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Asked by flissboo to Claire, Kate, Matt, Rob, Sam on 24 Jun 2013.
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Sam Geen answered on 24 Jun 2013:
It’s really hard to say. The most likely thing is that humans either kill ourselves off with wars, or change from being human by modifying ourselves enough that we no longer look or act like humans. Some science fiction authors have suggested that we upload ourselves into machines or computers once we understand how to do that, because we would live longer and be more powerful. But we could also be killed off by sudden disasters like asteroid impacts. Ultimately, no-one knows how long humans will survive because our society is changing so fast, and we don’t know what the future will hold.
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Robert Woolfson answered on 25 Jun 2013:
We have an upper limit. In about 4 billion years, the sun will turn into a supergiant and melt the planet. Before then, there are a huge number of things that could go wrong. If the time the planet had existed was your arm, our existence would barely be a freshly cut fingernail.
We haven’t been around for that long, cosmically speaking, but we’ve had a good run so far. Seeing as we can’t really predict what will happen in the future, we may as well enjoy the time we get.
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Matthew Pankhurst answered on 25 Jun 2013:
The average time a species of mammal (which is what humans are) is on earth is not much more than 1000 thousand years (although people argue about this). Humans have been around for 250-400 thousand years (people argue about this too!). So maybe we’re almost halfway?! However, we are unlike any other species ever to have lived on Earth, because we are capable of leraning about our universe with science, and changing our environments through technology. So…. who knows!
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