Abstract
The questions “Why don’t we have contact with extraterrestrial intelligent life?” and “How will mankind evolve in the near future?” are intimately connected. Clearly, civilizations that are far behind our technological state would not be capable of communicating with us. But even societies more advanced than us would have difficulties in making contact, as radio waves or spacecraft take a long time to cross the huge distances in our galaxy. In addition, such advanced societies might no longer exist. They could have fallen victim to external or internal dangers, or they might not wish to communicate with us. The only way to gain some insights into the possible dangers afflicting extraterrestrial intelligent societies and their likely mode of behavior is to consider our own future development, because these civilizations are expected to have gone through our own technological state long ago.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Chapter 8
Asimov, I. 1982: Evidence, in: The Complete Robot, London: Grafton Books, p. 518
Asimov, I. 1991: Foundation’s Edge, New York: Bantam Books
Billingham, J., Gilbreath, W., O’Leary, B. 1979: Space Resources and Space Settlements, NASA SP-428. See also: http://lifesci3.arc.nasa.gov/SpaceSettlement/spaceres/index.html; http://lifesci3.arcnasa.gov/SpaceSettlement/; http://www.ssi.org/
Binzel, R. et al. 1992: NASA Spaceguard Survey: http://impact.arc.nasa.gov/reports/spaceguard/index.html; http://impact.arc.nasa.gov/reports/spaceguard/; http://impact.arc.nasa.gov/index.html
Burrows, A. 2000: Supernova explosions in the universe, Nature 403, 727. See also van Paradijs, J. 1999: Prom gamma-ray bursts to supernovae, Science 286, 693
de Lange, T. 1998: Telomeres and senescence: Ending the debate, Science 279, 334
Dragicevich, P.M., Blair, D.G., Burman, R.R. 1999: Why are supernovae in our galaxy so frequent?, Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 302, 693. See also Tammann, G.A., Löfner, W., Schröder, A. 1994: The galactic supernova rate, Astrophys. J. Suppl. 92, 487, and: van den Bergh, S. 1994: Astronomical catastrophes in Earth history, Publ. Astr. Soc. Pacific 106, 689
Gavin, A.-C. et al. 2002: see Chapter 5
Hartmann, W.K., Miller, R., Lee, P. 1984: Out of the Cradle. Exploring the Frontiers beyond Earth, New York: Workman
Hamilton, C.J. 2001: Terrestrial Impact Craters: http://www.solarviews.com/eng/tercrate.htm
Henry, T.J. 2002: 100 nearest stars, CHARA, Georgia State University: http://joy.chara.gsu.edu/RECONS/TOP100.htm See also Cox A.N., Ed. 2000 see Chapter 1
IMP 2002: Impact crater locations: http://www.unb.ca/passc/ImpactDatabase/; http://www.solarviews.com/eng/tercrate.htm; http://www.lpi.usra.edu/publications/slidesets/craters.html
Kowal, C.T. 1988: Asteroids, their Nature and Utilization, Chichester: Ellis Horwood
Lewis, J.S. 1997: Mining the Sky, Reading, MA: Helix Books, Addison-Wesley LP missions 2002: see Chapter 7
Matthews, R. 1999: Black hole ate my planet, New Scientist, Aug. 28, 24 MPC 2002: Minor Planet Center at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, MA: http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/mpc.html; http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/TheIndex.html#MPs
NASA-ISS 2002: International Space Station: http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/station/; http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/; http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/
O’Neill, G.K. 1974: The colonization of space, Physics Today, Sept., 32. See also O’Neill, G.K. 1974: A lagrangian community?, Nature 250, 636
O’Neill, G.K. 1989: The High Frontier. Human Colonies in Space, Princeton: Space Studies Institute Press
Sepkoski, J.J. 1995: in: Global Events and Event Stratigraphy, O.H. Walliser, Ed., Berlin Heidelberg: Springer, p. 35. See also Marshall, C.R. 1998: Mass extinction probed, Nature 392, 17
Tomita, M. 2001: see Chapter 5
Zeck, G., Promherz, P. 2001: Noninvasive neuroelectronic interfacing with synaptically connected snail neurons immobilized on a semiconductor chip, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 98, 10457
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2003 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Ulmschneider, P. (2003). The Future of Mankind. In: Intelligent Life in the Universe. Advances in Astrobiology and Biogeophysics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-43212-9_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-43212-9_8
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-662-43214-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-662-43212-9
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive