I was just thinking what an infinitesimal blink one million years of time is in the parade of eons, and it made me think about what mankind will potentially be like one million years from now. Technology moves so fast now, how could you even possibly conjecture?
What will man be like one million years from now. Will our technology be so advanced it will seem like magic? What I wouldn’t give for a voyeuristic peek into the future.
I’m going to say that people will have technologically mediated wireless mind to mind data transfer abilities. It won’t be mind reading as such but your brain will be wired into a wireless data net.
Childbirth will be obsolete. Sperm and egg will all be combined and gestated artificially. Sex will be purely recreational.
Genetic technologies will allow everyone to be a healthy super genius
Money will be obsolete
Non-polluting energy generation technologies will be commonplace
Lifespans will be hundreds of years.
We will have explored many of the closer solar systems.
In fact I could probably say all these things for 10,000 AD. I can’t even imagine 1,000,000 AD.
Well considering that Homo Sapiens as we know them only originated about 250,000 years ago, in a million years time they might not even be recognizable.
I would be willing to bet that we wouldn’t be “wired” with anything. Most likely there will be little or no distinction between technology, natural life, and the genetically engineered variety.
Long, long before a million years, humanity will either be dead or replaced by it’s creations, IMHO. Whether we become those creations or are supplanted by them, that’s the question.
I tend towards thinking that by then we will have past the point (blast, what’s it called?) when we have made artificial intelligences more intelligent than we are. I doubt if organic life will survive this for long- after all, organics are weak, stupid and fragile. I think that humanity is more likely to then exist in the form of intelligences loaded into computers, reproducing (recreating?) by building new copies of themselves.
Either that, or we’ll all be dead. Wiped out by exploding sun, ecological catastrophe, aliens, take your pick.
We’ll have moved into computers, which will be running a perfect simulation of our brains, nervous system and sensory systems. This will eliminate death, since we can checkpoint ourselves. We might port ourselves after growing up a bit, and some will have children before this, but we might also have models of our DNA, mix them using simulation, throw out bad ones, and simulate the growth of the new DNA, and produce a brain model accordingly.
Sex is still around - I did say we have perfect simulations of sensory systems.
I’m hopeful that we can find some way of achieving FTL travel, but if not we can easily colonize other stars at lower than light speed once we are effectively immortal. It won’t even be boring - all we have to do is turn down our clock speed and a 100 year trip can seem like it’s taking a month.
That’s the optimistic view. More likely we’ll be extinct and the rodents will have taken over.
I think the opposite - we will have long exhausted our supply of fossil fuel and nuclear energy. The population of the USA will decline from hundreds of millions to a few million or whatever maximum number of people that can be sustained by unprocessed solar power - but their lifespans will be several hundred years long. To stay warm during the winter months, 98% of the world’s population will be living between 45° north & south latitudes.
A viable storage cell will be designed to help sustain vital systems (mainly telecommunications and medical needs) during hours of darkness. Air travel will be supplanted by solar powered trains. Due to advances in carbon nanotube technology, the trains will weigh a lot less and therefore still be able to go nearly as fast as they do now while operating on solar cells.