Our long term future...?

Discussion in 'The Future' started by Revenant, Apr 17, 2012.

  1. Revenant

    Revenant Member

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    Hello everyone,

    I love space. I love thinking about different theories, I love imagining scenarios in which we find life other than what is here on Earth. I watched a movie recently called Pandorum. It's placed in the mid 2100's, and it assumes that the Earth is destroyed, and that the ship where the movie takes place is on a course to a new Earth called "Tanis".

    And it always gets me thinking if this were true. Let's say, hypothetically, that we develop the means for space travel where we end up finding a 2nd very Earth-like planet. And we colonize there, because Earth is either gone from some catastrophic event, or simply, its' resources are depleted.

    Could you imagine placing yourself on this new planet? I'm sure that some of its' new inhabitants, generations down the line, would think... "wow.. we once lived on another planet called Earth. And from what I studied and read, it was an amazing place filled with beautiful creatures, amazing natural phenomena, and.. of course our roots and history. And I can never have an opportunity to experience it"

    It's just a small something to think about. The fact that this Earth is still here, and we are living on it. Something to be thankful for. You never know what the future has to offer, and if we do eventually leave this planet, it will leave behind a massive legacy. Our first planet, something perfect that we managed to mess up.

    I worry for my grandchildren, and their grandchildren, for how we shape the way we live, and how this mess we put ourselves in is so hard to come out of. I'm afraid it will be too late before we realize that this planet isn't Santa's bag of infinite gifts where you can reach in as many times as you want and pull something out each time.

    And that's basically my mind wandering, and something I wanted to write down and share. Please share any opinions or created scenarios, I love thinking about this stuff and it appears I'm the only one out of all my friends who delegates this much time towards something like this. So it's nice to hear from others.

    Thanks for reading
     
  2. IslandHippie

    IslandHippie Member

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    Some time in the future......



    I am going to order a pizza.
     
  3. Revenant

    Revenant Member

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    Well, I hope you truly enjoy that pizza. Because one day that will be impossible to do so.
     
  4. Spectacles

    Spectacles My life is a tapestry Lifetime Supporter

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    I really don't think of this. I would most likely be one of the major percent of the population to have not made it though the catastrophic event. Thank Goddess, since I am a hermit. Then again, they would not likely take any of the older people in any case.
     
  5. themnax

    themnax Senior Member

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    our long term future is not insured. not by any one nor any thing. many changes can be expected though. that much. i mean we're doing things all the time, that individually add up statistically, to critical forces that change things. the very means of the survival of the human species are among those things. and the biggest threat to the human species is two things, what we're doing to the environment by how we do things, and what we're doing the environment by there being so many of us doing them. driving cars and using power generated by burning coal are at the very top of the list. above or below or in the same place, is our failure to lower the human birthrate.

    a time of famine and mega-multi epidemics is what we're inflicting ourselves, on ourselves in our own forseeable future.

    i think the odds are good some small and nearly random segment of the population will more likely survive then not. the world of a hundred or so years after the plagues and famines had drastically, draconianly, and exceedingly unpleasantly reduced the total human population of the planet, everywhere on it, is a world i would love to be born again into. it may be two or three hundred years into the future before that morning after happens.

    but it doesn't have to be that way. transportation and energy production can both be done just fine without combustion, nor nuclear waste, nor pie in the sky hydrogen fuel either, with technologies that exist and are well proven now.

    likewise, human birthrate can be lowered, and without having to do anything directly and confrontationally to individual persons. though i support everything short of war or genocide that might also contribute to doing so.

    if we do those things, instead of continuing to fallow the garden path of short sighted greed, it may not be too late to avoid nature's way of solving our population excess.

    what about after that time? a thousand years or thousands of years into the future of those who survive to rebuild and do something other then repeat today's mistakes?

    for them, the universe awaits. in all its endless diversity to learn from and explore. but first we have to learn that conventionality is not a virtue, and thoughtlessness is not a form of freedom. and that the dominance of aggressiveness IS tyranny, regardless of economics, ideology, or belief, whatever gods, governments, or anything else should happen to see fit to exist.
     
  6. Tyrsonswood

    Tyrsonswood Senior Moment Lifetime Supporter

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    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSlXjrxqDOE"]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSlXjrxqDOE
     
  7. papa wolf

    papa wolf Member

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    I can only hope , that for their sake , we never find life out there .
     
  8. Asmodean

    Asmodean Slo motion rider

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    Yes, my mind has wondered in these subjects as well. My thoughts generally: we most likely die with our planet. It would be a trip to see our futural mankind on another planet giving credit to our roots but we probably do not get there ever. Better take care of this planet and stop acting ridicilous as a species, serving the economy and our deluded needs for temporal convenience and luxury.
     
  9. themnax

    themnax Senior Member

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    the galactic united nations has delt with worse then us. they don't need yet one more rogue world though. get over our collective ego arrogance and we'll be as welcome as anyone else. but we do need to get over that. and if we kill ourselves off with it instead, oh well, pity about earth. those things happen.
     
  10. SageDreamer

    SageDreamer Senior Member

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    I remember being very young and seeing things like George Jetson's flying car on television...the one that folded up into a briefcase that he could carry.

    In those days, the year 2000 seemed so, so distant in the future. In a way, I'm really disappointed and underwhelmed with the way 2012 has turned out. I was expecting things to be much more different from the way they were in the Sixties and Seventies.

    OK, we've got computers all over the place. We're seeing greater equality for nonwhite people, women and gay/lesbian/bisexual people.

    I was in grade school for the first Earth Day in 1970 and I thought that Earth would be uninhabitable by 2000 and that astronauts would have landed on several more planets by now and probably there would be commercial space travel. In those days, it seemed like NASA was sending up rockets every few months. Now? Pffft.

    If this planet becomes uninhabitable, probably only a very few people will be able to escape. The environmental movement is larger and more mainstream than it was in 1970, so I suspect that the planet is in better hands than it was in those days.
    .
     
  11. PsychonautMIA

    PsychonautMIA Chimps gonna chimp

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  12. themnax

    themnax Senior Member

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    there is certain A future. it simply does not belong to what we have mistakenly come to call civilization. an absurd error to call a rather shoddy attempt after the name of something that is still a very long way from coming into existence.

    though come into existence it will. to replace what we have been mistakenly calling it.

    it will come into existence after great suffering, or it will come into existence without the suffering, but to do the latter, we would have to stop bringing about the causes of that suffering.

    i would not jinx humanity to say it cannot. that is one of the lies people tell themselves as an excuse for ignorance and greed. that ignorance and greed are what we are and there is nothing else we can be, and that is the absolute lie.

    but it is a self fulfilling lie if we keep telling it.

    and there are beliefs that people have, that people call beliefs, and they tell people to keep telling themselves this lie. it is the very lie with which we are destroying ourselves. this lie of this so called human nature.

    no the world, in any rational sense of the word world, is in no particular danger. it is ourselves that are, and it is from ourselves, and only from ourselves, that we, ourselves, and what we mistakenly, if not outright wrongfully, call civilization, that is.

    the is not the end of there being A future. it is only that this other lie, the one we call civilization, is to undergo major changes and readjustments.

    quite likely these have already begun, and it is not an all at once things, but an ongoing thing, much as it has always been, though it is reaching critical points and which the process may accelerate somewhat.

    long term, a couple of hundred years from now, may less, and certain less then a thousand, will be a very green world. sweet smelling of pine and mint. a world in which humanity will have returned to there properly and reasonably smallness of numbers.

    cleaver of hand and mind we will surely be, as we cannot yet imagine such cleverness of hand and mind. but we will be of a woolier aspect. one with the beautiful faces of creatures we call lesser, who are not lesser at all, save that they are less obsessed with proving their ego. a fine and beautiful aspect, with wonderfully smooth silky fur, and wonderfully long floofy tails.

    the ruins of today's false civilization will of course be all about, and give great pleasure and curiosity to explore.

    and in time perhaps we will even venture beyond the confines of this world, which being less populated will be thus less confined as well.

    but furst we will have grown in the learning, that while all things welcome us to be a part of them, nothing but our own egos and self deception, has ever told us to claim to be above them.
     
  13. Tyrsonswood

    Tyrsonswood Senior Moment Lifetime Supporter

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    Somebody's been recording my dreams again....
     
  14. Meliai

    Meliai Banned

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    I don't think the earth will be destroyed, at least by humans. The earth is a bad ass bitch. Man-made climate changes alter weather patterns, and a change in weather patterns kills unsuspecting humans. The earth will destroy us a long time before we destroy it.
     
  15. Asmodean

    Asmodean Slo motion rider

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    As quoted from someone else: There is no more new frontier / We have got to make it here
     
  16. themnax

    themnax Senior Member

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    well there is sort of, at least one that offers the elan. but not one where we could live without bringing with us the environment our existence depends upon.
     

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