• Question: Do you think humans can survive another 200 years on this planet or would we have to get on spaceships and fly (into space)?

    Asked by abichohan to Davie, Gemma, James P, James V, Nuala on 29 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: James Pope

      James Pope answered on 29 Jun 2012:

      Hi abichohan,

      I think that the human race will survive another 200 years on this planet, which is a good job, as I don’t expect we will be ready to leave Earth and set of our into space inside 200 years as the challenges we would have to overcome to achieve it are very big, such as growing food and replenshing oxygen for ships large enough to carry a very large number of people on them.

      I do hope though that the coming decades see us trying to get out into space again, it is 40 years since we last left the moon and since then we haven’t even left a low Earth orbit, which is a crying shame and hopefully we will be going on missions to Mars or maybe the moons of Jupitar or Saturn! But who knows, I know I would go in an instant if I got the chance to!

    • Photo: James Verdon

      James Verdon answered on 1 Jul 2012:

      Hi abichohan,
      I think that we will survive for a long while yet. If climate change does happen then it could cause a lot of problems, but I don’t think it will be enough to wipe us out completely. The most likely ways that humanity could go extinct are either if a new disease emerges that is highly contagious and fatal, or if another asteroid hits.

      As James says, I think it will be a long long long time before we have enough technology to ship the human race off of this planet and go somewhere else. We haven’t even made it to Mars yet, and the nearest planet that we might be able to live on is many thousands of times further away than Mars.

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