To help keep things in perspective.

The news is: Humanity is whistling past the cosmic graveyard.
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24917/

And if that doesn't get us the sun burns out, expands and roasts the planet, in another five billion years plus or minus a million or two.

And we are, in the really long term, we are going to collide with another galaxy, and might be heading for a giant black hole. You might want to pencil all this in on your calendar. Pays to plan ahead.

HT:
http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2010/03/we_are_totally_doomed.php

I would hope that our advancements in technology that will have been achieved by that time, the human race will survive. That is one of the reasons I am saddened to see NASA budget cuts and a lack of interest in future advancement.

I think even a billion years for the existence of the human race is a stretch. Zombies will own the world by that point!

Seriously though, we, as a race, likely will not exist long enough to be present for the end of the planet. Continuing on our current course, we may be lucky to get a couple of million years. By then, I would ASSUME we would have the capacity to travel off-planet, perhaps doing terraforming & the like. But, as a race, going the direction we currently are, I dont see us having to worry too much about a natural world-ending event-unless natural is defined as human-driven...

We're just in a brief pause in our evolution from apes.

If a rogue sun-flare or nuclear crazies don't get us first then those mutants in our evolutionary process are sent off-planet to colonize newly found places. While they thrive, the 'normal' people eventually deteriate and start to de-evolve. Or was that a Heinlein novel?....

Of course most cosmologists have assumed that Super Nova are exploding dead stars but there is a tighter statistical correlation of Super Nova just being those advanced civilizations with just bigger versions of Large Hadron Colliders.

Since this entire thread is 'equipped to survive' off topic I'll venture to ask a question that's been puzzling me.
I've heard the distances are so great that mankind will never leave the solar system. Is this true?
The Sock

We were told in the past that the distance was so great man would never reach space, or the distance was so great man would never fly aross the country or the distance was so great man would never sail across the oceans.

"The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is past the ocean is flat again."
~ John Maynard Keynes, A Tract on Monetary Reform, 1923

Most science fiction is predicated upon faster-than-light travel. Physics says that faster-than-light is physically impossible. There is speculation about warped space and wormholes but, as far as anyone can tell, crossing space at speeds faster-than-light seems to be impossible. Even if technically possible it might require near infinite amounts of energy. As I understand it the entire output of our sun wouldn't drive even a small capsule faster-than-light.

Without faster-than-light travel the closest known solar system is over four light-years away. At 50% of light-speed, far faster than we have ever driven a spaceship, your talking eight years. Using just stored food, water, air your talking about a huge ship. And what happens if after they get there they find out there is something so very wrong they can't make a go of colonizing. Do they come back, plan for twice the material resources, or do we plan on leaving them hang.

The result of all this is that you have to make a much bigger commitment to cover the distances. In every step of a design process a larger ship multiplies the requirements on other systems. Heavier ship require bigger engines. Which use more fuel. Which means more structure. The longer the trip the more crew you need if they are to stay sane. Larger crews uses more food, water, air. Which means a larger structure and larger engines ...

Some science fiction writers describe 'planet' ships that are self-contained ecosystems. With a ship so large and a crew so numerous that they may not, over the decades, remember that they are on a ship. Ships where the crew have children and it takes decades, possibly hundreds of years, generations, to get to distant stars.

Yes, it is a grand vision. Far more complicated than Star Trek and Star Wars where you only have to pack a lunch to visit distant stars. It is anyone's guess that we might develop the technology, wealth and global will to build a ship large enough to get colonists to even the nearest stars. We have a very long way to go and our apparent inability to travel faster-than-light makes it even harder. Not impossible. Just more difficult.

I'm not a physicist, and I'm not stellar at math (nice pun, huh?). But, I do remember from Calc II, that there was an equation you could rotate around an axis, determine it's volume, but if you tried to determine surface area, you would reach infinity. I may have reversed it. The point is, up to that point, I didn't know enough (and actually didn't need to take any other math, and was not motivated enough to care...) to solve the problem of infinity, but the professor said it would be taught in a later class.

So, my point is: Many times in the past, we just didn't have the right perspective.