Immortality

I just read this article over at Huffingstuff about how the  world is going to end 4 billion years from now.  Of course the teaser headline read:

Space Agency Predicts Date of World Ending Galactic Smash Up!!!

Which was a bit misleading, since “4 billion years from now” is not really a precise date.  When I read the headline, I was expecting something much more immediate and specific, like December 12, 2012.

Of course, we may have evolved a bit by then

Galactic smashup was also a bit misleading, since the prediction is that our Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy will collide then, and since both galaxies consist of a bit more than 99% empty space, there’s a reasonable chance we won’t collide with anything at all.

And the whole thing was a bit disingenuous, because that’s about the time our own sun will expand and fry our worthless butts quicker than a corn dog, anyway.

Still, it was not the headline or the story that bothered me and moved me to this post.  It was the comments.  Comment after comment talking about how it doesn’t matter, we’ll all be dead and the human race extinct, so why worry about it.

I find this attitude to be indicative of a lack of imagination, defeatist, and completely unacceptable.

Admittedly, 4 billion years is a megastretch of time.  If you consider human history from the time that Joshua fought the battle of Jericho to the present, that’s 1/400,000th of the way we have to go.

Still,  I’d like to get there.  I don’t mean me, personally, I don’t expect any medical breakthrough that will give those of us living now life immortal.  But I have kids, and I hope that my kids have kids, and my grandkids have grandkids, so on and indefinitely into the future.

Yes, billions of years and yes, beyond the survival of our  planet.  It’s a long road, but we are on it.  The next step will be more near space futzing around, bigger space stations, tourism, space based telescopes and solar power arrays, the kind of stuff we have now but more.  Then comes the space elevator, which we don’t have materials strong and light enough to build it just yet but we will.  Then the mining ships will take off for the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn and, at some point, space will become profitable.  Then the terraforming of our moon, Mars and even hellish Venus, I suspect by crashing iceteroids into them until, in the case of Mars, an  atmosphere is created and, in the case of Venus, a deadly one is altered.

Then will come the ark ships which will take off for the stars.  Star Trek stuff.  I don’t know how far off that is, exactly, but it’s not 4 billion years.

The human race will survive.