Posted on 04/15/2025 9:56:41 AM PDT by Eleutheria5
A BILLION YEARS from now?
A BILLION is 1000 times a MILLION... that's NOT anytime soon!
Humans will self extinct within the next 1000 years. Then the cycle of life will start all over again.
Too many time lords
But he’s got the best song in the musical
We’re never getting off this planet.
Space isn’t empty, there’s hydrogen everywhere at an average concentration of 1.8 atoms/cm3. And at velocities of 0.5C and greater, every hydrogen atom slammed into is converted into ionization radiation, which will pass through the spacecraft (and you) and kill you dead dead dead in mere minutes.
But we’ll likely never get that fast because there’s also dust scattered everywhere in space, and colliding with a piece of dust with the mass of a standard grain of sand (0.00440 grams) at 0.1C (30,000 kms) will have an impact force equivalent to the explosion of more than a half a ton of TNT (1043.3 lbs).
So we don’t really have to worry about the radiation because the space dust will kill us first ... if we fly faster than, say, 0.05C.
The nearest exoplanet we have seen directly outside of our solar system is about 12 lightyears away, which would take 440 years to reach at 0.05C because you can only accelerate half way there and then you have to use the last half of the trip to slow to a velocity low enough to be captured by the target exoplanet’s gravity.
The trip to the next nearest galaxy would take a million years at 0.05C.
The eggheads estimate we’d need 10,000 to 40,000 mating pairs to have sufficient genetic diversity to successfully colonize another planet. And because it would be a multi-generational flight, they would have to grow food en route (Silent Running, anybody?). So it would have to be a YUGE spacecraft.
The most “compact” way to do it would be to have an all-woman crew, and a freezer full of fertilized embryos. Every woman on board would have to be a surrogate mother, and during the voyage, they would only implant female embryos. So for this plan to work you might have to have tens of thousands of generations of women born and raised knowing their goal in life is to one day be the surrogate mother to their own replacement on the crew.
And if one rebels, you either throw her out the airlock into space, or to conserve the resources, kill her and user her corpse for fertilizer. Or just eat her.
And when they finally arrive at the distant planet, and once they’ve erected a permanent, self-sustaining habitat, only then can they start implanting male embryos and raising boy children. At which point no woman would have ever so much as seen a live man in centuries.
The game changes if we learn to control and/or exploit wormholes. But since they’ve not yet been proved to be possible, I don’t see that happening any time soon.
Like I said, we’re never getting off this planet.
We’re not traveling to other solar systems with today’s technology, but perhaps in the next 100 million years, there might be some advances.
Or maybe even sooner than 100 million years, since there could be one of those nasty ol’ killer asteroids that might land sometime before then, if it can’t be destroyed.
Planet of the Apes, the Musical?
I can see it now on Broadway!
It was a Simpson episode.
OMG. This is a South Park episode, in which every story idea was done by the Simpsons.
The sun will expand to engulf the Earth in 7.59 billion years, give or take a couple of weeks .... this, according to other "experts".
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