Originally posted by humy
It will be a while before we can say we get minimum a few weeks heads up.
An asteroid large enough to cause a mass extinction would be much more visible than a much smaller one that is not. I would guess it would take much less than 200 years before we will have a warning system can guarantee a minimum warning of a few weeks of a really large ...[text shortened]... teroid ever causing our whole human species going extinct even within the next 10 billion years.
Ten BILLION years? That is an appreciable percentage of the age of entire frigging UNIVERSE! The SUN won't be here in 10 billion years. It will be ashes spread over a thousand light years.
You seem to have an unbounded optimism but you should temper that with a dose of reality.
Humans have only been around, including all the variants, Heidelbergensis, Neandertals, Australopithecus, Homo Habilis and so forth, only a few million years.
On the geological scale, a brief amount of time.
If we don't get off the planet, we will lose our technology perhaps, and maybe sooner than you think. I sure as hell hope not but we are facing daunting tasks if we are to keep our world civilization together.
This mad rush to produce the next greatest widget is quickly depleting our resources, like copper, which is said to run out in as little as the next 30 years.
Rare earths aren't THAT rare but it takes quite an industrial strength unit to get it out. Lose that technology and there goes rare earth, erbium, etc.
If we get into space in a big way, for instance, if we finally crack the problem of extreme strength in fibers, we may have a real space elevator, eliminating the need for giant rockets and bringing down the cost of getting to space more like a round trip ticket to Phoenix.
Then when we no longer have easily mined copper, for instance, the moon is a giant mine just waiting for us to exploit.
It will take something like that to overcome the dwindling resources here on Earth.
I would love to think the human race intelligent enough to overcome its warlike tendencies and political waffling to get real colonies on Mars, Asteroids, the moons of Pluto, and so forth, with an eye to Alpha Centauri, a destination that gives you 3 stars for the price of one, so much science to be learned being there, not the least of which is just having a camera taking pictures of distant galaxies and getting actual parallax off them, thus pinpointing the exact distance and then able to calibrate our standard candles, novae and supernova's. That aside from what wonderful things we would find sniffing around those three stars.
Imagine having a photo baseline of 4 light years! Right now we get parallax on stars something like 300 ly away using a baseline the diameter of Earth's orbit, 180 odd million miles. Doing the same thing with cameras in space near Earth and around any one of the trio at Alpha Centauri gives you a baseline 138,000 times wider. That would give us direct parallax to 40 million light years out. That alone would be worth the trip. Anyway stuff like that is how we get out of the doldrums we are in now, increasing population versus dwindling resources.
The next 100 years will tell the tale I think. By the end of this century there will be definitive proof or disproof of global warming and all that entails, losing Florida, etc., whether we can sustain our technology, all that will be sorted out by centuries end. Then a new story starts in the year 2100 or so. One way or the other.
Ten billion years. That is a pipe dream.