The End of Man

Red Archon · Post by **Red Archon** » Tue Feb 21, 2012 6:36 am

So I was having an argument with a friend, who has an optimistic flair, about the next one thousand years or so. The premise was that we do not encounter alien species during that time. I asserted that the social cataclysm following the mass migration of people from the equatorial areas due to climate change is probably going to seal the deal for man, but he was somewhat certain that we'd be able to colonize an alternative planet, or a moon or space stations to contain the problem. I also asserted that whereas the pollutants we release probably run out before we manage to turn this planet into a Venusian hellscape, we might shrink the habitable and arable area too small to sustain the population. He reasoned that when the food and water run out, the population count is going to go down, enough to be sustained with a smaller amount of production.

And so on.

Would you say humanity will survive for a thousand years in any notable capacity? Why?

erik · Post by **erik** » Tue Feb 21, 2012 7:11 am

I think that whatever dominant life form exists on this planet in 1000 years it won't be humanity as we recognize it. What does that count towards?

Red Archon · Post by **Red Archon** » Tue Feb 21, 2012 7:58 am

Depends on what you mean. Are you suggesting that the species will evolve into something else or that the society will?

edited for error.

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Tue Feb 21, 2012 10:17 am

There is only an extremely faint chance of extinction for humans in the next thousand years. A major nuclear war could do it, but people with very large collections of the things know that too. A big rock from space could do it, but they only come along every few hundred million years.

The current carrying capacity is upwards of eight times our current levels, if people stopped eating meat or swimming in valuable water, and other stupid pastimes.

Climate change could reduce the carrying capacity, or increase it slightly, who knows. Diseases could become very common again (though that's mostly down to food supply for the poor). Wars could flourish, even with small nuclear exchanges. None of that would matter either way, as it would take innumerable catastrophes on that level to drop us back to a billion, which is still a vast number of humans.

Pollution doesn't matter. We're not frogs. Some people get sick, and die, and life expectancies drop, and people breed faster. That's how that works.

Solar power will replace fossil fuels, if only for the rich, and the poor can be blown to bits in extraordinarily large numbers to compensate for any inefficiencies. Mostly by setting them on each other, irony of ironies. Recycling will become compulsory, and the future world will mine all our garbage dumps for precious metals. Yes, it's hard to get enough lithium to push around one tonne cars at 100 kph, but it's not hard to get enough to make your push bike go slightly faster, and poor people don't need fancy push bikes.

Space colonies are a joke: the energy requirements are obscene and living in a hermetically sealed bubble without external supplies is very much easier here on earth (and no one has even done that yet).

Aliens will not come here. Energy requirements are very real things. Even beaming messages back and forth over just a few light years is almost impossible in practical terms. We will eventually find life elsewhere, almost certainly as pond scum. Warp drives are fairy tales.

There will be no singularity of technology, only stupid and deeply credulous people believe god will appear out of our porn machinery.

Every other species bigger than a chicken? They could go extinct. We are a mass extinction event. But in the next millennium, credulous people will still believe in the magic sky faeries, rich people will still be really shitty to poor people, and rich nations will still steal the resources of poor nations (even if that's the antarctic republic stealing the north-american concurb's ancient garbage dumps).

Oh, and they will look back on us and wonder what the fuck was up with that shit, because they can no longer understand what it is to think like we do.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Tue Feb 21, 2012 11:38 am

If human beings are still the dominant intelligent lifeform after a thousand years that'd mean something downright catastrophic for humanity. And this is true even if no major ecological disaster happened on earth. It would also mean that that either technological progress ground to a screeching halt (for one thousand years!) or actually progressed backwards. There are pretty much no scenarios I can think of that wouldn't be a, if not ecological/demographic, a sociological disaster for human critters.

People being around two hundred years from now with no sort of awful external or internal factor? I could see it happening if I squint. Strong AI Research / Genetic Engineering might be slowed but not halted for any number of reasons (for that long, though, it'd have to be pretty much all of them) but still at the point where sometime in the future people could cross the technological threshold. A thousand years, though? That'd mean something done fucked up, like the Republic of Gilead taking over.

erik · Post by **erik** » Tue Feb 21, 2012 2:09 pm

Basically what Lago said. If we haven't changed so much physically either via genetic modification, technological modification or going so far as being usurped by our own AI, then it will probably mean that something went very wrong, like major disaster knocking us back to the medieval age with drastically reduced populations and a more hostile environment. Not that it would take nearly so long to crawl back out when the ruins and memories of an advanced civilization remain.

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Tue Feb 21, 2012 3:20 pm

erik wrote:Basically what Lago said. If we haven't changed so much physically either via genetic modification, technological modification or going so far as being usurped by our own AI, then it will probably mean that something went very wrong, like major disaster knocking us back to the medieval age with drastically reduced populations and a more hostile environment. Not that it would take nearly so long to crawl back out when the ruins and memories of an advanced civilization remain.

What caused the dark ages in Europe last time? You'd think if that were the case, people would remember stuff like aqueducts and medicine and things wouldn't have been so crappy for a thousand years.

tzor · Post by **tzor** » Tue Feb 21, 2012 3:34 pm

Lago, what the hell are you talking about? We could literally decimate (in the modern sense, as opposed to the Roman definition which was to reduce the population by 10%) the entire human population on the planet and we would still be the “dominant intelligent life form” on the planet.

Life in the year 3012 will be vastly different from that of 2012, just like it is vastly different from that of 1012. The people might live a whole lot longer than we do today, and have a whole lot of different health problems than we do today (just like this is true for those form 1012) but the basic nature of man will not have changed much. Evolution works on a much grander scale.

Technology will go in ways we cannot imagine. In 1012, the only food preservation system available was salt. We had to either mine it or extract it from the oceans. Wars were fought over salt. By 2012, not only can we manufacture salt for practically nothing, we no longer consider it a good way to preserve food (it’s “bad” for you). I think it stands to reason that whatever problems we think cannot be solved will be trivial matters that is left for historians to joke about. This would be true even if technology is linear, which it is not.

What really has changed of the nature of man from the time of Plato? Not much, actually. It will be the same thing in another thousand years. Hopefully by then, we will have realized that the only solution is to get over it and go from there.

tzor · Post by **tzor** » Tue Feb 21, 2012 3:46 pm

RobbyPants wrote:What caused the dark ages in Europe last time? You'd think if that were the case, people would remember stuff like aqueducts and medicine and things wouldn't have been so crappy for a thousand years.

Roman engineering lasted well after the Roman empire fell. Roman medicine wasn't all that spectacular in and of itself. (It was mostly an import from Greece; Rome was a land of engineers not scientists.)

In fact the next great advance came from Persia, but since Muslims and Christians weren't on good speaking terms that is the biggest reason why there is a dearth of medical technoligy in Europe during this time.

If you want to know why the ages were "dark" (and that's not a proper term anymore except as a joke among astronomers in order to explain why a supernova visible during the day and recorded in China was never even mentioned by the European monks) you might want to go back to the old standby; former empires tend to get invaded ... a lot.

And that generally makes everything suck.

sabs · Post by **sabs** » Tue Feb 21, 2012 3:56 pm

Also, therewas the mini ice age caused by Karakatoa.
There was the fact that The Catholic Church banned and buried a ton of science as being Blasphemous.

As Tzor's pretty poster shows, a lot of invasions. Though he is missing the raping and pillaging of the Vikings in the 900-1000 range.
The 100 year's war.
The crusades

Europe gets pretty spectacularly spanked for about 1000 years, starting in about 400 and ending in 1400. Said ending being heralded by the ever popular Black Death.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Tue Feb 21, 2012 4:12 pm

Well Global Warming, food shortages, Water shortages, and now the russians say we are headed straight for a new ice age starting in 2014 and having it's peak in about 2055 give or take about 11 years . . Well, at least we won't live to see this all come to fruitition, because the maya calendar tells us the world is ending in 2012 anyway . .

JonSetanta · Post by **JonSetanta** » Tue Feb 21, 2012 5:27 pm

Read this, although it might be laggy to view or download lately:

http://www.operatorchan.org/r/src/alltomorrows.pdf

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Tue Feb 21, 2012 8:10 pm

Stahlseele wrote:Well Global Warming, food shortages, Water shortages, and now the russians say we are headed straight for a new ice age starting in 2014 and having it's peak in about 2055 give or take about 11 years . .

That kind of thing probably wouldn't cause the extinction of mankind. If you want something that would actually cause the death of man rather than 'merely' setting civilization back anywhere from several decades to several centuries you need to think bigger than that. Like asteroid impact or solar flare or full-on nuclear war.

If you want mankind to survive for another thousand years you need to have some kind of ecological disaster, whether man-made or not. We're at the point where even strictly sociological disasters (like a surprise Oceania Party or Republic of Gilead taking over the entire world) probably wouldn't spell the doom of mankind on its own.

Maj · Post by **Maj** » Wed Feb 22, 2012 1:26 am

Gotta admit, I would not have expected a "yeah, "whatever" from the religious guy and a bunch of end times crap from the antireligionists. Myself...? I'm in the "yeah, whatever" camp. Same humans, different trappings.

Hopefully in the next thousand years, we'll develop a new scientific method that will broaden our understanding of cycles and systems so when we mess around with one thing, we don't blow the whole system out of whack. If we can pull that off, we'll do great.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Wed Feb 22, 2012 2:11 am

Where do you see the species in 300 years, Maj?

Personally, I don't see humanity existing in its current form for that long no matter how nicely things work out otherwise. Genetic engineering is already in its nascent stage and the human genome has barely been mapped for half a century.

K · Post by K » Wed Feb 22, 2012 3:06 am

I don't see any endgame scenarios playing out in the next 1000 years, so count me as an atheist without a doomsday scenario.

Technology adoption is woefully slow and fought by conservatives, dwindling resources will merely lead to a lessening of quality of life well before crisis (no lawns for us triples our water supplies, for example), and various wars between nations already too shitty to desalinate water aren't going to feature world-destroying tech.

I mean, as much as I like the idea of the Singularity, there is no evidence that people living today are taking advantage of even 1% of what technology is capable of, so there is no reason to predict there would be some kind of techno-utopia in a millennium. Africa is still going to be a hole in 1000 years and petroleum depletion is going to return the Middle East to the "wandering herdsman" culture within 200 years.

Ted the Flayer · Post by **Ted the Flayer** » Wed Feb 22, 2012 3:30 am

I don't think human society will be recognizable in a thousand years, but I think we'll still be around in some way or another. I kind of think that Futurama is the closest thing to an accurate prediction of the future that anyone has (we'll all have nicer toys to play with, but everyone will still be broke, and working shitty jobs they hate, and so forth).

erik · Post by **erik** » Wed Feb 22, 2012 3:48 am

Maj wrote:Gotta admit, I would not have expected a "yeah, "whatever" from the religious guy and a bunch of end times crap from the antireligionists. Myself...? I'm in the "yeah, whatever" camp. Same humans, different trappings.

Hopefully in the next thousand years, we'll develop a new scientific method that will broaden our understanding of cycles and systems so when we mess around with one thing, we don't blow the whole system out of whack. If we can pull that off, we'll do great.

I should note that myself and probably Lago as well, were not saying that humanity were going to doom ourselves, just that in the next thousand years our potential to modify what it is to be human is going to continue to change more and more rapidly to such an extent that it is likely that what humanity is then will not be recognizable as what humans are now. So not really end of times for humanity just a continuing evolution.

We're already creating individually tailored replacement organs and carry unbelievably vast amounts of knowledge in tiny portable devices. We can print foods, objects, organs, you name it. Programs being safer drivers than people. In 100 years time the advances are going to be staggering (though still no flying cars). I cannot even imagine what we will be capable of in 300 years, let alone 1000. Complete body transformations, real-time instructions on how to do about anything, ability to create complex objects from goop, and rampant automation.

The end of times crap we've noted is a hypothetical that could prevent this progress, and a very unlikely impediment in my opinion.

I think that the knowledge to do amazing things will spread, and that the means to use such knowledge will become more accessible as well.

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Wed Feb 22, 2012 4:03 am

K wrote:Technology adoption is woefully slow and fought by conservatives

We're talking a thousand years. The past 50-100 years alone probably represent more scientific progress than all of mankind's history, and today's conservatives are a dying breed. Seriously, the children of the past 10-20 years have been some of the most tolerant (and least violent)... ever. The battle against their brand of idiocy has been won, and right now it's just trying to get them out the door without letting them shit all over everything. New conservative/liberal divides might crop up around new things, but it's hard to concieve of any divides as passionate.

But to Maj; I don't think saying humanity will change is a doomsday scenario. Parts of the world are going to have a bad few centuries no matter what happens, and possibly longer (K's also right that the benefits of technology to humanity are going to be majorly disproportionate, but that's obvious. This stuff isn't going to happen overnight, and when it happens it's going to happen where the wealth exists to support it), but humanity is going to keep kicking. It's just that at some point transhumanism is going to get its funk on and humanity is not going to look the same anymore, and there's the potential for a lot of radical changes. A lot more radical than the leap from 1012 to 2012, and that was a big leap.

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Wed Feb 22, 2012 5:16 am

The past 50-100 years alone probably represent more scientific progress than all of mankind's history

That may not be true. The people of ~1500 CE had good reason to believe the same, and they were wrong. A lot of our "technology" is really just massive free energy expenditure based on unsustainable resource extraction, not much of it will survive the next century in anything like it's current form. The bicycle might stay big, or it might not. Who knows. Big horses used to be the shiznit, now they're nothing.

just a continuing evolution.

No. Genetic propagation of even key survival genes takes forever on our generation scale. We'd be out of place transported to 1,000 BCE, but we'd learn the local language in a couple weeks, learn a useful skill in another week, be fully fit for it in a month or two, and just live a normal life and die at about the same age as the locals, unless they killed us for our funny clothes.

Genetic manipulation is a joke. We can't even change bacteria as fast as they change themselves, it's all about working with what's already out there. We can select for plants that are resistant to certain toxins, but so can nature, on about the same time scale. We change the environment, small life adapts, big life goes extinct.

Complete body transformations, real-time instructions on how to do about anything, ability to create complex objects from goop, and rampant automation.

Surgery, telephones, plastic, and the industrial revolution. Welcome to the past.

300 years is +7 to 15m of sea level rise and a post-coal society. If anything, computers will be much slower, but run on ambient light and be almost perfectly efficient. Dense cities, with almost no roads, hundreds of thousands of people living in walking distance, working from home on the internets (real plural). Everything delivered in parts via micro-standardised parcel tubes from the local omni-factory for home assembly, using materials from your personal recycling account, including sewage. Electric food revolution to replace farms with solar fields and bacterial soups that harness the electricity (vastly more efficient than chlorophyll, if no quicker, thousand-level growing basements).

Most of the earth might be retired as a wilderness preserve. People can spend most of their days trying to entertain each other, waiting for their turn to walk the wilds in a safe-suit.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Wed Feb 22, 2012 5:17 am

DSMatticus wrote:Parts of the world are going to have a bad few centuries no matter what happens, and possibly longer (K's also right that the benefits of technology to humanity are going to be majorly disproportionate, but that's obvious. This stuff isn't going to happen overnight, and when it happens it's going to happen where the wealth exists to support it),

I don't think that people are going to put up with having hopelessly retarded, diseased, and ugly children for centuries. This is just my conjecture, but, I strongly believe that a lot of tolerance for inequality is borne of thinking that there might be some way to reverse it down the long through hard work and not making waves. The tides change on this when certain people are literally having better children than you. Except for some heavily entrenched minority groups I don't think this kind of genetic inequality is going to last very long.

Of course it's probable that even after humanity has converted to Transhuman 1.0 (assuming that we don't have whizbang robot buddies) that there will still be humans around, but they'll matter about as much as, oh, Cathars did by the 15th century. Still around without having to look too hard, but for all intents and purposes extinct.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Wed Feb 22, 2012 5:26 am

tussock wrote: Genetic manipulation is a joke. We can't even change bacteria as fast as they change themselves, it's all about working with what's already out there. We can select for plants that are resistant to certain toxins, but so can nature, on about the same time scale. We change the environment, small life adapts, big life goes extinct.

What does that have to do with human genetic engineering?

tussock wrote: Surgery, telephones, plastic, and the industrial revolution. Welcome to the past.

Thanks for completely obfuscating the vast differences between 21st century and early 20th century surgery, telecommunications, plastic (seriously, what the fuck?), and of course further revolutions in chemical engineering and artificial selection. You may have heard of the last two, it's led to what junior high school students call the Green Revolution. Something that most people couldn't even imagine could happen 50 years after the start of the 20th century but which we take for granted today.

But totally ignoring the huge gap of change between 21st and early 20th century technology, which is larger than the gap between early 20th century technology and 18th century technology, which is still larger than the gap between 18th century and 1st century technology you were totally on the mark there.

Parthenon · Post by **Parthenon** » Wed Feb 22, 2012 6:05 am

I just don't see actual genetic change happening within the next 300 years. Humanity is too large and mixes too much in unpredictable ways for any genetic change to actually stand out and change humanity without being spread out and diffused into nothingness.

Not without a Golden Man scenario where Evolution Zero has dominant genes and manages to procreate with more than 10% of the population.

While there are examples of species evolving dramatically within one or two generations from environmental changes they are relatively small populations in a small area with short generations.

The only way I can see it happening is with actual eugenic programs over centuries (and even that will have a negligible population compared to the rest of humanity), or if humanity gets forcibly split and different sections of humanity get separated for centuries in an environment which is much harsher than anything existing.

The only real way would be actual genetic modification, which would take a long period of changes and huge amounts of testing.

Heres the thing: actual real-world physical tests of evolving solutions to perform tasks create working results that are actually impossible by simulation. As in with circuitry it creates circuits with seemingly useless parts that are actually needed.

Any genetic modification to the genome would necessarily be small scale for a generation or two to make sure that what they have tried to do actually is what happened. And then the population would be so small as to be ignorable.

Humanity may well be genetically different in a millenium, but I can't see three centuries.

K · Post by K » Wed Feb 22, 2012 6:26 am

DSMatticus wrote:
K wrote:Technology adoption is woefully slow and fought by conservatives
We're talking a thousand years. The past 50-100 years alone probably represent more scientific progress than all of mankind's history, and today's conservatives are a dying breed. Seriously, the children of the past 10-20 years have been some of the most tolerant (and least violent)... ever. The battle against their brand of idiocy has been won, and right now it's just trying to get them out the door without letting them shit all over everything. New conservative/liberal divides might crop up around new things, but it's hard to concieve of any divides as passionate.

We are talking about a thousand years, and look at how little has been accomplished.

I mean, Western morality is dictated by a 2,000 year old religion (and in some places like the East, even older ideas). We still have peasants and the super-rich. We haven't let go of war. We let the least genetically fit breed without restriction while the intelligent and beautiful and strong do not because of social restrictions.

Our only real accomplishments have been a big chunk of knowledge that the merest fraction of us comprehend and the fact that we rode a free energy boom that fueled a huge amount of manufacturing.

I mean, we have organic farmers who are ignoring the Green Revolution. We have Christian Scientists who ignore medical advances, hippies, hipsters, Evangelical Christians that prevent us from doing cell research, and shadowy moneyed interests in politics that put the myth of the Illuminati to shame.

There is never going to be a Transhuman revolution. The instant the tech nears completion, it'll be made illegal on "moral" grounds and the few people who do it will get gunned down or imprisoned despite their minor advantages.

I mean, Dolly the Sheep was born in 1996, and we still haven't even tried to do human cloning because of the social backlash and have barely made progress on stem-cells because of the repercussions.

Heck, when the free energy ride is over, I expect manufacturing will peter down. This will be known as our Golden Age where goods cost almost nothing.

erik · Post by **erik** » Wed Feb 22, 2012 6:48 am

K wrote:We let the least genetically fit breed without restriction while the intelligent and beautiful and strong do not because of social restrictions.

Citation needed.

I think we waste tons of energy because we can afford to. There is plenty of ground to be gained by simply working on our energy efficiency.

I do hope that reason will beat out superstition over time. I cannot help but look back and think that we are progressively improving not just technologically, but ethically. I cannot imagine living in American society 50 years ago, let alone 100 years ago. It seems utterly barbaric.