I love twilight zone, and outer limits to a lesser extent, but they never include both parts of the issue. I’d like to see one done by Rod Serling that tackles the before and after of a catastrophic meteoric event.
Not until I read this thread...
Don’t worry, the chances of anything happening are extraordinarily low, and even if they happen, you won’t even know!
I don't really get all the negativity towards humanity, I think for a species to get to the point of travel space they'd have to be the dominant species of their planet with the ability to consume the resources available to them so they'd be a lot of wanton violence and waste of resources (Until they think up something more efficient) along the way.
In that theory instead of a god it would only need a benevolent alien species to somehow cloak other planets with life so the developing species couldn't detect them.I actually have a theory about that. It verges on theism. It's a sort of variant of the anthropic principle, though.
I think whatever values you plug into the Drake equation, they end up with sapient species distant enough from each other that species incapable of even getting along with their own kind end up self-annihilating long before encountering others.
So the species who do survive long enough to encounter others are vastly likely to have gone beyond that stage of being the miserable, evil monsters we are currently. So if we ever do meet other species, we'll have survived the current infantile state we're in and be worthy of it.
And I call us "evil" but even that is not necessarily true. While many of our acts are so depraved and vile that they defy belief, every now and again one of us does something so pure and beautiful that it offers a suggestion of what we could become.
Look up rogue planets, imagine knowing there could be one coming our way. : )
Almost no one talks about Cosmic Strings anymore, although the idea used to be popular in the 1990s. Cosmic Strings were first postulated to explain the formation of large scale structures (clusters and superclusters of galaxies) in the universe: it was believed that as these high-density objects lash and whip around, they would send wakes of gravitational waves, pushing matter into clumps that would then grow into structures. But today's analysis shows that large-scale structures can form very well on their own, without Cosmic Strings. On the contrary, the presence of such hyperdense entity will leave tell-tale signs in the Cosmic Microwave Background, and no such marks have been noted.
This, often presented as "Heat Death of the Universe", is another discredited idea, back from in the time when people were not entirely sure whether the Universe will keep expanding forever, or would it stay still after a while or even start contracting in the future. We now know that the Universe is not only expanding, but expanding at an ever faster rate. The maximal allowable entropy of the Universe will be increasing faster than anything we can do to increase its actual entropy. So the Universe as a whole can never reach maximal entropy; there is no "Heat Death".
Frank Wilczek, in the book Global Catastrophic Risks, analysed the possibility and found it extremely unlikely.
An ordinary supernova has to be within about 50 light years from us to do real harm, but the much-rarer, high energy gamma-ray bursts, the effect can be devastating over long distances (25,000 light years). This is because the bursts, which can come from such sources as hypernovas or mergers of neutron stars, are not only much more energetic, but they also concentrate their energy within two opposite-directed beams. Some fringe theories suggest that gamma-ray bursts might account for at least some instances of mass extinction, but most paleontologists prefer more mundane explanations.
