How Long Humanity?

[Ori Vandewalle]

I'm thinking about far future settings where the entire history of humanity up to now is a forgotten infancy. I'm thinking about tens of millions of years from now when the Earth's surface is a stranger, a billion years from now when the sun is so bright and hot the oceans boil, or a hundred billion years from now when the universe is cold and dark and dying.

I think it's relatively easy to imagine a future setting where humans have become post-human, imprisoned stars, sent their robot descendants far out into the cosmos to feed off supermassive black holes, etc. But how far into the future is it plausible for there to still be essentially normal humans around, doing more or less normal human stuff, just with extremely advanced technology? Is it plausible that some splinter of humanity becomes galaxy-striding superintelligences while the rest decide to just stick to a planet and white picket fences?

 

[Margaret Note Spelling]

Yes. No. The truth is, you could probably make any length of time work. Shorter period of time (in relative terms of course), with some kind of fast technological advancement, or longer period of time with slow advancement or many setbacks. Star Trek did it in two or three hundred years, although sadly they were still tied down to flip-phones and three-inch floppy disks the entire time. Ender's Game did it very quickly by making us steal alien technology, until Card skipped three thousand years ahead in Speaker for the Dead. (And, now that I think about it, didn't actually change a whole lot of things technologically from one time to the next. Most of the huge advancements happened in Ender's Game. Huh, didn't realize that before.)

That's the beauty of science fiction, is that nobody can contradict your future predictions (unless you write a book titled 1984 or a movie titled 2001). You could probably make any amount of time work just dandily for you.

 

[Venusian Broon]

I think it depends what you mean by human. I believe, from memory, that from the fossil record some have calculated that the average 'life-span' of a mammalian species is about three million years, perhaps if they are long-living, ten million years.

So technically at some point our descendants, assuming we survive any extinction events, would be a different species - and how would they think act and behave compared to us? Add to this telelogical evolution that looks likely right now, as we discover more and more about our genetics and become 'post-humans' as you say. At some point post-humans will be so different to us they will definitely have left any definition of the current human species. Frankly most of our literary musings about what they might look like are far too ' 21st Century human'.

On the other hand, could humans like us survive for millions of years like a living fossil? Just like a coelacanth or horseshoe crab? I don't rate our chances very highly being as static as a horseshoe crab, but I suppose it's possible.

 

[BAYLOR]

I think it depends what you mean by human. I believe, from memory, that from the fossil record some have calculated that the average 'life-span' of a mammalian species is about three million years, perhaps if they are long-living, ten million years.

So technically at some point our descendants, assuming we survive any extinction events, would be a different species - and how would they think act and behave compared to us? Add to this telelogical evolution that looks likely right now, as we discover more and more about our genetics and become 'post-humans' as you say. At some point post-humans will be so different to us they will definitely have left any definition of the current human species. Frankly most of our literary musings about what they might look like are far too ' 21st Century human'.

On the other hand, could humans like us survive for millions of years like a living fossil? Just like a coelacanth or horseshoe crab? I don't rate our chances very highly being as static as a horseshoe crab, but I suppose it's possible.

Or we could become like Eloi and the Morlocks in H G Well The Time Machine . I always found that aspect ofWells vision of the future disturbing and bleak and worse still, the deleted chapter The Grey Man .

 

[-K2-]

Regarding the face of the earth, consider this. Devil's Tower in Wyoming is 867 feet from its base to the summit. It stands 1,267 feet above the Belle Fourche River and is 5,112 feet above sea level.

It is composed of igneous rock. The land around it is sedimentary rock. They estimate 40.5 million years ago, magma pushed its way up through the sedimentary rock left by the receding shallow sea, and there are a lot of theories as to what it really is and how it was formed.

What is not a theory, however, is that what we see today of Devil's Tower, did NOT push up above the landscape toward the sky.

The entire landscape around it eroded away revealing it.

It would be fantastic enough to imagine some great volcano thrusting its way upward...but to consider it's the rest of the world that was scrubbed off, is almost unfathomable. How much of the worlds history has been lost, turned to dust and spread elsewhere. I can't even imagine how different the world might have looked. For all I know, much of North America could have been some massive smooth mound, that only once eroded left the vast character we see today.

K2

 

[Ori Vandewalle]

At some point post-humans will be so different to us they will definitely have left any definition of the current human species.

Certainly, although I can imagine they might still think of themselves as "human." I mean, biologically speaking we're essentially identical to humans of 50,000 years ago, but the globe-spanning technological monstrosity we've become over the last few hundred years isn't even remotely similar to that original mode of life which persisted for tens of thousands.

 

[BAYLOR]

Certainly, although I can imagine they might still think of themselves as "human." I mean, biologically speaking we're essentially identical to humans of 50,000 years ago, but the globe-spanning technological monstrosity we've become over the last few hundred years isn't even remotely similar to that original mode of life which persisted for tens of thousands.

The shrinking Y chromosome might play a role in what humanity becomes.

 

[Brian G Turner]

It's an interesting set of questions, because aside from natural evolutionary processes we are also closing in on the power to use genetic engineering and technology to directly change ourselves, which raises the possibility of different types of humans developing in the future.

Ralph Kern touched on this with his novel Endeavour.

 

[Danny McG]

Regarding the face of the earth, consider this. Devil's Tower in Wyoming is 867 feet from its base to the summit. It stands 1,267 feet above the Belle Fourche River and is 5,112 feet above sea level.

It looks better in mashed potato IMO

 

[TheEndIsNigh]

I agree with @Danny McG it looks definitely man made. The Romans did something similar with early concrete.

As for your time travel thing.

It could happen yesterday. Some bloke tinkering away on his old Moog synthesizer interface to a EMP generator could invent the Jangwatsonian drive and we could be off planet on Sunday. Earth could have it's nuclear war and be a thing of the past only known about in sandscript writing.

There have been many re-discoveries of Earth by decedents of colony ships in the past.

I'd just go with it - set up your civilization however you want it to look like and run with it.

You're the author, what you say goes. As long as it;s credible to an old cynic, but hey, I'm a thing of the past, you go on without me.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

I envisioned the far future in my novel Urbis Morpheos.
I wanted to try something so far in the future Earth was unrecognisable. A couple of Chronners read it and made interesting comments...
It was a huge challenge to create a world both recognisable (there are some human beings left) and unrecognisable (most life has evolved from artificial creations over millions of years).
Oh, and there are mushrooms...

 

[Venusian Broon]

Certainly, although I can imagine they might still think of themselves as "human." I mean, biologically speaking we're essentially identical to humans of 50,000 years ago, but the globe-spanning technological monstrosity we've become over the last few hundred years isn't even remotely similar to that original mode of life which persisted for tens of thousands.

Just thinking about our current situation, we clearly have what we envisage as 'cousins' in our evolutonary tree in the past - namely Neanderthals and Devensions. We interactred and procreated with them and technically they should be regarded as human. However I think most people, without thinking hard about it, would view them as distinct to 'us'. But as you point out how close are we to whoever we identify as our closest ancestors that we envisage walking out of Africa ~100-50.000 years ago?

What now about, say, the Lobsters in Bruce Sterlings Schismatrix*, humans who have adapted to themselves to the hard vacuum of space. Would they view soft bodied beings like us, as the New Neanderthals? We would be their ancestors, but we would not be 'them'. They'd become something different.

I'm reading some history of mathematics at the moment and one of the things that surprised me a little was how different a mathematician from ancient Greece would have thought to us today. Concepts that are taught to children today would have been mentally incomprehensible to Pythagoras or Euclid. (i.e. no semblance of algebra, instead proof by rhetoric. Wow! The word salads they produced make my brain hurt and yet they produced some beautiful stuff. Those men and women were formidable!)

Now I'm not saying we're that different from the ancient Greeks - I mean it was only ~2500 years ago! - but if you're talking about millions of years, these slow shifts add up.

----------------------------------

* Ah you made me remember one of my favourite SF books of all time! What a great vision and future solar system. Of course now I'm loathed to pick it up again and re-read it again, in case I don't like it as much now...

 

[Biskit]

That's the beauty of science fiction, is that nobody can contradict your future predictions (unless you write a book titled 1984 or a movie titled 2001). You could probably make any amount of time work just dandily for you.

I'm clearly getting old - this morning is plagued with half-remembered things, but there was a film I re-watched last year that started with something akin to "the year is 2010 and the Earth is plagued by XYZ..." and it took me a moment to register that this future-Earth was ten years ago and if the predicted XYZ ever happened, it never made the news headlines.

 

[Venusian Broon]

One way you might be able to preserve 'our' humanity into the far future would, I think, be if at some point we became effectively immortal. As it feels difficult when reach adulthood to change much

Although how the prospect of endless time would impact a person evolved to have a good 40-50 years again might make a big difference. Perhaps it would be incredibly boring. Perhaps they would scrub their memories every fifty years and become a different person just to enjoy life again?

 

[Astro Pen]

My prediction for humanity is that it will evolve into a technological world of it's own creation. Already the survival pressures and skills required by successful western individuals are vastly different from even 1000 years ago.
Kids are losing interpersonal skills as they communicate via phones more than face to face.
Whilst we will learn whatever language we are born into, we fail to recognise that that wiring is also taking place across the board, socially and culturally. We are phenomenally flexible organisms. Most of our behaviour being learned, not hard wired.
Brain cavity size is increasing because of caesarian section allowing the birth of larger skull sizes, and that survival is feeding back into the gene pool, the medical technology gliding slowly from peripheral to essential.
Is Homo Novis due on the horizon? Yes happening now by stealth selection. If we were to return to a neolithic world today 95% of the world would be dead within a month or two. Not from the catastrophe itself but because it is completely incompetent outside the artificial environment it created. Even the most basic hunter gatherer competence is absent, and there won't be time to raise a generation that has it. "You ain't never caught a rabbit, and you ain't no friend of mine"
So like it or not we are increasingly destined to survive and evolve within the haven of the technological womb. Now we are going down that road we'd better maintain and curate it carefully.

 

[paranoid marvin]

Dinosaurs lived for well over 100 million years. Having said that they did not have the same penchant as humans to destroy each other or their environment. How many species of animal and plant life have humans wittingly or unwittingly eradicated? And we have only been around for 6 million years, a fraction of the time of the dinosaurs.

However we do have an insatiable curiosity and a desire to better ourselves. (As far as we know) we are the first inhabitants of the Earth to have the capability to travel to our worlds and to have an ability to survive the next Extinction Level Event that threatens our planet. Whether we survive this will depend largely on whether we have kept things together long enough to have the capability to colonise other worlds

Once travel and colonisation of planets becomes possible then there is no reason for humans not to be around a hundred million years from now.

 

[-K2-]

This chunk of rock has other plans...

Like it or not, just like pandemics--when not if--in our relatively near future, earth is going to get whacked again. So, I'd not worry too much about the million/billion year plan and start from there instead.

K2

 

[Venusian Broon]

Dinosaurs lived for well over 100 million years. Having said that they did not have the same penchant as humans to destroy each other or their environment. How many species of animal and plant life have humans wittingly or unwittingly eradicated? And we have only been around for 6 million years, a fraction of the time of the dinosaurs.

However we do have an insatiable curiosity and a desire to better ourselves. (As far as we know) we are the first inhabitants of the Earth to have the capability to travel to our worlds and to have an ability to survive the next Extinction Level Event that threatens our planet. Whether we survive this will depend largely on whether we have kept things together long enough to have the capability to colonise other worlds

Once travel and colonisation of planets becomes possible then there is no reason for humans not to be around a hundred million years from now.

Yes but our term 'dinosaur' is a rather nebulous term that describes a vast panaroma of evolution. The dinosaurs that first appeared were very different from the final ones (Although birds are still about and I'd count them, being as they are descendents of dinosaurs.)

I do think our descendants could be around millions of years from now, but would we recognise them as us? Perhaps in a hundred of million of years our descendants become pygmy dumb animals that are farmed by intelligent giant spiders for food.

Going into space and colonising it will certainly help aid our survival and we'd surely evolve/build ourselves into a vast number of different species given time, although I'm now more of the camp that it's much easier and more effective to invest in Dyson swarms than try and colonise planets.

 

[-K2-]

Going into space and colonising it will certainly help aid our survival and we'd surely evolve/build ourselves into a vast number of different species...

What a great way to find new folks to war with. Think about it, self-sufficient colonists build an independent society upon a rich planet, and here comes old-earth folks wondering 'why they're not slaving away digging up resources to send home-world.' I'm of the opinion that no matter how much we might physically evolve, we're significantly farther away from maturing.

K2

 

[BAYLOR]

In The Killing Star by Charles Pelligrino and George Zebrowski . Humanity discovers hat if you a special that that achieves space travel, what you do is seek put other lifeforms and wipe them out before they do the same to you.