Where will we go in the next century?

[NASAFanboy]

Better is a subjective term. When I look around "humanity" has not gotten better.

Depends on how you see it. As a supporter of civil rights, science, and education, humanity most certainly has gotten better. Atleast those crazy fundies and primitivists know how to read and write their own signs and books. This is "better". A long time ago, a poor man would've starved and noone would care. Today, the poor man has the opportunity to recieve a check from the government every month to prevent him from starving to death (Atleast in the wealthier nations; I define wealthy as by their assets, so yes, the United States is still extremely wealthy).

[NFUN]

Better is a subjective term. When I look around "humanity" has not gotten better.

He never said humanity has gotten better, but that progress tends to be better for humanity. Necessity is the mother of invention, and want is its uncle (finesse is difficult). Whether or not humanity and the average human is better spiritually, emotionally or physically is unimportant if the average human considers themselves better off than before.

On Cyborgs:In my opinion, the singularity, whether through a MMI (I really need to beat that game) or through physical alterations or both will probably happen, though later than commonly predicted. With robotics still being a relatively new field, and our growing understanding of nerves and muscles, by the middle of the century, maybe a decade earlier, will fully-functioning prosthetics be developed and reasonably cheap. 20 years later (or earlier, depending on how organ manufacturing/printing turns out) most of the essential human organs can be synthesized somewhat effectively, potentially raising life expectancy to those who can afford it dramatically. The brain *might* be able to be replicated in another analog form, but with the demise of Moore's Law, whether or not it can be effectively digitized is up in the air. Probably it would, as when processors begin to stop getting more expensive they might get cheaper, allowing supercomputers to serve as brains, or nanotechnology will serve as a large advance in computing.

On Society: Like in all eras of history, the 21st Century will face its own share of problems, but who is to say it will be worse than the tyrannies much of the world has endured, worse than the plague, the Crusades, all of the bloody pointless wars or the rampant poverty or the Cold War? True, humanity now has the potential to wreck havoc on a global scale, but truly nobody is willing to do that. I will try to avoid politics as much as possible, but the Middle East will likely, slowly, resolve its problems, when they get tired of killing themselves and when foreign governments decide intervention is not worth it. Best Korea sabre-rattles, nothing more, and if it behaves too poorly China will decide to stop letting them exist. The world powers will stare daggers at each other, but the two possibilities of government rule don't want anything serious to happen. A plutocratic government's puppets wouldn't want all of their hard work and wealth to be wasted, and a democratic government's people don't want large scale, destructive war, no matter the antipathy they might feel towards the other side.

Internally, AGW will gradually be accepted as the effects of warming become more clear, and actions will be taken part to delay and disrupt it. It will still likely cause some instability, but instability in impoverished areas is the norm rather than the exception. Political extremism rises and falls, and moderation and agreement will be reached once again. General health might decline in wealthy nations for a time, but not so much as to threaten the nations or their wallets (severely) and eventually advances in technology and understanding of previously overlooked processes (the human microbiome for one) will allow for somewhat effective treatment for rich ailments, like obesity. Polio is almost gone, Dracunculiasis has about a dozen scattered cases, and the focus of disease eradication will spread with these two gone. The world is in through some tough,times, but nothing that can't be overcome and nothing that will doom humanity (probably).

To be continued...

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Edited July 11, 2014 by NFUN

[Rondon]

Better is a subjective term. When I look around "humanity" has not gotten better.

I have lots of issues with that perspective, nearly every single aspect of the average persons life is far better than what it was a century or two ago. The fact I love is that today the country on earth with the lowest life expectancy: Chad at 49 years, has a life expectancy 10 years longer than the life expectancy of the average person at the start of the industrial revolution, who in turn had a life expectancy 10 years higher than a person from the medieval/ancient era.

[kmMango]

Things have gotten better with humanity as a whole. Our life expectancy, infant mortality, and even poverty have gone down continuously for the past few decades. Now, if we could just get our energy under control.

Edited July 11, 2014 by kmMango

[magnemoe]

Better is a subjective term. When I look around "humanity" has not gotten better.

It has in an very dramatically way, today hunger pretty much require civil war or an absurd government, 150 years ago it was common after bad harvest even in western Europe.

[Exclipse]

I would not say we are withing reach of warp drives now, the testing is all theoretical still, based on theoretical fuels. But 2114, I think we might be launching our first interstellar missions.

[kmMango]

I'd save that for 2214.

[NASAFanboy]

I'd save that for 2214.

I think we would be doing it by the 22nd century. The ships would depart Earth and take around fourty to fifty years to arrive at their target star - some may even take a whole century. 2214 is around the time I think the ships would start to arrive and begin their mission. Considering the massive extension of the human lifetime by then through medical technologies (Allowing us to live one or two centuries), this would be a acceptable timespan. The ships would probably be funded by wealthy companies or large nations.

[-Velocity-]

It's hard to tell where we will go. I recently read an article about how "humans" might be able to escape the death of the Sun and other incredibly distant cosmic catastrophes. I had a good laugh. "Humans"- 6 BILLION YEARS from now? LOL If we still have anscestors alive in that unimaginably distant future, they will NOT be humans.

We WILL go extinct. We SHOULD go extinct. Homo habilis, homo erectus, homo antecessor, etc. they are ALL extinct. If homo sapiens never goes extinct, if we never evolve into something else, we're doing something wrong- trying to cling to a past that should be long dead. The future is evolutionary change. And this could come much sooner than natural evolution would normally allow.

I think that almost all science fiction stories and futuristic predictions, many of the ones I see on this thread, will prove to be very naive. In particular, any prediction that assumes that the future "us" will be essentially the same as the present-day "us" seems likely to prove incorrect. By 2114, we may no longer be a "human" civilization- we could just be "Earth" civilization (or if space travel and colonization accelerates, simply "Sol" civilization). That is because many of "us" may no longer be "human" or even have human origins.

This may not happen as early as 2114, but it certainly COULD. We're progressing on two technologies that could be incredibly transformative- genetics and machine intelligence.

Genetics could allow us to take a direct, intelligent hand in our own biological evolution. To date, we've been subject to the nearly-blind hand of Darwin. All we have to go on is natural selection. It's a very slow process, and now that we've essentially taken ourselves out of nature, it may not even be selecting features anymore that make us more fit to survive! An example is intelligence. Studies have shown that stupid people tend to have more kids than intelligent people, so we've probably been evolving slowly towards stupidity over the last few hundred years or so that this correlation has been true. (There is no need to have a lot of kids in the present age; we've already overpopulated this planet in terms of long-term sustainability by at least of factor of two or three in my opinion.)

Anyway, when we can take a directed, intelligent hand in our own biological evolution, it's really hard to say how things could change. Intelligent design (by US) can work changes on a timescale vastly shorter than slow natural selection and evolution.

Genetics could also lead to the creation of non-human intelligent beings- think of David Brin's Uplift series of novels. The main idea is that it could become possible to genetically modify non-human species into intelligent, technology users that would share the planet with us, make the universe a little less lonely, and add greatly to diversity. That probably can't happen by 2114 though.

If we understand genetics well enough, then we could even design our own organisms from scratch. There is much talk about nanotech among futurists- many are basically impossibly-small NEMS systems (I read Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age and noticed that many of his nanotech ideas were literally physically impossible. I'm an electrical engineer getting a Ph.D. in MEMS fabrication so I have a good ability to judge). I believe in nanotech, but I think that nature already found one of the best, if not the very best, nanotech solution for us- life, DNA, genetics. Every living cell is a wonder of nanotechnology. Why in the hell would we re-invent the wheel, when we can just modify, copy, and engineer living cells?

Anyway, the other technology that is potentially radically transformative is machine intelligence. Our fastest supercomputers are only now beginning to approach the estimated processing power of the human brain- if those estimates of the brain's processing power are true (I saw a recent study that claimed we might have under-estimated our brain's processing power by a factor of 10 to 100). It's no wonder at all that we haven't created machine intelligences- our computers are not fast enough. Once we DO have computers that are fast enough, MI becomes a software problem. It's a tough software problem, but with a fast enough computer, we don't need to worry about hardware anymore- we just need to find the right program to run.

Assuming we conquer this step, then it really becomes tough to predict the future. MI could become much smarter than even genetically modified humans, and in turn create the next generation of even smarter machines, and so on. This is known as a "technological singularity"- where technology progresses so fast due to machine self-improvement that our ability to predict the future really becomes near to impossible.

I think the assumption that machines will somehow be hostile to humans is simply based on our own xenophobia and racism. Since we're programming at least the first generations of machines, we have a big hand in what kind of values they adopt. There will be diversity in thought among the superintelligences, too. If some superintelligent machine does somehow become hostile, then it will be crushed by the vast majority of superintelligences that are benevolent/benign. Biological life also cannot survive in the locations that machine life can, so why would there even be a conflict in the first place? If the machines hated biological beings enough, then they could just go live in the Kuiper belt or some very distant and removed location.

Anyway, in the end, I see a future coming where all these sci-fi stories about the human race existing alone in the future- which is the majority of sci-fi stories- will be shown to be naive. We'll not be the human race, we'll not be human civilization. We'll simply be "civilization", or "Earth civilization", or perhaps, "Sol" civilization. And that's a good thing, IMO. If the human race never creates any "children" at all, that will be very sad.

Edited July 12, 2014 by |Velocity|

[NASAFanboy]

Almost all people regard anything that evolved from humanity is still "human". Anything that was born a human is still "human", no matter if it's a cyborg. Genetically engineered humans are still humans, and the basic human rights still apply to them. It will still be "human" civilization..perhaps in the far far future it will be referred to as "earth civilization" as evolution makes us much different, but for now, GM humans, cyborgs, and evolved humans are still humans.

[peadar1987]

Yeah, I thought that was the way evolution worked. Our common ancestor with all apes was just "ape". All descendants of that ape are still apes. Our descendants will also be apes, but also human, even if they evolve into separate species that can't produce fertile offspring.

That would be pretty cool actually, multiple subspecies of human. All more or less of the same intelligence, but with various physical adaptations to whatever conditions they had evolved under.

[magnemoe]

Yeah, I thought that was the way evolution worked. Our common ancestor with all apes was just "ape". All descendants of that ape are still apes. Our descendants will also be apes, but also human, even if they evolve into separate species that can't produce fertile offspring.

That would be pretty cool actually, multiple subspecies of human. All more or less of the same intelligence, but with various physical adaptations to whatever conditions they had evolved under.

Decent chance we get multiple species, various adaptation, various standards and companies. Most important you also got various preference.

Goth and furrys would have different ideas

[NASAFanboy]

Yeah, I thought that was the way evolution worked. Our common ancestor with all apes was just "ape". All descendants of that ape are still apes. Our descendants will also be apes, but also human, even if they evolve into separate species that can't produce fertile offspring.

That would be pretty cool actually, multiple subspecies of human. All more or less of the same intelligence, but with various physical adaptations to whatever conditions they had evolved under.

Perhaps that would've been had these apes developed civilization and advanced technologies, and this happened over thousands of years (Note how I point out that in several thousands of years, humans would've evolved to a point where it wouldn't make sense to refer to it as "human civilization). A genetically modified human is still human. A cyborg born human still is human. A century of evolution won't suddenly give us radical changes. Read the whole post, please.

[kmMango]

I think we would be doing it by the 22nd century. The ships would depart Earth and take around fourty to fifty years to arrive at their target star - some may even take a whole century. 2214 is around the time I think the ships would start to arrive and begin their mission. Considering the massive extension of the human lifetime by then through medical technologies (Allowing us to live one or two centuries), this would be a acceptable timespan. The ships would probably be funded by wealthy companies or large nations.

I was thinking that 2214 is the earliest we could have a working Alcubierre drive. Without one, the time gets impractical.

[78stonewobble]

I'm quite weary of genetically enhancing humanity too much in any specific direction. Our strength sofar has been adaptability.

Also: Ewrgh... Technological singularities... Well, if we take "honey I've shrunk the kids" as a documentary maybe... Data processing, will allways take time, energy and physical space. There will allways be hard physical limits to how compact and how fast you can make it. Even for a machine. Ie. an android will allways be limited in processing capability compaired to a supercomputer.

Smarter than humans? Sure... Infinitely smart? I think not...

I still think it's more likely that we'll be able to create artificial animals -> humans ... before we can create a true machine intelligence.

[magnemoe]

I'm quite weary of genetically enhancing humanity too much in any specific direction. Our strength sofar has been adaptability.

Also: Ewrgh... Technological singularities... Well, if we take "honey I've shrunk the kids" as a documentary maybe... Data processing, will allways take time, energy and physical space. There will allways be hard physical limits to how compact and how fast you can make it. Even for a machine. Ie. an android will allways be limited in processing capability compaired to a supercomputer.

Smarter than humans? Sure... Infinitely smart? I think not...

I still think it's more likely that we'll be able to create artificial animals -> humans ... before we can create a true machine intelligence.

Yes, we have no idea how to make an sentinel computer, not even to make one as smart as a dog, we have some very vague ideas that is all.

All current smart computers uses expert systems combined with brute force trial and error.

Far easier to uplift an animal or create smarter humans, no we don't know how to do it but its just a matter of understanding genetic better as both should be doable.

And I agree that specializing humans would be an bad idea.

[NASAFanboy]

I was thinking that 2214 is the earliest we could have a working Alcubierre drive. Without one, the time gets impractical.

Forty to fifty years is not impractical if the humans are almost immortal or can live centuries. Even a hundred year journey could happen (Considering humans will live in centuries by then/using cyropods), or even two hundred year journey.

[xcorps]

Just putting this out there: At its current speed, Voyager would take 40000 years to reach the Proxima Centauri if it were actually headed there (it isn't). Where do you expect that are we going to get the technology to send a probe to any star and have it arrive there within the next 100 years?

Nanorockets. Just around the corner.

[PakledHostage]

Nanorockets. Just around the corner.

Although skeptical, I googled "nanorockets". It seems that they are a proposed method of delivering drugs to very precise targets within the body... Have you, maybe, been partaking?

[NASAFanboy]

Although skeptical, I googled "nanorockets". It seems that they are a proposed method of delivering drugs to very precise targets within the body... Have you, maybe, been partaking?

I think the user was referring to this little toy.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19325961.500-nanorockets--the-ultimate-baby-boosters.html

[1of6Billion]

I think we're back in LEO after 1 relatively successful manned mission to Mars. Maybe a small (ISS-sized) base on the moon.