Shoutbox

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Originally posted by UTI
The robots would wait (if they're smart) till they hae everlasting batteries/motors and such, so they never die out... it's a scarey thought really

Best news (besides saving a bunch of money by switching to geico)... I'll be dead by the time it happens

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People don't have everlasting batteries (unfortunatly, or fortunatly in some cases), so maybe the robots would realise that eventually they have to die.

Luckily, robots are going to find it hard to reproduce. Even if we like... gave them... bits... they'd be unlikely to conjure the power to create an exact replica of themselves from "normal" reproductive metals (its why the "complex design" of a watch argument falls down [I'll post about this in the intelligent design / religion thread if you really need me to]) because of how metals react as opposed to organic chemicals. (Carbon-based).

Of course, they could just harvest the metal and stuff and follow the same procedures we used to create them to create a copy.

Besides, if the robots get too intelligent, we still have EMP. (Although I'd hate to think what it'd be like if the robots invented something equivalent that worked on humans).

So, umm, yeah, robots FTL.

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Originally posted by The fightclub master person
seriously though, either somebody is going to be successful in the creation of a huge amount of anti-matter and will be able to contain it for a long period of time, untill they get careless (like all humans do with everything else) and things get out of control.. so we will all die pretty swiftly and painlessly i should hope. or everybody's gonna want to nuke everybody else, and if we all nuke eachother we're all gonna die

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An antimatter explosion would be so cool. If you believe Dan Brown (Angels and Demons), we would basically be engulfed by a white light which would so own.
Although it's unlikely this will happen, it's incredibly hard to keep antimatter stored in large quantites, because it's impossible to create a perfect vacuum, so there would be particles annihilating each other. Besides, small quantities of antimatter are produced naturally from collisions in Earths atmosphere every day. (Although the energy released is 9x10^16J per kg of matter/antimatter, which is roughly 100 times more than the amount produced per kilogram of nuclear fission/fusion.)

If we're slow to get off the ground, it's likely that we'll all get nuked to shit. Especially with nubs like George Dubya Bush in office, jeez. I'd feel safer with N. Korea with nukes rather than that guy (mainly because they'd have to be some spiffy nukes to reach the UK from there - nubs can't even reach Japan atm ).

I think though, once we establish like moon colonies and stuff, we'll be almost safe from this kind of thing. (Unless we actually physically blow Earth to shit, then the moon will have nothing to orbit, will begin orbiting the Sun... could be nasty)

But once we're off colonizing the galaxy... well, there are only 6-billion odd people on Earth, and it's a big galaxy.

If you seriously think you're at danger of being extinctified any time soon, just think, "basement, food stocks, and one of these."