
Humans were once an endangered species - soundsop
http://www.physorg.com/print183278038.html
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hga
The Earth is a rather hostile place when you use a megayear scale.
Paleontologists and geologists have also found a variety of events (e.g,
megacaldera such as Yellowstone cutting loose, meteor impacts) that are
correlated with mass extinctions. We shouldn't tarry in establishing self-
sustaining habitats off the Earth.

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kiba
Is there an organization who is carrying out the necessary task of
establishing off-world colonies for humanity?

If so, what is the website and how can individuals help?

It is one thing to posit a need, but quite another to do it.

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ajju
A large number of private space companies (eg masten space) are working on
building cheaper spacecrafts. That is the first step. Once we have a way to
reach potential off-world colonies more cheaply (and thus conduct more
extensive research, create a commercial payoff for creating one etc),
establishing one will be a real possibility.

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ramchip
Nitpick: volcanoes cause 'volcanic winters', not 'nuclear winters'.

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jrockway
Don't worry, I'm sure we'll eventually kill ourselves off.

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paulshort
After millions of years of being forced to use our wits to survive combined
with periods of inbreeding (resulting in a relatively narrow genome), humans
are now a super-race of genetic mutants ahead of our time on the evolutionary
scale. It wouldn't surprise me one bit if being too smart for our own good
contributed to our demise.

Edit: By "inbreeding" I mean - if the human population were reduced to a few
thousand breeding individuals, and those individuals were also spreading or
migrating into different areas of Africa, the middle East, Europe, etc. at the
same time, that would mean much smaller groups of people who breed within
their "community." It may have been thousands or tens of thousands of years
before those different communities met up with each other and combined genetic
material again.

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ramchip
Wouldn't inbreeding cause the _opposite_ of a super-race? Inheriting different
genes from both parents can prevent a lot of problems; for example the fact
that women have two copies of the X chromosome makes them a lot less likely to
be color blind. Having a uniform gene pool means that people would end up with
similar genes and be more likely to have diseases.

I'm not sure if/why recombining after a long period of isolation and mutation
would be better than staying together and just sharing mutations gradually.
It's an interesting question though, there's problem some research paper
somewhere that could tell us...

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tokenadult
The brotherhood of humankind is more than just a metaphor--it's a reality.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_recent_common_ancestor>

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nazgulnarsil
we've been through the eye of the needle several times already. we just had
(still have?) the nuclear one. we have what is IMO the biggest one coming up:
AI.

