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Comment by bambax | Hacker News Reader

Everything eventually comes to an end: civilizations, stars, individuals, species.

Dinosaurs ruled the earth for a longer time than elapsed since they've been extinct. Almost double, in fact.

Humanity is extremely recent; at the most, homo sapiens sapiens is 200,000 years old -- and history goes back 10,000 years. There is no special reason why humanity would (or should!) survive indefinitely.

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Dinosaurs are a rather large group of animals (and you can join primitive birds with more "reptilian" dinosaurs, but I digress...) and humans are a subspecies (homo sapiens sapiens), comparing dinosaurs' extinction with human's extinction its almost like comparing mammals extinction with white shark extinction.

That's a parochical view, valid only in the context of the classificatory scheme to which you allude and which we find useful in certain respects at present. To use Nassim Taleb's metaphor, humans have turned out to be evolutionary black swans.

Disagree about the "should". Why would we not want to survive indefinitely? And when it comes to species, humans are clear outliers. I'm not sure how well one can extrapolate human future from what happened to the dinosaurs.

Perhaps OP is being a bit more philosophical. Not suggesting that it is a failure of will or a straw poll of our future direction but instead because we are/arent worthy of continuing...?

> humans are clear outliers

In what sense are humans outliers?

Well, space colonization does open up the possibility for surviving maybe a few billion years. Maybe we can even reverse entropy and survive indefinately (que the Isaac Asimov novell).

I agree. Though the questions will remain as how it will end and when it will end.

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