7 ms·

The Next Ten Billion Years

85 points by IsaacL 13y ago

z92 13y ago
Relevant Timeline of far future from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future To me the most interesting point in the future is 120 trillion years: when all the stars in the universe have exhausted their fuel, and the Universe has gone dark.
- coldtea 13y ago
  >To me the most interesting point in the future is 120 trillion years: when all the stars in the universe have exhausted their fuel, and the Universe has gone dark. Sorry, but doesn't that sound like the LEAST interesting point in the universe?
  - iliis 13y ago
    Well, you may never have read Asimov's "Last Question": http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm
    - shijie 13y ago
      I have somehow never read that. It was stunning in its breadth. I loved it. It made me ponder the significance of the series of self-perpetuating chemical reactions that comprises my biological existence. Now I'm sitting here at my computer, waxing existential, when I'm supposed to be building the auth and permissions section for an API...
    - padobson 13y ago
      [SPOILER] If he was going to invoke a biblical narrative where an infinite number of immortal humans, having evolved past the need for their material bodies, merge into a single, ultra-creative consciousness, he could have at least tipped his cap to the duality of the nature of man and had a large number of those minds (1/3 for maximum compatibility with the biblical narrative) reject cohesion with the singular consciousness and descend into the chaos to fuel its contrarian existence to the ultimate plan of the universe. [/SPOILER] Or, you know, whatever.
    - coldtea 13y ago
      I've actually read it many times. How does a fictional story becomes an argument about the heat death of the universe being "interesting"? You expect the same things as in the story to happen then?
melloclello 13y ago
This is awesome
didgeoridoo 13y ago
Great, I love to start my day with a bit of existential horror. I had some stuff to do, but now I think I'll just stare into the middle distance and contemplate the pointlessness of it all.
- lukeqsee 13y ago
  Makes one wonder "why" and become very nihilistic. What's the point of anything? (Which obviously results in the answer of 'nothing'.) This was a very well-written story. Let's remember, it's just a story, just a conjecture, just a spinning of a tale. Perhaps it's logical or perhaps it's not, but in the end humans have tenaciously clung to the idea it all has meaning, and I expect we will until the end, for better or worse.
- sedev 13y ago
  There's a follow-up post[1] where he talks more about the reactions: "A vision of a future in which civilizations, species and worlds follow life cycles like those of all other natural things didn’t leave them furious or depressed. Their comments instead featured such words as “comforted,” “delighted,” and “awed.” It’s easy, and also common, to mischaracterize such feelings as simple schadenfreude at the failure of humanity’s overinflated ambitions, but there’s something rather more significant going on here. Not one of the readers who made these comments made gloating remarks about the fate of humanity or the Earth. Rather, what comforted, delighted, and awed them was the imagery of Nature’s enduring order and continuity that I wove throughout the narrative, and brought to the tightest focus I could manage in the last two paragraphs. " [1]: http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2013/09/a-sense-of-homecoming.html http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2013/09/a-sense-of-ho...
- ddoolin 13y ago
  I guess it's horror in a very wide sense. But me and any memory of me will be long gone before any of this even begins to happen. I had my time here, enjoyed it, and it'll come to an end, as all things eventually do.
- api 13y ago
  The spiritual tradition from which the author of this piece speaks -- and it's more warmed-over quasi-hippiedom than anything genuinely Pagan or Druidic -- is a repeated affirmation of precisely that.
gonvaled 13y ago
Great reading! Things could of course play out like this but, since we have no really no clue, aiming for the stars is the most exciting alternative. The biggest mistake we could be making right now is to waste the current free oil reserves that are probably necessary to move to the next technological level. But I guess capitalism leaves no other option: we need the profit motive to keep things running. Maybe another economic system would be better suited to reach grand goals, but which one?
- LogicalBorg 13y ago
  Utopianism, of course. Imagine a civilization fueled entirely by hopium!!
  - gonvaled 13y ago
    I am not suggesting that capitalism is not the economic system most suited for human nature: it probably is (at least more suited than communism, if we accept that the theory of evolution can be applied to historical processes, and thus capitalism has survived as the fittest alternative) What I am suggesting is that precisely because human nature is only compatible with capitalism, we are not going to be able to tackle long term existential problems.
    - LogicalBorg 13y ago
      That is a sensible criticism. I agree that the human race is wasting absurdly vast quantities of oil and that they seem to display no more awareness of this issue than the average monkey. I'm not sure if "capitalism" is the problem though, since greed and waste existed long before its ideas were articulated. I sometimes thing our economic system should be overhauled with better accounting techniques so we actually count the expenditure of resources as a loss rather than as a profit as we currently do, under the rather dubious assumption that more consumption is always better. I guess we'll find out how badly we have erred when the future teaches us. I hope its lessons are gentle...
      - 13y ago
jbattle 13y ago
Interesting, but how does humanity rise from a non-industrial dark age to high technology without any reserves of fossil fuels? I say we get only one shot at this - if we our our grandchildren blow it, we remain at ... ok this is stupid ... ewok levels of civilization forever after.
- ceautery 13y ago
  Well, there are worse fates than being cuddly.
- mfringel 13y ago
  Actually, you just have to wait until the planet "generates" more oil via geological processes. You're just going to be waiting a very very long time.
  - xerula 13y ago
    When our great deposits of fossil fuels were being laid down in the Carboniferous, efficient decomposers / recyclers of dead wood and plant material (chiefly higher basidiomycete fungi) had not yet evolved. Nowadays there is much less opportunity for dead organic material to accumulate in the kind of quantities that geological processes can turn into significant oil reserves.
- alexeisadeski3 13y ago
  Solar?
arethuza 13y ago
This reminds me of a Time Team special where they pointed out that the island of Great Britain has completely lost its human population and be re-populated at least seven times so far.
- arcadeparade 13y ago
  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1528151/Humans-tried-and-failed-to-colonise-Britain-seven-times.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1528151/Humans-tried-and-fai...
  - wobbleblob 13y ago
    "It reports that sea level rises and cold climates intervened to push pioneering groups of humans out again and again until our ancestors were finally established some 12,000 years ago." I wonder if the word finally is misplaced there. During the next glacial period, the area may become uninhabitable again. In those past 700k years they talk about, there may have been periods much longer than 12k years that the area was inhabited. Each of those previous 7 settlement attempts would probably have seemed like the finally successful attempt to the people at the time.
    - wavefunction 13y ago
      The article mentioned one gap of 100,000 years between colonization attempts.
- CmonDev 13y ago
  And the population was always reaching millions.
wobbleblob 13y ago
I wonder on what basis the author assumes that the next glacial period is a million years from now. This would be a clear break with the last million years (100k year severe glaciations separated by 10-15k year interglacials), or of the first half of the pleistocence (mild glaciations every 40k years). If the holocene interglacial really is extended to a million years, it would likely be enough time for the polar ice caps to disappear completely, ending the quarternary ice age altogether.
- bradleyland 13y ago
  I thought that at first too, but then I realized that there is no explicit declaration that there weren't many glacial periods in-between. It just so happens that a million years from now, the earth is in a glacial period. Then again, I don't know what the "holocene interglacial" is, so your other points are probably well founded.
  - wobbleblob 13y ago
    The holocene interglacial is what we are living in now. It started 12000 years ago, at the end of the last glacial period. This extended period of glaciations and interglacials together is called the quarternary ice age, also known as the current ice age. Ice ages are the periods in earth's geological history when permanent ice caps and glaciers existed at the poles and in mountain ranges. We think of that situation as normal, but it has only existed for the last 2 to 2.5 million years. The high albedo (reflection of sunlight) of the ice sheets at the poles cools the planet down further, so an ice age reinforces itself. In other words, we are now living in a warmer period inside an ice age. There have been other ice ages before, but the last one before the current ended about 100 million years before the first dinosaurs evolved.
Houshalter 13y ago
Contrary what reading the news might lead you to believe, the world is better off than it's ever been and continuing to get better. Why does the author believe technological progress will halt tomorrow?
cousin_it 13y ago
I feel there's a much higher chance that humanity will drastically change its own fate (for better or worse) in the next hundred years, and any forecasts beyond that have very wide error bars. Artificial intelligence is the big one (it ends the current era of "business as usual" no matter whether it's friendly or not), but there's also nanotech, superviruses coming from desktop bio-hackery, mind uploading, good old nuclear terrorism, etc. For "business as usual" to continue and things like climate change to stay relevant, we need to dodge all of the above, which is difficult. For a more thoughtful take on the future of humanity, Google for the keywords "existential risk". Bostrom's writeup is a good start: http://www.nickbostrom.com/existential/risks.html http://www.nickbostrom.com/existential/risks.html
- protonfish 13y ago
  Technology, even AI, is only a tool - whether it is used for good or evil depends on the hand that wields it. There is no reason to believe that any new technology will help humankind as a whole as long as those that desire power are lavishly rewarded for their malevolent acts. Our society today is defined by war, authority that refuses accountability, and oppression of anyone with less power than ourselves. We have plenty of technology to solve all of our problems already - more will not save us.
  - smellf 13y ago
    Strong AI is more than a tool - it's life, created by humans and more intelligent than we are. How could that not change everything?
    - protonfish 13y ago
      That is if Strong AI is not just a myth. I think that intelligence is simply a process that determines behavior to accomplish a goal. The question becomes, what goals will people program these genius machines to accomplish?
- clord 13y ago
  Earlier generations could have said the same thing before each of: the internet, petroleum, flight, biotech, robotics, atomic bombs, the electric grid, the automobile, etc. AI, nanotech, biohacking, and other possible future technologies just don't seem anywhere near as disruptive as that first list. They'll get incorporated into the "business as usual" machine if they come to pass at all — and much more easily than, say, atomic bombs were.
nezumi 13y ago
Reading the follow-up article he talks more about the 'folk mythology of progress' and speaks of the cycle of nature (intelligent species and civilizations) as a more fundamental truth. Here's a counter proposition: yes, the processes of nature are supremely powerful and yes, humans are apt to make life difficult for ourselves and yes, progress isn't a given. What we call progress is really just humanity fulfilling our ecological destiny of adapting to new niches, just like every other species. But by destroying our environment, we are creating the very evolutionary pressure necessary to force our own adaptation - which we will continue to rightly term 'progress'.
jere 13y ago
>Ten years from now... Among those who recognize that something’s wrong, one widely accepted viewpoint holds that fusion power, artificial intelligence, and interstellar migration will shortly solve all our problems, and therefore we don’t have to change the way we live. Oh, of course. Dontcha know that, during that time, we'll be no more than 6 years away from a computer passing the Turing Test? http://longbets.org/1/ http://longbets.org/1/ And we'll be only ~20 years away from the singularity which solves everything. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity But in all seriousness, this was quite entertaining. I don't know if we have any reason to expect another (highly) intelligent species to arise in the next 100 million years. Were there any obstacles in the past 100 million years that prevented an intelligent species from developing before humans?
- protonfish 13y ago
  Just because they don't make jewelry and weapons doesn't mean some other animals (elephants, whales, other apes) are not highly intelligent. I prefer to call civilizations like ours "technological" and not pass judgement on the smarts of other creatures because they don't like building things.
  - jere 13y ago
    I wasn't sure what phrasing to use (and I definitely didn't like the simple term "intelligent species"). I kind of agree with you, but I think it's a little silly to say only our technology distinguishes us. I'm reminded of Anathem here: even if we all lived like monks shunning technology, we'd still be set apart by our mathematic, scientific, and philosophical reasoning.
    - maxerickson 13y ago
      The monks in Anathem are technologists that shun distraction.
      - jere 13y ago
alexeisadeski3 13y ago
What's so wrong with solar power?
- rbosinger 13y ago
  Ask the Corbicules!
rbosinger 13y ago
That was strangely relaxing.
mathattack 13y ago
Very interesting work. I find it very hard to imagine that a society capable of building skyscrapers and venturing into space won't leave more clues of it's existence to subsequent societies. Certainly it will be much more permanent than what the Mayans are leaving us. Perhaps the clues will be cities, perhaps it will be radiation, perhaps it will be stripped land.
- ekianjo 13y ago
  I don't share the vision of the author but you'll be surprised how quickly any building may collapse once not maintained: plants will grow under concrete and end up breaking it over years and years, and erosion will progressively do the job as well. And sidementation will end up covering all that's left over centuries: look in Egypt, most of the ruins we found were deep under several dozens of meters of sand.
  - mathattack 13y ago
    I think the point of the article is not the end truth of what he says, but just to encourage speculation, so I think all of us will draw different end conclusions. I doubt that we'll have as many iterations of society as he suggests. At some point we'll do something that kills all of us, and will then hand it off to the next species. If you look at Detroit, it doesn't take long for nature to take back buildings. I would just think that there are certain artifacts or clues that would be somehow visible. We are leaving much more artifacts than every civilization before us put together. But I might just be inserting my short term bias into the situation.
  - fzltrp 13y ago
    Sand is not sedimentation.
nkarpov 13y ago
Although not completely related, this reminds me of Asimov's famous story... The Last Question. Must read. http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm
- fennecfoxen 13y ago
  It reminds me of only-partially-related C.S. Lewis poetry. http://allpoetry.com/poem/8508345-Re-adjustment-by-C_S_Lewis http://allpoetry.com/poem/8508345-Re-adjustment-by-C_S_Lewis
chsonnu 13y ago
If you liked this you may like Asimov's The Last Question: http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm
- GrantS 13y ago
  True, and even more similar to Olaf Stapledon's 1930 novel "Last and First Men" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_and_First_Men http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_and_First_Men And on a much shorter time-scale, similar to Clifford Simak's novel-ish collection of stories "City" from the 1940s onward: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_(novel) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_(novel)
friggeri 13y ago
Great read, reminds me a lot of Last and First Men. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_and_First_Men http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_and_First_Men
vlucas 13y ago
This is pretty bleak and pessimistic. As an optimist, I'd like to think that our advancements in technology will save us eventually. We have made significant advancements in clean energy like wind and solar, and those advancements won't stop. We have also made significant advancements in crop yields, etc. Of course, by the time those power sources are so widespread, there will be much more pollutants in the atmosphere from fossil fuel power sources, so who knows. Anyone have a future that is a little more rosy than this? Not looking for a utopia here, but just something other than the complete fall of civilization thousands of times over.
kazagistar 13y ago
Artificial intelligence not being practical is a silly conclusion. We already have intelligence: in a few million years of fucking around with existing intelligence, I am pretty sure we can make some significant progress. The insistence on it being silicon is what causes people to get the wrong idea.
prithee 13y ago
If you are at all interested in constructing these timeline focused thought experiments I highly recommend "microscope" an RPG by Ben Robbins. http://www.lamemage.com/microscope/ http://www.lamemage.com/microscope/
wavefunction 13y ago
This brings up a thought I've had repeatedly (an admittedly unscientific one) when considering human history. Considering that it "only" took us several thousand years to transform ourselves from hunter-gatherers to our current technologies, it makes little sense that this is the first human culture to reach the point we've reached. Then I try to dissuade myself from such a notion, rationalizing that if that were the case, we'd know it from some sort of evidence by this point. And yet, I still can't shake the notion that this "shouldn't" be the first time around. Weird, especially since I consider myself a hardcore skeptic.
- lettergram 13y ago
  Even stranger, our sun has collapsed and been rebuilt at least once (estimates are 3 times). Makes you wonder how many civilizations could have been built. More specifically to your comment, even on our planet, the evidence of civilization would be hard to find if there was a civilization several million or even a few hundred thousand years ago. "Dust to dust"
  - sounds 13y ago
    Our sun has collapsed and been rebuilt at least once? Google search for "sun collapsed rebuilt 3 times" lists Stonehenge, which seems to indicate Google can't find anything on the subject. I really don't understand what you're saying. Can you please elaborate?
    - clord 13y ago
      I think it's a reference to the supernova that occurred before our sun existed, which created the seed material for the sun to form from. It had to have happened because there are heavy elements on earth that only form in a supernova.
    - 7b64f0f2 13y ago
      You can probably determinate the number of supernovas/hypernova/etc that happened before the sun by analyzing the proportions of different elements in the solar system and then use the various equations to compute how many explosions you would need to create the heavy elements (heavier than iron) that are observable since they are mostly created in these situations. You probably can get these equations by analyzing nebula composition and the type of star which was there. Also, the type of star gives an indication of it's history.
lettergram 13y ago
I think the author ignores several important facts. For one, humans are high on the food chain and in turn may not be as robust as say roaches, but we can construct pretty much everything. We will evolve and change, but the extinction of the human race would require several Unprecedented events. Even a large meteorite striking Earth would have trouble killing off humanity (obviously if it's big enough...). Furthr, algae reduce carbon much MUCH more efficiently than plants and can reproduce much faster. Even more we already have processes of turning algae to oil (although the oil is of poor quality). All that being said the more carbon dioxide is released the quicker/more algae will grow and the more oxygen and oil can be produced. In other words, obviously there are limits and I challenge you (the author or reader) to do research, but although humanity has problems. As a species we are doing alright.
ebertx 13y ago
The most fascinating part about this post is seeing how differently people react to it: nihilism, awe, wonder, etc. The story seems to be a rorschach test of sorts.
userulluipeste 13y ago
I like better the version in which a civilization could colonize the entire galaxy in about 5 to 50 million years (with low-speed means of space travel): http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=where-are-they&page=3 http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=where-are-t...
CmonDev 13y ago
A perfect example of a naive linear prediction. The thing is that progress is not linear.
roc 13y ago
This projection seems to hinge entirely on the idea that you can't build solar panels, wind farms and hydro dams without cheap oil. As those have only become more economical as oil has become more expensive, I find it particularly difficult to buy into long-run projections based upon that unexplored/unexplained/unjustified assumption. Setting up humanity as reliant on fusion, or massive increases in new energy generation in general, also strikes me as a red herring. Likely: we just won't need it. Even if (this time) it really is ready in ~50 years, guess what? Population is going to peak and begin to fall in ~50 years as more countries become wealthy, healthy and secure enough to make large families a poor reproductive strategy. And is there any reason to expect that energy demand is going to increase fast enough with a static-to-falling population (in the future) to match or outstrip the growth of energy demand with a growing population (today)? Western per-capita energy use is flat. [1] So I don't see how. Absent some trend of every nation transitioning to US-level per-capita energy use [2], the energy needed by the ~9B humans living in 2050 likely represents the peak of world energy demand. If you're going to predicate the collapse of civilization on a shortfall of energy generation, you need to show how that happens in the next 50 years, which is well within the capability of existing coal, oil and gas resources. Further, an assumption of a war-wracked world hand-waves away the question of how on earth nuclear-armed powers are able to go to war with one another. This has been an unsolved problem in modern geopolitics for nearly 70 years now. These powers can certainly squabble via proxies. But, by definition, no major harm can be on the line lest it escalate directly into the conflict no-one can win. And existential threat is the major harm. So how could a nation decide that certain destruction is at all preferable to incremental destruction? [1] Some countries are at a higher level than others, but all the western countries are essentially flat. chart: http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/international/energy%20per%20capita.png http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/international/en... from: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/08/its-official-western-europeans-have-more-cars-per-person-than-americans/261108/ http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/08/its... [2] Any assumption that every nation will transition to US-levels of per-capita energy use seem unjustified by the data. European and Japanese levels have been flat to falling-modestly for some time. It's much more likely that US energy use will begin to fall, as suburban sprawl and huge houses become increasingly uneconomical and we move closer together, drive less, build more sensibly, telecommute more, etc.

85 points by IsaacL 13y ago

z92 13y ago

Relevant Timeline of far future from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future To me the most interesting point in the future is 120 trillion years: when all the stars in the universe have exhausted their fuel, and the Universe has gone dark.

coldtea 13y ago
>To me the most interesting point in the future is 120 trillion years: when all the stars in the universe have exhausted their fuel, and the Universe has gone dark. Sorry, but doesn't that sound like the LEAST interesting point in the universe?
- iliis 13y ago
  Well, you may never have read Asimov's "Last Question": http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm
  - shijie 13y ago
    I have somehow never read that. It was stunning in its breadth. I loved it. It made me ponder the significance of the series of self-perpetuating chemical reactions that comprises my biological existence. Now I'm sitting here at my computer, waxing existential, when I'm supposed to be building the auth and permissions section for an API...
  - padobson 13y ago
    [SPOILER] If he was going to invoke a biblical narrative where an infinite number of immortal humans, having evolved past the need for their material bodies, merge into a single, ultra-creative consciousness, he could have at least tipped his cap to the duality of the nature of man and had a large number of those minds (1/3 for maximum compatibility with the biblical narrative) reject cohesion with the singular consciousness and descend into the chaos to fuel its contrarian existence to the ultimate plan of the universe. [/SPOILER] Or, you know, whatever.
  - coldtea 13y ago
    I've actually read it many times. How does a fictional story becomes an argument about the heat death of the universe being "interesting"? You expect the same things as in the story to happen then?

melloclello 13y ago

This is awesome

didgeoridoo 13y ago

Great, I love to start my day with a bit of existential horror. I had some stuff to do, but now I think I'll just stare into the middle distance and contemplate the pointlessness of it all.

lukeqsee 13y ago
Makes one wonder "why" and become very nihilistic. What's the point of anything? (Which obviously results in the answer of 'nothing'.) This was a very well-written story. Let's remember, it's just a story, just a conjecture, just a spinning of a tale. Perhaps it's logical or perhaps it's not, but in the end humans have tenaciously clung to the idea it all has meaning, and I expect we will until the end, for better or worse.
sedev 13y ago
There's a follow-up post[1] where he talks more about the reactions: "A vision of a future in which civilizations, species and worlds follow life cycles like those of all other natural things didn’t leave them furious or depressed. Their comments instead featured such words as “comforted,” “delighted,” and “awed.” It’s easy, and also common, to mischaracterize such feelings as simple schadenfreude at the failure of humanity’s overinflated ambitions, but there’s something rather more significant going on here. Not one of the readers who made these comments made gloating remarks about the fate of humanity or the Earth. Rather, what comforted, delighted, and awed them was the imagery of Nature’s enduring order and continuity that I wove throughout the narrative, and brought to the tightest focus I could manage in the last two paragraphs. " [1]: http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2013/09/a-sense-of-homecoming.html http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2013/09/a-sense-of-ho...
ddoolin 13y ago
I guess it's horror in a very wide sense. But me and any memory of me will be long gone before any of this even begins to happen. I had my time here, enjoyed it, and it'll come to an end, as all things eventually do.
api 13y ago
The spiritual tradition from which the author of this piece speaks -- and it's more warmed-over quasi-hippiedom than anything genuinely Pagan or Druidic -- is a repeated affirmation of precisely that.

gonvaled 13y ago

Great reading! Things could of course play out like this but, since we have no really no clue, aiming for the stars is the most exciting alternative. The biggest mistake we could be making right now is to waste the current free oil reserves that are probably necessary to move to the next technological level. But I guess capitalism leaves no other option: we need the profit motive to keep things running. Maybe another economic system would be better suited to reach grand goals, but which one?

LogicalBorg 13y ago
Utopianism, of course. Imagine a civilization fueled entirely by hopium!!
- gonvaled 13y ago
  I am not suggesting that capitalism is not the economic system most suited for human nature: it probably is (at least more suited than communism, if we accept that the theory of evolution can be applied to historical processes, and thus capitalism has survived as the fittest alternative) What I am suggesting is that precisely because human nature is only compatible with capitalism, we are not going to be able to tackle long term existential problems.
  - LogicalBorg 13y ago
    That is a sensible criticism. I agree that the human race is wasting absurdly vast quantities of oil and that they seem to display no more awareness of this issue than the average monkey. I'm not sure if "capitalism" is the problem though, since greed and waste existed long before its ideas were articulated. I sometimes thing our economic system should be overhauled with better accounting techniques so we actually count the expenditure of resources as a loss rather than as a profit as we currently do, under the rather dubious assumption that more consumption is always better. I guess we'll find out how badly we have erred when the future teaches us. I hope its lessons are gentle...
    - 13y ago

jbattle 13y ago

Interesting, but how does humanity rise from a non-industrial dark age to high technology without any reserves of fossil fuels? I say we get only one shot at this - if we our our grandchildren blow it, we remain at ... ok this is stupid ... ewok levels of civilization forever after.

ceautery 13y ago
Well, there are worse fates than being cuddly.
mfringel 13y ago
Actually, you just have to wait until the planet "generates" more oil via geological processes. You're just going to be waiting a very very long time.
- xerula 13y ago
  When our great deposits of fossil fuels were being laid down in the Carboniferous, efficient decomposers / recyclers of dead wood and plant material (chiefly higher basidiomycete fungi) had not yet evolved. Nowadays there is much less opportunity for dead organic material to accumulate in the kind of quantities that geological processes can turn into significant oil reserves.
alexeisadeski3 13y ago
Solar?

arethuza 13y ago

This reminds me of a Time Team special where they pointed out that the island of Great Britain has completely lost its human population and be re-populated at least seven times so far.

arcadeparade 13y ago
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1528151/Humans-tried-and-failed-to-colonise-Britain-seven-times.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1528151/Humans-tried-and-fai...
- wobbleblob 13y ago
  "It reports that sea level rises and cold climates intervened to push pioneering groups of humans out again and again until our ancestors were finally established some 12,000 years ago." I wonder if the word finally is misplaced there. During the next glacial period, the area may become uninhabitable again. In those past 700k years they talk about, there may have been periods much longer than 12k years that the area was inhabited. Each of those previous 7 settlement attempts would probably have seemed like the finally successful attempt to the people at the time.
  - wavefunction 13y ago
    The article mentioned one gap of 100,000 years between colonization attempts.
CmonDev 13y ago
And the population was always reaching millions.

wobbleblob 13y ago

I wonder on what basis the author assumes that the next glacial period is a million years from now. This would be a clear break with the last million years (100k year severe glaciations separated by 10-15k year interglacials), or of the first half of the pleistocence (mild glaciations every 40k years). If the holocene interglacial really is extended to a million years, it would likely be enough time for the polar ice caps to disappear completely, ending the quarternary ice age altogether.

bradleyland 13y ago
I thought that at first too, but then I realized that there is no explicit declaration that there weren't many glacial periods in-between. It just so happens that a million years from now, the earth is in a glacial period. Then again, I don't know what the "holocene interglacial" is, so your other points are probably well founded.
- wobbleblob 13y ago
  The holocene interglacial is what we are living in now. It started 12000 years ago, at the end of the last glacial period. This extended period of glaciations and interglacials together is called the quarternary ice age, also known as the current ice age. Ice ages are the periods in earth's geological history when permanent ice caps and glaciers existed at the poles and in mountain ranges. We think of that situation as normal, but it has only existed for the last 2 to 2.5 million years. The high albedo (reflection of sunlight) of the ice sheets at the poles cools the planet down further, so an ice age reinforces itself. In other words, we are now living in a warmer period inside an ice age. There have been other ice ages before, but the last one before the current ended about 100 million years before the first dinosaurs evolved.

Houshalter 13y ago

Contrary what reading the news might lead you to believe, the world is better off than it's ever been and continuing to get better. Why does the author believe technological progress will halt tomorrow?

cousin_it 13y ago

I feel there's a much higher chance that humanity will drastically change its own fate (for better or worse) in the next hundred years, and any forecasts beyond that have very wide error bars. Artificial intelligence is the big one (it ends the current era of "business as usual" no matter whether it's friendly or not), but there's also nanotech, superviruses coming from desktop bio-hackery, mind uploading, good old nuclear terrorism, etc. For "business as usual" to continue and things like climate change to stay relevant, we need to dodge all of the above, which is difficult. For a more thoughtful take on the future of humanity, Google for the keywords "existential risk". Bostrom's writeup is a good start: http://www.nickbostrom.com/existential/risks.html http://www.nickbostrom.com/existential/risks.html

protonfish 13y ago
Technology, even AI, is only a tool - whether it is used for good or evil depends on the hand that wields it. There is no reason to believe that any new technology will help humankind as a whole as long as those that desire power are lavishly rewarded for their malevolent acts. Our society today is defined by war, authority that refuses accountability, and oppression of anyone with less power than ourselves. We have plenty of technology to solve all of our problems already - more will not save us.
- smellf 13y ago
  Strong AI is more than a tool - it's life, created by humans and more intelligent than we are. How could that not change everything?
  - protonfish 13y ago
    That is if Strong AI is not just a myth. I think that intelligence is simply a process that determines behavior to accomplish a goal. The question becomes, what goals will people program these genius machines to accomplish?
clord 13y ago
Earlier generations could have said the same thing before each of: the internet, petroleum, flight, biotech, robotics, atomic bombs, the electric grid, the automobile, etc. AI, nanotech, biohacking, and other possible future technologies just don't seem anywhere near as disruptive as that first list. They'll get incorporated into the "business as usual" machine if they come to pass at all — and much more easily than, say, atomic bombs were.

nezumi 13y ago

Reading the follow-up article he talks more about the 'folk mythology of progress' and speaks of the cycle of nature (intelligent species and civilizations) as a more fundamental truth. Here's a counter proposition: yes, the processes of nature are supremely powerful and yes, humans are apt to make life difficult for ourselves and yes, progress isn't a given. What we call progress is really just humanity fulfilling our ecological destiny of adapting to new niches, just like every other species. But by destroying our environment, we are creating the very evolutionary pressure necessary to force our own adaptation - which we will continue to rightly term 'progress'.

jere 13y ago

>Ten years from now... Among those who recognize that something’s wrong, one widely accepted viewpoint holds that fusion power, artificial intelligence, and interstellar migration will shortly solve all our problems, and therefore we don’t have to change the way we live. Oh, of course. Dontcha know that, during that time, we'll be no more than 6 years away from a computer passing the Turing Test? http://longbets.org/1/ http://longbets.org/1/ And we'll be only ~20 years away from the singularity which solves everything. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity But in all seriousness, this was quite entertaining. I don't know if we have any reason to expect another (highly) intelligent species to arise in the next 100 million years. Were there any obstacles in the past 100 million years that prevented an intelligent species from developing before humans?

protonfish 13y ago
Just because they don't make jewelry and weapons doesn't mean some other animals (elephants, whales, other apes) are not highly intelligent. I prefer to call civilizations like ours "technological" and not pass judgement on the smarts of other creatures because they don't like building things.
- jere 13y ago
  I wasn't sure what phrasing to use (and I definitely didn't like the simple term "intelligent species"). I kind of agree with you, but I think it's a little silly to say only our technology distinguishes us. I'm reminded of Anathem here: even if we all lived like monks shunning technology, we'd still be set apart by our mathematic, scientific, and philosophical reasoning.
  - maxerickson 13y ago
    The monks in Anathem are technologists that shun distraction.
    - jere 13y ago

alexeisadeski3 13y ago

What's so wrong with solar power?

rbosinger 13y ago
Ask the Corbicules!

rbosinger 13y ago

That was strangely relaxing.

mathattack 13y ago

Very interesting work. I find it very hard to imagine that a society capable of building skyscrapers and venturing into space won't leave more clues of it's existence to subsequent societies. Certainly it will be much more permanent than what the Mayans are leaving us. Perhaps the clues will be cities, perhaps it will be radiation, perhaps it will be stripped land.

ekianjo 13y ago
I don't share the vision of the author but you'll be surprised how quickly any building may collapse once not maintained: plants will grow under concrete and end up breaking it over years and years, and erosion will progressively do the job as well. And sidementation will end up covering all that's left over centuries: look in Egypt, most of the ruins we found were deep under several dozens of meters of sand.
- mathattack 13y ago
  I think the point of the article is not the end truth of what he says, but just to encourage speculation, so I think all of us will draw different end conclusions. I doubt that we'll have as many iterations of society as he suggests. At some point we'll do something that kills all of us, and will then hand it off to the next species. If you look at Detroit, it doesn't take long for nature to take back buildings. I would just think that there are certain artifacts or clues that would be somehow visible. We are leaving much more artifacts than every civilization before us put together. But I might just be inserting my short term bias into the situation.
- fzltrp 13y ago
  Sand is not sedimentation.

nkarpov 13y ago

Although not completely related, this reminds me of Asimov's famous story... The Last Question. Must read. http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm

fennecfoxen 13y ago
It reminds me of only-partially-related C.S. Lewis poetry. http://allpoetry.com/poem/8508345-Re-adjustment-by-C_S_Lewis http://allpoetry.com/poem/8508345-Re-adjustment-by-C_S_Lewis

chsonnu 13y ago

If you liked this you may like Asimov's The Last Question: http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm

GrantS 13y ago
True, and even more similar to Olaf Stapledon's 1930 novel "Last and First Men" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_and_First_Men http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_and_First_Men And on a much shorter time-scale, similar to Clifford Simak's novel-ish collection of stories "City" from the 1940s onward: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_(novel) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_(novel)

friggeri 13y ago

Great read, reminds me a lot of Last and First Men. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_and_First_Men http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_and_First_Men

vlucas 13y ago

This is pretty bleak and pessimistic. As an optimist, I'd like to think that our advancements in technology will save us eventually. We have made significant advancements in clean energy like wind and solar, and those advancements won't stop. We have also made significant advancements in crop yields, etc. Of course, by the time those power sources are so widespread, there will be much more pollutants in the atmosphere from fossil fuel power sources, so who knows. Anyone have a future that is a little more rosy than this? Not looking for a utopia here, but just something other than the complete fall of civilization thousands of times over.

kazagistar 13y ago

Artificial intelligence not being practical is a silly conclusion. We already have intelligence: in a few million years of fucking around with existing intelligence, I am pretty sure we can make some significant progress. The insistence on it being silicon is what causes people to get the wrong idea.

prithee 13y ago

If you are at all interested in constructing these timeline focused thought experiments I highly recommend "microscope" an RPG by Ben Robbins. http://www.lamemage.com/microscope/ http://www.lamemage.com/microscope/

wavefunction 13y ago

This brings up a thought I've had repeatedly (an admittedly unscientific one) when considering human history. Considering that it "only" took us several thousand years to transform ourselves from hunter-gatherers to our current technologies, it makes little sense that this is the first human culture to reach the point we've reached. Then I try to dissuade myself from such a notion, rationalizing that if that were the case, we'd know it from some sort of evidence by this point. And yet, I still can't shake the notion that this "shouldn't" be the first time around. Weird, especially since I consider myself a hardcore skeptic.

lettergram 13y ago
Even stranger, our sun has collapsed and been rebuilt at least once (estimates are 3 times). Makes you wonder how many civilizations could have been built. More specifically to your comment, even on our planet, the evidence of civilization would be hard to find if there was a civilization several million or even a few hundred thousand years ago. "Dust to dust"
- sounds 13y ago
  Our sun has collapsed and been rebuilt at least once? Google search for "sun collapsed rebuilt 3 times" lists Stonehenge, which seems to indicate Google can't find anything on the subject. I really don't understand what you're saying. Can you please elaborate?
  - clord 13y ago
    I think it's a reference to the supernova that occurred before our sun existed, which created the seed material for the sun to form from. It had to have happened because there are heavy elements on earth that only form in a supernova.
  - 7b64f0f2 13y ago
    You can probably determinate the number of supernovas/hypernova/etc that happened before the sun by analyzing the proportions of different elements in the solar system and then use the various equations to compute how many explosions you would need to create the heavy elements (heavier than iron) that are observable since they are mostly created in these situations. You probably can get these equations by analyzing nebula composition and the type of star which was there. Also, the type of star gives an indication of it's history.

lettergram 13y ago

I think the author ignores several important facts. For one, humans are high on the food chain and in turn may not be as robust as say roaches, but we can construct pretty much everything. We will evolve and change, but the extinction of the human race would require several Unprecedented events. Even a large meteorite striking Earth would have trouble killing off humanity (obviously if it's big enough...). Furthr, algae reduce carbon much MUCH more efficiently than plants and can reproduce much faster. Even more we already have processes of turning algae to oil (although the oil is of poor quality). All that being said the more carbon dioxide is released the quicker/more algae will grow and the more oxygen and oil can be produced. In other words, obviously there are limits and I challenge you (the author or reader) to do research, but although humanity has problems. As a species we are doing alright.

ebertx 13y ago

The most fascinating part about this post is seeing how differently people react to it: nihilism, awe, wonder, etc. The story seems to be a rorschach test of sorts.

userulluipeste 13y ago

I like better the version in which a civilization could colonize the entire galaxy in about 5 to 50 million years (with low-speed means of space travel): http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=where-are-they&page=3 http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=where-are-t...

CmonDev 13y ago

A perfect example of a naive linear prediction. The thing is that progress is not linear.

roc 13y ago

This projection seems to hinge entirely on the idea that you can't build solar panels, wind farms and hydro dams without cheap oil. As those have only become more economical as oil has become more expensive, I find it particularly difficult to buy into long-run projections based upon that unexplored/unexplained/unjustified assumption. Setting up humanity as reliant on fusion, or massive increases in new energy generation in general, also strikes me as a red herring. Likely: we just won't need it. Even if (this time) it really is ready in ~50 years, guess what? Population is going to peak and begin to fall in ~50 years as more countries become wealthy, healthy and secure enough to make large families a poor reproductive strategy. And is there any reason to expect that energy demand is going to increase fast enough with a static-to-falling population (in the future) to match or outstrip the growth of energy demand with a growing population (today)? Western per-capita energy use is flat. [1] So I don't see how. Absent some trend of every nation transitioning to US-level per-capita energy use [2], the energy needed by the ~9B humans living in 2050 likely represents the peak of world energy demand. If you're going to predicate the collapse of civilization on a shortfall of energy generation, you need to show how that happens in the next 50 years, which is well within the capability of existing coal, oil and gas resources. Further, an assumption of a war-wracked world hand-waves away the question of how on earth nuclear-armed powers are able to go to war with one another. This has been an unsolved problem in modern geopolitics for nearly 70 years now. These powers can certainly squabble via proxies. But, by definition, no major harm can be on the line lest it escalate directly into the conflict no-one can win. And existential threat is the major harm. So how could a nation decide that certain destruction is at all preferable to incremental destruction? [1] Some countries are at a higher level than others, but all the western countries are essentially flat. chart: http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/international/energy%20per%20capita.png http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/international/en... from: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/08/its-official-western-europeans-have-more-cars-per-person-than-americans/261108/ http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/08/its... [2] Any assumption that every nation will transition to US-levels of per-capita energy use seem unjustified by the data. European and Japanese levels have been flat to falling-modestly for some time. It's much more likely that US energy use will begin to fall, as suburban sprawl and huge houses become increasingly uneconomical and we move closer together, drive less, build more sensibly, telecommute more, etc.