Homestar Runner Wiki Forum

I got reminded of this of the Armageddon thread.

It's some people that suggests humans as a race cease to breed so we can restore the earth to its natural health.

Wikipedia
Their website.

I think it's a great idea, but I know it will never happen.

I think this is a brilliant idea that conflicts with my dream of having a child.

However, if everyone only had ONE kid, the population would begin to peter out, right?

Good, because I plan on having only one kid.

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Lol, this is rediculous. Anyone who thinks this could be possible needs to stop being a communist.

YOU HAVE NO CHILDREN. WE MAKE EARTH GOOD.

Anyone who thinks this is possible should be required to participate for the good of the gene pool.

OK, kinda harsh...but I still think it's a dumb idea. Voluntary human extinction would mean the human race is totally giving up on millennia of progress and advancement, not to mention the millions of people who would have died in pointless wars up to that point. It's not forward thinking.

Now, do I think we could use less population growth? Yes. But not to the point where we start losing people.

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beep beep I'm a Jeep

Quite frankly, there are a lot of people who I think shouldn't be allowed to reproduce...

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Humans are a natural product of the earth.


and also


I 'gree.

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Am I the only one that is getting the Flat Earth Society vibe from this?

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No.

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Anyone who believes this is a good idea at all deserves to go extinct.

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So, so you think you can tell Heaven from Hell, blue skies from pain. Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail? A smile from a veil? Do you think you can tell?

The problem I have with the idea is that ultimately it doesn't matter whether we're here or not. We're all going to die anyway -- and by "all", I mean all life, not just humans. The only question is when.

So I think if one asks whether we should go extinct, one is asking the wrong question.

- Kef

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So have they killed themselves yet or what? It sounds like a suicide cult to me.

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*facepalm*

No.

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Rating of forum gone from 3 to 2 due to facepalm.

I think my dad posted something like that in 2007…

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That is true, really. After all planets become dead and every star burn out, it will be the end of time. Life will still go on after people until that moment where the last living organism dies.

Quite depressing, really.

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Noid, you know I would agree with you on this, but in all truths, read the link. Its a belief that we should stop breeding to save the biosphere, not go out and kill everyone just because. Its actually a very good idea, because its a peaceful way of ending it, not in some sort of violent massacre or natural disaster.

If anything, this is how I would like it to end. The only problem with it is that when the population goes down significantly, and there is only around 2 million people living on earth, most utilities and governments and systems would collapse due to the loss of leaders, people to run it, and all sorts of things. It would dwindle down, all the way back to an eventual pre-colonial America all around the world. The last man on earth would either go crazy from loneliness, or kill himself to be with people to talk to.

In other words, while it may be a peaceful idea, and a great and beautiful way to end it without violence, the last few people would revert to their natural violent instincts and end up killing for survival, and would probably end up reproducing just to survive.

Basically, The population would wane down to a few hundred thousand, then the thought of extinction would be replaced with thoughts of population survival, ultimately resulting in the same situations that we are in now.

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That's not so harsh... if they want to, let's just let 'em do it!

Anyways, I agree, this is a very pointless idea. I don't think I need to repeat why...

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Every star's going to burn out?

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Well, I'm not an astronomer, but no star can have an infinite life, right?

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Correct, but that's not going to happen for another 10 Billion years.

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Wait, I thought new stars were constantly being created. We didn't just start out with a bunch of stars, yanno. Nebulae create stars.

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It prolly won't be that every star burns out. I mean, it might be, but in theory, the way all life is going to end in the universe is by something they call "The Big Crunch". This is basically when matter density exceeds critical density. The universe, in theory, is expanding by an unknown force. Eventually, the expansion will be to much for the current phase, and the universe will collapse into itself. This could create a super dense state or even an unimaginably large black hole.
Then again, some people believe this could possibly cause another Big Bang, which would be pretty awesome.

There's a simpler theory called the Big Chill that says that the universe will expand so much that it will become absolute zero in all areas of the universe. This way wouldn't really END the universe, it'd just dwindle off.

I don't know why I told you all this.

I'm going to be an astronomy major, so I have the answers.

What happens is that yes, every star will burn out eventually, but how long it takes for the star to die depends on its mass. For example, huge supermassive stars like the Pistol Star will probably go supernova in the next few million years, class-G stars like the sun and Alpha Centauri live about ten billion years altogether, and red dwarfs like Barnard's star will probably burn for 300 billion more years before they finally die, so that means that no red dwarfs in the universe have died yet.

When a star goes supernova, it leaves behind a giant dust cloud, like the Crab Nebula, that eventually clumps together until it becomes dense enough in spots to form new stars. The thing is, every time a star goes supernova or just dies, some of its matter gets locked up in a white dwarf forever, which basically means that it can never be used for making new stars, unless it's close enough to a different star that it draws in enough matter to reach 1.4 solar masses, in which case it will explode again. But eventually, all the matter in the universe will be locked up in white dwarfs, which will eventually cool down into a black dwarf, and slowly lose matter due to proton decay for about 10^200 years until it disappears completely.

Also, they've discovered that there's not enough matter in the Universe for the gravity to pull the universe into a Big Crunch, so it'll expand forever, completely devoid of all matter and light. All that'll be there is the occasional photon and maybe a MACHO or two.


But since the Earth is going to be destroyed next month, it doesn't really matter to us.

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beep beep I'm a Jeep

... Eh, I thought I did pretty well for a 13-year-old who has never taken any astronomy-related classes in her life and only learned things through DiscoveryScience programs and magazines...

Oh, you did, I wasn't trying to be mean or anything, just contributing.

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beep beep I'm a Jeep

Macho?

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Wikipedia knows.

Basically massive objects that we can't detect with current technology, but we know they're there because of the effects they have on other stuff. Dark matter, pretty much.

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beep beep I'm a Jeep

You guys are making this stuff too complicated. One need only consult the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which basically implies that the energy of the universe will eventually dissipate. That is, it won't decrease (because the total amount of energy in the universe is always the same), but it will gradually become evenly distributed. In other words, the law says that eventually there will no longer be any concentrated energy sources, and that includes stars. This results in the aforementioned "big freeze".

Wikipedia also has an article about the ultimate fate of the universe. The Big Freeze isn't necessarily the way the universe will end, but it will probably end that way if nothing else causes it to end. Of course, this is not 100% certain... the Laws of Thermodynamics only apply to physics as we currently understand it. That is, there is no known way to break the laws, but that doesn't mean we are 100% certain the laws apply 100% of the time, without exception. For instance, there could, hypothetically, be a way to create energy from nothing, or a way for the entropy of the universe to decrease. But as far as we're aware, there's not.

- Kef

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Well, you'd think that by the time when the universe starts freezing/collapsing/whichever, after some billion billion billion billion years, our technology should be high enough that, if it's possible, we should be able to do something about it. If it won't be possible... well, then we're screwed.

But back to topic; although humanity going extinct would fix a couple of problems for the rest of nature for the time being, it doesn't matter in the long run, since life always adapts, and earth has faced far, far worse things than humanity. Also, if we're gone, some other species might just evolve to take our place. Besides, you couldn't possibly get everyone one earth to agree on not breeding, since just about everybody (me included) would rather if we fixed the problems some other way, and stayed alive. Or spread into space, if there's nothing we can do about earth.

In the absense of humans, some other creature would, as duke said, take our place.

Also, we can't simply "Not reproduce". That would actually kill the majority of creatures on the planet for a plethora of reasons. If the goal of human extinction was to protect all other life, it would take decades of planning. All dangerous artificial material would have to be disposed of. Structures would have to be dismantled. Things like that. I mean, imagine if we all died, and left millions of gallons of nuclear waste just sitting there in cans in disposal facilities. They would eventually corrode, and we would have no one to clean it up.

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Really? Name a few.
I really can't think of any.


Yeah, uhh that would be trillions of years after the sun goes supernova anyway, we have other things to worry about.

Also I don't think it would happen at all:
Furrykef's reference to the laws of thermodynamics doesn't really apply since the universe does not act much like a fluid. I suppose the universe as a whole could be seen as 'dissipating' as the galaxies move (and accelerate) further and further away from each other, but the galaxies themselves remain tightly clumped together.
All the energy does not dissipate, as much of it is stored as mass, and only the stars can convert this mass to energy (ignoring other types of nuclear reactions and such which have negligable effect on the mass and energy of the entire universe).

But I think JohnTheTinyCowboy is on the right track; at some point, there will not be enough material left over from star collapses to form new stars. Then yeah, the universe would go cold.
Personally I think humanity will be wiped out in some cataclysmic natural disaster long before this happens anyway. That's how I interperet armageddon.

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SIBHoD.