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Let's assume that there is going to be a global catastrophe on earth within the next 10-25 years and we cannot do anything to stop it. This global catastrophe is going to wipe out almost all of the animal life forms as well as plants. More specifically, humans and all of the primate subspecies will not be able to survive this global catastrophe and will cease to exist.

Let's also assume that "mother" earth would be able to recover from this global catastrophe within several 1000 years, which once again would make the earth suitable for primate type species to live on.

Questions:

  1. Will it be possible to preserve the human species as is so once the earth is habitable again then we can "give birth" to human species?
  2. If 1) is not possible then how can we preserve our scientific knowledge so that once a given species (not necessarily primate type) evolves to the capacity of being able to create a writing system and being able to do math that we can immense them with our scientific knowledge from the past several thousand years? In a way, give "jump" start to their civilization?

I assume that 1) implies 2) but not the other way around.

HDE 226868
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    This question is too broad, it will not be answerable unless the catastrophe is specified. – March Ho Dec 31 '14 at 17:45
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    I am going to have to second that this is too broad. In addition to the lack of catastrophe specifics you have asked two separate questions with very different types of answers. I recommend closing this question and instead asking two questions for each of the above scenarios. – dsollen Dec 31 '14 at 18:04
  • Part 2 is answered here. Take your pick. – HDE 226868 Dec 31 '14 at 18:18
  • I, too, think this is too broad. Looking at all our answers, you can see that we aren't going anywhere specific because the catastrophe is unspecified. – HDE 226868 Dec 31 '14 at 18:35
  • It is not about the catastrophe, but it is more about the fact that that humans would cease to exists in a given catastrophe. And the question is what we can do to preserve the human species as well as the scientific technology we have achieved thus far... –  Dec 31 '14 at 19:14
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    Question is invalid. If catastrophe is bad enough it eliminates any chance of humans to survive, it will eliminate any complex life, and it might take millions of years of complex life to evolve again. Instead of building structure to protect human knowledge for millions of years, why not build Moon/Mars/space colonies and preserve humanity directly? – Peter M. - stands for Monica Dec 31 '14 at 20:02
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    There's an excellent question in here — problem is, there are a dozen excellent questions in here, depending on how drastic the catastrophe is (how much knowledge about the Earth do we share with our future readers?), on what your intent is (#1 is very different to #2) is but mostly on what survives or evolves afterwards (are we writing/building for humans, for dolphins, for some new lifeform evolved from algae, for robots?). Please focus your question on the specifics that you're interested in. – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Dec 31 '14 at 20:30
  • HDE: part 2 is NOT answered in the "50K years before species come back". It's an order of magnitude of difference. Books can last several thousand years (dead sea scrolls, for example). We have some cave paintings, but that's about it for longer spans. – user3082 Jan 03 '15 at 10:26

4 Answers4

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I feel that part 2 is answered here, so I'll just answer part 1.

Will it be possible to preserve the human species as is so once the earth is habitable again then we can "give birth" to human species?

There are a couple of options:

  • Cryonics: This is easy. Just freeze a couple humans (preferably in their prime both physical and mentally, and fertile) and put them somewhere safe. Power for the equipment can be provided via solar power or nuclear fission/fusion, depending on how advanced humans are at this point. You will need some sort of trigger to push the people out of their long slumber. You can design this trigger based on the catastrophe itself
    • If there's an ice age, add temperature sensors to figure out when temperatures are better.
    • If an asteroid has hit and the sky is obscured by dust, use photoelectric sensors to determine if theirs enough sunlight.
    • If the atmosphere is the wrong composition due to, say, plants dying out, have sensors that will detect favorable levels of various compounds.
  • Test tube babies: Store embryos for many years, then have an automated system "give birth" to them.$^1$ There was a similar idea in the movie Interstellar, although that assumed that people would be around to release the embryos. The ideas behind in-vitro fertilization are feasible and have been tested; the idea of a machine "giving birth" to babies is more speculative. But the bulk of the technology already exists.

Both of these options are fairly feasible, given today's technology.

$^1$ Weird, I know.

Community
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HDE 226868
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  • even if you could give birth to babies it wouldn't do any good without a caregiver. human infants are helpless on their own. even if you had something to provide basic food and water for them they would all die or be mentally deranged without human-like contact; we need contact with humans for our brains to develop right. test tube babies would only work if you had nearly human-level robotic AI's, designed to emulate an extensive amount of human emotional behavior, to care for the children. – dsollen Dec 31 '14 at 19:46
  • @dsollen I feel kind of bad, leaving babies alone to die. I do disagree that human contact would be needed for emotions. Robots are being developed that can mimic human emotions very well; they're part of the reason that household robots are gradually becoming more popular. I'll see if I can find some specific examples. – HDE 226868 Dec 31 '14 at 19:48
  • None of the options you mentioned are feasible now or in near future. (1) Cryonics: when frozen, water crystals destroy proteins in the cell. (2) We can freeze embryos, but we need a womb of a human mother to grow them, and another 25 years of education to make them usable humans. – Peter M. - stands for Monica Dec 31 '14 at 19:51
  • @PeterMasiar I forgot that most people who are cryopreserved don't really have a guarantee of ever waking up. I guess you're right about it being unfeasible today. In the near future, though, with the help of croprotectants, this may become feasible. I suppose I can't defend the test-tube babies, though. – HDE 226868 Dec 31 '14 at 19:53
  • OK so we can agree that both of your solutions are not feasible now or in near future. To revive cryogenically preserved people, technology to revive them would have to survive for long time and after all that time be reliable enough to thaw and revive them. Very unlikely. Moon/Mars colony is much simpler and more feasible - because if something goes wrong, we can have fighting chance to fix it, with living thinking humans around. – Peter M. - stands for Monica Dec 31 '14 at 19:58
  • @PeterMasiar Is it okay if we resume this in about an hour (perhaps in chat?) I'd like to discuss this, but I'm pressed for time at the moment. Thanks. – HDE 226868 Dec 31 '14 at 20:04
  • Why do you think you need a human womb to grow a baby? – user3082 Jan 03 '15 at 10:28
  • @user3082 Because the question talks about the near future or the present day, and that's really our only option. – HDE 226868 Jan 03 '15 at 14:19
  • Umm, how about any mammal of sufficiently large size? – user3082 Jan 05 '15 at 05:40
  • Since I can't edit the comment: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11581663 – user3082 Jan 05 '15 at 05:50
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I'm writing this assuming you are sticking to the story that humans cannot - even with adequate preparation - live on the planet Earth during these thousands of years.

Short answer: most likely not... though there are two possible avenues to your question:

  • Humans survive then re-colonize Earth (i.e. live in space for thousands of years)

  • Human evolution occurs again

The former is not possible with our technology and probably won't be for a long time. The latter... is complicated.

We don't have a good enough picture of how evolution works/worked to even know how to potentially "prime" the planet to accelerate this.

However, let's stray from the scientific and say you somehow do accomplish this: jump-starting the civilization with technology will have disastrous implications. So disastrous in fact that nearly every Sci-Fi show that has ever played with wildly technologically-different cultures sharing technology has explored its disastrous effects.

Bottom line: you may want to scale back your catastrophe to one where people can, for example, live inside a mountain for a few hundred years then re-emerge.

iAdjunct
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  • are you implying trying to encourage a human (ie ape like mammal species) to evolve? that would be nearly impossible to control. Leaving information for any sapient species is already a very hard challenge, but expecting it to evolve anything like humans seem unlikely. – dsollen Dec 31 '14 at 18:06
  • @dsollen: That was my point: we don't have nearly the understanding to even be able to THINK we could do that. – iAdjunct Dec 31 '14 at 18:12
  • @iAjunct I know, I was just reinforcing what you were already saying. :) – dsollen Dec 31 '14 at 18:16
  • @dsollen: just making sure :) – iAdjunct Dec 31 '14 at 18:25
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I am going to assume it is something like an asteroid or Global Warming after passing a point of no return, something that actually can be predicted but not prevented and still give us time to try and prepare.

I'll split this into 2. Something from outer space that we could see coming with time to prepare would likely be serious enough that there would have to be many different repositories around the globe to try and have at least one survive the collision.

The other could be a disease or some man made disaster that kills us from the inside. This is much more likely to leave things we've build alone. So they wouldn't need to be protected quite as much.

In either case there would need to be something very severe to have a chance to wipe out EVERY SINGLE human on earth. We have several question and answer scenarios here trying to do just such a thing.

So I say, First if it is serious enough to truly wipe out humanity, (and not a specialized virus that only attacks us) it will devastate the entire ecosystem and will likely take millions of years for 'another' species to reach our level of technology. That is a long time to make anything last. On top of that how to communicate to them in a meaningful way?

Now if it doesn't actually kill off everyone we would likely try and put enough people into space in the hopes of saving a part of us and the rest would hope to survive by the disaster hitting a different part of the world. We would also spend time working on ways to survive past the event, trying to get as many people as possible through. Storing away supplies, and knowledge to the best of our ability.

bowlturner
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Question itself is invalid. If catastrophe is bad enough it eliminates any chance of humans to survive, it will eliminate any complex life, and it might take millions of years of complex life to evolve again.

Instead of building structure to protect human knowledge for millions of years, and restore it without humans present, why not build Moon/Mars/space colonies and preserve humanity directly? Humans can observe and fix any unexpected problem and fix it.

It is easier (and more fun) to preserve small remnants of humanity, than tho preserve human knowledge without the humans.

Peter M. - stands for Monica
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