What if: The end is nigh!

[Super Pony]

In the US they'd choose who gets to go and who gets to stay with a game show like dancing with the stars. "your performance was 'star worthy'! You win a pass offworld!"

Sorry blue team you get to go work in the mines, factories and sprawling hydroponics research labs....here's a jump suit...

 

[Umbran]

What would people do?

In the short term, I would expect chaos. Fierce, terrible chaos.

If it is bad enough, the long term is then mostly subsistence agriculture until the end.

 

[Bullgrit]

I'm still interested in the question of how we'd react if there absolutely was no hope.

This is actually where I intended this discussion to go. That's why I said, "no chance of any survivors at all" and "Too soon to really advance technology to a point of taking people to other planets".

As interesting as the discussion is about "how far could we get technology if survival of the species depended on it" is, I'm more interested in thinking about how mankind would/could handle the knowledge that it would all end within the current generation.

Bullgrit

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I'm getting some booty.










Y'know...pirate treasure!

 

[Scott DeWar]

I'm getting some booty.



Y'know...pirate treasure!

uh huh. sure.

 

[Joker]

It's hard to determine how people will react in such a situation.
It's not just knowing you are going to die. It's knowing that there will be nothing like you existing in the near future.

Because imminent doom is still a bit off most of the social controls will still be in place, i.e. police, riot control, militaries etc.

So although widespread chaos may occur, it will likely still be contained, with military and thus lethal intervention if needed.

What's more concerning is widespread depression. Knowing your genes are not going to continue can have a detrimental effect on your mental well being.
It is because of this and because the cataclysm is going to happen a few decades from now that there will likely be a concerted effort to save as many people as possible in order to preserve our species. Even though the powers that be may know programs such as cloning, iron wombs or a mass exodus are doomed to fail, setting up constructs that will give people hope does a lot towards placating the masses.

Of course, all of this is entirely speculative and the opinion of someone who isn't well versed in the subject of human behavior during apocalypses.

 

[ssampier]

I'm getting some booty.










Y'know...pirate treasure!

I'm bringing the Goonies.

http://youtu.be/mkB5-BHxKZI

We'll save Astoria from Developers planet from certain doom.

 

[cignus_pfaccari]

Exactly how you do it depends on what you're taking, and how much of it. What kind of ships you need to move 100 people and a million cells may be different than what you use to move 10,000 people.

The absolutely most plausible drive would be what we use today - chemical rockets. Lots of them. Big ones.

The next most plausible is a plasma drive, which NASA already has in development. These use electricity to ionize a gas (hydrogen or helium, in most versions), and accelerate it out as a rocket.

Everything else I'd call theoretical.

I imagine we might start out with chemical drives, at very least for the pathfinders, and then depending on how well the plasma drive works, maybe switch to some Orion drives. Those at least have been demonstrated in small-scale tests, and hey, if the world's going to be destroyed, environmental concerns will, as has been mentioned before, fall by the wayside.

Brad