No one knows. We certainly have the power to last a long time, but we also have the power to end things for us very quickly. I tend to think that the world will last and that we will learn to be more responsible. Naiive? Maybe.
If by ‘world’ you mean human society as we know it today, then I think that its fair to say that it’s in a fragile state, and the next couple of centuries will be quite a challenge with population growth, energy and resource limitations and increasingly complex global inter-dependencies. Climate change and its consequences (changes in water supply, changing frequencies and intensities of wind and rain storms), will add another layer of complexity to this.
No-one can really answe that, we need to take care of the world as best we can for future generations and always consider future consequences of our actions and decisions.
It depends what you mean by “the world”. The planet earth can take a lot of stuff, even global warming, but human civilisation might not. Given how many species have become extinct due to human action, I think it’s entirely possible that we destroy ourselves at some point. But I really don’t know. With the human race gone, I think life on earth will persist after that – some life forms are really amazing at adapting to difficult conditions (did you know that there is a microorganism that lives in the cooling water of nuclear power plants? How cool is that?) At some point though (about 10 billion years from now) the sun will become a red giant, and that will be it for planet earth. I don’t know about the rest of the universe.
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