A week ago, for science Wednesday, I wrote about   THE WORST CATACLYSM EVER FOR PLANET EARTH .  Today, what was the worst event for Humanity? Here is one viewpoint, with the gray bar indicating how many people would have died today if projected to our current population: The second world war only comes in at #11, mostly because it was too recent. China seems to monopolize this list. Not taking current population as the base,  Wikipedia  says the Khans might have disposed of 80 million, and so did Mao and Deng.  But various Marxist-Leninist leaders did away with nearly 150 million. Adolf Hitler?  "Only" 25.5 million. The  Black Death  around 1350 might have killed up to 200 million. The world population then was 370 million. Doing the math, this means if the same percentage of people in the world died, the equivalent today would be 4.3 billion, which is more than half our current population. Genghis Khan killed the equivalent of fewer than 0.8 billion. There is some speculatio

Four years ago the  Smithsonian Channel  featured Steven Hawking on four space documentaries.  One was  Leaving Earth:  Or, How to Colonize a Planet .  He passed away in 2018 at the age of 76 before the program was completed.  I just watched this episode and it helped me synthesize variant thoughts in my mind about the ultimate fate of Humanity. In 1976 I spent a summer at NASA's Ames Research Center, joining a group of university faculty on Project Orion to  design the first device capable of detecting an extrasolar planet .  At that time, the planets of our solar system were the only ones ever seen.  After meeting Carl Sagan at Ames during that interval to view the first photo sent back by Viking 1, five years later when I was working for the U.S. Senate, I helped him convince the U.S. Congress to gain the initial funding for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Established was annual funding for 12 years, leading to the formation of the SETI Institute in Palo Alto. Sinc