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Comment by r3trohack3r | Hacker News Reader

A viable chance at getting off this rock.

500+ million years is a blink of an eye on a cosmic scale. Humans are the only species we’ve observed that has a viable chance or surviving on cosmic time scales; and we will likely bring other life along with us for that ride.

Short of another human-equivalent species evolving, or a hyper resilient organism that can piggy back on space debris, humans are literally the only shot life on Earth has.

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> 500+ million years is a blink of an eye on a cosmic scale.

How so? It’s 1/8 of the lifespan of the planet and about 3.5% of the age of the universe.

That is not “a blink of an eye”, that’s a pretty impressive innings by any definition.

Humans will be lucky if we make 1 million years at this rate.

Well, according to the Big Freeze theory (seems to be the most probable) 500 million years is less than a blink of an eye when compared to the time the universe will consume until it cannot anymore.

Why does that matter? Why are humans so special? I 'feel' like octopuses are the better candidate :) putting aside trivial human aspirations....

When they successfully escape earths orbit, get back to me.

Until then, all odds are stacked against them. They’re going to go extinct in an instant on a cosmic timescale. Unless, of course, humans choose to bring them along and save them from that fate.

I'm not necessarily disagreeing, but it's interesting to me that in our many hundred thousand year history as a species, the "point" of our intelligence (by your measure) wasn't even a suggestion until maybe 120 years ago, and only a dream until maybe 60 years ago. What are the chances?

Perhaps a scholar in 320 AD would also have been surprised by how remarkable it was that the true purpose of human intelligence had only been so recently discovered.

Bingo.

This is the chasm that needs to be crossed. Its not just the immediate advantage your species gets from intelligence. It’s cultivating that to a point where you realize all life on this planet is default extinct. Then getting your species to the point where you even have a _chance_ of changing that default.

Humans are still default extinct. We are on a path to changing that default.

No we're not, at best we're just changing the timeline. You're still either time bound by the death of the universe best case scenario or resource bound before that happens (if the universe can "end"). Extinction is inevitable at any timescale.

Well the whole point of the game of life is to keep the game going for as long as possible.

to follow up on the point above, how do you know that leaving earth is the only way to escape extinction? that's only what you can imagine given the technology available, just like someone living in 320 couldn't conceive of space travel.

I agree that the ultimate purpose of any species is to continue to exist. I'm just skeptical because your definition of that is so related to modern science fiction

I mean eventually the sun will lose energy and hell, a planet destroying asteroid could hit at any time.

One response from the Christian tradition is that humans are creatures made in the image of God with rational, moral, and spiritual faculties. Other animals lack these faculties. Furthermore, we are decreed to be stewards over the created order by divine command.

Christianity decrees its followers to be stewards over the created order, but outside of some small groups, there's no major tradition of vegetarianism in Christianity, nor any particular care for ecology and sustainability as is practiced in many other religions.

Because stewardship of the earth got translated into dominion over it and that became the dominant narrative in a dominant branch of Christianity in most of the world (Evangelicalism).

Dinosaurs perished to become oil to power our technology, they deserve some credit.

It was mostly the plant species alive in that time, not dinosaurs per se.

> viable chance or surviving on cosmic time scales

how incredibly arrogant.

Arrogant is a tremendous understatement. There's a chance that 10 million years ago on some other planet existed a far more advanced civilization than humans could ever imagine, but they died out after 1 million years. So they would have had 1 million years of advancement, which is still 50 times more advancement than the 2000 or so years of scientific progress we've had, and even that would be but a tiny tiny tiny fraction of a blink of an eye in space and time. To think that "humans have a viable chance of surviving cosmic time" is incredulous if you know even rudimentary physics.

I would prefer ambitious.

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