Originally Posted by The_Heretic

The "live anywhere for a year" thread got me thinking.

Suppose you were sent on a spaceflight to anoher solar system. Now I'm assuming it'd be a hell of a lot slower than the speed of light, so we'll asume it's either close enough you can live to see the destination or you're crygenically frozen then awakened at the end.

As you'd expect your ship receives constant updates from mission control as well as news. So, while exploring this new solar system, one day your latest batch of news from home includes the fact that it's all gone to hell. War- or whatever other global disaster, is destroying human civilization. That this will be the last transmission. The mission control guys go through the usual platitudes of how sorry they are you won't be returning home, or that if you did you'd be the only human left on Earth etc. etc.

Whatever...

That's the last transmission and, for all intensive purposes, you're the sole surviving member of your species many, possibly scores of lightyears away from anything habitable, much less your believed Earth.

What do you do after that?