1000 years?

[Neil]

So, in the year 3000? The human species?:- 1) Will have of continued to expand, and will now be an interplanetary species living successfully on other planets and quite likely other solar systems? 2) Will have succumb to an issue or catastrophe (eg: climate change or resource depletion), and be living in state in which they will never leave Earth, and thus in effect slowly circle the drain? 3) A global issue would have wiped out (or as good) human kind - Serious climate change, volcanic activity, major resource depletion, gamma ray bursts from neighbouring supernova, the list goes on forever. Choose 1, 2 or 3, and explain?

[krakenslayer]

Option 1, but with a major caveat. If you look at the general trends in human scientific endeavour over the past fifty years, our focus has not been so much upon outward expansion and exploration (a few impressive milestones aside), it has mostly been at the microscopic level: microprocessors of exponentially increasing computational power, ever greater data storage devices, new and continually faster means of transferring information, advances in biotech, chemical engineering and, increasingly, cybernetics. If the trend continues, space travel will continue to be ignored in the short term, and before the middle of this century it will become commonplace for people to replace and/or complement inferior biological organs with electronic sensory, computational and neuro-entertainment devices. By the end of the century, cheap, accessible gene therapy will be used not only as a medical treatment, but to enhance and customize our remaining biological parts. Later, I expect the the bio- and computer technologies to merge and result in custom parasitic and symbiotic organisms that function like the electronic cybernetic adaptations of earlier decades but with the benefit of interfacing directly with the human nervous system. A form of telepathy is thus made possible and the connected post-human interfaces directly with the internet (or its distant progeny) and the rest of the connected human race. Privacy and secrets are a thing of the past. Massive social and cultural reordering. Birth becomes a rare and curious event, life expectancies soar. Crime and violence amongst connected individuals is virtually eliminated due to the unavoidable empathy of interfacing directly with anotherbhuman mind, the few crimes still committed are punished not with jail time or death, but by forcing them to directly experience the victim's consciousness at the time of attack. A kind of hive mind develops. Death of the original biological substrate no longer means death of the individual, as the bioelectric patterns that make up a personality can be easily copied and transferred (whether the result is a survival of the original consciousness or a creation of a new consciousness that THINKS its the same person, will probably continue to be argued). Now that it is possible to transfer consciousness outfit a human body, space travel becomes easy: stick a thousand people on the distant ancestor of a modern hard drive in a rocket and shoot it towards the stars, or put a dish on Mars and beam us there inside a zip file. That's my prediction. I'll leave it up to you to decide if that constitutes HUMAN space travel at all, however.s

[Danny]

The human species is far too virulent an infestation to get wiped out, if cavemen lived through freezing ice age style environments then it would take something incredible like a giant meteor to stamp us out for good. I imagine we'll break orbit and start to colonise, claim places, new political groups rise and form and no doubt this will lead to wars over who is sitting on the best resources as is the usual thing we do and aside from that probably not much change. look at the difference between 1012 and 2012. Tech and some social ideas changed, aside from that we are pretty much the same. We'd need something truly crazy to make a big change in humans. maybe 250,000 years on separate planets could cause some evolutionary divergence, but given how totally we craft our environment to suit us even today id say thats still unlikely if we can create a form of easy space travel that keeps the species interconnected.

[Rottedfreak]

I go for option one though I don't believe the people that go into space will be homo sapien sapien, more like products of the species through molecular technology.

[Mike70]

. look at the difference between 1012 and 2012. Tech and some social ideas changed, aside from that we are pretty much the same. We'd need something truly crazy to make a big change in humans. there is one thing else to consider here, danny: people in the middle ages were far more self sufficient than we are. they made their own clothes, grew their own food, and weren't dependent upon constant deliveries to grocery stores. i think that is the key difference between our civilization's ability to survive something like a huge pandemic. if you remove truck drivers and train engineers from the system, everything will start to fall apart very quickly. i'm not saying that will happen anytime soon but pandemics have been a part of life since people started living in large groups. back to the choices at hand: i'm going to engage in optimism and choose option 1. i think that all things considered, while it will be painful and there will be ups and downs, eventually our species will achieve great things and someday, explore what lies beyond our own system. whether this will happen in 1,000 years or 10,000 doesn't really matter to me. if our civilization falls another will eventually rise to take its place and probably go further than we have. look at how long it took to equal the engineering skills of the Romans after they were lost. that's where i'm gonna leave this for now 'cause i don't want to run on for 12 pages.

[EvilNed]

The human species will never colonize anything beyond the Moon, and even that is doubtful. It is wishful thinking, and such a future is unreasonable. To go outward and expand requires a lot of resources. Resources are finite, and dwindling. Oil, which we use for almost everything in our industrial society today, will be gone or de-facto depleted within the next 50 years. To replace it, we have bio-fuel, but for that to nourish we need water to grow crops - water that we are also running low on. Meanwhile, populations are growing and the water demand is rising. Again, water is a resource that will, within the next 50 years, will become worth it's weight in gold. Glaciers are melting, and they are the sweet water reserves we've relied on for the last 10,000 years to provide us with fresh water each season. They are soon to be long gone. Rivers will run dry, lakes will stagnate and land will dry up. Solar power is inefficent, as is wind. Hydropower is about to become a lot less useful and we've already exploited up most of it. What IS left is Coal, which is already what gives us roughly 50% of our energy today, but Coal is also what's fucking up our planet. The argument that "much happened in the last 1000, or even 100 years" doesn't take into account the fact that the last 50 years and within the coming 50 years, the human race has and will expand with greater speed than it ever has before. The resources that could once be devoted to research and experimentation (the moon landings fall into this category) are now focused on other matters and are also draining fast. Yes, Mankind has survived ice ages. But we've never had to endure an extinction level event, of which life on earth has faced five in it's lifetime. If such an event were to occur in the coming 1,000 years (which is not unreasonable, given that Yellowstone is around 50,000 years overdue for an eruption) then the human race might well succumb and die out. The future is grim. Our civilization will either burn to ashes or fade out into obscurity. But it won't happen in the next 1000 years, it'll probably happen in the next 100 years.

[Danny]

there is one thing else to consider here, danny: people in the middle ages were far more self sufficient than we are. they made their own clothes, grew their own food, and weren't dependent upon constant deliveries to grocery stores. i think that is the key difference between our civilization's ability to survive something like a huge pandemic. if you remove truck drivers and train engineers from the system, everything will start to fall apart very quickly. i'm not saying that will happen anytime soon but pandemics have been a part of life since people started living in large groups. true enough, i would go so far as to say a reliance on such things is our biggest weakness as a species. take it away and most of the 1st world crumbles.

[Neil]

I think I'm with Evilned here. I'm a 2/3... We are burning through our resources as quickly as we can with no long term consideration. We are those natives on Easter Island chopping down all their trees, only to realise too soon, we've chopped down too many now to build a ship to get off the place. Marooned! I suspect when we realise that we've used up to much of our vital finite resources on Earth, we'll only then realise we need them to get into space to find/harvest more! Marooned! And that's ignoring the chance of a super volcanoes basically wiping humanity out (Yellowstone), or as good as. Or global warming causing the ocean's frozen methane reserves to melt. Or even just a random galactic event like a large meteor or a nearby (in astronomical terms) star going supernova and irradiating us all. As much as I'd like to think in a 1000 years we'll be safetly spread out, with our eggs in many baskets, I fear the next 100 years will see the end to that "happy ever after" outcome As a species we're not taking our fragility on this planet very seriously, and the Universe certainly doesn't owe us any special consideration.

[rongravy]

Borgs, man.

[babomb]

Gotta go with EvilNed and Neil on this. Combination of 2 and 3. Simply because 1 seems extremely unlikely when you consider all the factors involved beside just those that support theory #1. Advances in technology are based on delicate support mechanisms like a functioning economy. Which has a bad rippling effect. The ability to continue advancing like that depends so much on lower level abilities many people take for granted. You can't build newer and better technology without the raw materials needed. Like silicon, gold, copper, lithium. Which is an industry based on other support mechanisms like oil. So advancing technology is not something that can sustain itself without all the sub-industries remaining fully functional also. Alot of things can go wrong that don't seem like an immediate threat. But when the cycle of action and consequence begins, problems quickly become larger and harder to control. While I'd like to be a person that can easily say "the human race will never stop advancing, we're unstoppable", that just isn't accurate and the evidence suggests to the contrary...

[Tricky]

Who's to say evolution has stopped on the human body and mind yet? Maybe in 1000 years we'll have evolved (or regressed) into something completely different that isn't as capable as we are now, or maybe we'll be more advanced?

[Neil]

Who's to say evolution has stopped on the human body and mind yet? Maybe in 1000 years we'll have evolved (or regressed) into something completely different that isn't as capable as we are now, or maybe we'll be more advanced? Evolution only works with one set of DNA having a greater chance of making it into more off spring than another. So here in the UK, we seem to be devolving at the moment with chavs on welfare popping out multiple children, while hard working families tend to stick to 1-3 kids due to careful consideration. What is the impetus in modern Western societies for more successfully passing on your DNA? It seemingly has little to do with the improvement of the species now.

[AcesandEights]

Neil, the chavs will simply devolve into the fast-breeding, dim-witted, yet short lived and ultimately limited morlocks of our far flung future. Most of the middle class will turn (more) into slug-like mole people and only the cream of the crop will rule with well framed forms, straight teeth and Neiman Marcus cards. Evolution is a itch.