Felicia Day on Colliding Galaxies!
Oct. 26th, 2009 07:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greygirlbeastThis is very, very cool and funny (and I'm not just saying that because I think she's hot and we happen to be in the same WoW guild):
Of course, Felicia fails to point out what makes worrying about the Milky Way colliding with Andromeda in three billion years truly silly. Homo sapiens will have long-since become extinct, if not by our own hand, simply through the inexorable cycles of biological and planetary evolution. We will be long, long, long gone. To put this in perspective, the oldest ancient fossil microbe-like objects are dated to be 3.5 billion years old, just a few hundred million years younger than Earth itself. That's the timescale we're working with here.
Of course, there are the grotesquely optimistic idiots who imagine all the galaxy as our future suburban sprawl...
Of course, Felicia fails to point out what makes worrying about the Milky Way colliding with Andromeda in three billion years truly silly. Homo sapiens will have long-since become extinct, if not by our own hand, simply through the inexorable cycles of biological and planetary evolution. We will be long, long, long gone. To put this in perspective, the oldest ancient fossil microbe-like objects are dated to be 3.5 billion years old, just a few hundred million years younger than Earth itself. That's the timescale we're working with here.
Of course, there are the grotesquely optimistic idiots who imagine all the galaxy as our future suburban sprawl...
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-10-27 12:25 am (UTC)Only if by "grotesquely optimistic idiots" you mean "delusional to the point of an imminent psychotic break"...
no subject
Date: 2009-10-27 12:29 am (UTC)Bingo.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-27 12:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-27 01:23 am (UTC)That was my thought exactly while watching the video. I mean, it's all extremely interesting to learn about and to speculate about, but beyond foolish to worry about. Worrying about what may happen when Andromeda comes swirling into the Milky Way is basically worrying about the fate of whatever rises to take the place of what took the place of what took the place of what took the place of humans. I'm just not that altruistic, I guess.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-27 04:04 am (UTC)It has nothing to do with altruism. It's just common sense.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-27 03:47 am (UTC)Surprisingly, many very intelligent people do not realize that homo sapiens could evolve into a new genus in the relatively near future, possibly as early as 200k years. This leads to some wildly speculative conversations, particularly when one tosses sexual selection into the fray. A couple joints don't hurt either.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-27 04:07 am (UTC)Surprisingly, many very intelligent people do not realize that homo sapiens could evolve into a new genus in the relatively near future, possibly as early as 200k years. This leads to some wildly speculative conversations, particularly when one tosses sexual selection into the fray. A couple joints don't hurt either.
Thing is, even if humanity survives long enough to speciate, even if this is not an evolutionary dead end (as I tend to think), it is beyond unlikely that any mammals, much less humans, will still exist in three billion years. Life will have perished in some cataclysm, or will have assumed forms we can only begin to imagine. There may be some other species' civilization, there may not.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-27 10:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-27 06:18 am (UTC)I think there’s a chance we might have some form of descendants around in 3 billion years, but if so, they would be unrecognizable to us now. Given that the galaxy is not already someone else’s suburb, I doubt we would ever attain galactic sprawl; too few people would ever want to move beyond significant speed-of-light lag from the rest of civilization. Being mere light-hours away would be the boondocks and meditation retreats of a solar system.
My own theory is that there are civilizations all over the place, but we can’t tell they’re present. Any mature civilization will have used up all of their electromagnetic communications bandwidth at maximal efficiency, and maximally compressed information is indistinguishable from noise. While our radio and television signals radiating across the universe are currently intelligible, that’s just because of our crude technology; less than 200 years from the development of radio, we’ll look like just another stellar noise source.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-27 02:59 pm (UTC)I don't think you grasp the profundity, deep-timewise, of 3 billion years. It may be that, if humanity gets a clue, and is very lucky in the bargain, "there’s a chance we might have some form of descendants around" in 30 million years, "but if so, they would be unrecognizable to us now." But even that is extraordinarily unlikely.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-27 05:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-27 07:43 pm (UTC)but if we get to the point that we can adapt ourselves consciously to changing conditions, we might very well become like cosmic mildew, always coming back even after getting hosed down by a gamma-ray burster.
This is my nightmare, humans that will not become extinct, no matter what.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-27 06:49 pm (UTC)Ah, human ridiculousness never ceases to appall me.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-27 07:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-27 07:44 pm (UTC)You're in the same guild as Felicia?
Yep.