How long can human civilization last? Who is in charge of the fate of mankind?

66 million years ago, the dinosaurs that ruled the earth for 65.438+0.6 billion years were extinct and completely disappeared from the earth. At the beginning, this race occupied almost every corner of the earth, but now, they have already become fossils for human excavation, research and appreciation.

Even such superior creatures will be extinct, let alone human beings.

Whether human beings will exist forever, and if not, how long they will be extinct has been debated. Hawking, a famous physicist, once warned mankind. Nowadays, the deterioration of the earth's environment makes this problem more and more realistic.

Richard Gott, a professor of astrophysics at Princeton University, once pointed out that we usually don't realize our existence until middle age. When you are a baby, you won't realize such a thing as "self", you won't consider the question of "who am I", and even you can't keep your memory. Even with memories, it is unlikely that human beings will consider similar problems in childhood.

If we compare this theory to human beings, when we start to think about how far we are from extinction, we have already bid farewell to human childhood or childhood, and may even have entered middle age. If the development of modern science and technology is the beginning of mankind's "ruling the earth", then the "growth stage" of mankind as an intelligent creature is only a few hundred years, that is to say, mankind and human science and technology have hundreds or even less than a hundred years left from "adulthood" to "death".

If it had been a hundred years ago, few people would have believed this question. Nowadays, the global climate is deteriorating, the environment is facing collapse, and a large number of creatures are extinct, all of which have sounded the alarm for us. Coupled with the epidemic that is still raging around the world and the local wars that are unwilling to stop, we are more worried about the overall fate.

Of course, as a whole, human beings are different from individuals, and extinction and death are not exactly the same. If we take enough effective measures to protect the earth's environment, control the epidemic and stop the war, then there is great hope for mankind to continue to exist. The premise is that we humans must have free will, and this universe cannot be the result of fatalism.

What is fatalism?

From a theological point of view, it seems easy to understand that God is in charge of everything and the future fate of mankind has long been doomed. When modern science was first established, many people questioned it. Today, however, the problem has arisen again.

Fundamentally speaking, we living people are all made up of microscopic particles. Micro-particles are in constant motion, and one of them will affect other particles around them, eventually affecting the whole world with the butterfly effect, and even the whole universe is running under such a weak influence. When something happens, it actually comes from the influence of countless previous events, and it will also lead to countless future events.

In other words, the reason why you make a certain decision about something may be caused by your personality on the surface, but at a deeper level, it may be that a neuron has transmitted a certain signal and made this decision. If so, then the fate of mankind has been doomed. From this point of view, the fate of the world seems to have been decided by all the events that happened today, but we will only see it when it really happens.

Even so, for us now, the future is unknown. In particular, the fate of each individual is hard to guess, not to mention the fate of the whole human race. From a statistical point of view, even if fatalism is established, we can judge the duration of civilization as a whole, without sticking to everyone's analysis.

There is another way to predict the survival time of human beings, and that is to find the answer in the universe. Our sun is not old. There are stars in the universe earlier than the sun. There may be habitable planets around them. Even billions of years ago, they bred life and developed technology, but now they are extinct. Perhaps, just like today's human beings, they inadvertently destroyed their own planet and eventually ended in extinction.

We can know something about these data, and then we can guess how long we can last in different periods. It's a bit like we want to know how high the decay probability of an atom is, which can be inferred by observing the decay of the same atom. Therefore, we can conduct space archaeology or look for possible relics of cosmic civilization to speculate on the time when human beings can exist. It sounds a bit sci-fi, but there may be important discoveries in the future.

The problem now is that all human beings live on the earth. Once the earth's environment has really changed dramatically, whether it is man-made or not, the final result will be the demise of mankind. Finding a second home, such as Mars, may be a better way.

But the current environment of Mars is really not conducive to human survival. There is no oxygen, no drinking water and no food. More fundamentally, we haven't even sent a person to Mars, let alone a large number of immigrants.

Saving the earth is more feasible and realistic than immigrating to Mars. Many people have been calling for protecting the earth's environment and stabilizing the global climate, instead of spending so much money to transform Mars.

This is what scientists are doing now, but there is a saying in China that "sharpening a knife does not make a woodcutter by mistake". Transforming Mars will not affect the work of protecting the earth's environment, and saving the earth's climate does not mean that we should not explore Mars. The two are not contradictory.

When the car was invented, someone even asked, "No one has treated the horse manure on the street." What about now? Cars enter thousands of households, and horse manure is no longer a problem. Of course, horse manure and the earth environment are not the same concept, but the reason is the same. In order to make greater progress, we must have a forward-looking vision.

Oscar Wilde, an English poet, once famously said: We all live in sewers, but some people will look up at the stars. In other words, those who blindly confine their eyes to the earth and refuse to explore the mysteries of the universe are the animals that our ancients described as living in wells.

In a word, whether there is so-called fatalism or not, whether Mars can make us survive or not, protecting the earth's environment is indeed a top priority for mankind at present.

I believe you will often see relevant news. In recent years, the global average temperature has hit record highs, and the temperature in some areas has continuously set new records. Due to global warming, natural disasters have become more frequent and intense.

At least for the moment, the fate of mankind is still in our own hands. How to control climate deterioration and how to protect the earth's environment is the most fundamental problem that determines the duration of human civilization.