The Future of Humanity

What does our future hold? We all think about it--although many perhaps not as frequently or as far ahead as I. I'm a futurist, albeit an amateur one. I have no Ph.D's or publications to my name, nor am I a formal member of any futurist "societies." (Although I do occasionally subscribe to the Extropians email list and Alcor's Cryonics magazine.) All I have is a keen interest in science & technology, the resources (if not the time) to pursue those interests, and the desire to know what's going to happen in the future--one decade, one millennia, one eon, one trillion eons from now.
This page shows some of my projections and predictions for the future. In the near term (the next couple of centuries or so), I can foresee humanity going two ways, depending on what actions we take (or don't take) and what our priorities will be. To illustrate these two diverging paths, I have created two countries for the sake of argument, which I shall call Libertaria and the People's Republic. Although I believe that the United States will still exist 500 years from now, it will be a very different country from the USA we know today. (Just as today's USA is quite different from the USA of just a century ago.) Depending on the road we take, it will likely evolve to resemble one of the two fictional countries I describe here. I hope it's Libertaria, although I fear we are already closer to being the People's Republic.

A.D. 2050
   Petroleum reserves are virtually gone. Most energy comes from coal, natural gas (including methane ice), and nuclear. However, renewable energy--solar, wind, thermal, and biomass--are finally gaining strong footholds as energy prices rise and energy storage technologies (batteries, flywheels, and hydrogen) improve and mature. Energy production is less centralized, shifting toward community-level power generation.
   A promising new field called nanotechnology is realizing its first fruits. Ultra-powerful distributed computers, virus-hunting nanoprobes, and primitive diamond production are now possible. The "universal assembler," however, still looks to be a few more decades down the road. Average life span tops 100 years, with some living to 130.
   Computers are vastly improved. Processor chips consist of many fast nano-computers, working in parallel. Computer animation becomes indistinguishable from reality in terms of resolution & detail, fluidity, and accuracy of movement. The average at-home desktop PC will have the equivalent of 40 GB of RAM, 10 GB/sec. net access, virtually unlimited storage, a 40" flat-screen HDTV/monitor and processing power analogous to a 20-terahertz CPU. These integrated home computers handle all aspects of home automation, communications, entertainment, finances, and computation.
   Multiple space probes have visited, mapped, and analyzed every major body in the solar system, along with several minor ones--comets, asteroids, moons, even objects in the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud.. A half-dozen permanent space stations exist, used for zero-G manufacturing, space tourism, and research. There is also a new, permanent, energy-independent moon base, and serious plans are finally being made to establish a permanent presence on Mars.
   In Libertaria, the educational system has evolved from what it is now to a system that better prepares students for college and the workforce, and more emphasis is placed on learning about rational thought, the scientific method, the value of free-market economics and the importance of civil liberties. Schools have been privatized and compete for students, not just in quality and price but also by offering choices in the type, style, and focus of the curricula. The economy grows at an average annual rate of 6-7%, with inflation averaging 2%. The Dow Jones index breaks 20,000,000. The average income, in 2000 dollars, is around $80,000. Government spending as a percentage of GNP is around 0.5%. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and most welfare have been privatized. There is no federal sales tax, personal or corporate income taxes, capital gains taxes, property taxes, or inheritance taxes. There are around six major political parties, with the Libertarians holding majority control in Congress. Because of the high levels of wealth and education, crime levels are a tenth of what they are now. It is possible for most people to become financially independent by age 40.
   In the People's Republic, the educational system is pretty much the same as it is now. Students are barely taught about democracy, science or evolution; are frequently and thoroughly searched for anything illegal or objectionable; are daily forced to swear allegiance, right after the morning prayer; and are thus molded into monolithic, dependent bureaucratic drones. As a result, hardly anyone cares who gets elected, although government is regarded as the Provider, Protector, and All-Around Problem-Solver of The People. 75% of the workforce is government-employed. Total taxes of all sorts take roughly $13,000 of the average $16,000 annual income. The Dow Jones index breaks 25,000. Inflation and unemployment average about 15% in a long-stagnant economy. Military spending is way up, because it's almost cheaper to invade other countries for resources than to produce your own. (Not to mention shoring up govt. confidence.) There are two and only two political parties, who vie for the most tax dollars. The federal debt was at $22 trillion, before the government unilaterally declared all its debts Null and Void (which it starts doing yearly, despite coerced reassurances that it won't). Private media still exist in theory, but to get approval for a govt. media license, parties must submit to de facto govt. control. Internet, TV, radio, and print content are heavily regulated "for the children" and "to protect the moral fiber of the country." Poverty and ignorance, and hence crime, are rampant, and 10% of the population is serving "tough on crime" mandatory life sentences in prison for offenses as minor as second-time shoplifting.

A.D. 2500
   The entire world now uses a single currency, the credit. Hard currency and barter still exist, though smart cards are the norm.
   Hundreds of smaller languages have become moribund or extinct. 90% of the world's population now speaks one of about a dozen languages.
   Most computer programs can now be created simply by telling the computer what you want it to do and how.
   Traditional nonrenewable energy sources are gone. Renewable energy for homes, and nuclear fusion for industry are the mainstays. Deuterium is harvested from ocean water, and helium-3 from the lunar soil. Most households are energy-independent. Some that produce excess energy sell it to industry or to others.
   Nanotechnology has matured. People can now live in augmented bodies almost indefinitely, or can upload their consciousness into a reliable quantum nanocomputer. The "uploads" live at a highly accelerated rate in environments of their own design, and are virtually immortal. In the real world, material objects (including food) can be produced at almost no cost with nano-assemblers. Information (especially new product designs and new forms of entertainment), services, and real estate are the chief economical products.
   Because of a real-estate crunch, many people construct their homesteads on and under the sea, in space stations, on the moon & Mars, even in cyberspace or free-floating in Earth's atmosphere. This crunch is not so much a result of Earth's population, currently hovering around 10 billion, as it is simply a desire for more space, more room, and more ground (i.e. raw building material).
   Whole cities now exist in orbit, on the seas, and on the moon, with a few on Mars. There are colonies on some of Jupiter's and Saturn's moons, and lucrative mining operations on a number of asteroids. Plans are made to terraform Mars, and eventually Venus and Titan. The first unmanned probes, traveling at nearly half light speed, beam back information from local star systems.
   The People's Republic finally underwent an economic collapse, followed soon after by a political and governmental collapse. They had gone from leader of the free world circa 2000, to a de facto communist nation. Their citizens suffered terribly in the ensuing chaos. Having been indoctrinated with the concept that government is the cure, and with no respect for or real knowledge of the free market or individual liberties, they did the only thing they knew how to, and established yet another government to clean up the mess. It would take a strong, iron-fisted government to keep the peace and force production, no matter the human or economic cost--never mind that it was exactly this reasoning and this kind of government that got them into the trouble they were in. So the police state was followed by the fascism followed by the fiefdom followed by the "command economy," none lasting for more than a century or two before imploding. But people slowly came to realize and not fear the simple perfection of the free market, the need for respecting the rights of others, and that these things must not be taken for granted.
   These were well known and well-respected concepts in Libertaria. "The proof is in the pudding," so to speak. With very little government to speak of, Libertaria took a little longer to establish a manned presence in space, but when it did, it was because the demand was there, and no one was paying for a costly space program through involuntary taxation. At first only the large corporations could afford the space stations and lunar bases, as was originally the case with computers, but as the economy grew and the technology advanced, more and more came. With advanced nanotechnology, even individuals could go to orbit in their own vehicles, twice the size of a station wagon. When 2500 rolled around, most citizens were "born rich" and could pursue education, hobbies, projects, enterprises, and personal exploration without having valuable time squandered working to earn money for food and other necessities.

A.D. 12,000
   English as we know it is a dead language. The vast majority of humanity and its descendants speak a single primary language, Unicom. This language is flexible and modular yet very precise, making it ideal for engineers, creative writers, and computers alike.
   Nanotechnology has matured to the point that mankind can control his physical environment by thought alone, as easily as he might a cyberspace environment. "Utility fog" allows magic-like powers, like fabricating furniture seemingly out of thin air.
   All biological and genetic diseases have been eradicated. Those humans which are still created the old-fashioned way--being born--are still far superior, with larger, more complex brains, perfect organs, and a healthy physique. These qualities are soon expanded considerably further with the use of augmented intelligence and cybernetic prostheses. Most "bios" eventually go on to upload themselves, becoming immortal Superintelligences whose cyber-reality progresses millions of times faster than our present-day perception of the passage of time.
   Colonies--from scientific outposts and mining ops to thriving megacities--can now be found on, around, or in every major moon and planet in the solar system. Huge collectors mine the solar wind for anti-matter. The first settlers arrive to colonize and, eventually, even terraform planets in other star systems. Plans are made to construct ringworlds, rotating habitats encircling entire planets.

A.D. 1,000,000
Homo sapiens are a long-dead species. Our descendants have evolved from carbon-based sentients, to computer-based superintelligences. It's hard to speculate what life would be like in a society where ideas, not objects, are the items in demand. With no need to work and toil for one's survival, it might be like being an eternally-retired billionaire. The things to acquire would be education and experiences; the things to engage in would be science and the arts. With practically unlimited computing power, it's possible for populations to number in the quadrillions within a single solar system. And living life accelerated billions of times faster than now, imagine the advances that could be made with that much brain power!
With the advent of stable, macroscopic wormholes, galactic exploration and colonization proceeds at breakneck speeds. Plans are made to enclose gas giants and even entire stars in Dyson spheres. Each gas giant could provide thousands of times Earth's area for habitation; each star, millions, plus vast amounts of energy for billions or even trillions of years. And this is just for those sentients who would want to venture out of their god-level state in cyberspace. Those within, could create all this territory to wander--with custom environments and laws of physics, to boot--within perhaps a few cubic inches of quantum memory.

A.D. 5,000,000,000
   A few of our descendants, now literally countless in number, hold a memorial service for old Sol, the star that gave birth to the human race. No such memorial for Earth, though; it was long ago disassembled for its matter. Even if Earth had still existed, though, its skies would have looked very different. The sun, now a red giant, is among different celestial neighbors. The Sagittarius dwarf cluster and both Magellanic Clouds have merged with the Milky Way, which has expanded in size from the added kinetic energy, though its mass is only slightly bigger. Many of the stars in our galaxy are beginning to feel significant gravitational effects from the Andromeda galaxy, which now all but fills the northern skies.
   Both galaxies are teeming with life--our life. The levels of both diversity and intelligence are beyond comprehension. The first true meta-intelligences arise--mega-sentients composed of many superintelligences. As an analogy, think of countries, which are composed of people. By and by, countries largely act like amoebas. They seek and fight over resources, react to stimuli (weather, other countries) in mostly predictable ways, and over time strive to expand as much as possible. Sometimes one will "eat" another, or divide into smaller units. Now imagine if countries acted not like primitive amoebas, but as sophisticated sentient entities. Imagine if every neuron in your brain was not a cell that simply sparked a signal whenever it reached a certain threshold, but a thinking superintelligence able to act, react, and interact in complex ways with its environment and its many neighbors. Creating a Mona Lisa or solving Fermat's Last Theorem might seem trivial matters hardly worthy of the fraction of a second it would take to do both.
   Relativistic wormholes have made possible near-limitless energy, as well as the exploration and colonization of many of the galaxies in our local group. Plans are made for ultra-long-term universal survival, including development of energy sources to last an exponentially long number of years, far after the last of the longest-lived stars have turned to cinders or plunged into galactic black holes. The three main possibilities are:

Develop a truly limitless and infinite source of energy, something that could actually last forever. (This might be some form of harnessed zero-point energy or, on a larger scale, deriving energy from the expansion of the universe.)
Use wormholes or some other technology to "burrow" out of this dying universe into another one.
Or, find some way to create a new universe from scratch.

A.D. 100 Trillion
   The meta-intelligences of previous eras have continued to evolve. What constitutes an individual has been completely blurred. Sentient intelligences exist at many levels--quantum neuron units give rise to intelligence units which together give rise to superintelligences whose actions together form meta-intelligences which are parts of even higher forms of intelligences. This hierarchy is not cultural, merely functional. Many of the higher life forms also possess consciousnesses able to perceive different stretches of time simultaneously. For instance an uploaded being would be able to create a work of art and contemplate philosophy over a few nanoseconds, while at another level it might take pleasure observing geological formations on some planet the way we might view a very fast and long-term time-lapse video, while on a still longer level of consciousness it might direct the motions of stars in orbit around the galactic core, all the while remembering memories from its "childhood" a few trillion years ago.
   Energy is now becoming scarce again. Galactic clusters are now hundreds of billions of light-years apart, nearly all stars have long ago burned out, and there is no new naturally-occurring star formation. In order to maximize the extraction of energy from stellar sources, over billions of years our descendants adjust the courses and orbits of stars to keep them from flying out of galaxies or plunging into black holes, as nearly all would eventually otherwise. Over trillions of years, new stars (almost all white and red dwarfs) are created through judicious use of stellar collisions. A good amount of energy is also derived from the rotation of black holes.
   Options are considered for survival into the exponentially-far future. One would be to send a wormhole mouth a few hundred billion light-years into the intergalactic void and, far away out there, initiate a quantum event that would result in another big bang, "overlaying" a new young universe on top of this one. You could only repeat this a few times, however, before turning our universe into a closed one that would eventually re-collapse in a big crunch. One could also create a "basement universe" connected to ours through a wormhole; but keeping the wormhole mouth open during the early stages of inflation and expansion would be difficult at best. Another option, more drastic, would be to initiate a universal vacuum decay, collapsing our three spacial dimensions into two. This would effectively greatly increase the mass-density of the universe, but it is uncertain whether life could survive either the initial process or in the new two-dimensional universe afterward.
   But somehow, life will continue, striving for eternity.

For a far more long-term view of the universe, sans human influence, visit my Years of Tomorrow page. Also, I'd appreciate hearing any comments you may have, or if you'd like to ask me about or discuss something on this page.

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