LogFAQs > #972343001

See, much of what you are stating makes sense, but there is another factor.

We currently have technology to make a much smaller population of humans live like gods and colonize at least our solar system with the resources at our disposal. If the population of this earth was 1 billion instead of almost 8 billion, and the entire world worked together to reduce the amount of menial labor needed, allowing all 1 billion humans to work towards advancing technology, artistic desires etc, we would not have many of the problems we have right now and could accomplish amazing things.

That seems fictional, like no way it could happen, but honestly most "apocalytic" scenerios will just lead to such a situation. More than just the US have underground bunkers on their own power/air source etc that could even survive the loss of atmosphere on this planet. After such a catastrophy (or just a virus that kills 95% of people etc), the remaining humans would have a ton of resources to play with, and not a ton of people to use them. Robots/machines etc would be used because a very small percentage of humans are no longer using a freakton of resources to live like gods and requiring a huge majority of humans to work like slaves doing menial tasks.

The point is that we don't need to advance that much more technology wise (Even if it's likely that we will based just on the last 10-20 years....many would say 20 years ago we were already reaching a point where advancements might slow down, but the reverse has happened instead). With what we have now, we could easily set up bases on the moon and mars within a few decades, to the point where mining at both locations could sustain life there indefinitly (much harder on our moon do to no easy access to water mind you, and if the earth goes poof in most cases so does the moon so it's not really worth the investment other than having a place to launch from that requires far less fuel (if you can mine metals on the moon and build things there, you only need to get the fuel to that planet/water to use it as a great place to launch/build larger ships etc for further colonizations).

Mars could be like a second earth, it's already within the range of planets that could sustain life, it would just need a long term teraforming process to make humans able to live there outside of domes etc. Not something that would happen (With current tech) within 100 years, but it could happen eventually.

Anyway, you are right that it is all pointless really, we need to deal with the reality we live in now, and the extreme likelyhood is that no matter what happens to the human race as a whole, a majority of us will not live out our years at this point if we are younger than 60 (dieing from natural causes that is). More than likely war or disease or other factors will kill off a majority of humans. It won't wipe out humanity (that is VERY hard to do now) but for most of us it won't matter.