On Thu, 17 May 2001, Robin Hanson wrote:
> Assuming a sigmoid anytime soon is clueless, and I say this just based
> on standard economics, not any special singularity concept. The world
> economy has been doubling every 15 years for a century now, and just
> continuing that growth for another two or more centuries should make
> an enormous dent in the biosphere. If we knock ourselves off, we'll
> likely take much of the biosphere with us.
Without human intervention, the biosphere will be essentially gone in much
less than a gigayear (possibly in just 500 megayears), when the solar flux
will go up as the Sun starts to move visibly off the main
Hertzsprung-Russel sequence, making Earth first turn into steamy hell only
fit for extremophiles, and then lose the volatiles entirely, before being
engulfed within the red giant atmosphere (ranging to where the current
Mars orbit is) and then deorbiting into the star core.
Before there are going to be giant asteroid impacts, which will eclipse
anything that humans could do.
The biosphere is fragile as it is, without human impact.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 10:00:06 MDT