Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion Climate Change Forum An experiment that hints we are wrong on climate c

For the very long term, the best thing that could possibly happen to the Earth is an asteroid collision wiping out 75% of the population.

It would be terrible to live in the times following it, and there would be much anguish. And it would be unimaginably awful, to be sure. But five hundred years later the descendants of the survivors would be living practically in paradise. They would have all the technology and knowledge that we have today (plus any that are discovered in the meantime, though the discovery rate would be seriously slowed), and amounts of resources that haven't been seen in centuries. They would look back on the event as the collision that saved their world.

Some scientists want to bring about such a thing by engineering a disease that will kill a huge portion of the population, but that reeks of evil to me - that implies a group of people deciding where to unleash it and which population segments will be hit hardest. The random occurrence of an impartial asteroid would be far better.

And short of something like that happening, I think Earth is about to become a very hot place to live. The warming and it's effects are going to kill off just as many of the population before things come back into equilibrium. The only differences are that the deaths will be slower and more painful and the survivors will have to wait a whole lot longer for paradise to show itself.

Given the choice between a bullet and a slow poison, I'll take the bullet. Given the choice between an asteroid and just waiting it out, I'll take the asteroid. Even if it's my house it touches first.

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