> Some 66 million years ago, a catastrophic event wiped out three-quarters of all plant and animal species on Earth, most notably taking down the dinosaurs. The puzzle of why so many species perished while others survived has long intrigued scientists.
More importantly, it means that even if we annihilate our specie because of our stupidity, life has great chances going on and in millions of years perhaps, the earth might be governed by another intelligent specie.
> Simple computer models initially suggested this disaster could render our planet inhospitable in as little as 150 million years from now. But late last year the journal Nature published a much more sophisticated simulation by a team from the Laboratory for Dynamic Meteorology in Paris, and this suggests we have got at least a billion years before this apocalypse.
For long term survival you need to get off your planet, for which you probably need intelligence. Earth has around half a billion years left until it starts feeling serious issues with our sun. If our evolution took something like 10 percent longer things would be tricky
Or become a bacteria that has a really great chance at surviving in space and have your planet get hit by an asteroid. You go up in debris and colonize the galaxy over millions of years
We could easily seed the rest of the solar system and even a few nearby other solar systems with basic archaea and what not capable of surviving on any large object with water, at least guaranteeing some form of life escapes the death of Earth. It takes intelligence to figure out how to do this, but we have enough intelligence and the means to do it right now, but we aren't since we're largely concerned specifically with human survival, and humans are much harder to keep alive and transport through space.
Anyway, even if that always happens, that seems a bit too large a hill for evolution to notice it's not a global peak and route around. Unguided genetic evolution is scarily efficient, but not that much.
(Funny thing that memetic evolution may be able to make that decision, but if you are right, it's the problem by itself, so it couldn't fix it.)
That's an interesting thought, when you think about long term survival of a species, how much does all this technology help?
If you think about humans surviving the same asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs, I think we would have a good chance, some people would stay in underground bunkers and eventually repopulate the Earth, but the majority of the population would probably die, and a lot of technological progress would be lost.
