Delta4Embassy
Gold Member
While I applaud the sentiment (for purely biased reasons heh) nothing lasts forever. Not the universe, not galaxies, stars, planets, empires, or people. Everything that is, eventually isn't.
Eventually the universe will run out of raw material for making stars and the last star will burn up it's energy, dim, and die. The universe will be effectively dead since everything will be frozen at or very near Absolute Zero.
Much sooner though the Andromeda and Milky Way galaxies will 'collide' and the stars passing close will screw up any planets' orbits and assuming the increased radiation doesn't sterilize both, things will be very different.
Around about the same time our star Sol will enter its red giant phase and expand to envelop Mercury, Venus, and probably the Earth. Though the Earth wont be vaporized it'll technically be in the outermost region of the expanded star and fry. It'll be a cinder at best. But life will be long extinct.
Sooner still, Earth itself, or rather its' inhabitants might well wipe themselves out as our technology outpaces our wisdom and we invent weapons capable of wiping out life at the genetic level. It we unravel our genes and DNA we're all done. Nukes are bad, but beyond their blast effects, perfectly survivable underground. But if we start fiddling with genes and genetic engineering, not long after, it'll occur to someone if we can manipulate DNA to optimize things, suppress genetic diseases, we can also create weapons which target just those people with certain genetic characteristics.
Every civilization and empire that's come before is gone now. Just as Rome, Persia, and others have fallen so will the US. Some more pessimistic than myself say we're in the midst of our our fall now. I think we're seeing the beginning but could still postpone it a bit further down the road. But it'd require confronting reality and making the hard decisions and I don't see that happening.
