response 1 of 91:

Feb 27 13:55 UTC 2001

Personally, I think science will kill us.  Not that I'm advocating against
the use of science - I think it's done a great many things.

But someday, someone is going to try to reproduce a black hole in a lab,
they'll be successful, and it will quickly suck up the entire world (followed
by the solar system but then who really cares).

response 9 of 91:

Feb 27 19:42 UTC 2001

I think our culture will evolve to the point where no one wants to have 
the responsibility of having kids anymore and we'll just slowly die out 
that way. 

response 11 of 91:

Feb 28 02:03 UTC 2001

Are you predicting plague, famine or war after that?  It already is way
overpopulated - you cannot keep destroying the air, water and soil at this
rate forever.  

response 13 of 91:

Feb 28 07:30 UTC 2001

Humanity's end can't come from overpopulation, as that will lead to
massive reduction of the population, and some people will survive and
carry on. I don't see an *end* except via a large enough space rock
arriving, which it is fair to say is inevitable. The only out of this
scenario is populating Mars in time (low probability) or a friendlier
planet at another star (vanishing probability). 

Re #1: science can't wipe us out. Science is solely an intellectual
process. A product of science might, but I think that would be more
likely to be a constructed disease, rather than anything physical. 

response 15 of 91:

Feb 28 09:07 UTC 2001

Actually, there are plenty of other places we could populate.  We
certainly have the technology today to populate the moon.  It would be
expensive, time-consuming, and it's not clear it would be "worth it"
(economically speaking), but it's certainly doable.

We're very close to being able to do the nearer asteroids which are in
some ways easier.  A worthwhile step to populating the asteroids would
be a mission to mars.  If we can succeed in sending people to mars and
back, that will demonstrate we have reasonable small self-sustaining
life-support, and can travel reasonable distances, both of which would
be necessary to populating the asteroids.  Self-sustaining life-support
could also make life on the moon much more attractive economically
speaking - our present technology to populate the moon would probaby
include sending massive amounts of oxygen and other raw materials to the
moon in some very expensive fashion.

Life in either of these places would be very different than life as we
have known it on Earth.  Most of these people would spend most of their
lives underground, as that is the only reasonable way we have at present
to be protected against radiation.  Low gravity would present special
challenges, and advantages.  Pregnant women on asteroids might need to
spend the 1st 3 months of pregnancy onboard giant centrifuges.  Old
people with heart conditions might well last longer.  Most people would
be spending almost their entire lives in small communities where they
are much more dependent on each other for both survival and happiness
than we are at present.  There would likely be very little place for the
individual rebel in such a society.  On the other hand, giant screw-ups
would be self-cancelling; the survivors are likely to be very suspicious
of any system that does not have multiple checks and self-balances, and
is not designed to last as a closed cycle stable system for the
long-run.  A natural size for these communities would be "about 100
people" -- this is a size that would work well with our psychology.
This is too small for good genetic diversity, so there would need to be
a larger looser sense of community, in which some large fraction of
young people are encouraged to migrate and join new communities to marry
& have children.

Either or both of these (settling the moon, migrating to the asteroids)
is likely to happen "someday"; there's just too many valuable minerals
and other reasons to get out there for somebody not to bother.  Sure
there are problems to confront to doing this, but they're all solvable,
and far less mysterious than the problems confronting the Wright
brothers, or JFK.

So far as "the big rock" goes - yes, in a geological sense it's
inevitable.  But by the time that happens, there's a very good chance
Homo sapiens won't be left anyways - as a species, we're only about
100,000 years old, and there's no reason to suppose that in 10,000,000
years we won't quietly evolve into something quite different.  The
interesting question may not be whether evolution will happen, but what
form it will take, and how much of it will even be "natural".

response 17 of 91:

Feb 28 13:35 UTC 2001

We have 97 worlds to choose from as it is.  Well, not all of them are big
enough to support life, but many of them may be.

response 19 of 91:

Feb 28 15:45 UTC 2001

There are a tremendous number of exceptionally valuable resources on and
 under the ocean floor. In many ways, they are no cheaper or easier to 
get to than those on asteroids, but it makes far more sense to build 
underground or undersea colonies here on Earth than it would to do so on
 the moon or asteroids.

That side discussion is not entirely unrelated to the subject of this 
item - How will humanity end? I think Grex will bore everybody to death.
 ;-)

response 21 of 91:

Feb 28 18:15 UTC 2001

Most of the imagined "resources" on the moon, and maybe even on Mars,
are not anywhere near as attainable as those on earth. The moon is
not *differentiated*. All resources on earth that are useful to humans,
apart from simple "aggregate", occur because of differentiation, either
through chemical processes (most ores) or biological processes (hydrocarbons,
some ores). That is, chemical and biological processes, acting over
millenia, with water and tectonics as agents, have concentrated minerals
into ore bodies or processed plant remains into accessible fuels. These
processes did not occur on the Moon, and possibly not on Mars. 

response 23 of 91:

Feb 28 23:55 UTC 2001

Killing _everybody_ with a virus (including highly isolated little groups
of natives in interestingly undesirable real estate, nuclear submarine
crews, the 1 person in 100,000 who's got a mutation which really screws
up the viral game plan, etc.) doesn't strike me as realistic.

"Deranged or Tragically Mistaken Scientist Destroys Earth With Artificial
Black Hole" sounds far better as a plot for a grade-B movie than as a 
serious scenario.

Runaway global warming & similar fun seem like fairly plausable ways to do
ourselves in.

Getting knocked off by genuine ET's who think of humans excaping the Earth
& running around in space in ways similar to Australians thinking about
rabbits strikes me as a real (if hardly actionable) danger.