Re: Apple II: Second Best Tech Product of All Time!

[pausch@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <1176090609.786374.263150@b75g2000hsg.googlegroups.com>,
mdj <mdj.mdj@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Apr 9, 4:47 am, "Michael J. Mahon" <mjma...@aol.com> wrote:
> 
>> True, but when the sun becomes a red giant, the earth will be
>> well and truly cooked.  Hopefully, we will have found new places
>> to live before then.  ;-)
>>
>> Since I think that mankind's destiny transcends the destiny of
>> the solar system, the sun's end may not mean the extinction of
>> mankind.
> 
> Destiny is a little fatalistic for my tastes :-) But logic would seem
> to dictate that if human civilization survives even 50% of the time
> remaining before the Sun becomes a problem then the technology to live
> elsewhere, or even repair the Sun (we are after all a nostalgic bunch)
> should be available :-)

It always amuses me when people believe that human civilization will
still be around several billions of years into the future....

Think back a billion years.  Life on Earth was then very primitive -
this was well before the cambrian explosion of life.  A lot has
happened in the evolution of life on Earth since the, right?  Man-like
animals have been around for only a few million years, modern man has
been around for only some hundreds of thousands of years, and human
civilization has been around for only a few thousand years.  So why do
you believe evolution will stop now, so mankind will be around several
billions of years into the future?  Are we slowing evolution down?  No
way!  Instead, we're rather speeding it up with our technological
advances, which now are influencing the Earth also on a global scale.
Our artificial breeding of both plants and animals also speeds up
evolution a lot.

In a way I like that very long-term perspective though, and it would
indeed be nice if such a long-term perspective gained wide acceptance
within mankind.  We would certainly deal with e.g. the global warming
issue in a quite different way if we really considered billions of
years of future, rather than at most a few decades of future....

Anyway, mankind will definitely be gone since a very long time a
few billions of years into the future.  Either we will be extinct, or
else we will have evolved into something else.  And there may of course
be more than one future branch of evolution from present-day mankind.


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