Human civilization will be very different from what is it today on the positive side of technological advancement, pending some particularly bad/untimely extinction event. Chances are even something that's able to kill off most of humanity, which is pretty unlikely over the next 10k years according to my research and understanding, will still leave enough intelligent people and technology to have greatly advanced by then. Country makeup and language will also be completely different in 10k years, considering that the rate of change is only speeding up. The power advantage of being big isn't what it used to be, so I think governing regions will be smaller than what is it now, but with some formal global government structure with smaller tiers, similar to the current U.S. having the federal government, state, then further local levels. How is it possible for pollution to kill us off? I'm not asking rudely, I'm just curious why you and some others think so. Similarly, why wouldn't humanity have moved on from oil by the time it has run out? The most advanced civilizations are already shading away from oil, to my understanding. The only reason that progression isn't faster is because there's plenty of oil for the short run. Oil has only become a major resource in the past, what, 100 years? 200 years? We're talking about TEN THOUSAND years from now.
I think that technological enhancement of human bodies will common place in 10k years. Here's an article that implies that, along with discussing exponential growth of technological advancement and other things: kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns Predicting the impact of sentient AI in how negative it could potentially be is one of the hardest aspects of predicting the future for me. For intelligent robots and what have you to decide to group, I believe their intelligence would have to become way more advanced than ours, there'd have to grow a great communication gap, and they would need to have little use for us. The magnitude for each of those is important because, take for instance the differences between the most and least intelligent groups of humans: as technology and all the aspects it affect advance, the gap between the productiveness of the most and least intelligent widens, but are the most intelligent becoming more hostile and suppressive? No, just the opposite is happening. As opposed to humans vs. animals, smart and dumb people are closely similar enough to where there's enough respect from the former that at least many smart people want to help them. There isn't much difference between the wealthy of First and Third countries when you compare them to the poor.
Nietzschefan, point out or summarize the relevant parts. I read and didn't get much out of it, related to the topic. I'll note that, knowing little about him, we know a lot more now than when he lived. I reread superstring01's post and agree with the sentiment that we'll physically be pretty different that far in the future, due to incidental evolution and technology. Our being wiped out by something humanity created is pretty unlikely at any point, based on what I know. Someone cite an article supporting otherwise? Great volcanism and astronomical threats will be much greater problems over long periods of time, I think, and even then, some form of humanity should survive.
Nietzsche basically predicts with his Philosophy that man will give over to something "better". In fact if you read that, with some Issac Asimov on the brain you can see, he predicts A.I taking over without even knowing robots or computers are remotely possible. Just like he predicted WWI(and II by proxy), and he predicted nihilism(and got blamed for it). He is one of very few thinkers that understands man is not a constant and humans change too...in a constant state of "flux"
Based on? Crime is trending down. While the ability to do a lot of damage with little resources is increasing, crime prevention is similarly doing so but at a greater rate, to my knowledge. As I touched on in an earlier post, humanity will adept to use other resources and/or use current ones differently. Developing countries will eventually become more efficient and environmentally friendly, just like current First World countries have and are still doing.
This makes me think of a 'Pinky and the Brain' episode where they made a paper mache earth Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Yeah, whether solar power technology is made more efficient, or more likely other currently non-existent technologies, power usage should be much more efficient and cleaner by then.
Agreed on everything, except that losing our "advantage" seems pretty unlikely to me, unless it's in a way that's generally good for humanity (e.g. integration with AI).
I agree with this to a great extent. I believe the primary reason to be that people generally aim to serve their own interests to a greater degree than they think they do. There's currently a lot of pressure even to pull back financial support of other countries, though there's some merit to that. If the receiving poor were more open to doing things our way, that would help to, but I'll save that for another thread. What? Elaborate more on hoarding's contribution to world hunger.
Hahaha. Mostly to completely agreed. Wait wait wait wait. "Poverty" is a relative terms, but if you use a definition more like those used of people living in First World countries, it's way, way higher than 12%. Just Google up information about GDP per capita by country to see this. Even giving some leeway for cost of goods differences, hundreds of millions to a couple billion people would be considered impoverished in First World nations. I support most business done with developing countries because it (1) creates wealth for people who have much less of it, and (2) gives us much cheaper prices. :bravo:
If the animals that support us became extinct ahead of us No cattle, sheep, pigs, horses, rabbits, camels, buffalos and the list goes on. Would we then domesticate rats and mice and cockroaches? Since man is versatile and not bound to any particular habitat or food source (i.e. not over specialised) he will survive. But this still depends on availability of clothing, requires animals, industrial, or will he be running naked. That could limit us if there were no animals and industrial society failed. A lot of places you won’t survive a day naked. There is a lot of knowledge but without a decent population, knowledge will be lost. For no one will be able to remember it all. So we can't depend on what we know collectively. Or it could be the other way and things progress? But that will require some doing for there seems to be a lot of conflict still present.
I wrote: Convivial responds: I tried to outline some reasons in my earlier posts. Everything from nuclear war to bio-hackers. More broadly, I was thinking along these lines: * History shows that civilizations rise and fall. * We are currently forming a single global civilization. * The fall of world civilization will be a global event. * Any "dark-age" that results is likely to be much more widespread and hence much more dramatic than the 500-1000 CE post-Roman period was in Europe, relatively speaking. * Many of the planet's most easily exploited mineral resources have already been depleted. * While abundant resources may or may not still exist at the bottom of the sea or in low-grade deposits, extracting those resources will require more and more technology. * If world civilization ever collapses and enters into a new dark age, then low-technology medieval-style successor states may find that it's almost impossible to find resource deposits that can be worked with the technologies that they will have available in those reduced circumstances. * So these dark-age successor states might find themselves confronting a huge barrier between themselves and eventual reindustrialization. * Suggesting that their medieval-style society might prove to be the new normal and our industrial civilization might turn out to have been a one-off historical fluke.