I'm not at all. I'm feeling pretty hopeless about the whole thing lately. Lots of people have claimed we don't need to worry because technology will save us. But I'm not counting on that. I said in another post, it's too little too late:

"So, I was watching a show about the car of the future and they were talking about all the different alternative-energy cars people are trying to develop such as hydrogen, ethanol, lithium battery, etc.When I first started watching the show I was feeling hopeful. But after the show I was feeling somewhat depressed. it's looking pretty grim, frankly. Nothing's going to happen soon and, even when it does happen, it won't be enough. They're saying by the year 2050 there will be 2.5 times as many cars on the road as there are now. And, while progress is being made towards finding alternative-energy cars, it's slow and none of the options so far is particulary ideal."

And there are many other problems to besides energy that are looming on the horizon. Overpopulation is another issue that no one seems to want to talk about and probably won't until it's too late.

I was also recently watching another show on the politics of global warming. That was also rather depressing. (I gotta stop watching TV). Even if the technology becomes available to solve our problems it won't help because politics are more influential than science. Politics have squashed science many times throughout history and will continue to do so as long as humans continue to worship the Almighty Dollar. I'd like to be optimistic but history does not give me a whole lot of reason to.

Space colonies (that is, non-terrestrial bound living spaces) are not some kind of science fiction fantasy. They're entirely plausible. We're doing it on a small-scale right now.

Wormholes are also not science fiction fantasy. See Stephen Hawking's work on black holes and string theory (and, well, just read a Brief History of Time. It's quite good, and surprisingly funny). Whether or not they have practical applications might be questionable at the moment, but merely dismissing them as 'religion' is bullshit.

Building on the human genome until we can manipulate future generations to be birthed with hardier adaptations, again, is not science fiction fantasy. We're already at the stage where we know how to turn dormant traits on or off. In fact, dogma is one of the few obstacles still in the way for this line of important research.

Contact with extraterrestrial life who might be able to lend a hand at some point in the reasonably reachable future is not science fiction fantasy, presuming Drake's Equation holds any water at all and there are some civilizations who've survived self-destruction. Funding and a sincere approach to the field is the major obstacle here.

I'm an optimist. I don't see the point in being a pessimist. If we're all doomed, hey - we're all doomed. May as well just call her quits and euthanize the planet then, eh?

Yeah colonies are plausible, but long distance space travel for humanity has not made substantial progress in decades and space colonisation we're talking a massive impossible payload in just fuel and life support many times over. Without radical innovation in propulsion and environmental systems, it just won't happen.

It's really really really unlikely that wormholes will have practical applications for us.

It might not be fantasy but it has ick factor written all over it.

Drakes equation is statistical speculation not based on anything but the fact that one humanoid presence exists in the universe. Calculations of the bare chances of extraterrestrial life in this era of the universe are interesting, but they are not as thoroughly grounded in the physical conditions required for life as they should be.

That said, Extra Terrestrial life is still an exciting possibility.

I am a bit Theistic regarding the future of humanity, I think we should return to philosophy for the answers we seek. I'm not a technophobe, but I think we would do well to look outside technology for the first time in a long time. Creating technology to solve our perceived problems has possessed us for millennia now, it has us very deeply entrenched, so much so that we equate relinquishing any of it with failure and doom, which is ironic since it is with technology it would seem that we failed and doomed ourselves to begin with. 

Still I don't think we need to relinquish technology, just the irrational, and obviously backward, fear that we can't without dooming ourselves, will do.

Hiya ronin-dog

Now about Kevin Rudd, I don't like him much because so far all I've seen him do is a magic show. We were already on target with the Kyoto Protocol due to the agreements we have already signed with other Asia-Pacific nations and the United States. So him signing the Protocol has made absolutely no difference, it was just an attempt to please the people. Because frankly most people are not aware that even though China, India and other developing countries are signatories of the Kyoto Protocol, they are exempt from following it because they are developing countries.

I believe currently China is building a new coal power plant every week and intends to do so for many years.

The US, Australia and other countries protested about the exemptions to no avail. So we are now on a piece of paper that condones the exemptions.

Nothing has changed.

Historically, colonization implies a self-sustaining population and industry.  The International Space Station is (at its best) a laboratory for observing the effects of long term inhabitance of a zero-g, high rad environment on a small percentage of the organisms we would need to sustain ourselves.  The money would be better spent on asteroid observation in my opinion.

Have you read Brief History?  Hawking is correct in being very cautious about the possibility of wormhole transport.  He clearly states that the degree to which space-time may have to warped may be such that nothing other than very tiny particles may be sent through.  Wormholes were predicted by Einstein and Rosen and they have neither been witnessed in real space or created in a laboratory.  It's not something to stake the future on.

Well, I'm very much in favor of limited soft eugenics myself, but as a molecular biologist, I'm well aware that you can't just add whole suites of genes to even single-celled organisms and expect them to behave in the same way they do in their native organism.  We can expect big breakthroughs certainly, but those will all be for suiting us to the changing conditions of this planet.

Predictions regarding the amount of life in the universe and whether it will be intelligent, whether it will choose to contact us and whether it will choose to help us is knocking on faith's door.  Our astronomy's not sophisticated enough to learn anything real about the structure of planets within the liquid water zone of properly sized stars.  I'm all in favor of SETI's work, but the fact of the matter is that any signal sent by means of electromagnetic radiation (radio waves up to gamma) will spread and dissipate with time, making it very unlikely that you'd get anything but noise unless some possible culture was using something like the Death Star's superlaser as their radio tower.  Doing Morse Code by having a gigantic ceramic sheet orbit your sun would be cheaper, and we're not looking for that.

I'm an optimist along certain lines myself.  But I don't do well with the idea that we just start looking elsewhere.  This planet is the only one we know anything about surviving on.  We've almost gone extinct on it and come raring back and I figure we can keep doing that until we see a real change in the amount of heating we get from the sun or we get hit by a huge fucking asteroid.  And while there eventually may be reason to hope for even more than that, right now we can only survive until some future generation possibly happens upon that reason.  My suggestion is ultimately that we move from faith to calculated risk.

All in favor of creating a race of hive mind androids to do the work for us, say aye!

Oh shit...

Greetings Doomed Soul.  We are DamnDirtyApe.  How may we be of service?  We have already assumed that you would prefer your pets as a nutritional slurry and have accordingly blended them and strained out the bones.  

Who says we need one, single, massive colony? Why not do it piecemeal - creating essentially a giant network of colonies? Hell, that even eliminates the problem of having to think at a macroscopic level or do some kind of mega-project. We just gradually send-up people, perhaps a few thousand at a time, and make a slow transition from Earth to space.

I really don't see the problem. Humans tend to make better ecosystems than what nature alone provides anyway.

I think that's fucked-up.

We've been leaning on technology because, well, it works. Which is a lot more than can be said about sitting cross-legged on your floor and mumbling incantations.

What are you even talking about? We've been messing-up the planet (alongside a number of other organisms) to fill our basic needs long before we kicked-off the industrial age. Hell, we did a lot more damage in our primitive days than we're doing now.

'Going green' is an extremely recent trend.

Well, we're going to have to leave it sooner or later. Eventually, all of the Earth's water is going to have dried-up - not to mention that, at some point, the sun is going to enter the next stage of it's lifecycle. And long before either of those things, we'll probably be largely out of natural resources (...and even before that, we might have impacted the global temperature enough that there's nothing to curb insects from out-competing us, and nearly everything else, on the planet. Or the honey bee might well go extinct, and the lack of large-scale pollination might fuck us right up).

I view the Earth as a temporary, we'll-make-do-with-it-for-now, ecosystem. Always have. It's been a great home, but we can make better ones, and it's starting to become a pretty tight-quarters living space.

Well, to be precise, we're going to have to die eventually.  That's the only thing that's certain.  Whether it's the sun, or the earth, or Andromeda, or the universe's energy death, humanity will die.

We don't have to get off the planet.  It may well be impossible.  Even if it's possible, we don't have to do anything.  I think you're really overestimating the human animal's potential to accomplish such far sighted goals.  We can't even give up our Humvees.