Can the human race survive the next 100 years?

Not really, it is all about risk management...for the human kind...

 

Wonder if the asteroid strike is part of the Solar System evolution process...just as our weather pattern....

 

Your figures are a little off. Homo sapiens has been in existence for somewhere between 130,000 years (fossil evidence) and 200,000 years (DNA projections). In vernacular language we generally apply the word "human" to the creatures who started building tools, creating the qualitative difference between us and all other species, about 2mya. Biologists apply the word to all species of genus Homo, which split off from the chimpanzees 7mya.

The first chordates appeared around 550 mya. 750 mya there were no vertebrates, much less mammals, much less primates to even vaguely resemble humans.

Depending on what we find after more exploration of Mars, it could conceivably be possible to construct a self-sustaining habitat there. We might figure out how to do that fairly soon, but it has to involve transporting a lot of material there to get the construction moving, and that will be collossally expensive. That will slow the pace of the project.

And of course Mars is in the same solar system, so it won't escape the death of the sun a few billion years hence. (See below.)

As I have posted elsewhere, there has been an inexorable trend over the last eleven thousand years to increase the size of our "tribes" by merging them. I see many signs that we're on the verge of the final merging into a single civilization, although there are forces still working against that, as I have already pointed out.

As I have already opined, I don't think that the transport of significant amounts of matter, including living creatures, over interstellar distances will ever be practical. Even if life is a lot more common than it so far appears to be, and even if it commonly evolves into intelligent civilization-building life, the nearest civilization could still be a couple of hundred light-years away. A round trip could take a thousand years or more.

Given the context of the OP--a hundred years--I think we're safe in assuming that even if we expand the universe of discourse, we're still expected to confine our defintion of "human" to H. sapiens, or at least a species that will be our successor in genetics and culture. That fits even the loosest conventions governing the current use of the word: genus Homo.

Well sure. But the sun is almost exactly halfway through its lifecycle. That means it has another four or five billion years to go. We can reasonably expect as much change to occur on this planet during that time as occurred during the first half. Actually, the sun's temperature is slowly increasing and within a mere one billion years the earth will be too hot for water to exist in liquid state so we don't have quite that much time.

By then, even if our brightest physicists haven't found a way to overcome the lightspeed limitation on interstellar travel, a few of our generation starships will have found reasonably earthlike planets on which to establish colonies, far from the impending catastrophe in our solar system of origin. No, they won't be able to come back and rescue the rest of us and carry the Magna Carta and the Sphinx, but they'll have a really good digital library with best wishes from billions of people back home and the planet's entire catalog of literature, music, video, history and everything else. Heck, our whole galaxy is only a hundred thousand light-years in diameter. A generation starship could traverse that entire distance in a few million years... assuming they're not all unlucky enough to be destroyed by errant meteors.

Hey, I'm a teacher. (Adults, not children.) One of my mantras is: "There's no such thing as a stupid question, but geeze there sure are a lot of smart answers."

Ask away. We're here to serve.

 

If you want to honestly enumerate the most important risks to the survival of the human race in the century that began with 9/11, you can't possibly ignore religion, particularly Abrahamic religion. To "remain neutral" and steer clear of this subject, for the sake of political correctness or to spare the feelings of the religionists, is to practice bad science and take a chance on reaching an invalid and misleading conclusion.

It's quite plausible that at the Mesolithic/Neolithic cusp, religion could have been a positive force. Hostility between tribes was so intense that more than half of adult human skeletons from that era that have been analyzed with modern instruments show the cause of death to be violence. For two tribes to discover a common spirituality could well have been the first step to a peaceful bonding.

But through a couple of Paradigm Shifts (the Agricultural Revolution and the Dawn of Civilization), tribes became larger and people were exhorted to feel kinship with total strangers they would never meet. It was inevitable that two consolidated tribes would come in contact that espoused different spiritualities. At this point religion was no longer a bonding influence.

But then the religion of Abraham arose, and it conferred on its followers a sense of smug superiority over those of other religions. This was exacerbated by the two evangelical variations of Abrahamism, which by their nature rapidly increased the size of their "tribes." Eventually their sense of superiority made them belligerent toward "infidels" or "heathens," and conversions were done at swordpoint. As Christendom and Islam became larger, this belligerence escalated.

The result was that the evangelical Abrahamists committed three atrocities for which no atonement will ever be possible: the obliteration of three of earth's six precious, irreplaceable civilizations--Egypt, Inca and Olmec/Maya/Aztec.

Add to this their equal enthusiasm for turning against one other: the Crusades, the Catholic-Protestant wars that defined the Reformation, the ongoing Sunni-Shiite feuds, the Holocaust, the wars between Jews and Muslims that comprise the political landscape of the Middle East, and the Crusades restarted as fallout from that landscape but joined by a U.S. President from the Bible Belt.

Religion is now a wedge between communities, stalling the advance of civilization at the tribal level as we struggle to transcend it and build transnational hegemonies, hoping that one day our entire species will be members of a single worldwide civilization. No less august a student of human nature than Carl Jung said, "No wars in human history have been as bloody as those among the Christian nations." He did not live to wonder whether a war between Islam and the combined forces of Christendom and Jewry would update that observation.

To be sure, there have been occasional eruptions of violence that match the ferocity of the family squabbles among the Children of Abraham. Genghis Khan's Mongol conquests, the American Civil War and World War II... well that's about it and none of them destroyed an entire civilization.

Since WWII the scope of secular warfare has waned precipitously. Today nations are downright reluctant to come to each other's aid, for fear of escalating a small conflict in Darfur, Georgia or Myanmar into World War III.

If there is a deliberate man-made threat to the survival of mankind in this century, it is the unabated hostility of Abrahamists toward one another.

 

The concept of the generation starship has been around for decades. It could be built in orbit using current technology and powered by solar sails. That would make it rather primitive and slow, but nonetheless workable. The biggest challenges are to guess the "critical mass" of population needed to ensure the survival of civilization within a closed space for thousands or millions of generations, and to be able to steer and stop to replenish the raw materials lost to entropy.

By the time some other civilization's generation starship reaches us, the ship itself will be pretty old, but there's no guarantee that its science and other culture will have advanced far beyond us in such a small community. As I noted, it will be difficult to ensure that the distant descendants of the original crew don't become lazy and foolish with so much automation around. Sci-fi stories have been written around that theme: "There's a planet over there emitting radio signals. Does anybody remember how to stop this thing?"

Don't you suppose that the creatures or other living things on that ship will have curiosity? Might they not want to stop here just to see the place, and even to talk to us, no matter how primitive we are? Assuming that the lightspeed limit can never be circumvented, it could have taken them a thousand years or more to find another inhabited planet with another species or type of sentient life. Even if they've been cryopacked (or in "standby mode"

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) and very little time has passed for them, this encounter would have to be a momentous occasion and they wouldn't want to miss it.

Else, why are they out exploring at all?