paiute folkways have survived. There's been massive influence from Spanish and later mestizo culture - no denying that... but I'm comparing it to the damage done to other native North American cultures and on that scale they're doing pretty well.
That's the difference you get between subjugation and extermination.
Scientists tell us the Earth only has about 2 billion years left.What can we as citizens do?
What do you mean, exactly? Civilisation? Mankind? Life on the planet? The planet itself?
Because those are different things.
What can we do against those?
To keep civilisation from snuffing itself out, we have to try to either find peace (unlikely, man is a creature of war, it will be more than just an uphill struggle to get past that), or at least make sure we don't get too reckless with doomsday weapons like nuklear power.
Mankind could survive as a race without civilisation, depending on what hits it. Others would probably take out the whole species (along with many other species). Some of them we just have to refrain from doing (like the typical The Stand or Resident Evil scenarios, where research f*!#s up and unleashes a Super Virus), others we have to research methods of prevention (like meteors and all the nice kinds of cosmic rays.)
Many of the things above might not just stop at one species. Or even most species. They'd just take out all life. Some we can prevent, others are harder. For example, in a bit over a billion years, the sunlight will have become sufficiently strong to make the greenhouse effect go into overdrive, boiling away much of the oceans. By no later than 4 billion years from now, this alone will wipe out all life on the planet. Preventing that will be harder, but provided we don't wipe ourselves out, some of the other things don't get us, and keep studying like good nerds, a billion years is a very long time to find a fix for that problem. Look at all the stuff we have found a fix for in the few millennia we had civilisation. A billion years? Whatever becomes of mankind in that time will do stuff we don't think our omnipotent gods could do.
Finally, five billion years or so from now, the sun will change gears and blow up enough to simply swallow earth. But, again, billions of years. If we don't wipe ourselves out with our recklessness, and keep a focussed eye onward for other problems (like the mass extinction-inducing meteor that has statistically been overdue since before our ancestors decided they've had it with their chimp brothers and want nothing to do with that branch of the family, going so far as divorcing themselves genetically) - our species (or what it will evolve into), with a billion years worth of research and discoveries under their belt will be capable of stuff we probably cannot even imagine.
Maybe we won't be on Earth any more. Maybe this universe will have lost its intrigue, and we'll have made a few of our own. One for work, one for transit (Wormholes? Please. Better to shift over to the Transitverse, where lightspeed is infinite, mass immaterial and thus you have instant travel), one for fun (I'll let each of you decide what the physical laws will be like in there).