What do you see in the future of humanity?

[Yukaphile]

Since this is a sociopolitical discussion, I thought the news section would be the best. Apologies if it's not.

But yeah, basically, what do you see in humanity's future, say, 100 years from now - and then 1,000 years from now? I'll share my thoughts, and then others can share theirs. I do believe that we're on the verge of either wiping out the ecosystem, transforming it into something like Venus, or that we're going to experience a huge societal disruption, possibly through war, but you can't rule out other means, that throw us back by several centuries. Nuclear war is always possible. So is global infrastructure collapse. Or an asteroid strike. Some kind of natural disaster. Really, I just don't see that we have much of a future. Just glad I ain't gonna be around to see it.

But that's me. What do you guys think?

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

The more the average person knows, the more they realize they don't know about things like this...

[Zoinksberg]

There's a story, probably apocryphal, that while John was writing the Book of Revelations he was in a big hurry because he was afraid he wouldn't finish writing before it happened.

Veracity of this story aside, it contains a clear truth: the end of the world is and has always been at hand. Eve of Destruction. Future's so Bright. The End of the World as We Know It. The world has been on the brink as long as we have been on it. Yet here we are.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

Zoinksberg, that may be the case to an extent, but also remember that it only takes one time to take. The more power can be concentrated in the hands of one jackass with a grudge, the more advanced weapons technology gets, the more globally connected we are, the higher the risk is of a few really bad choices setting everything on fire.

Heck, you don't even need human intervention to destroy civilization. Gamma storms, the yellowstone volcano, and the ever popular Meteor of Death, plenty of stuff is ready to go off and turn us into an interesting layer of soil strata. As much as I hate Elon Musk, things are going to stay pretty damn dicey as long as we have all our species eggs in one planetary basket.

Mind you, I think that a soft apocolypse might not be as bad as Mad Max and the Preppers make it out to be. Humans have a much greater capacity for cooperation and kindness than people who are hard and bitter are willing to admit. Hell, we randomly made friends with apex predators. Assuming that descent into anarchy automatically means the world is turned into biker gangs and creepy patriarchs and that stuff ignores the spectrum of human reaction to smaller-scale infrastructure-smashing disasters.

[Riedquat]

Wall-E seems to be about as close to what I expect that I've seen. Not the piles of rubbish bit but the never-do-anything part of it.

No chance of the world ending I'm afraid. Make a big mess of, with severe unpleasant results for society, possibly, wipe out everything, that's really far-fetched scaremongering.

[Darth Wedgius]

Cosmic rays have been increasing for four years straight. But that's happened countless times as the sun's magnetic activity has waned before waxing again, and without good technology we might not have even noticed.

NASA recently detected an asteroid that could release 270 gigatons of energy (more than 10,000 times as much as Mt. St. Helens) if it hits the earth, but there's less than a thousandth of a percent chance it will actually hit.

We haven't seen a disease spread to take out even nearly half the population of a continent after the advent of modern medicine, and even air travel doesn't seem to spread the really virulent stuff around too fast to handle.

Wars and crime have been decreasing for a good long while now.

Global warming, while serious, doesn't seem to have any of the experts worried about actual human extinction.

And the only cannibal zombie attacks seem to be confined to Florida.

All this leads to one dour and all but inevitable conclusion: we're going to have to go through at least one more election cycle.

[Wargriffin]

... With my luck

You humans still won't have learned anything in 500 years and yet by only the mercy of God you'll still be here, clamoring about what virtue you've achieved or how you aren't the unlearned degenerate savages from the 21st century thus that makes your 'better' cause you've 'figured out' this life thing

and then you'll have the ones always moaning about how life is so hard and it doesn't make any sense to them, too caught up in their moral absolutes to accept the simple truth 'life is absurd' and just cause someone doesn't love you back isn't a crime

all while I wait for you to find that one solitary cave on Titan, the side of which is a crude record of an invisible War. Told in carvings and hieroglyphs, it tells of two warring races,one flesh, the other metal, a fearsome explosion, and a solitary stranger walking away from the wreckage. Beneath the stranger is a phrase scratched in stone that translates as: 'You are not alone'!"


and then I'll laugh

[Admiral X]

Turned into orange tang.




youtu.be/lGcnHvkLRb0

[technobabbler]

it all depends on the following----

will tech innovations allow the bottom 5 billion (out of 7+) people be able to enjoy a relatively comfortable first-like world lifestyle in a sustainable manner?;

will the top 500 million people be willing to voluntarily consume less a la the TNG Piccard Speech about improving oneself? ----or will governments redistribute/confiscate the wealth of the top 1%?

Or will it be a free-for-all? if there is science hits a wall in the next 50 years for corp yields or energy storage/generation/efficiency. Or if 1/3 of the world turns religiously fundamentalist etc.

100 years from now....a lot like today. Much like if you got dropped into 1919 NYC, you'd be able to manage fine as long as you had some cash, excluding segregation laws obviously.

1000 years from now? Who knows. Compare 1019 Anglo-Saxon England to London 2019. A change along the same magnititude.

1000 years from now, today's English probably might as well be a foreign language.

and assuming civilization is still chugging along, my random bet is that humans wouldn't have broken the FTL barrier though.

[TGLS]

1000 years from now, today's English probably might as well be a foreign language.

Well, unless of course formal English ossifies because of business pressures and the like. Then something moderately intelligible to English might endure to the modern day.

and assuming civilization is still chugging along, my random bet is that humans wouldn't have broken the FTL barrier though.

Honestly, I'd bet the opposite. Things proven impossible tend to remain that way (though I suppose that it's possible to construct an FTL system where relativity remains intact).