Is the natural end of human evolution that we will become super intelligent, immortal beings ie Gods

In My Humble Opinion
1

Humanity via science and tool using over the past few millennia has seen vast increases in man’s capabilities and we’ve only been doing real science for a few hundred years. It is reasonable to expect that if we continue on this path of progress for another several thousands or millions of years (which is a blink in time re the age of the earth and the universe) we will logically get to a point that we are effectively immortal intelligences able to manipulate the physical world to our whims?

Obviously we would not be “homo-sapiens” humans at that point but it is reasonable to expect that is an achievable state of existence thousands or millions of years into the future?

2

Pure speculation on my part. …

We’ll either get pretty close to that or kill ourselves off along the way. IOW the one thing that *won’t *happen is getting a bit more advanced than we are today and then simply stopping making progress.
But …

When you say “to our whims” and include things like comparisons to “gods” whatever those might be you start to go off the deep end.

Tech is not magic; it only appears to be so to beings who’re clueless about the science behind the tech. e.g. …

If in fact our current understanding of physics holds out and the speed of light really is an absolute limit everywhere and always, then no, we won’t be able to whim ourselves off to Orion IV for lunch.

3

Insert “Forbidden Planet” quote here.

4

I think it’s really impossible to know what is really possible more than the somewhat near future. Let’s just take our current state and look back some period of time and think about it. If we look back roughly 30 years into the 80s, cellphones and pcs were just starting to become something that the middle class could afford. I seriously doubt most people could really even understand what it’s like not just to live in the age of the internet, but to carry around a smart phone in our pockets far more powerful than anything they had then. We have constant access to all the knowledge humanity has ever gained, movies, tv, games, and we can reach anyone anywhere in the world instantly. Perhaps not godlike to them, but probably on the edge of what they could imagine what it could be like to live in the future. After all, seeing 80s sci-fi doesn’t really lead anyone to what we have now, except perhaps Star Trek:TNG.

So what if we go back farther, like 100 years to the early 20th century. The idea of TVs is probably vaguely at their ability to imagine, as they had movies then, but even basic computers is probably nearly impossible for them to even conceive. They had flight, but what we have now is far more advanced. I think if they saw some of our modern technology, I don’t think they’d see us as gods, but they might be lost on exactly how we could have achieved some of these things, and probably shocked that certain other things they might have expected, like perhaps flying cars, still aren’t here.

And say we go back maybe 500 years. These people don’t understand light or electricity, muchless things like flight, computers, etc. I strongly suspect we’ve have trouble even explaining some of the basic concepts to the overwhelming majority of them, not because they’re dumb, but just because it’s so far beyond anything they’d ever experience in their daily lives. Hell, they’d probably accuse us of witchcraft or devil worship.

Anyway, I think my point is, if you go back far enough, we basically ARE gods in the eyes of the people that lived at that time. Hell, we can do more than most of them would even expect of God to be able to do. We can manipulate the genome and create new forms of life. We can fly, have instant access to knowledge far beyond their understanding. If one were so inclined and had the ability to time travel, I believe one could go back several hundred years and pretend to be a prophet or a deity and probably gain a sizable following.

And as we go forward, technology grows exponentially, and there’s no sign it will slow down or stop any time soon. Surely, if we’re gods to the people of 500 years ago, the people of 500 years from now–barring a near apocalypse–will appear as gods to us, probably even much sooner because of that exponential growth. Hell, I wouldn’t be shocked if the lives humanity lives in 50-100 years will be virtually unimaginable to us as we live now. And, even those people will probably just see their lives as pretty much normal; they won’t have these feeling of living in the unimaginable future, just as we don’t relative to our ancestors. And they’ll probably wonder the same we do about what future technology brings, but it will be in the context of whatever amazing things we’ve created since.

And what if something as truly revolutionary as the internet–pretty much not foreseen just how impactful it would be–comes along. After all, I’m only in my early 30s, and the life I live now is far different than I ever could have imagined when I was growing up. What if we find a way to make free energy (or, at least in context, so cheap as to be essentially free), or time/ftl travel, or true artificial consciousness. Something along those lines could change our lives beyond our ability to understand it as we are now in a matter of a couple decades.

So, sure, I do think it’s only a matter of time before we are virtually immortal and omniscient, as least as we understand those terms now. We’re only just now starting to scratch the surface of nanotechnology and the quantum world. I have little doubt that we’ll figure out a way to manipulate the world in some fundamental way that we cannot even conceive of right now.

5

The natural end of any species is extinction. Humans have technology that in some ways takes them out of this kind of natural cycle. However, in some ways it doesn’t. Humans came close to extinction 50,000 years ago so today they have very little genetic diversity, and the genus Homo shows very little species diversity. Who knows what can happen in millions of years …

6

I could see us going backwards a few times along the way - in terms of cultural / scientific / social evolution - the occasional dark age.

We’re already transitioning out of the age of small science and into one where a bigger approach is needed / used to solve important problems. This requires a stable society (ideally a global one) where people are connected to one another. If this structure gets disrupted, which doesn’t seem wildly implausible if you’re considering big timescales, then you would have a situation of scientific progress grinding to a halt. Where it’s just not possible for small numbers of individuals to do anything new.

BTW -What is the field called that would consider the relationship between genetic evolution, and the social and scientific ‘evolution’ of humanity? It seems a fascinating question - like the OP says, we’ve being doing science for a few hundred years and the progress has been staggering. Yet what is the genetic difference between me and Henry VIII? I’m guessing not much in the grand scheme of human evolution.

7

Something I see happening to humans is not so much like what happened to the birds on the gallapogos islands. Our new world of technology has essentially opened up a new world, some will enter it and some will not. Those who do not will likley continue to breed with others like themselves as will those who have netered this technical world. I see us splitting off eventually into tow or more distinct subspecies.

8

I really don’t know how to answer this. Evolution doesn’t stop until you go extinct, so talking about any “natural end” doesn’t make sense to me.

Other than that, I think it’s more likely to be guided by unconscious social/psychological forces rather than intentional technological ones. For example, people with poor impulse control probably have more children. Poor impulse control is not a “desired” trait, but any gene that breeds faster will, over time, dominate the gene pool.

Given a choice to engineer yourself any way you want, many people will pick the option that makes them happiest, but what if that means 24/7 in a lucid dreaming state? That’s not a “desired” trait either (at least not from the perspective of ruling the universe as gods).

9

Only if there is an unoccupied niche for super-intelligent, immortal beings that can believably be attained through adaptive radiation (random mutation culled through sexual and natural selection).

I’m more than a little skeptical that

a.) such a niche exists
b.) that you could reach such a state via evolutionary processes.

I’m sure there are lots of folks who think that the niche is already occupied, to boot, but as an Agnostic, myself, I suspend judgment on that.

10

"*Walter Pidgeon found out
He really did not have clout
When invisible super things came to the door.

But Anne Francis, it’s true
Could fill out a miniskirt or two
So Frank Drebin picked her up off the floor.*"

11

“Is the natural end of human evolution that we will become super intelligent, immortal beings ie Gods”

No, but our machines will.

12

I’ve always liked the timeline given by Steven Baxter in his novel “Evolution”. Humanity’s intelligence peaks right about now-ish, when we come close to destroying the earth. From there, reduced intelligence becomes selected for, and humanity’s descendents gradually return to being unintelligent animal species. At the end, there’s this weird thing where they become symbiotes with weird plant-like things, but that’s not important right now. I suspect he did that to emphasize the often ignored fact that there is no direction to evolution; that we are not guaranteed to continue on the path that’s got us here, inevitably getting smarter and smarter and smarter. At every step, we could just as easily turn around and go down a different path, if that turns out to work better.

So, no. I don’t agree that it’s the “natural end of evolution” that we become super-geniuses.

13

The OP may want to dive into the works of the Roman Catholic paleontologist/theologian Teilhard de Chardin, who believed the ultimate goal of evolution is to unite us all into a collective conciousness. Not immortality, but certainly super-intelligence.

14

Resistance is futile. Extinction is the end.

15

Our best bet is to master cyborg technology and achieve what is essentially digital immortality.

The question is: how do we keep the essence of humanity but transfer our physical dependence outside of our bodies?

16

A great thread, post.

For me, if we can enjoy a good meal, wine and an occasional orgasm, we are already gods. I hope it continues for my ancestors.

17

The most recent issue of Scientific American has an article on how humans managed to conquer the planet. The two keys are our instinctive cooperation, and our weapons technology. When we developed the bow and arrow, we became gods…

But before that, we evolved the ability to work together in teams.

(There is a cute way of visualizing this: imagine 200 chimpanzees standing in line, boarding an airplane, sitting quietly for six hours, and then debarking patiently. It couldn’t happen! They’d be killing each other! But to us, it’s a perfectly reasonable skill.)

I think the history of civilization has been to accentuate our cooperative skills. We’ve gotten to the point where we can run a city – a nation! – without too much fighting. But we still have enough instinctive aggression that we have fist-fights, riots, and an uncomfortably high rate of rapes and murders. This is something that our “evolution” will need to address.

18

Evolution is not goal-directed, it’s opportunistic. If anything is the “natural end” of a species’ evolution, it’s extinction. And though our “tools” have evolved enormously over the past million or so years, we’re substantially the same. What would cause us to evolve into something else?

The vast majority of your ancestors are already dead.

19

Read Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon for a variety of futures for the human race, all of which happen in that book.

20

Here is a view I picked up from a community-college Intro to Anthropology 101 type of class. This might be something standardly accepted in anthropology, or perhaps just one professor’s view:

With the rise of technology, human evolution has basically come to a stand-still.

“Rise of technology” here could mean everything from as long ago as the discovery of how to use and control fire, to keep warm.

In the wild (or “state of nature” as Hobbes put it), life is nasty, brutish, and short – and, a species with good genetic diversity can survive as a species because some individuals will happen to have the right stuff. Those, then, will tend to proliferate, so that “right stuff” becomes increasingly the species standard. That’s evolution.

However, humans have developed to ability of modify our environment to accommodate us more-or-less as we are, rather than evolving to accommodate us to our environment. We build houses and wear clothes to protect us from the weather. We developed agriculture to ensure food for everyone (most of the time anyway). We developed medical technology to protect us from diseases somewhat, and reduce infant mortality, and reduce mothers’ mortality in childbirth.

Absent all these advances in technology, humans could have evolved greater in-born protections against all those kinds of things. But instead, we didn’t. Technology helps keep alive whole contingents of people who otherwise probably wouldn’t have survived, and their genes are not filtered out of the gene pool (the X-treme cases of the Darwin Awards notwithstanding). Thus, human evolution has substantially ground to a halt.