General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: We should have been colonizing the solar system by now. [View all]LunaSea
(2,894 posts)We probably have about 40 more years.
Because we're not special.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/17/science/17tier.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
In 1993, J. Richard Gott III computed with scientific certainty that humanity would survive at least 5,100 more years. At the time, I took that as reason to relax, but Dr. Gott has now convinced me I was wrong. He has issued a wake-up call: To ensure our long-term survival, we need to get a colony up and running on Mars within 46 years.
If youre not awakened yet, I understand. Its only prudent to be skeptical of people who make scientific forecasts about the end of humanity. Dr. Gott, a professor of astrophysics at Princeton, got plenty of grief after he made his original prediction in 1993. But in the ensuing 14 years, his prophetic credentials have strengthened, and not merely because humanity is still around.
Dr. Gott has used his technique to successfully forecast the longevity of Broadway plays, newspapers, dogs and, most recently, the tenure in office of hundreds of political leaders around the world. He bases predictions on just one bit of data, how long something has lasted already; and on one assumption, that there is nothing special about the particular moment that youre observing this phenomenon. This assumption is called the Copernican Principle, after the astronomer who assumed he wasnt seeing the universe from a special spot in the center.
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The sobering facts, Dr. Gott says, are that in a 13.7 billion-year-old universe, weve only been around 200,000 years, and were only on one tiny planet. The Copernican answer to Enrico Fermis famous question Where are the extraterrestrials? is that a significant fraction must be sitting on their home planets.