End of the World stuff?
So Steed is voting Tory now?

Meteor on it's way.:/\\k:

And now back from the hospital I can elaborate.

We are coming steadily but swiftly up to the Singularity. Computers are becoming faster and stronger, and with the likely event of Moores law coming into play in the near future we will be moving into new forms of processors and memory storage. Also we're rapidly expanding our interconnectivity.
Within a century, two at the most, I would wager that the line between man and machine will be either blurred or non-existent. Following that, and the solution of the complex ethical and social questions that it poses, we will likely shed our physical bodies entirely and move towards a data based existence with our physical bodies being created by machines for our consciousness to inhabit if we desire for trips outside of the mainframe.
In this regards, the entire consciousness of humanity can be easily uploaded to a probe and sent outside of the solar system when the sun enters the phases we've already discussed. These probes could be Von Neumann machines which will find an unhabited planet and terriform it for us before building the structures which will create bodies for our consciousness to exist in.

These things are likely to happen, short of a hit by a planetoid sized rock which would wipe us out entirely. Other events, plague, nuclear war, standard sized asteroid hit (dinosaur extinction sized) would set us back extremely far in our technological and social development, but it would be unlikely to destroy humanity entirely. A species of such size is very hard to destroy utterly, even the dinosaurs themselves weren't utterly wiped out, our birds are proof of that, they just changed as a result of the dramatic change in their environment.

That our world has an expiration date is nothing new. the interesting is to read all these "funny" things on the Internet, when something natural things are about to happen, like the solar eclipse we had a few weeks ago. According to them-we are facing the end of the world at every cosmic occurrences.

The translation of the sentence "End of the world is" to Danish is funny ´cause here they say "jordens undergang" = " earth's destruction or end of the earth"

When Danish news paper or people write that, I use to ask them how much knowledge they have about our planet-Tellus. I even ask them how got they are at translating from English to Danish.

There's a huge different between end of the world and the end of our planet.

Markus

The more so as Alexander the Great turned the concept to fabulous profit at Gaugamela with a lunar eclipse and R.E.M. cranked out a hit! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0GFRcFm-aY ... and of course a decent Danish director too: Lars Van Trier's Melancholia with one of my favorite actresses. http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV..._SX214_AL_.jpg
There's a lunar eclipse tonight in Napa....:hmmm: