Extinction in the long term is pretty much guaranteed for any large animal that doesn't evolve the capability of getting off this planet, or an alternative method for surviving huge rocks falling from the sky.
As it stands humans have the best shot at doing this. Perhaps we'll manage to save the giraffes as well and take some of them with us.
The meteor impact threat is just a few steps from being solved. The serious problem is that humans continuously desire to kill each other on large scales. That psychological flaw won't disappear just by changing planets. Previous this was only a mortal danger to the small percentage of young men fooled into dying. As of the 20th century however, species endangering percentages of the population could die in war.
Furthermore, advancing technology makes smaller and smaller groups with smaller and smaller budgets, more and more deadly. If there remains even a modest chance of a species ending war per century century, then our remaining time as a species is very short indeed.
So while they are certainly worth doing, the species can not be saved by something as simple shifting asteroid orbits or colonizing Mars. We have to solve the other much harder problem.
I'll agree that there are many more difficult issues to be solved, but the fatalist position takes us absolutely nowhere.
As somebody else in the thread pointed out already, violence has actually decreased since the days of bashing each other to death with stones - and it definitely was not just the foolish young men getting killed.
Also the meteor impact threat is far from being solved apart from some theoretical viewpoint, to begin with the percentage of the sky we are actually able to actively scan for such objects.
>I'll agree that there are many more difficult issues to be solved, but the fatalist position takes us absolutely nowhere.
Very, very true. I was actually pretty uncomfortable making my original post. But there seems to be too much confidence in the "end of history" narrative that assumes that the relative world stability of the last 70 years is permanent or that the cold war could only happen once.
So at the risk of posting something demoralizing, I thought it worth while pointing out (maybe overly dramatically) that there is an innate and extremely dangerous flaw in human thinking that is, by far, our most serious threat and that we neither fully understand it nor have a known permanent cure for it.
And what few fields are thinking about that problem are all soft sciences.
As it stands humans have the best shot at doing this. Perhaps we'll manage to save the giraffes as well and take some of them with us.