The Future, part 1
I often think of what life will be like in the future, and I look to my relation to the past as an example of what may hold in the future.
The near future of 10 years (very likely much the same)
The not so near future of 20 years (very likely a good bit different)
The future of the next generation of 50 years (very likely very different)
and then larger distances:
100 years (recognisible, but full of things so different, we can hardly imagine)
200 years (a world of people that likely can speak the same language as myself, but who lead lives that are quite different)
500 years (where the ability to speak the same language starts to break down)
1000 years (which might as well be on another planet.)
From here, I look to the future in the in the same way - in ten years things will be much the same, with some added new things. Ten years ago, the Internet really kicked off with Netscape. Now, you are reading this courtesy of that technology.
20 years ago, you would not have been able to do that, unless you were geared into a BBS at some horrifically low baud rate - blogging was not possible, and hyperlinks weren't happening, and P2P wasn't even a dream. 20 years ago, life was a good bit different. Not so much as to be unrecognisible - and certainly not so different that the devices that made the differences weren't present. Also, politically, socially, and economically, things were different, but not that different. The capitalist industrial Centre was beset by the adversary of a failing Soviet Union, but overall, the American Empire was in full swing, and continues to be so to this day. 20 years ago people were enamoured of the latest trend in theory - this "postmodernist" thing. Now, the postmodern (Derrida, Baudrillard, et al) has given way to the hypermodern (Virilio), and that is giving way to the Permanent Contemporary (Warwick and others), as even the notion of Modernity as a point in time is dispensed with.
50 years ago? World War Two had only been over for 10 years - the destruction of that time, from Nanking and Pearl Harbour, to Auschwitz and Hiroshima, it was all reverberant in the immediate cultural memories, as those born after that disaster hadn't yet made cultural artifacts of their memories which would not, obviously, have any specific memory of the horror and holocaust - they were only ten years old. No computers in homes, cars with tailfins and jet ports, virulent anti-communist paranoia, segregated drinking fountains, it was a significantly different world 50 years ago.
100 years ago? There are television shows that show just how incredibley different, and to us in the 21st century, truly difficult, it was to live in an age before radio, television, dishwashing, clothes washers,refrigeration, and the other conveniences that the age of petroleum has afforded us. Women couldn't even vote in the USA. 100 years ago was only 40 years after the Civil War ended chattel slavery. 100 years ago, women wore complex and heavy clothing. Everyone wore hats. Automobiles were rare, slow, smelly, and expensive. The streets reeked of horse manure and urine. There were many common things - language was similar, but the lexicon and accents were slightly different.
500 years ago? People 500 years ago had more in common with people who lived 2000 years ago than they do with us.
I look to the future with the same vision and hope. I hope that we, as a species, will be around in 2000 years. I have my doubts. And that is the problem - there is a good chance that we are headed to extinction. I see several broad scenarios for the Human Prospect:
1. Swift Extinction: through a combination of ecological disasters, biological and nuclear wars, the human species is largely wiped out in short order, and the remaining individuals who do survive the initial horror can't survive or bring offspring to survive the radioactive, polluted, ruined landscape. I don't see this as likely, but it is certainly a strong possibility, especially given the Bayesian mathematics behind it.
2. Not so swift Extinction: Calamities strike. we use up whatever resources are left. We lose access to metals. Humanity slowly erodes back to a neolithic existence. A Not So Swift Extinction could come to an abrupt end by way of a sparse neolithic race on a ruined planet contending with an asteroid strike or supervolcano.
3. Swift Extinction with Issue: Through some incredible breakthrough in genetic science, humans break the genetic code, and are able to easily and quickly manipulate the human genetic code so we can develop ourselves into homo futuris. At the same time, we collectively reduce our population either voluntarily (like everyone getting a CLUE and not having more than one kid) or involuntarily (through various forms of slaughter and / or disease) or a combination of both. In any case, the result could be that within 150 years, homo sapiens will have disappeared, replaced by homo futuris. Homo futuris would then set about setting up the Galaxy with life.
4. Gradual Extinction with Issue: This would be where the species forks: homo sapiens remains, with homo futuris evolving side by side. Very likely, there would be great warfare between the groups that develop homo futuris (scientific secular societies) and those that oppose homo futuris (clueless fundamentalist retards, luddites, and others) on some nutty notion peculiar to whatever bizarre religiousc / ideological dogma du jour they cook up. This conflict would also happen with scenario #3, but in scenario #3, the objections are dispensed with quickly due to failures of society as promulgated under conservative ideologies of greed, warfare, ecological destruction and religious bigotry in the face of massive breakthroughs in genetic engineering.
In this scenario, #4, the calamities are less acute, and the genetic engineering breakthroughs less forthcoming. Therefore, it takes longer for homo futuris to arrive, and would arrive so gradually as to simply assimilate into the end-game human culture, as a new culture based around their own capabilities is developed. This scenario would have homo futuris taking several hundred years, if not a few thousand years, to become the dominant species. This would entail a depopulation of the human numbers through other means in the short term, resulting in fewer people being available for the research, creating even greater delays in the development of homo futuris. Once people get over themselves as a species, and we have the technology to completely master the genome and then develop custom genomes, we can then set about developing intelligent species for specific environments, such as the vacuum of deep space (at one extreme) or for planets that have been made marginally inhabitable. I see it as quite possible that we could evolve various sub-species for survival on a planet like Mars - homo martia?
What would such a "human" be like? A wookie?
Meanwhile, homo sapiens could continue to exist and even be left behind. As homo futuris sets up life throughout the Galaxy, homo sapiens are left to live a more moderated existence on a depleted world. Eventually, they would elect for genetic treatment and their children would be homo futuris. They each would live out their lives as homo sapiens, until the that day when the last one is gone. she would be buried with great respect by her children, who all live to be 1000 years old, have IQs that are off the charts, are innately at peace with themselvesand the universe, and they have heavily enhanced brains with highly interoperative multi-corpus collosia, and biolinks to various machine intelligences, and: they are all incredibly healthy and beautiful. But then, everyone thinks their kids are beautiful, right?
I see scenario #4 as the most positive.
But to get there will take an enormous amount of work, and the deck is stacked against us.
How? Resource depletion due to over-population.
If we don't fix the problem now, it won't get fixed, and we will have sealed the fate of life in this solar system. It takes a lot of power to get out of the gravity well, and to do that we need metal and resources. We need the resources that are presently being pissed away on war to be used for reducing human suffering, and building our gateway to the stars. At the same time, we must use our cultural production systems to educate the planet and get people to stop having kids.
How to do that will be the point of another essay. Word of warning: It might not be nice or pretty.
The near future of 10 years (very likely much the same)
The not so near future of 20 years (very likely a good bit different)
The future of the next generation of 50 years (very likely very different)
and then larger distances:
100 years (recognisible, but full of things so different, we can hardly imagine)
200 years (a world of people that likely can speak the same language as myself, but who lead lives that are quite different)
500 years (where the ability to speak the same language starts to break down)
1000 years (which might as well be on another planet.)
From here, I look to the future in the in the same way - in ten years things will be much the same, with some added new things. Ten years ago, the Internet really kicked off with Netscape. Now, you are reading this courtesy of that technology.
20 years ago, you would not have been able to do that, unless you were geared into a BBS at some horrifically low baud rate - blogging was not possible, and hyperlinks weren't happening, and P2P wasn't even a dream. 20 years ago, life was a good bit different. Not so much as to be unrecognisible - and certainly not so different that the devices that made the differences weren't present. Also, politically, socially, and economically, things were different, but not that different. The capitalist industrial Centre was beset by the adversary of a failing Soviet Union, but overall, the American Empire was in full swing, and continues to be so to this day. 20 years ago people were enamoured of the latest trend in theory - this "postmodernist" thing. Now, the postmodern (Derrida, Baudrillard, et al) has given way to the hypermodern (Virilio), and that is giving way to the Permanent Contemporary (Warwick and others), as even the notion of Modernity as a point in time is dispensed with.
50 years ago? World War Two had only been over for 10 years - the destruction of that time, from Nanking and Pearl Harbour, to Auschwitz and Hiroshima, it was all reverberant in the immediate cultural memories, as those born after that disaster hadn't yet made cultural artifacts of their memories which would not, obviously, have any specific memory of the horror and holocaust - they were only ten years old. No computers in homes, cars with tailfins and jet ports, virulent anti-communist paranoia, segregated drinking fountains, it was a significantly different world 50 years ago.
100 years ago? There are television shows that show just how incredibley different, and to us in the 21st century, truly difficult, it was to live in an age before radio, television, dishwashing, clothes washers,refrigeration, and the other conveniences that the age of petroleum has afforded us. Women couldn't even vote in the USA. 100 years ago was only 40 years after the Civil War ended chattel slavery. 100 years ago, women wore complex and heavy clothing. Everyone wore hats. Automobiles were rare, slow, smelly, and expensive. The streets reeked of horse manure and urine. There were many common things - language was similar, but the lexicon and accents were slightly different.
500 years ago? People 500 years ago had more in common with people who lived 2000 years ago than they do with us.
I look to the future with the same vision and hope. I hope that we, as a species, will be around in 2000 years. I have my doubts. And that is the problem - there is a good chance that we are headed to extinction. I see several broad scenarios for the Human Prospect:
1. Swift Extinction: through a combination of ecological disasters, biological and nuclear wars, the human species is largely wiped out in short order, and the remaining individuals who do survive the initial horror can't survive or bring offspring to survive the radioactive, polluted, ruined landscape. I don't see this as likely, but it is certainly a strong possibility, especially given the Bayesian mathematics behind it.
2. Not so swift Extinction: Calamities strike. we use up whatever resources are left. We lose access to metals. Humanity slowly erodes back to a neolithic existence. A Not So Swift Extinction could come to an abrupt end by way of a sparse neolithic race on a ruined planet contending with an asteroid strike or supervolcano.
3. Swift Extinction with Issue: Through some incredible breakthrough in genetic science, humans break the genetic code, and are able to easily and quickly manipulate the human genetic code so we can develop ourselves into homo futuris. At the same time, we collectively reduce our population either voluntarily (like everyone getting a CLUE and not having more than one kid) or involuntarily (through various forms of slaughter and / or disease) or a combination of both. In any case, the result could be that within 150 years, homo sapiens will have disappeared, replaced by homo futuris. Homo futuris would then set about setting up the Galaxy with life.
4. Gradual Extinction with Issue: This would be where the species forks: homo sapiens remains, with homo futuris evolving side by side. Very likely, there would be great warfare between the groups that develop homo futuris (scientific secular societies) and those that oppose homo futuris (clueless fundamentalist retards, luddites, and others) on some nutty notion peculiar to whatever bizarre religiousc / ideological dogma du jour they cook up. This conflict would also happen with scenario #3, but in scenario #3, the objections are dispensed with quickly due to failures of society as promulgated under conservative ideologies of greed, warfare, ecological destruction and religious bigotry in the face of massive breakthroughs in genetic engineering.
In this scenario, #4, the calamities are less acute, and the genetic engineering breakthroughs less forthcoming. Therefore, it takes longer for homo futuris to arrive, and would arrive so gradually as to simply assimilate into the end-game human culture, as a new culture based around their own capabilities is developed. This scenario would have homo futuris taking several hundred years, if not a few thousand years, to become the dominant species. This would entail a depopulation of the human numbers through other means in the short term, resulting in fewer people being available for the research, creating even greater delays in the development of homo futuris. Once people get over themselves as a species, and we have the technology to completely master the genome and then develop custom genomes, we can then set about developing intelligent species for specific environments, such as the vacuum of deep space (at one extreme) or for planets that have been made marginally inhabitable. I see it as quite possible that we could evolve various sub-species for survival on a planet like Mars - homo martia?
What would such a "human" be like? A wookie?
Meanwhile, homo sapiens could continue to exist and even be left behind. As homo futuris sets up life throughout the Galaxy, homo sapiens are left to live a more moderated existence on a depleted world. Eventually, they would elect for genetic treatment and their children would be homo futuris. They each would live out their lives as homo sapiens, until the that day when the last one is gone. she would be buried with great respect by her children, who all live to be 1000 years old, have IQs that are off the charts, are innately at peace with themselvesand the universe, and they have heavily enhanced brains with highly interoperative multi-corpus collosia, and biolinks to various machine intelligences, and: they are all incredibly healthy and beautiful. But then, everyone thinks their kids are beautiful, right?
I see scenario #4 as the most positive.
But to get there will take an enormous amount of work, and the deck is stacked against us.
How? Resource depletion due to over-population.
If we don't fix the problem now, it won't get fixed, and we will have sealed the fate of life in this solar system. It takes a lot of power to get out of the gravity well, and to do that we need metal and resources. We need the resources that are presently being pissed away on war to be used for reducing human suffering, and building our gateway to the stars. At the same time, we must use our cultural production systems to educate the planet and get people to stop having kids.
How to do that will be the point of another essay. Word of warning: It might not be nice or pretty.
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