When I sit and listen to environmental campaigners I have to explain that whilst I sympathise with them they fail to understand that no matter how well we look after this planet we are all still stuck on a tiny ball of luck and chance and if we dont get our civilisations out of this gravity well we are going to disappear in the universe.
What if. The gravity well is so deep, and space at the other end so hostile, that it takes an entire planet's resources and a pyramid of all the life and intelligence on it to boost a few fragments of DNA out to somewhere that they can take root.
In the long term, it's not just us individually that are dead but our civilisation, species, life, solar system, star, galaxy. If you look far enough ahead into the future.
If human life is 1m years old (ish). It seems reasonable to think that it will still be around in another million years. The question is whether the brief 10,000 years of civilisation in the middle is an aberration that flashes and then burns out or something sustainable that reaches some kind of stability. Or even that fulfills some kind of SciFi destiny and spreads small parts of itself beyond the gravity well.
In the long term, it's not just us individually that are dead but our civilisation, species, life, solar system, star, galaxy. If you look far enough ahead into the future.
If human life is 1m years old (ish). It seems reasonable to think that it will still be around in another million years. The question is whether the brief 10,000 years of civilisation in the middle is an aberration that flashes and then burns out or something sustainable that reaches some kind of stability. Or even that fulfills some kind of SciFi destiny and spreads small parts of itself beyond the gravity well.