Astronaut: 'Single-Planet Species Don't Last' 921
An anonymous reader writes "Gemini, Apollo and Space Shuttle astronaut John Young, due to retire in two weeks, says that the human species is in danger of becoming extinct: 'The statistical risk of humans getting wiped out in the next 100 years due to a super volcano or asteroid or comet impact is 1 in 455. How does that relate? You're 10 times more likely to get wiped out by a civilization-ending event in the next 100 years than you are getting killed in a commercial airline crash.' He says that the technologies needed to colonize the solar system will help people survive through disasters on Earth. Young has written about this topic before in an essay called 'The Big Picture'." In related news, the Shuttle overhaul program is on track for a May 2005 launch.
Prove it (Score:5, Insightful)
So he writes about volcanic activity, planetoid impacts and solar disasters. What if we spent all our resources on keeping the planet safe? We could drill out pressure of volcanoes and build super bombs for planetoids. If our sun goes all bets are off though we need to find another solar system but I bet we could figure out something in 4.5 billion years.
But all in all he is correct I am just point out a con; however, I don't think that ~5 billion people could be wiped out by any single event that left the planet habitable afterwards.
Re:Prove it (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Prove it (Score:4, Insightful)
I've been of this thought for a long time. Anybody who passed high school biology should realize that the human race is already in serious shape. Think about it:
- Starvation - In nature populations are kept in check by starvation. Starvation is running rampant in third world countries. The world population is growing so rapidly that it's becoming more and more difficult to adequately feed everybody.
- Disease - In nature populations are thinned out by disease. Mankind has managed to effectively fight disease for decades and thereby help increase the population. The flu used to kill hundreds of thousands of people but now it's more of an inconvenience. Smallpox is all but gone. Nature responds to this by introducing AIDS, SARS, Ebola, etc. If the avian flu manages to jump into the human species (not unlikely) then new flu outbreaks could kill millions [seniorjournal.com].
- Fertility - The fertility levels in many species drop when they become overpopulated. Mankind has done a good job of creating fertility drugs, etc. to allow continued growth of the population. Mankind seems to think it's a right to have offspring, despite what nature may be telling them.
- Homosexuality - There are theories that nature uses homosexuality to help control population sizes. The basic theory is that when a population reaches a size that can no longer be naturally supported by the environment that homosexual tendencies become more prevelant. Of course it could just be that the percentage of gay people hasn't changed, it's just that there are more now since the overall population is growing.
IMHO these are all signs that the human population is reaching a breaking point. It may not happen in the next 50 years but it wouldn't surprise me at all if within the next 200 years or so there's some major population-thinning event like a pandemic, massive starvation, etc.Re:Prove it (Score:3, Interesting)
What a bunch of BS. There were fear mongers 40-50 years ago telling us about the population bomb and that before the year 2000 comes the world will be depopulated by hunger and disease and other dreadful stuff. Well we are still here and the world's people's living conditions have much improved, abeit much more slowly than could have been the case if human greed for wealth and power were not present.
Re:Prove it (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Prove it (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Prove it (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course it could just be that the percentage of gay people hasn't changed, it's just that there are more now since the overall population is growing.
A more likely explanation is that the percentage hasn't changed but the social acceptability of admitting to homosexuality has, hence it is being more accurately reported now.
Re:Prove it (Score:5, Insightful)
Starvation - In nature populations are kept in check by starvation. Starvation is running rampant in third world countries. The world population is growing so rapidly that it's becoming more and more difficult to adequately feed everybody.
The world has more than enough food to feed everyone on it many times over - food doesn't just run out, its a highly renewable resource. The problem is greed - human, corporate and government greed. "Its our food, if you want it pay us for it" attitudes. There are food surplus "mountains" in every first world country, doing nothing but rotting. Other problems are war - take Sudan for instance, where lots of relief food arrives, but bever reaches those who need it. Its stolen or destroyed by the warlords.
Re:Prove it (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a distribution problem. Recall U.S. efforts to "feed the hungry" in a bunch of third-world countries... local warlords take all the food, the people end up no better off...
Warlords taking food. (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, it was worse than that. There was at least one incident where the warlords used the donated food to feed themselves and their soldiers while they killed their enemies... Who happened to be the farmers. So in this case, our food donations actually made the situation worse.
Re:Prove it (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Prove it (Score:3, Interesting)
1. Starvation - It has pretty much been conclusively proven that we have FAR MORE than enough food to feed everyone on the planet. The issue is market dynamics, and governmental control. We can feed the people in Bangladesh, Somalia, Haiti, etc... if there were a stable environment to deliver food in. This is a human-created problem. Food supply is NOT the problem.
2. Dise
Re:Prove it (Score:4, Insightful)
I didn't see any fear of homosexuality in the parent post, but I do have a question. Why is any level of disagreement with the homosexual lifestyle immediately branded as a phobia? It seems like the term is overused and misused an awful lot.
Re:Prove it (Score:5, Insightful)
Homosexuality was also not put forth as a danger to the human race. It was listed as an example of emergent issues that help keep populations in check. Political correctness does not trumpt science, reality, or reason. It is possible to think about and try to understand why successful species (i.e., species that survive and reproduce) have sub-populations that pair bond in ways that will tend away from reproducing. There is nothing homophobic, biased, or discriminatory in try to understand how and why this happens.
Another issue to factor in to our understanding of these emergent homeostatic mechanisms is why heterosexual pair bonds who are naturally equiped (and actively engaging in the requisit behavior) to reproduce choose not to.
Re:Prove it (Score:3, Informative)
No it's not. But must (and I realize you were weren't doing this) people who bring up the Bible to do stuff like defend marriage claim it defines marriage as between a man and women. When it's really between a man and his wifes (concubines allowed), according to the bible.
And the concubines issue comes up again. It's technically adultorous, but it's still allowed. In Leviticus it's stated that being married doesn't prevent a man from ta
Re:Prove it (Score:3, Interesting)
More room for everyone is mainly a matter of geography. Do all the Japanese *really* need to be crammed into 6x8 apartments? No, they can move, or Japan can build out it's shores in the same way Singapore came about. Tension is mainly the result of peo
Re:Prove it (Score:5, Funny)
You don't work in the PR department for the dinosaur government do you?
Re:Prove it (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Prove it (Score:4, Interesting)
True of the huge dinos that are the media image. But at least a half dozen dinosaur species survived the big crash, roughly the same number as for mammals. They were all in the branch that we now call "birds", of course. They weren't big or specialized. The best modern equivalent would probably be something like a crow, one of the ultimate "generalist" species. The surviving mammals were all more or less like rats and shrews, of course. In the next such disaster, it'll be mostly species like those that survive.
Humans are generalists, of course. But in a similar disaster, we'd probably be at a disadvantage to crows and rats. This is mostly because of our size, which will be a problem in a world with a shortage of food. But our brain does give us an advantage, so maybe we'd survive.
Anyway, another asteroid impact will happen. Maybe next week, maybe 100 million years from now, but it's coming. Astronomers know of around 1000 rocks with sizes > 1 km in Earth-crossing orbits, and reasonable estimates are another 500-1000 more exist. That's actually not very many, and chances of an impact in any one year are quite small. But some of them are going to hit our planet some time in the future.
Maybe some of us will be alive to see it
Re:Prove it (Score:5, Insightful)
Suppose a large meteor did take out he US. Our population is a little under 300 million. That only leaves about 6 billion other people to try an muddle through without us.
A sufficiently severe catastrophe, whether an asteroid hit or something else, could take out 99% of the human population and still leave some 63 million people.
Americans, Europeans and many others are certainly dependent on technology. Most of us wouldn't know which end of a seed to plant in the ground. But there are huge populations of the world who still live fairly primitively.
The question wasn't whether we'd just shrug it off and continue like nothing happened. The question was whether the human race would go extinct. You know, every last member of the species dead? That kind of extinct?
About the only thing which would kill us without completely destroying the world would be some sort of super flu or other bug which was universally fatal to us but not to other species. (Another possibility would be one which was not fatal but caused universal sterility.) The odds of that are extremely tiny - there seems to always be some fraction of the population that are somehow immune to any specific disease.
Saying that we won't be driven to extinction doesn't rule out the possibility of any of a plethora of catastrophes. It just says that, as a species, we'll almost certainly survive anything short of complete destruction of the planet. Our civilization may not, but we will.
Re:Prove it (Score:3, Insightful)
The question wasn't whether we'd just shrug it off and continue like nothing happened. The question was whether the human race would go extinct. You know, every last member of the species dead? That kind of extinct?
Well, be fair. First off, I have to say you're absolutely right. But in order to make a race extinct, you don't need to kill all
Some of us rednecks who hunt... (Score:3, Insightful)
Sean
Re:Prove it (Score:5, Funny)
Great Old Ones (Score:4, Funny)
"What other higher order species that has multi planet colonization did he do his evaluation against?"
The Great Old Ones [cthulhu.org] and their minions? Those Mi-Go are pretty hardy buggers.
On the specifics of this report's premise, it seems to me to be a hell of a lot cheaper (and more realistic at the present) to ensure humanity's survival by being able to "Go Deep". If the we could harness geothermal power down deep, we could power lights that could grow plants in our subterranean cities, etc. and keep ourselves going.
Sure we'd end up living on glowing fungus in the end, and evolve big giant eyes and go all pasty-white pale, but then when we travel back in time to visit Earth in the 1960s-80s we'll look like we're supposed to.
Must be Friday. I need a drink.
---
Cthulhu holiday songs [cthulhulives.org], for the gift that keeps on loathing.
Re:Prove it (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think he needs to. There have been several events in our worlds past that would have wiped us out were we around -- and ended up wiping out most everything alive at the time.
I question the "1:455" chance for us to get wiped out in the next 100 years, but what
Re:Prove it (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd also go so far as to say that colonizing other planets is now the most important thing mankind can achieve. Purely from the perspective of preserving our species, it's the next critical step. If you consider how susceptible we are not only to external threats (meteors, epidemics, space locusts, etc), but also just the day-to-day concerns that we might accidentally annihilate ourselves with the war-de-jour, the best way to increase our chances for survival is to spread out a little bit and prevent an accident like that from doing us all in at once. Bottom line is, if you're all about doing something great for mankind, this is a really important problem to solve.
Re:Prove it (Score:5, Insightful)
While I believe you are correct, I don't think mankind is there yet. Look at it in perspective. What we're talking about here would take global cooperation of the scale never seen before. We can't even wipe out AIDS or world hunger or war, how are we going to work together to colonize another planet?
I'm reminded of Carl Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot," and the profound wisdom of his words:
How do you convince a culture like that to put aside the generations of bigotry and hatred, and to work together for something truly noble? Think about your target audience. You have 10th generation racists, anti-gay bigots, xenophobic taxpayers who all demand that their way be the way because "I pay taxes, dammit!"
In one sense, you can look back through history and believe that mankind has come a great distance, but when you consider things on a cosmic scale, you realize we've barely advanced at all. We still have war, racism, hatred, disease, even though eliminating all of those things has been without our reach for several decades now.
In the end, it will not be the asteroid that dooms us. The asteroid is merely a statistical inevitability. They've hit before and they'll hit again. What will really doom us is our self-absorbed inability to recognize the inevitability of our impending doom, and act on it. Our own selfish need to be "on top" of this rock will prevent us from conceiving of an existance beyond this rock. We will continue going on, pretending that maybe that last asteroid was really the last one, and the next 4.5 billion years will be smooth sailing. Could we really be that naive? I believe, "yes."
Re:Prove it (Score:3, Insightful)
Purely from a survival perspective, it makes the most sense to attack the colonization problem as early as p
Re:Prove it (Score:3, Insightful)
Think about the last time there was a massive wave of remote settlement (1500s-1700s). How much did they rely on global cooperation?
Granted, it's important to get launch costs low so that the two efforts can begin to become comparable.
Re:Prove it (Score:3, Insightful)
Can we be better ? Always. Can we be worse ? Certainly. In the end all I was saying before is we are who we are and that is not a bad thing. Some seem to think being who we are and not being our own perfect ideal is sufficient reason not to go forth and 'spoil' the rest of the universe. Something I think is absur
Re:Prove it (Score:3, Informative)
Part of the issue with a couple of them is that a super-volcano eruption can easily make earth 'habitable' but not for us.
Likewise for asteroid impacts.
Leaving the earth "Habitable" does not mean that we can comfortably (or for that matter uncomfortably) live on earth for some period after the event. Earth happens to be "habitable" for a lot of creatures that happen to be extinct because of our own hand right now. Dodos, Pa
Re:Prove it (Score:3, Insightful)
This happens to be one of my pet peeves. Anyone who thinks that humans are at the top of the (supposed) food chain (or chart as you call it) has never been stalked by a cougar or a bear.
I'm not sure when/where the idea of a food chain with a bottom and a top arose but it's poppycock. There is a food *cycle* in which every thing is food for something else (what do you think happens when you die and they
Re:Prove it (Score:3, Informative)
If done early enough, they wouldn't have to be "super bombs." They could simply be small thru
Better yet... (Score:3, Interesting)
One of the neat ideas I've read about involved putting an asteroid on a repeating earth-mars course. You put a base on the asteroid, using the asteriod as shielding. You then use smaller vessels as a shuttle, so you don't have to accelerate that much mass. Use hydroponics and such to keep the supplies required as low as possible.
Re:Prove it (Score:3, Insightful)
You are absolutely right. He does not have one single shred of evidence to back up his wild postulations about multi-planet species.
I am sure you will join me in recommending that we immediatly fund a large, well organized effort to do further investigation into these so-called "colonizations", including multiple on-site visits, and perhaps permanent research stations to study any indigenous species we find during this effort.
Re:Prove it (Score:4, Insightful)
His point is that we aren't funding this type of research enough. Also, he seems very concerned (and rightly so) that most of our species are blissfully ignorant of the dangers that we impose on ourselves, for example by relying so heavily on fossil fuels.
Re:Prove it (Score:5, Insightful)
So, if we colonize one or two other planets, that just gives us a few more baskets. What we need are hundreds or thousands of baskets.
In fact, we should probably abandon planets altogether.
There are tons and tons of nice organics and water waiting for us in the Kupier Belt. Sitting at the bottom of a gravity well, dependent on one biosphere for all your free oxygen is just asking for trouble.
All we need to do is:
Re:Prove it (Score:3, Informative)
Yes you are correct. It also refers to any self-replicating machine.
From the Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
A few self-replicating space probes, Von Neuman pondered, could explorethe galaxy in only a
Re:Prove it (Score:3, Funny)
Paging Fred Saberhagen. Dr. Saberhagen, phone 322.
Re:Prove it (Score:3, Interesting)
My answer here is that while comet-riders could certainly spread to fill the entire galaxy, they would find it difficult to go beyond that. Intergalactic distances are enormous; you'd need a colossal commit
Re:Prove it (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Prove it (Score:3, Interesting)
1 in 455 chance of effective human extinction within a century means the expected interval between events like that is 31,500 years (100 years * log(0.5) / log(454/455)). Over the past 600 million or so years, there have been six definite mass extinctions (Cambrian, Ordovician, Devonian, Permian, Triassic, Cretaceous), with some scientists suggesting there have been more, occurring on a 26 million year cycle.
Great! (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes. Manned missions are risky and expensive. Unmanned and remotely controlled probes are just fine and dandy and they yield plenty of useful information about the conditions in space and on other planets, but what's that information good for if we're never going to leave our planet and/or when we're going to get hit by an extinction level event?
As a species we have definitely become too concerned about safety in exploration. Can't shoot people up to space because they might get killed? Well, duh? What if the explorers like Magellan or Vasco da Game had thought about it like that?
The saddest comment I once got was: "we'll never be able to colonize other planets because the conditions are so fundamentally hostile, so let's not waste any funds/effort on manned space flights." What the hell happened to the human will to explore and survive? What's the point in sending out probes if the information gained will certainly be lost in the (near) future when the big one hits the earth?
Re:Great! (Score:2)
Re:Great! (Score:4, Insightful)
1 in 455? (Score:5, Insightful)
Just cause some retired guy in an interview says it, doesn't make it true.
Re:1 in 455? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:1 in 455? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:1 in 455? (Score:5, Informative)
The probability is not 100% it is in fact 20%.
Chance of no event in a 455 year period: 454/455 = 99.8%
Chance of no event in 100 such periods: (454/455)^100 = 80.3%
Hence chance of an event in 100 such periods: 19.7%
Using your whacked out mathematics I guess in 100000 years the probability of at least one event is 200%?!?
Re:1 in 455? (Score:5, Funny)
First of all, it's a 1 in 455 chance of being wiped out by asteroids, volcanic activity, comets, vampires, dark elves, zombies, or McDonald's, but he seemed to convenienly leave off the end of the list.
Secondly, he forgot to mention that this takes into account the fact that all humans who have not broken the code of the Greblor (roughly 96.3%) will be delivered by the benevolent lizard Godzilla back unto our home planet - a place of safety and prosperity in another dimension. Only the evil, self-destructive humans will remain.
Further, it is predicted that 97.1% of those who stay will be delivered in the second coming of Godzilla after having repented of their evil ways.
So as you can see, most of us have nothing to worry about. They neglected to mention the other parts of the report, which actually explain why the numbers are obviously true.
Odds are off (Score:4, Funny)
I've heard of numerous commercial airline fatalities in the news. Can't say I've heard of any civilization-ending events in my lifetime.
Sounds like FUD to me.
Re:Odds are off (Score:5, Funny)
Well, duh.
Re:Odds are off (Score:2)
Re:Odds are off (Score:5, Informative)
Consider that the number of people involved in any particular crash is quite low compared to the number of people on the planet. Thus, while there may be multiple crashes in any given period, the chances of *you* being killed in that crash are quite low.
On the other hand, if you have a single civilization-ending event, by definition the chances of it affecting you are quite high.
So to estimate the impact on *you* in particular, you need to compare
(number of people killed in plane crashes)/(total number of people on earth)*(chance of a plane crashing)
vs
(number of people affected by civilization-ending event)/(total number of people on earch) * (chance of civilization-ending event)
Airline Crash (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Airline Crash (Score:5, Insightful)
Your mistake is not realizing an average person takes many, many, many more than 1 flight in their lifetimes.
According to the National Safety Council [nsc.org], your odds of dying are actually slightly worse. Your odds of dying due to injury in a plane crash are about 1 in 4,023 (see this table [nsc.org]).
If you rarely fly, then your at a favorible statistical end of the spectrum with respect to fatalities due to injury by air travel - but remember, some people bank several flights each and every week for years.
Actually the stat is not as for out... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not sure where your stats came from, but world-wide there were WAAAY more than 83 fatalities in 2000 [aviation-safety.net]. There were even more fatalities than that in 1945 when commercial airline service was in its infancy and passenger volumes were vrey low (no jumbo jets).
The link I supplied only counts commercial, multi-engine airliner accidents. There are likely many more airplane fatalities then that--military, spacecraft and non-commercial or crew-only flights (trainers, cargo flights, bus
How'd they get 1 in 455? (Score:5, Insightful)
The statistical risk of humans getting wiped out in the next 100 years due to a super volcano or asteroid or comet impact is 1 in 455
Dare I ask how that number was dervied? It seems awfully arbitrary, and full of doom-and-gloom.
Re:How'd they get 1 in 455? (Score:5, Informative)
In fact, a 1 in 455 chance of humanity being wiped out in each successive 100 year block gives us a 454 in 455 chance of surviving that 100 year block.
Our odds of surviving 200 years is the odds of us surviving the first block (454 in 455) times the odds of us surviving the second (another 454 in 455) - about 99.5%
In other words, the odds of us surviving 100n years is (454/455) ^ n. The odds of us making it through the next millennium, then, is (454/455) ^ 10; that equates to about 44 in 45, or a one in 45 chance of our species being wiped out before we see the next millennium bug.
The odds at 10000 years (n=100) diminish to about one in five that we'll all have been wiped out - that is, four in five that we're still here.
Around the 30 000 year mark, the chances we're wiped out are pretty much even. That would mean we'd tend to expect mass extinction events about once every 60000 years, on average. you could consider that as a kind of indicator as to the validity of the original statistic.
Beyond that point, it becomes easier to quote the odds we're still here than that we're not.
After 100 000 years, we get down to about a one in ten chance of still existing. In other words, out of all the possible ways the next 100 millennia could go, only one in ten of them finish with us still existing.
In other words, the number predicts survival is unlikely, but it's not impossible, and the odds keep dropping, but they don't reach zero.
Whether the 1 in 455 number is right or not is open to question, of course, but just because we've been around more than 45500 years is no reason to dismiss it completely.
Flying cars and robots too... (Score:2)
Look positive (Score:3, Funny)
Why always look at the negative side of things? It would reduce the problem of slashdotting websites...
Obligatory beowulf reference... (Score:3, Funny)
Kewl!
Ooh, factoids! (Score:2)
I betcha you didn't know that if you lined up 100 years of civilization-ending events side by side, they'd span 2,000,000 football fields from the Earth to the Moon!
and... (Score:5, Funny)
- Jack, Fight Club
Sometime you hear people talk like they're going to live forever. Well I got news for you.
NOT!
Umm.... (Score:2)
Huh? (Score:2)
So every 45500 years, a mass extinction event takes place on Earth? That sure doesn't sound right.
Hyperspace (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the discussions in the book touches on objective "levels" of civilization and species.
IIRC, it can be broken down something like this:
Level 0: What humans are now.
Level 1: Mastery of the entire energy capacity of a single planet
Level 2: Mastery of the entire energy capacity of a single solar system
Level 3: etc...
He supposed that Level 2 and beyond was the point at which a civilization was effectively permanent, able to survive anything less than the total heat death of the universe.
Neat stuff.
Re:Hyperspace (Score:5, Funny)
Level 4: masters of the universe
Level 5: All power put in one place and given to one man for justice - He-man.
Level 2 is only permanent if you don't piss off any of the higher leveled species so much that they wipe you out.
Re:Hyperspace (Score:3, Funny)
How come... (Score:2)
In A World Where... (Score:5, Funny)
What he really meant to say is this:
The statistical risk of humans getting wiped out in the next 100 years due to a super volcano or asteroid or comet impact would be 1 in 455--were it not for the heroic actions of one man, his wise-cracking, non-WASP sidekick, and a plucky band of researcher/rock star/mercenaries...
Re:In A World Where... (Score:3, Informative)
I suggest you go read up on Lord Kelvin and his attempts to prove that the Earth couldn't possibly be millions of years old. He argued, quite convincingly at the time, that when you accounted for all known incoming and outgoing heat, the earth couldn't be more than about 10,000 years old or it would have frozen solid. And it is true that the earth is slowly cooling off, as the Sun doesn't p
Re:In A World Where... (Score:3, Informative)
I agree (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I agree (Score:3, Funny)
--- SER
One Planet ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Hello - the title of this
Re:One Planet ... (Score:5, Funny)
Hello - the title of this /. article is misleading...
You must be new here.
multi planet species (Score:2)
Pointless talking about this (Score:2)
random statistics (Score:2)
The Dominion (Score:2)
Humans already wiped out -- film at 11000 BC (Score:2, Informative)
So it's almost certain that none of us are here. You're not reading this. Cockroachs are the dominant species on earth.
Old quote, but good: (Score:5, Funny)
Says everything, really.
Re:Old quote, but good: (Score:5, Funny)
Oh yeah? How do we know that the impact off of the Yucatan that wiped out the dinosaurs wasn't due to the crash of some attempt to launch a crew of brontosaurs into orbit? Do you know how much energy a rocket full of brontos would pack? The Truth That They Don't Want You To Know (this week) is that the dinosaurs went extinct because they had a space program!
Look for my amazing new book on this subject "Really Friggin' Ancient Astronauts: T Minus for T-Rex" at a bookstore near you, soon.
Re:Old quote, but good: (Score:3, Interesting)
This quote means well, but it's dumbed down to the point of being misleading. A better explanation would be "Dinosaurs are extinct because they were hopelessly incacapable of adapting to climate changes."
Just so. Dinosaurs are really extinct not because they couldn't build spaceships, but because they couldn't make parkas. Or light fires. Or build dwellings. Etc. etc....
Though a global catasrophe could make the Earth uninhabitable to
Statistics? (Score:3, Insightful)
Nevermind, the point is if the chances are 1 in 455, that means that roughly every 455 years a civilization-ending event must be occuring. I don't see that, do you?
Re:Statistics? (Score:3, Interesting)
What about one-star species? (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of the possible "civilization-ending" events will actually leave quite a few humans alive, certainly enough to reestablish civilization over a few centuries. The "really big" problems involve our primary, the Sun. If that stops behaving in a very calm, consistant manner, we all die, no recovery possible.
At the very least, we need a colony beyond the asteroid belt. Sadly, no large rocky planets exist out there (though perhaps one of Jupiter's big-4 moons would suffice). Better yet, a truly extrasolar colony, but that would require information we don't quite have yet (such as a likely Earth-like planet around another star).
'Single-Planet Species Don't Last' (Score:5, Insightful)
To all the naysayers.... (Score:5, Funny)
Statistics were only recently discovered, hence they didn't apply back then.
Stupids.
Bad math (Score:3, Interesting)
Cynicism (Score:3, Insightful)
Surely it is simply good sense that species resident on multiple planets, and particularly in multiple solar systems throughout the galaxy, and indeed the universe, are more likely to survive?
Don't put all your eggs in one basket and all that - multiple planets in one system means the species has a better chance of surving a planet level extinction event, multiple solar systems means the species survives past the end of one star, multiple galaxies...
And of course, that's ignoring the other benefits potentially offered. I just find it a bit unexpected that
Why Airliners? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Why Airliners? (Score:3, Funny)
1 in 455? (Score:3, Insightful)
unless there has been some significant new discovery about the cosmos that i am unaware of, the odds for the occurance of some cataclysmic event severr enough to wipe out all human life should be about the same for the next 100 years as for the last hundred years, and the hundred before that.... if there is a 1 in 455 chance of it happening in the next 100 years, then that should mean that there is a 1 in 45,500 chance of such an event happening in any given year.
given the fact that the human race has been around for ~2 million years so far, i think his odds are a little off. otherwise we should have been wiped out around 20 times already.
and this ignores the fact that the odds are most likely going down over time, as the level of event that would be required to wipe out the human race gets rarer and rarer the more we advance. an event that could have wiped out all of human life 2000 years ago wouldn't be nearly enough to do the job now...
Re:Sounds good but... (Score:2, Interesting)
Super volcanoes exist. (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know if Krakatoa qualifies as a super volcano because of that, but there is a currently-dormant volcano that apparently is considered "super" in Yellowstone National Park. [solcomhouse.com]
~Philly
Re:45,500 Years = 100% chance of human wipe-out (Score:3, Informative)
There is a 45,499 out 45,500 chance of actually surviving a given year. This equates to a 99.9978% chance of survival. This percentage is then taken to the power of the number of years you want to survive.
In this case to survive for 45,500 years with these odds you would have 99.9978% ^ 45,500 = 36.7875% chance.
So your chance of actually being wiped out would be 63.3212% instead of the 100% certainty o
Re:Forgetting something? (Score:3, Informative)
~Philly