where do you base that assumption? no one really knows, it's just fantasy again. must be a reason for intelligence.
Ok zaga.. do you want fantasy or not ? If not, I already gave you the answer. Not that I'm saying that that was fantasy.. but if you think it is how can you be complaining about it when you asked for fantasy ?
We went from an agricultural to an industrial society in about 200 years. No one can imagine what society will be like in a million years. Certainly the limitations of being stranded on one or a dozen planets will be irrelevent. We could download our consciousness into machines and "live" forever.
When the humans end? You have to provide a time frame. But one thing is for sure, we will not develop FTL drives anytime soon, simply because, assuming our counterparts at the nearest star system just 100,000 years in advance would be buzzing our space stealing our blondes and taking over America like we did Iraq....
I can imagine somebody building a weapon that can destroy the earth in a much smaller timeframe and everybody being that persons slave
you're right in one sense it wont be humanity as we know it, but isn't there a difference between something dying out and something evolving into something else?
Not really.. Lets imagine that humans at one point colonize Mars. After a few hundred years the colony loses contact with Earth for some reason. The humans on Mars live and evolve there over a period of, lets say, 500.000 years. Back on Earth humanity changes little because the environment doesn't change all that much. So after 500.000 years the 'humans' on Mars may not be humans anymore (meaning that they can no longer interbreed with the humans on Earth and produce fertile offspring). So now you have the Martians on Mars and the Humans on Earth, two different species. Now a huge meteorite crashes into Earth and causes humanity to go extinct. Only the Martians are left, they are not humans.
if martians evolved from humans they will possess an element of human in their genetic structure even though they've changed over the years. unless of course they become machines, maybe at that point the biological will have died. but i know what you mean about changing species over years of evolution, but it's not as though a species has died out it's evolved into another species.
One group evolved and became another species while the other group did not evolve beyond species boundary, they remained humans, and eventually died out. Evolving means that only the individuals that are fit enough survive. The individuals that are not fit enough either die out or produce little offspring compared to the fit individuals. In this sense the human genetic makeup has indeed been lost and in fact has died out. Read this: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/12/071219-whales-evolved.html Now tell me, are whales still Indohyus ?
I guess Homo sapiens never fall under the category of "prehistoric human", and the multitude of new branches become "modern humans" huh?
Homo earth and Homo mars (I couldn't think of proper latin terms) would still be members of the same genus, but different species. Homo sapiens would be the extinct hominim. The living descendants would assume the title of modern humans. Erm.....I think I have my classifications stacked correctly, but I may be wrong......:shrug:
I don't know how you defined Homo earth. In my little story your Homo earth is the same as Homo sapiens. The humans on Mars evolved into Homo mars. But if you wait long enough they may evolve beyond the genus boundary.