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Our species has evolved from apes over about a million years. A billion years ago, we were bacteria. Who is this "we" that you think might be around in 50 bill

Our species has evolved from apes over about a million years. A billion years ago, we were bacteria. Who is this "we" that you think might be around in 50 billion years, to colonise the moons of Saturn?

rbanffy 4y ago
We have removed most of natural selection from our evolution. It's entirely possible we could evolve to be H. G. Well's Eloi, served by mechanized Morlocks, or just that we extinguish ourselves after a couple centuries of Idiocracy.
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  > We have removed most of natural selection from our evolution. Ho-ho! So nobody died from COVID-19, because we have defeated disease? There's a new outbreak of Ebola in West Africa. QE2 just died of "old age". New variants of COVID-19 Omicron are circulating in EU, and killing people vaccinated against the old variants. I've been reading of new polio outbreaks. But it's great that we've defeated natural selection; clearly the Brave New World has arrived.
  - samatman 4y ago
    The number of people of childbearing age who died of COVID is a rounding error, which is true of everything else you mentioned as well. Did you think the Queen was due to have a couple more heirs before her untimely passing?
  - rbanffy 4y ago
    I said most, not all. We'll eventually grow resistance to COVID or Ebola provided enough exposure, the same way we developed resistance against the flu (that, for instance, South American indigenous populations didn't when the Spanish first arrived), as we'll weed out those with propensity not to vaccinate their kids, because their kids may not be able to reproduce. But you won't die because you are not strong enough to hunt a mammoth.
jillesvangurp 4y ago
I think the more urgent question is 50 years from now when we might have general AIs that are smarter and faster than us. Maybe they'll figure something out for us. From there to the end of the solar system and eventually the universe will be quite a bit of a journey that may or may not feature some of the more wacky stuff that Ian Banks and other authors have already imagined. Given how we struggle to foresee even the very near future, I'd say all bets are off that far out.

rbanffy 4y ago

We have removed most of natural selection from our evolution. It's entirely possible we could evolve to be H. G. Well's Eloi, served by mechanized Morlocks, or just that we extinguish ourselves after a couple centuries of Idiocracy.

denton-scratch 4y ago
> We have removed most of natural selection from our evolution. Ho-ho! So nobody died from COVID-19, because we have defeated disease? There's a new outbreak of Ebola in West Africa. QE2 just died of "old age". New variants of COVID-19 Omicron are circulating in EU, and killing people vaccinated against the old variants. I've been reading of new polio outbreaks. But it's great that we've defeated natural selection; clearly the Brave New World has arrived.
- samatman 4y ago
  The number of people of childbearing age who died of COVID is a rounding error, which is true of everything else you mentioned as well. Did you think the Queen was due to have a couple more heirs before her untimely passing?
- rbanffy 4y ago
  I said most, not all. We'll eventually grow resistance to COVID or Ebola provided enough exposure, the same way we developed resistance against the flu (that, for instance, South American indigenous populations didn't when the Spanish first arrived), as we'll weed out those with propensity not to vaccinate their kids, because their kids may not be able to reproduce. But you won't die because you are not strong enough to hunt a mammoth.

jillesvangurp 4y ago

I think the more urgent question is 50 years from now when we might have general AIs that are smarter and faster than us. Maybe they'll figure something out for us. From there to the end of the solar system and eventually the universe will be quite a bit of a journey that may or may not feature some of the more wacky stuff that Ian Banks and other authors have already imagined. Given how we struggle to foresee even the very near future, I'd say all bets are off that far out.