Instead of creating flying cars, we realized that they are rather impractical. The internet and cell phone have had an even greater impact on our society than we could have expected, because they fundamentally change how we interact with information. We are essentially becoming cyborgs because each member of our society can instantaneously access the accumulated knowledge of the society through a machine that is not part of our bodies, but might as well be for the time we spend using it. This information revolution occured over the span of 50 years. In 1,000 years, will we even be recognizable as human? Perhaps then we could say that humanity will be extinct as a species, but what we replace it with might be something else entirely. Something we can't describe today. To get there, we only need a few crucial pieces of technology. Combine a general-purpose AI with effectively limitless processing power and you get an idea machine. It can design starships, write bestsellers, cure cancer, and bioengineer our brains over the course of a second. All it needs are constraints. It just needs to be told what we want it to create, and it can evolve the solution by considering billions of possible solutions and mutating them based on the result of experimentation. The only limit is processing power, really, and having an AI capable of evolving solutions to general problems. We see the processing power at our fingertips grow exponentially. Quantum computing may be the technology that gives us what we need to perform miracles. At this point, technology quickly becomes indistinguishable from magic. This is the singularity. We have no idea what it has in store. We could model the universe and understand how it works. We can learn how time works. Maybe we might learn that there is much more out there than our tiny 4 dimensional corner of reality. Maybe the way our brains experience time is fundamentally deceptive, and the heat death of the universe is only when that tiny corner we started in gets recycled for another use, while we go out adventuring in the multiverse.
I was watching this youtube video and an idea came to me. In the video, he states that Neanderthals may have been less successful because they interbred more often and had a smaller population. Perhaps something along those lines could happen to humans, especially if our numbers dropped dramatically, and then over time, we had to procreate with closer relatives. Given a few thousand more years, this could lead to our decline and eventual extinction.
Oh yeah, keep forgetting about that. It's...not just gonna affect the US if our economy collapses, yes? I mean, if we gotta go down then so be it. I just don't wanna drag the rest of the world down with us!!
yep I think you're right. It's not just the debtor it's going to fall on its ass it's all the people we owe money to.
Well it is the way of nature, more that anything else. Though we could do it to ourselves since we like killing each other over pretty much anything. But the reality is that we well evolve into something else in time, unless we manage to stop the process entirely. So of course we will be naturally phased out, and something new will pick up where we leave off at.
If we start to spread around the system, and eventually the galaxy , then it's hard to say. Of course, all things end, at least in the "big crunch" principle, but there are countless years until then. If we aren't restricted to this planet alone, our expansion could be limitless.
Not according to my world view. All people have an eternal soul and spirit that's spent somewhere after one dies. This is constantly in dispute though so I wouldn't expect that to be different here. As far as just no more humans on Earth as we know it now, I don't see that happening. My world view is centered on the Bible and there isn't anywhere in it that says that man will be extinct. Massive causalities, but there will be people here before the new heaven and new earth as well as after.
My son and I were throwing this scenario around recently. Given the easily accessible data for TALEN and CRISPR an intelligent, sufficiently educated individual with access to relatively cheap laboratory equipment could easily create, by design or accident, a staphylococcus or streptococcus strain that the human immune system cannot handle. Humanity has reached extinction-level numbers in the past. I'm not up on the battle between mitochondrial Eve vs. anthropology but at last check mitochondrial Eve was definitely in the sweet spot. Logically, if all modern humans descended from one woman among others, there couldn't have been very many women to begin with (the statistics on the genetics of only one woman out of a large group of women being the sole provider of all contemporary mitochondrial DNA approach zero.) Then we have at least two distinct human bottlenecks (one in the middle east, one in the Bering Strait region) in which scientists believe the population of breeding Homo sapiens sapiens dropped to as low as 1,000 ( do a search using "genetic bottleneck Homo sapiens sapiens") The Influenza Pandemic of 1918 killed off a lot of humans and it was a naturally occurring influenza. One wouldn't require much to intentionally create an influenza strain that evades the human immune system. (They once said creating a nuclear bomb was impossible for any but the largest countries with the best scientists and equipment. Oops.) If you want to go on an albino rabbit hunt, check out the distribution of the alleles that provide HIV resistance and the implications thereof. On the other hand, we are now capable of actively modifying both our environment and our genetics to cope with such events and advances in both immunology and genetics promise more tools for that box.
Which will happen in about a billion years time. If the species is still around by then, it will no longer be homo sapiens.
Probably but as we are the only known species capable of intentionally modifying our nucleic acids via artificial techniques for specific purposes, we could also limit changes. Who knows?
Interesting that of those responding, 87% say humanity is a "disease" to the planet. Most of that 87% are uneducated idiots but not all. Could a few of them have sufficient skill and resources to create a pathogen that "saves" the planet from humanity? Absolutely, though the instinct for self-preservation is strong even in those who think everyone else needs to die. https://www.debate.org/opinions/are-humans-a-disease-to-earth Spoiler: Why is it. ... not one of those 87% are planning their own suicides in order to save the planet from themselves? Honestly, if they believe this nonsense surely they not only have been surgically sterilized but are taking positive action to remove themselves from the petri dish.
The interesting thing about intelligent life is that our sample consists only of ourselves. Yes, most species that have ever existed have gone extinct, but none of those have had our capacity to improvise and problem solve. Somewhere, right now, some people are making plans to survive the coming ecological disasters and/or nuclear wars, and have been doing since the 1950s. If the missiles fly tomorrow, they'll get most of us, but not all of us. Which is to say: hell if I know. Anyways, here's a tangentially relevant video on this topic I saw recently:
Sampling is definitely a problem. And extrapolating based on other species' extinction is shaky because no other species can intentionally modify its environment and genetics to address a specific problem. (No, natural selection isn't what I'm talking about.) Even in a mass disease scenario some people will have natural immunity. How many is unknown but the variability in cell structure almost guarantees it. I say almost because it is possible to create a bacterial strain that uses a universal protein upon which it attaches (thinking a glycophosphate perhaps.) Same for viruses, like an engineered cold virus. But ultimately who knows?
I doubt that medical science is, in and of itself, sustainable. As a planet, humans just can't afford it monetarily. Look at the big picture. We're toast.
