What's Next?

What's Next?

Our survival may be a larger issue than many of us may realise.
This universe appears to have started off with a big bang some 14 billion years ago. 

Planet earth agglomerated about 4 billion years ago, and self-replicating organic life began here about 200 million years after this.  In another 4 billion years or so, our star- the sun- will inflate its photosphere and consume the earth.  But well before this the earth will become too hot to be habitable for carbon-based life forms.

So, organic life has already probably had more than three quarters of its available time slot on this planet. In a practical sense, our species is about the only chance that any life originating from here can survive past earth's destruction.  Unless we can get off-planet, nothing from here is likely to- and this includes every other species and their descendant species, currently endangered or not.  Their only chance of longer-term survival lies with us and what we evolve to and can manage to do.
There is a reasonable view that Organic life must be commonplace throughout this universe, especially resilient basic forms such as bacteria. More complex forms are much less likely- but the number of known star systems is so huge that even tiny probabilities become near certainties.  However, we don't yet know that we aren't the only organised life form capable of seeding the known universe, and until we do know this, then we shouldn't do anything to preclude it (assuming it's a useful thing to do).

What if we are the only chance there is?  What if somewhere in the distant future some unknowable descendants raise a glass and say "crikey mate, here's to you for having a go- and especially for not self-destructing".
Personally I doubt that carbon-based DNA has much of a long term future.

For any realistic chance of long-term survival, we (carbon-based life that is) need to get off planet- too many eggs in one basket here, too many paths to extinction.

But we humans are just not tough enough for the temperature ranges of the wider universe, are too susceptible to radiation, needs gravity for many physiological functions, and aren't long lived enough for travelling to the stars

Nor will it be enough to seed the universe with long lived and hardy bacteria because the evolutionary path from bacteria to sentience is fraught. 

The development of self-replicating life forms from chemical processes is unlikely enough, but the odds against a stable environment enduring for the few billion years it then takes evolutionary processes to move from this to sentience are so high as to give some credence to the notion that we humans may be the only ones to have made it to date.

The obvious answer is that we need to create self-replicating electronic entities that can go off and populate the universe.

And we are close to being able to do this.

They will be our descendants.

                               Peter Lynn, Ashburton, New Zealand, March 2010.