[medymed]

No matter how much we conspire to destroy the environment on earth, by burning fuel or nuclear war or otherwise, the earth (or parts of it) will likely be more hospitable to humans than any other alternative. We can shoot some vials of DNA towards Alpha Centauri etc, but so much for the interplanetary humanistic escapists.

[luqtas]

700 years ago, a lot of people didn't knew America existed... 200 years ago, a smartphone would sound pretty sci-fi

what if we manage to head out of the solar system after 5 million of years? we are here for 300,000 so far

[aredox]

S-curves only look exponential at the beginning.

[MrVandemar]

The number of things we know are increasing, and the more information we have, the more likely we are to be able to extrapolate our capabilities.

We can watch as much "Star Trek" as we like, but we ain't going nowhere.

[inglor_cz]

"and the more information we have, the more likely we are to be able to extrapolate our capabilities"

I don't believe that. Major progress usually comes from entirely new technologies, not from continuous development of the already known ones.

You wouldn't be able to extrapolate current IT sector from the state of things in 1924, because the transistor, the crucial building block for really heavy computation, wasn't around.

Same with people in 1824 trying to predict current civil aviation from their state-of-the-art balloons.

[Vecr]

There's a lot of extrapolation going on already. It's like if you speculated an evil demon as running a VR simulation in the year 1900, more powerful than current computers. No knowledge of transistors needed. On the level of math and physics, there are new discoveries, but they don't come that often for the kind of thing big enough to help in this case.

[CGamesPlay]

You could have used that line about extrapolating our future at any point in history, and it would have been wrong each time. So I don't think it will be right now.

[MrVandemar]

Well, [checks watch] it's 2024 so I'll just jetpack over and up to the parking lot, and drive my flying car home, and catch the 2nd week of the Moon Olympics.

It'd be nice, but you know what, let's look after what we have, and if we get to Star Trek, that's fine, but if we don't we still have somewhere to live.

[FL33TW00D]

This comment is really sad! Humans are destined to explore.

[indoordin0saur]

Some people have spent so much of their lives staring down at their shoes that they've never seen the stars above.