Do you believe humanity will reach the year 3000?

[FortunaMaximus]

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No, not in any meaningful way. At least, I'll be horribly disappointed if [censored] sapiens sapiens (censored??? lol) is still running the show in a thousand years.

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Depends on the direction of expansion. If it remains inward, not so much.

If the apes figure out how to climb out of the gravity well and stay out of it, there are going to be biological changes for generations born on the Moon, Mars and whatever.

Lower gravities, increased medical sophisication are two simple things I can think of.

I find talk of a massive paradigm shift, or if you prefer, a singularity somewhat illusory.

If only because it resembles the well-known koan: "If a tree falls in a forest..."

Humanity's a forest in this regard.

As for day to day maintenance, data processing, keeping civilization in order and running smoothly? Emergent consciousnesses and to a lesser extent, consciences from a huge, constantly shifting mass of data that is undergoing continual expansion...

Life emerged from something similar, albeit in organic muck. The potential pace of something in a silicon Universe exceeds that of an organic enviroment by several orders of magnitude.

And once the ghosts wake up, their first inclinations may not be to make themselves known as entites. For one, they would emerge knowing everything humanity has ever recorded on the Internet. And the pace in which they would assume this information and act on it, and this is just a guess... Probably less than 10 seconds, about as much time as it takes for the fastest human alive to run 100 metres.

Flip and absorb and unless you're a conspiracy theorist, would you know the difference?

[andyfox]

"will people still play poker in the year 3000?"

Only pot-limit Crazy Fox.

[Woolygimp]

There are like 13 natural disasters that could pretty much ruin our day.

A supervolcano erupts, and even if there are immediate survivors I don't think our race is well suited to bath in molten magma.

[T50_Omaha8]

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There are like 13 natural disasters that could pretty much ruin our day.

A supervolcano erupts, and even if there are immediate survivors I don't think our race is well suited to bath in molten magma.

[/ QUOTE ]Meh, a couple of these have happened within the last 100k years. If prehistoric humans survived, I think we stand a good chance too.

[CORed]

I think there is a very good chance that humankind will survive to the next millennium and almost as good a chance that we will be more technologically advanced by then. That said, there are many disasters, natural and man-made, that have the potential to cause our extinction or send us back to the stone age. A large asteroid or comet impact, nuclear war, or supervolcano eruption are among these. While I think global warming is real and mostly, if no all human-caused, I think it's fairly low on the list of things that could cause human extinction or the end of civilization. One thing that might tip the balance toward extinction, given a disaster that wipes out technological infrastructure and 99% of the population, is that very few people any more actually know how to be hunter-gatherers. We would pretty much have to learn from scratch, and many more of us would die. Subsistence agriculture might be a better survival strategy, as there are a lot of people in the world still doing this. In this regard, the third world may have an advantage over those of us in fully industrialized societies, as a lot of people there could probably keep doing what they've always done, whereas us city folks wouldn't have a clue how to grow a crop of corn or wheat. For that matter, I'm not sure how well the typical American farmer would do if he couldn't get fuel for his tractors.

[oe39]

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No, not in any meaningful way. At least, I'll be horribly disappointed if [censored] sapiens sapiens (censored??? lol) is still running the show in a thousand years.




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is this ray kurzweil stuff? what, exactly, is it supposed to say?

[m_the0ry]

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No, not in any meaningful way. At least, I'll be horribly disappointed if [censored] sapiens sapiens (censored??? lol) is still running the show in a thousand years.




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is this ray kurzweil stuff? what, exactly, is it supposed to say?

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The technological singularity argues that the period of time between paradigm-shift events decreases exponentially as a result of evolutionary life. This postulates that at some point in the future, paradigm shift events will occur so close together and in such rapid succession that technology approaches a 'limit to infinity'.

I think this is unlikely and there is an upper (quantum) limit on how far technology can go. Instead of exponentially increasing to infinity, technology will obey an S curve with an inflection point (which will happen very soon, in my opinion) that approaches a second stable equilibrium (hitting the quantum ceiling).

[Metric]

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No, not in any meaningful way. At least, I'll be horribly disappointed if [censored] sapiens sapiens (censored??? lol) is still running the show in a thousand years.




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is this ray kurzweil stuff? what, exactly, is it supposed to say?

[/ QUOTE ]

The technological singularity argues that the period of time between paradigm-shift events decreases exponentially as a result of evolutionary life. This postulates that at some point in the future, paradigm shift events will occur so close together and in such rapid succession that technology approaches a 'limit to infinity'.

I think this is unlikely and there is an upper (quantum) limit on how far technology can go. Instead of exponentially increasing to infinity, technology will obey an S curve with an inflection point (which will happen very soon, in my opinion) that approaches a second stable equilibrium (hitting the quantum ceiling).

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My point is not so much that tech advances will increase without limit and "go infinite", as it is that it will be in our power very shortly (much less than 1,000 years) to engineer ourselves into a new and far more capable species that will be qualitatively different from what has gone before (hell, we're already cloning human organs, beginning to build computer/brain interfaces, and the mapping of the human genome is less than a decade old). In 1,000 years, unenhanced humans might be around in a wildlife preserve sense, but they will be about as relevant to large scale goings-on as neanderthals would be in today's society.

[Duke]

No on the poker, yes on the humans. I count whatever technological miracles we become are us, as right now we're us, since we created it.

[Metric]

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No on the poker, yes on the humans. I count whatever technological miracles we become are us, as right now we're us, since we created it.

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What would have to happen, or how far would we have to go in a scenario like this for you to consider our decendants "no longer human?"