Apocalypse hypothetical

Imagine the following scenario: Astronomers have found an asteroid on a collision course with earth. It will destroy out civilization and kill all humans on the planet. However, that won't happen for another ten years. A large number of the world's top scientists have come together to try and solve the problem, and they have concluded that we will not be able to deflect the object from hitting Earth. The only chance for the continued survival of humanity is to send a spacecraft full of people, which might survive in space for the several thousand years necessary for the earth to become habitable. Each person in the world is given a choice: If you dedicate the next ten years of your life to helping build the space station, you will be entered into the lottery for a ticket onto the space station. You can give the ticket to whomever you want. Otherwise, you can just relax for ten years, and join the biggest party of mass hedonism since Caligula. What would you choose?

So the scenario doesn't say what your chances of getting a ticket are. Most likely, that would be determined by how much work the people get done in ten years. How many people are necessary to repopulate the world? Preliminary research (i.e. google search) points to somewhere around 1,000, to avoid inbreeding. So probably the best strategy is to have as many self-contained satellite habitats orbiting the earth, each with 1,000 people. And then hopefully at least one of these will survive. Another strategy is to have just one massive space ship, but that's a bad idea since then it only takes one big mistake or accident (or crazy person) to destroy it.

So I'm looking at the situation where for two to three years, the scientists perfect a few models of space ship, then every factory in the world starts making as many of them as they can. Wikipedia says that in the last 50 years or so, only about 550 people have been launched into space. But our technology has grown exponentially (even though we are no longer capable of going to the moon) If we can devote a significant fraction of the world's GDP to this project, then we might be able to produce a few dozen of these space stations. . If we devote all our time and money to this problem, maybe we will be able to launch a few dozen of them before time runs out. So that's about 12,000 people who will be saved. At the same time, I would estimate that about half of the world's population would support this effort, that's about 3,000,000. That's a 1/25,000 chance for each person. A tiny chance, but perhaps worth it, if you know that you did your part in helping humanity avoid extinction?

Over several thousand years, each space station will undoubtedly develop its own culture and civilization, even if there is constant communication between space ships. Will they attack each other? If our space station's air filter breaks, will we raid another's, dooming them and saving ourselves? More likely, all space stations will work together, helping each other

Next is the problem of recolonization. When all the surviving space ships land, there might be some hostility between them. One issue is when, exactly, to land. If our space ship lands earlier than the others, we will have more time to set up a prosperous city and multiply. Later than the others, and we will have a more hospitable Earth to greet us. However, most likely there will be more than enough Earth for everybody, so this hostility probably won't cause human extinction.

A different possibility is to make a space craft that is capable of building more copies of itself from raw materials (moon rocks? asteroids?). That way we just launch a few "seed ships" and in a few millennia there will be hundreds or thousands ready to land. And in that case some may not want to land, but instead might move to other parts of the solar system (or to different stars!). This actually seems to me like a necessary step in the development of our civilization. With space stations that are not only self-reliant but also are capable of reproducing, we change all of space into a possible habitat for humanity. And in that case there's no need ever to return to Earth. We might just send it a post-card, though.

Say it with me: Oh-Ten

That's right! We're going to start saying the last THREE digits of years. We used to use two digits back in the '900s, then in '000 we got all scared about the so called "Y2K" so we moved to four digits. Then around '002 we moved back to two digits because obviously Y2K didn't happen. I mean, it did, but all the bad stuff didn't happen. But I'm telling you we shouldn't move back down from four to two. Have a look at the graph of human life expectancy over time, gleaned from this article:

As you can see, for the past two hundred years human life expectancy has been rising steadily. Soon, most people will live to be over 100 years old. Now, the reason we originally wanted to use two digits is because in our 35-year lifespans (for those of us who love the bacon) we would never be troubled with using the same number twice. Imagine if we called this the year zero, only using the last digit of the year. It would only make sense if we would never live to see the next year zero. But we WILL live to see the next year '10, so we need to act now and change our conventions. In the year '110, it will be too late to go back and change all our blog posts!

Act now! Say it with me: Oh-Ten!

War and Obesity: the human condition

In many places in the world, food is not abundant, and many people starve. But in the US, most people can afford to buy more food than they could ever possibly eat. Some of us can just eat and eat like slobs and never gain a pound (don't cry for me America), while others become overweight. However, bacteria don't get obese, they just make tons of children. In the long term even humans will follow suit, multiplying in the presence of excess food. As Darwin explains, a given population of organisms will grow exponentially until they use all available food. There is no doubt that the human population is growing at least exponentially (and maybe even superexponentially). Even if our current rate of food production were sustainable (which, because it's supported by fertilizers made from fossil fuels, some argue that it's not), we would eventually multiply to fill that vacuum. Until then, we will be overweight.

And once the number of people roughly equals the sustainable food supply, we will start to compete for those resources. We will go to war! Unless we can either a) transcend the laws of biology or b) find an infinite supply of resources, it seems that the human condition is to be at war. Let's examine two possible strategies to resist our fate:

1) The universe is infinite, right? Can't we just colonize every planet? This doesn't work for two reasons. First, while the amount of space is infinite, the amount of energy and mass (i. e. resources) is not. It's a huge amount, but given enough time we could expand to consume it all. Second, that still won't help the problem of local fluctuations in food, resulting in local warfare. Once we colonize the whole solar system, there might be a surplus of food on Jupiter, but we can't bring it to Venus, where people are starving. We have the same problem right now, on Earth, where one country gets fat while another starves and fights.

2) Our brains separate us from the animals, right? Can't we just all agree to have exactly two children per couple, plus a few extra in case of accidental deaths? Well wouldn't it be wonderful if we could all agree, but we won't. Those of us who do agree will pass on our agree-to-limit-procreation genes to a smaller and smaller fraction of the population than those with procreate-as-much-as-you-can-and-don't-listen-to-ecologists-or-bloggers genes. It's exactly the sort of trait that natural selection keeps a collection of on the walls of its hunting lodge.

Mutant Atomic Race of Super Men?

Let me start this like any other good article: by raffirming that I'm not a secret nazi racist. Now that's out of the way. So. I was reading an interesting article on bbc which quotes "Evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry of the London School of Economics" when he predicts that

The human race would peak in the year 3000, before a decline due to dependence on technology. People would become choosier about their sexual partners, causing humanity to divide into sub-species.

An interesting concept. First, let's think about how a species could diverge evolutionarily while being in the same geographical place (i. e. all of earth). Let's say you're some kind of squirrel thing. To get food you could either dig up tubers or you could climb up a tree and get some nuts. Let say right now the population has arms that are okay at climbing and at digging. But if they could just evolve thumbs, they might be able to climb a lot better, but no longer be able to dig. Or they could evolve shovelly-hands which would help them dig a lot better, but they wouldn't be able to climb any more. The species might evolve into two, since the child of a shovelly-arm and a thumb-hand would be bad at both things.

Aren't we starting to "decline" already? By that I mean, if all our technology were removed, we would be less fit than a thousand years ago. Our feet can't handle the rough ground. More of us are born with diseases which are merely inconvenient right now, with medical technology, but would be fatal or very bad otherwise. You might argue that we don't do hardly any real stuff now. Our houses are built by human-operated machines. Our food is harvested by human-operated machines from farms. Most of our transportation is by car, plane, or train. Even birth is increasingly being performed through C-Section. Women with poor birthing hips, who in the past would not have been able to pass on their genes, are now fine. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with any of these things, but it does show our increasing reliance on technology.

However, with the increasing research in genomic technology, there are some quiet murmurings about the possibility of, say, making sure your baby doesn't get a certain gene. If you have sickle cell anemia, for example, you might be able to take your haploid cells to a clinic, and have them filter our the ones without that gene. But would parents always select the most "fit" child? That depends on what we mean by fit, exactly. Right now, in American society, one might say that blonde women are more fit, because they're perceived as more attractive. But other women can just dye their hair. But in the wild, blond hair is less fit for most of the earth. Sunny days require a dark sun-reflector, which black hair (and black skin) do pretty well. No, the parents will choose their children to be the most fit in the framework of the anticipated environment.