Heard a reporter the other day talking about how we’re wasting money on space programs. Homo sapiens (e.g., modern man) came on the scene about 200,000 years ago. Then we almost got wiped out (estimates at under 10,000 total) by an ice age just 70,000 years ago. How quickly people forget. If you believe man made global warming has or will pass the tipping point to where Earth irreversibly becomes like Venus with a run-away hot house effect then we don’t have much time. Even if everything is good or can be worked-around, as the sun burns through its fuel it gets brighter. Estimates are that Earth’s oceans will have evaporated and life impossible in a billion years; long before the sun becomes a red giant that swallows the Earth. Bottom line is if we’re going to survive as a species at some point we need to grow up and find new housing and that means spending money on research. How long do we have best case? Stephen Hawking thinks we need to leave in the next 100 years. But, let’s assume we have 500 million years before things get bad enough that we can no longer execute a plan and things will go on as normal until then. That means currently, as a species, we’ve burned through 2/7ths all of our time already (or if you want to go to the first evidence hominids using fire we’ve burned through roughly half our time). What the heck were we doing wasting all that time earlier? Answer: Shivering. If people are constantly fighting congress about wasting money on the space program at the height of “planetary summer” when things are good, how do you think they’re going to feel in the middle of an ice age? So, out of the half billion years remaining to us to figure out how to survive, most of the time we’re going to spend arguing why it’s so cold. In the last half billion years there have only been say 60 to 80 thousand years of “planetary summer”. So really, that’s all the practical time we have left in a best-case scenario. Since the previous ice age homo sapiens haven’t changed much, but it took us 7000 years to invent farming, another 1,5000 years to invent the wheel and about 12,000 years over all to get to the moon. How long will it take after the next ice age? How well will our modern technology fare for our ancestors to re-discover after being ground over for 50,000 years by ice glaciers a mile high? What’s really interesting is the prior planetary summer, around 138,000 years ago. Earth was in a golden era. Homo sapiens had ~forty thousand years or so in this era, four times longer than the last ice age to now… and yet we have no record of any cities, writing, or much of anything else. The oldest cave paintings are thought to be 40,000 years old, made in an ice age about the time the Neanderthals died out. Homo Floresiensis hung on a little longer and became extinct just 17,000 years ago leaving us all alone. Flint Spears were invented by earlier hominids some 300,000 years before homo sapiens. With fire and spears homo sapiens must have been able to establish local dominance over the wildlife. So how did mankind not accomplish anything when they had 4 times longer then now to the end of the last ice age? Could that happen after the next ice age? Where we not the inquisitive explorers then that we are today? The predominate theory is we spent our days as nomadic wanders hunting and gathering. We know that humans exchanged resources over long distances during that period. But whatever art forms, sciences, and devices we created all decayed and very little was left. it seems that not much was remembered beyond fire, spears, and cooking; that is the essentials needed for survival when you can’t easily create tech. To be fair, it was really really cold for a really really long time for them. We know Both Neanderthals and Homo Florensiensis existed with us for those 40 thousand golden years, so perhaps it was a more peaceful and idyllic life with no need to compete for resources or to fix what ain’t broken. An attitude that may have eradicated two species and nearly ours as well.