AD 1,000,000: Who Will Make the Cut?

Great Debates
21

For instance, what would be taught to the equivalent of high-schoolers in 1 000 000 AD?

“During the first five milleniums, the earth was divided between various peoples, who had different customs, beliefs and languages, and often fought each other. After that, humanity began to leave the Earth”?
Even that would be way too much infos for a part of human history that would be the equivalent of the 25 years between 3000 BC and 2975 BC for us. But I grant that the teachers might to say that much so that their students will at least know that the human race originally occupied only on planet.

22

Our far-flung ancestors will take a look at the content which dominates our media and will determine that Jenna Jameson was the most important person on Earth circa 2000. And who are we to gainsay them?

23

If the human race survives until the year AD 1,000,000, I don’t believe that we will be as evolved forward as many of you are proposing. Evolutionarily speaking, a million years is a mere walk in the park. Many species (including many of those so called “losers of the evolution game" - the dinosaurs) have survived multi-millions of years, and have often done so essentially unchanged. I believe that most of the evolutionary variables that spurred our species toward increased complexity since our genesis are now gone. I portend a very long period of evolutionary stagnation for the human race, perhaps even a period of retro-evolution may ensue secondary to our arguably irrational breeding habits. Technology and genetic engineering will play bigger parts than biological evolution in our future, but even those “movers and shakers” will eventually hit a brick wall if evolutionary stagnation disallows a real increase in human intelligence.

I disagree with the conclusions that are being drawn from the above stated quotes. The human race took a great leap forward between *pre-historical *and historical times. I maintain that we would recall the first insect to chew wood, the great Australopithecines, the first hominid to utilize fire, tools, the wheel and so on and so forth IF their names were recorded and those recordings survived. The deeds and names of great humans are recorded now and those recordings have the potential to survive as long as our species survives. Millennia will separate the wheat from the chafe and much of today’s recorded history will fall by the wayside, but some, I believe, will survive. What does survive should be that which is deemed most relevant to future generations: space exploration.

Armstrong and Gagarin are simply manufactured icons for the genesis of human space exploration. Other real scientists deserve the *Father of Space Exploration *title more than they do. People like Edwin Hubble and Robert Goddard are more deserving, but, great as they may be, they are not icons in the same class as the early astro/cosmonauts. Ironically, the names *Armstrong *and *Gagarin *are not ubiquitously bantered about today-they sort of ride under the radar screen. But, I believe as time marches on, layer upon layer of archaic pre-21st century recorded history will peel away, but the names Armstrong and Gagarin will march into the distant sunset like the Energizer bunny.

24

Genetic Engineering would count as a form of controlled evolution. We will be able to give human beings appendages they never had or new organs, in 1000 years, let alone 1,000,000.

Erek

25

Actually, since the majoity of ‘people’ around in the far future are IMO likely to be silicon-based (SentientSand :)), I would imagine they’d be most interested in the likes of Turing and Asimov.

26

Why would it ? It seems highly implausible that we just happen to be as smart as possible. Besides, if we can’t improve ourselves, our creations will overcome and supplant us and the answer to the OP becomes “Nothing; we have no descendents. Humanity became extinct 999,900 years ago”.

Actually, I suspect space exploration will be considered as prosaic as truck driving.

27

Is it? Ancient people chissled their archives in stone and only a mere fraction has survived the ages. We can store much greater quantities of information, but for how long? Magnetic tapes, hard drives and CD / DVDs decay. Technology changes so fast that in 50 years time you won’t even have anything capable of playing current media. In a million years, a DVD would be nothing but fosilized limestone.

28

True, but as storage mediums evolve, at any given point it’s not difficult to transfer the data from the old medium to the new. And if each new technology gives an exponential increase in the amount of data that can be stored, why would you keep everything?

29

Er, why wouldn’t you keep everything.

30

The organisms living on (and still confined to) this planet will not remember anything about specific humans, if they’re sufficiently complex to be able to remember anything at all. Civilisation as we know it will end; if the descendants of humans exist at all in that world, they will do so simply as uncivilised animals; if there’s anything resembling civilisation, it will have no direct descendancy from ours.

31

aw. Feeling a bit down are we Mangetout?
I suspect that already in a few hundred years we’ll have some brain-machine symbioses whereby humans ver. 2 can have complete recollection of every little obscure thing ever recorded and known to humanity. So everybody will make the grade, from Michael Johnson to my uncle Bob.

A million years is way too far into the future for anybody to have any reasonable inkling of what things may be like.

32

Not really; people are far too glib with their assumptions that we’ll burst forth and colonise the galaxy, when in all probability, we simply won’t - crossing interstellar space is not just a little tricky, it’s probably technically more difficult than flying through the centre of the sun. That would be hard enough on its own, but we’re not going to have the energy resources to even work towards it, not indefinitely.

This planet that was our cradle will, in all likelihood, also be our grave. This may sound like a miserable wail of defeat but really it isn’t - I don’t think it particularly matters - the universe simply doesn’t need us; nobody will mourn our passing, and that’s OK by me.

33

What is going to spur this rapid evolution? Human beings (well, proto-humans) of 1,000,000 years ago were much less advanced than us but it’s not like comparing insects to modern humans. And what with medical care and standardized education keeping “unfit” people in the gene pool, you could argue that evolution is either in stasis or “declining” (a misnomer, since evolution has no set direction, but we could be getting stupider). Will we start genetically engineering ourselves, a kind of fake evolution?

34

Quite simply, you don’t need to and it takes up space. Stuff gets lost. Files get corrupted.

A million years ago, crossing the Pacific Ocean probably appeared the same way.

35

I agree with Mangetout (who woulda thunk? :wink: ) that intra-galactic colonization may be too great a technological barrier for the human race to ever overcome. Many people harbor the false belief that after mastering space travel within our solar system, traveling to alien solar systems will be easy and quickly realized. If you compare the distance differential, you should quickly realize that taking that next step will be more difficult by magnitudes of order. I surmise that in 1 million years hence, humans may colonize terra-formed planets within our solar system, and possibly some planets around the most local star systems – if we’re lucky. As for inter-galactic travel/colonization, I believe that may be an insurmountable universal barrier for all life forms for all time.

As I’ve proposed previously, I think that human evolution will stagnate. I also believe that the effects of genetic engineering will be limited even 1 million years into the future - some limits will be biological and some will be self-imposed. Many diseases will become non-existent, a few design improvements will be engineered, some intelligence boosts will be formulated, but all in all, I think that our 1 million year progeny will more recognizable to us than what most of you are positing – slightly more improved than Captain Piccard and his crew. As much as I would like to be an immortal super-sandman, I think we will continue to be mortal, fallible, carbon-based critters for a long time.

Now, think about everything that our descendants will most likely not have in common with us – things and concepts that they will not be able to relate to – and you will be able to see what historical figures may become obsolete. No basketball; no need to remember Michael Jordan. No America; no need to remember Christopher Columbus, Thomas Paine, George Washington, etc. No religion: no need to remember Jesus, Mohammed, Confucius, Buddha. Quantum mechanics deemed outmoded; no need to remember Neils Bohr, Edwin Schrodinger, etc. The list may be very long.

Then you have to consider endeavors and concepts that may not become obsolete, but the people associated with them are non-charismatic and easily forgettable. Crick and Watson: snore. Jonas Salk: boring. Johannes Gutenberg: hand me the No-Doze. This list is also quite long.

Indeed, the folks who will live on in infamy must be associated with ideas and concepts that do not become obsolete (i.e. space travel), and they themselves must be charismatic icons for all ages (even if their charisma was an agenda-based fabrication). Our decedents may name-drop people like Einstein and Newton, but they will do so while zipping around in their space ships named, the USS Armstrong and HMS Gagarin.

36

Nonsense. Currently known science doesn’t hold out the foggiest notion of how one might fly through the center of the sun unscathed, but it does offer a least one method of interstellar travel (generation ship) that is purely an issue of engineering and economics.

37

And I suspect you’re vastly underestimating those engineering and economic difficulties; your generation ship has to function all the way there how long is that going to take, even if your destination is, say, ten light years away?

To get there in any kind of reasonable time reqires stupidly vast amounts of fuel, that adds mass you have to accelerate, that requires yet more fuel.
To not particularly care when you get there means you have to build a machine that can continue to function for tens of thousands of years.

38

Sure, but you can’t reasonably keep on extrapolating that kind of advance indefinitely; sure, people once thought that travelling more than (IIRC) twenty miles per hour would suffocate you, but that doesn’t mean we’re similarly ignorant when we regard the speed of light as a fundamental limit, because our reasons for holding that view are based on a mass of science, indeed the concept underpins a huge swathe of physics that just isn’t going to get rewritten, because it works, whereas their reason for holding the view that fast travel would suffocate you was largely that they pulled it out of their collective asses and ran with it.

It isn’t the same thing at all; if it was, you could reasonably use the same argument to support any fanciful speculation you like;
Humans in 2008 will be able to turn themselves transparent at will; think that’s impossible? Well, back in 1800, they thought man would never fly! So there!
Humans in 2009 will be able to teleport themselves at will through solid objects; think that’s impossible? Well, back in the stone age, they thought…

And so on; that technology overcame difficulties in the past does not grant us licence to arbitrarily decide that it can and will overcome every possible difficulty in the future.

39

I’d like the OP alot more if we were talking about 100,000 years instead of a million. A million years is such a obsurd timeframe that we can’t even grasp it. The entire Homo genus is only believed to have been around for 1.5 million years.

I think the claim that we’ll have eveloved to the point of not even recognizing homo sapiens is silly, but we’ll still be different.

Anyways, if we allow that evolution isn’t a limiting factor and that we’ll still be existing and discussing human history that far down the road I think I agree with the OP. Even before reading the spoiler my first thought was Neil Armstrong, though a good argument could be made for Gagarin.

Religions will be a baffling curiosity at best. Politicians will be long forgotten and rendered moot. Inventors will all blur into obscurity.

They’ll be teaching kids about the timeline of human existance and it’ll look something like this:

The first man evolves
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Man harnesses fire
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Man learns to write
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Man leaves earth
And that would end the first chapter, and the kiddies would have a pop quiz. The only name from any of that that I expect to be on the quiz is one of the first explorers, most likely Armstrong. The many facets of science that lead to it probably wouldn’t be recalled in detail, they’d just know that “man learned to understand gravity” or “man learned the nature of matter”.

40

I don’t think he’s underestimating the complications of intrestellar travel, but I think he’s saying that flying through the sun is most likely to be impossible. At least travelling very long distances can be guessed at how it might be possible.