Abandon ship!....err, planet.

[thelordharry]

The date is 22nd May 2011. News breaks from the scientific community that in exactly ten years time, planet Earth will be destroyed. That's planet Earth will be destroyed = There will be nothing left of it but space rubble and nothing can stop that. All other planets in the solar system will remain intact. What would Mankind do? What could Mankind do?

[Captain Seafort]

File for an injunction at the local planning office on Alpha Centauri.

[thelordharry]

How about a super injunction to keep my affair with a Z List celebrity from being published in the papers?

[Mikey]

File for an injunction at the local planning office on Alpha Centauri.

Failing that, just thumb a ride from the cooks on the demo fleet.

[Tyyr]

Nothing, if that's the scenario we're fucked.

[Nickswitz]

Yeah, I think there will be a lot of violence, or a lot of charity, or a lot of both.

[McAvoy]

Public knowledge? yeah it would be all of the above plus more.

If it was kept a secret, then nothing. I am sure the governments of the world would try to figure out something. Perhaps a sleeper/generational ship if they could figure out certain things. But even ten years is too short, I think.

[RK_Striker_JK_5]

Hmm... call in Unicron or Galactus to eat the planet first and hitch a ride as a Herald?

[McAvoy]

or that.

[Deepcrush]

Mankind could die... thats about it.

[thelordharry]

So if not ten years, what sort of timescales are viable to at least have a chance?

[thelordharry]

and also, if Planet Earth was about to wink out forever in X amount of years, I wonder if we'd bundle up all mankinds achievements, famous paintings, small treasures etc etc plus a few servers and as many hard drives as possible of data (heh, a complete copy of Wikipedia) and send them out into deep space in the hope that in thousands of millions of years time, they would eventually reach a habited star system, 'The Inner Light' style...

[Tyyr]

The problem is we'd need to figure out a way to be able to survive, unsupported, on another world in this solar system... and there's no way we can get to that point in any reasonable time frame. We require out high tech gadgets to survive on other worlds. Without them we die. You'd need to be able to put all the equipment to manufacture everything you need on the moon or Mars along with the ability to extract the resources necessary to make those things, and all the equipment you'd need to maintain those factories and so on. Beside that challenge things like water, food, and oxygen are trivial.

Maybe if we had a hundred years.

[Graham Kennedy]

I doubt we could do anything in that time.

Ten years was barely enough time to get a couple of guys onto the moon for a few hours. Getting a couple of guys onto Mars would be twenty times harder. Getting a viable colony there would be a thousand times harder than that. Whilst I'm sure we could devote a good deal of Earth's resources to the task, throwing money at something can only make it go so much faster.

I suspect what would happen is that we'd end up with some sort of base on Mars with ten or twenty people in it and over the following few years the base would gradually wear out and fall apart, killing all the colonists.

[RK_Striker_JK_5]

But not before they go mad and kill themselves, I'm guessing.