The second word in Science Fiction is........

Fiction..... JAFOCHECK ....;p

Well the radiation from the sun going red giant is nothing compared to the radiation blasted onto the moons of Jupiter, so that wouldn't really be a concern, even if Jupiter's massive magnetic field could protect us from the sun. If we are on say Ganymede (lots of water there) we will probably be under the 200km thick ice sheet covering the planet, radiation wont be a concern (but we could have panels on the surface harvesting the energy). That is of course thinking only of modern technology (we could be there right now, it's just too expensive), who knows what our technology in 5 billions years will be like.

Climate change is not an issue for humanity as a whole. Billions of people will die in less advanced areas of the world, it would be a catastrophe to be sure, but if it gets bad enough we can just go underground. Growing food with artificial sunlight is easy, and we have good air scrubbing and water sanitizing technology, millions could survive. That's an absolute worst case scenario (nuclear winter). Our current impact on the climate means we are only really looking at some droughts and a few inches of extra water in the oceans over the next few hundred years. I think we are past the point of nuking each other into radioactive dust, a terrorist might get a few and cause some serious localized damage, but it's unlikely to trigger a nuclear war.

Nothing I've said is science fiction.  You should watch the National Geographic and Discovery channel more often. You'd be surprised what we have the technology to do right now, the only thing holding us back is the fact all our money is tied up in stupid stuff.

Like on...... reality....;)

Sounds like the Artillery man in HG Wells' War of The Worlds....;)

We can fight them from the sewers......

Like silly wars and saving fail companies.

Did you know there's a guy with a microchip in his head that allows him to control a robotic hand with his mind? Or that we have a method of sustained flight based on ionizing the air around a craft to create lift with no moving parts? How about a laser mounted to a plane that can blast apart a cruise missile in flight? None of that is fiction or theory, but real workable technology. But ya, our money is tied up elsewhere.

Man...I did all that work on that kick ass post on the 1st page...now you guys are gonna drift it all off into laalaa land.. . I like Sci-Fi as much as the next guy, really. I'm a huge Trekkie. I'd honestly love to see our technology get there some day. I just don't think it's likely.

Why? Human greed. Even in the face of a world ending disaster Greed will be a factor. Some people, Presidents, High Up Government Officials, will be spirited away the most remote and best dug-in locations to try to ride out the worst. The majority of the human population will left to die or to try to survive on their own without the governments tech or support...aka...they'll die.

It will take a Collapse of ASTRONOMICAL proportions to totally collapse the system so that we no longer value things on "money" and "greed" and instead work towards a more "Unitarian" goal. Being American I have always been a consumer, another cog in the industrial machine, a worker drone/zombie. It sucks. You can't say the word "Communism" here though without throwing everyone who's been brain washed with money into a panic though. I'm not talking about Stalin's brand of Communism. I'm talking about "Star Trek's" brand of communism. Of course they have magic technology that can make food and building materials out of thin air, and we don't. Most likely we never will. Some things on Star Trek are theoretically possible, but a lot of it (according to our current understanding of physics) is not and never will be no-matter how far our technology advances.

I would like to hope that maybe in a few hundred more years, being able to take apart matter on a molecular level and putting it back together as what-ever we wanted would be possible. When you think about it though, with our current understandings, that very same "Food Replicator" could split enough atoms at once to make a Black Hole. Which is Humanity most likely to use it for? Making Food, or making 100 Atomic Bombs go off At Once? Hmmm...as soon as someone is full, then gets pissed off, there goes everything in a hundred light year radius. That's only one example of what we could do with Star Trek technology.

As much as I'd like to hope and dream that the technology that we need today, and the Responsibility to use it wisely, would come in time to save us....chances are it won't. We use up resources and move on to the next resource until there's nothing left. You know what other organism in nature does that? Cancer. Viruses. Bacteria. What does that say about us? I honestly think we'll destroy ourselves, sadly. I'd like to think our technology will save us, but I don't see the advancements we need coming fast enough.

Unless maybe, Maybe, those technologies were to be driven into need by World War 3 (WW2 saw the birth of many technologies we never would have thought of in time). As we all know though, that will be a push button war where Millions all over the globe will die. In the world that's left over after that, no one might want to live.

There are advancements kept away from us to maximize sales of current technologies, so yeah, greed all the way baby!

Also, technology cannot save us per se. Humans with the task of its development and its (proper/correct) application should. Don't hold your breath though!!!

Moi? Never.

The world has already ended man, all we have left is some kinda weird collective nightmare...

Psst. Maybe we are in the matrix!

Are you trying to tell me that someone managed to get the ultimate question and the ultimate answer of the universe in the same universe?

42

I think that we should ask this kid:

You know how fertilizer is made. Look up the Haber-Bosch process. Most of the calories consumed by humans today, everything in excess of what was produced before the so-called green revolution in agriculture, come directly from oil drilling or coal mining, only a fraction come from the sun. 

You can't fertilize corn with oil derived fertilizer, turn it into diesel, and then make more fertilizer and expect the process to continue forever, and you can't make fertilizer with nuclear power. And then you've turned food into an energy commodity, tied to global energy consumption... which means food prices act more like gasoline prices.

So no, we couldn't run out of oil next year. Oil is food.

There is absolutley nothing to worry about here. The end will come when The Chicago Cubs win the World Series. That ain't gonna happen so breathe easy!

Look at our technology now compared to 100,000 years ago. Then think about now compared to 50,000 times that amount of years. Ya, we have nothing to worry about when it comes to the sun expanding.

The only things which could currently pose any risk to human life and the technological advancement which comes with it is a very large asteroid strike or a nuclear war. The risk of the first is diminishing rapidly as even private companies begin making the jump into space. The second will likely be made obsolete by more powerful human technology within the next century, if not the next 50 years. The only probable thing which could cause "TEH ENDZ OF TEH WORLDZ!!!" would be human conflict.

In addition, that same guy with the microchip also got him and his wife implanted with other neural interfaces, linking together their neurons via the internet. Telepathy. Then there are negative refraction metamaterials which today, only 5 years after negative refraction was first discovered, are on the low end of the visible spectrum. Cloaking. And there are all the fun quantum effects we are just now discovering. Its not science fiction. Its SCIENCE!

Um, first, the Haber process usually uses natural gas, not oil, but coal can also be used, and what they are actually using those for is hydrogen extraction. In fact originally they just used water. Second, fertilizer can be made in many other ways and most green farms are using simple compost, less than a third of the world's farms use fertilizer made with the ammonia from the Haber process.

The haber process uses hydrocarbons. In order to use water you must inject excess energy in the form of heat (or electricity), because water doesn't donate hydrogens until its so hot that its breaking down or until you've ripped them off electrically.

I'm just going to refer you to a link at this point and say compost doesn't feed 7 billion people. Natural gas is a byproduct of oil drilling, and also limited. In fact the hydrogen for your fuel cells ALSO comes from natural gas - because its the only way to get hydrogen thats actually efficient. Cracking water is about the most energy expensive way there is to get it, and we'd need to build a nuclear plant a month for the next 20 years.

http://www.organicconsumers.org/btc/fossilfuel060326.cfm

Most estimates are similar to this one. For every 400 calories you eat, you consumed over 2000 calories of fossil fuels.

Trying to run the world on biofuels actually makes the problem worse.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=biofuels-bad-for-people-and-climate

No.

From wikipedia:

"The Haber process now produces 100 million tons of nitrogen fertilizer per year, mostly in the form of anhydrous ammonia, ammonium nitrate, and urea. 3–5% of world natural gas production is consumed in the Haber process (~1–2% of the world's annual energy supply).^{[1][13][14][15]} That fertilizer is responsible for sustaining one-third of the Earth's population, as well as various deleterious environmental consequences.^[2][5] Hydrogen production using electrolysis of water powered by renewable energy is not yet competitive cost-wise with hydrogen from fossil fuels, such as natural gas, and so has been responsible for only 4% of current hydrogen production (almost all as a byproduct of the chloralkali process)."

From http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/100303_eating_oil.html

In the United States, 400 gallons of oil equivalents are expended annually to feed each American (as of data provided in 1994).⁷ Agricultural energy consumption is broken down as follows:

·        31% for the manufacture of inorganic fertilizer

·        19% for the operation of field machinery

·        16% for transportation

·        13% for irrigation

·        08% for raising livestock (not including livestock feed)

·        05% for crop drying

·        05% for pesticide production

·        08% miscellaneous⁸

And I realize the last link is from a bit of a Cassandra site, but the footnote is from a Canadian Agricultural Engineering journal and it sounds pretty reasonable to me to think that producing fertilizer is an energy intensive process that uses a lot of hydrocarbon input that can't simply be switched over to solar or nuclear overnight.

Yes.

It is, but most of the natural gas from oil wells is burned off at the site since they aren't interested in moving it to where it needs to be sold. We get natural gas from natural gas wells, it's a different resource and while limited we still have a lot left. It's also mostly just methane, and there are extremely vast frozen methane deposits all over the ocean floor that we have yet to tap into.

Which, if you tap them, are carbon sources that accelerate the greenhouse effect which will require MORE energy in order to combat drought (pumping and desalinizing water) and keep civilization viable. Also, when the oil runs out, we are going to have to shift to NG for electricity production, raising its price for agricultural uses.

Nuclear is the only real way out of this mess, with a good side helping of solar, but there is no will to do either, and we can't produce a nuclear plant a year, let alone each month. 

I wish I saw an easy way out, but the current way food is made, stored and delivered is completely unsustainable over the next century. Either human populations decline, or human populations decline. Meanwhile the loss of diversity at the species level means that whatever is left is going to be a much simpler, more vulnerable ecosystem thats unable to survive any sort of insult.

If there is a technological solution to all this, I don't know what it is. Slowing and reversing population growth, switching to local food production using sustainable methods ... I'd love to see it happen.

Also, its not entirely clear that if you start disturbing methane clathrates at the bottom of the ocean that they don't start spontaneously decomposing triggering a cataclysm. It may happen anyway as the oceans warm.

I think that's a different guy, the English Scientist, right? The one I knew about with the chip in his head was in college. He went on a football scholarship but got paralyzed. He couldn't play anymore, being paralyzed from the neck down, so he volunteered for the experiment. I want to say it was "Brown" university but I might be wrong. Going by memory here and not looking it up on Google.

Anyway, the guy with the chip in his brain had a wire coming out of the top of his head. He could play Pong and write emails with as much %70 accuracy most of the time. The mouse and Pong paddle were NOT moving with a eye pointing device. It was the power of his thought completely moving the devices. The chip picked up the electrical impulses from his brain and some-how translated that into input for the devices.

You can most likely find the exact article by doing a Google search on "Man with computer chip in brain plays Pong" and see what comes up.

EDIT: I found one of the article about the guy. Here it is on USATODAY. I don't think it was Brown unless Brown is in Mass. Anyway here's an excerpt:

Scientists gingerly tap into brain's power

The wires run from 100 tiny sensors implanted in his brain and out to a computer. Using just his thoughts, this former high school football player is playing the computer game Pong.

It is part of a breakthrough trial, the first of its kind, with far-reaching implications. Friday, early results were revealed at the American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation annual conference. Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology Systems, the Foxborough-based company behind the technology, told attendees the man can use his thoughts to control a computer well enough to operate a TV, open e-mail and play Pong with 70% accuracy.