How long do u think b4 the earth is outof resources/room ?

Question

and humans will have to move to space or maybe the ocean to survive or will it be too soon befor we have that technolgy and we become extinct just lookin for some oppions i know no one can know for sure :)

Answer 1

There is no reason why we should run out of resources or room.

Many communities exist on isolated islands, they maintain a stable population, managing their farming and crops and live quite well with no need to spread their civilisation beyond that island.

The earth is just the same, except this community is the whole of the population and we choose not to manage anything well. If everyone made some changes in their life to better use what we have available then we should be able to go on and on and on and on.

Answer 2

There is no way to know for sure seriously.

You will hear your whole life that the Earth has only a certain amount of resources. But, the Earth has been around for billions of years!

Humans will be able to sustain life for thousands, if not millions of years to come. We adapt! If a certain resource becomes extinct (which hasn't yet) we will adapt and use something else.

There is no problem on Earth, contrary to what you hear in the news. The reason we are searching the solar system is to find possibilities of another life.

The question you ask is pre-mature. There is no answer to your question because it won't be for thousands of years!

If you can, take a class in Astronomy when you get to college. I have taken 3 classes so far and it's very interesting!

Answer 3

Never.

This is because of the nature of economics. Most of the people who tell you "we are running out of whatever" don't understand economics. So as things become scarce, the price goes up, and as the price goes up people have incentives to find new sources, find new resources, or find new ways of doing more with less.

Take oil. People have been saying that we were running out of oil ever since the late 1800s (I kid you not.). No, we aren't making any more oil. That being said, we are making better ways to find and get at and get to oil. This has the net effect of increasing the amount of oil we can get to....(though envornmentlaists and lawyers have the net effect of restricting the supply by never letting us drill anywhere, but that is another story).

Most folks don't know this, but oil isn't in big lakes underground. It is literally in the rocks, and in order to get out of the ground and into the well it has to move through tiny cracks and pores in the rocks. (It moves becuse it is under massive amounts of pressure. I mean it's got 6,000 feet of rock up there pushing down on it, that makes for some pressure.) Well back in the old days a well would "run dry", but there would still be oil down there, trapped in the rocks... something between 1/3 to 2/3 of the oil was still down there, it was just that if the pressure dropped we couldn't get it out. Well when oil got expensive enough, we developed ways TO get it out, (they are called Secondary Production). We learned how to go to "used up" oil fields and pull more oil out of them. We also developed ways to drill deeper, and to drill offshore, and to drill through permafrost. India just hit a huge gas field off their east coast, and Exxon hit a big new oil field in the Gulf of Mexico just a few weeks ago, and nobody has ever even looked at Antarctica yet.

Another example was the hybrid car. Nobody cared about them except for nutty envorinmentalist till gas hit $3 a gallon. Once it made economic sense, people got interested. They found a new way of getting around using less oil. Insulation is a similar thing. Back before the 70s nobody insulated houses, energy was cheap and insulation was expensive. After energy costs went up EVERYBODY insulated everything, heating and cooling systems got more effecent, and now houses use a lot less energy than they used to.

Back in Elizabethan times England began to have an "energy crisis" of sorts, in that wood and charcoal were becoming scarce. Luckly they didn't have a government run program to solve the "charcoal crisis". What happened was people started burning real coal. Just plain coal, that England has tons of. Helped start the industiral revolution.


So, as long as the governments of the world let the economc system do what it does best, we will have times of higer prices on occasion, but we won't run out of things. As goods become scarce prices will rise, People will find newer and better ways of making do, and/or shift to other goods, which will decrease demand, and prices will then fall.

So maybe I shouldn't say Never, but we have several thousand years left before resource depletion becomes a serious problem... IF the economy is allowed to function as it should and the Governments don't start trying to make us "manage our resources" and "change everybody's lifestyle just a little".

Answer 4

Extinction could be as soon as a couple of hundred years (or sooner)!

Humans are too self-centered to care about anyone else or humanity as a collective community. We are descended from carnivores and as such will eventually devour ourselves - it's the nature of the beast.

Answer 5

uhm ... couple of centuries

people are generally good at limiting population growth beyond what the available technology can support - look at wars in medieval europe or modern africa.


We have the technology for living in space, it is just too freaking expensive b/c everything has to be custom-ordered.