aesmael

(17:19:56) Pazi AshFeather: I am visualizing two possible extremes.
(17:30:06) Pazi AshFeather: In one, you arrive. The three of us form an instantaneous, permanent communicative bond that borders on the telepathic. Just the sheer knowledge that someone else is out there like us, that we can rely on each other overwhelms our respective cognitive difficulties with a quiet, sublime confidence, granting a zen like mastery over our own abilities and potential. Within moments, it is decided that you will not be leaving, and a fortuitous congressional vote allows for poly, trans, gay marriage. Within days we are wed, and after our Japan honeymoon we return home to Vancouver and become successful, world-renowned artists. Years before old age truly sets in for any of us, a method of uploading human consciousness will be perfected and distributed freely to the masses; having been prepared for this eventuality by a lifetime of thinking sappy romantic transhumanist thoughts, we are fully able to explore the ripe possibilities posed by recursive self-improvement, culminating in our joint solution to the physics equations governing entropy and the complete rescue of our universe from the heat death.

In the other, your plane begins to sputter and careen moments before landing, driving the nose of the aircraft through the gates and striking a horrifically-out-of place liquid oxygen tank. The ensuing explosion not only immolates the airport, much of the surrounding countryside, and all therein, but also unseals a deadly microbe from a nearby bioresearch facility. It is a more efficient decay organism than any ever seen before or since on Earth, and it supplants the most basic levels of our food chain and quickly wipes out a majority of land-dwelling organisms. Virulent, competitive and highly adaptable, it soon displaces all life on Earth more sophisticated than some extremely lucky archaea living in marginal, hostile environments. Millenia later, a freak genetic defect propagates throughout the species, rendering it incapable of reproduction or even survival. In less than decade, every single one has succumbed to a wasting disease and dissolved into component plasms. An ill-timed solar storm irradiates the Earth, sterilizing all biotic compounds left from the dead microbes and alleviating them of the potential for further evolution.

I suspect that what actually happens will lie somewhere between those two scenarios.