janos
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Joined: 18 Feb 2006
Posts: 62
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 Posted: Sat Jun 03, 2006 12:29 am Post subject: The future, materialistic |
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According to present day scientific knowledge our Sun is half way through its stable, life supporting period of existence.
If we take the next five billion years as one day, i.e. 24 hours, we are into the first few seconds of the new dawn.
We came down from the trees at less than 40 minutes before the end of the day that is just passing. We acquired language, art, technology and built great civilisations during the last 3 minutes.
What about the future?
What could be a similar scale of achievement during the first 3 minutes of the new day (about 100,000 years in real time)?
How about a evolving into a full-fledged, spacefaring galactic civilisation, albeit still extending only to our home galaxy.
But, hey, we have acquired real technology and science a mere second (500 years) ago.
If we take the law of accelerating evolutionary development into account, we have to posit the achievement of full-blown inter-galactic civilisation during the next 100,000 years, that is, by the time we are 3 minutes into the new day.
One visionary futurist:
| Quote: | The Law of Accelerating Returns
by Ray Kurzweil
An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense "intuitive linear" view. So we won't experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century -- it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today's rate). The "returns," such as chip speed and cost-effectiveness, also increase exponentially. There's even exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth. Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to The Singularity -- technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history. The implications include the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence, immortal software-based humans, and ultra-high levels of intelligence that expand outward in the universe at the speed of light. |
But what are we going to do during the remaining nearly 24 hours? With this perspective, we may have to abandon the contention that human bodies need not undergo significant evolutionary adaptations.
Life crawled out of the see about 8 hours (1 billion years) ago. Maintaining life out of the dense watery environment posed a challenge to evolution not dissimilar to that demanded by the prospects of living in the vacuum of space. Human bodies may well become adapted to living in space without cumbersome mechanical protection...
But here, we are entering into worlds of fantasy as our reason-regulated imagination reaches its limits. Yet, it is still only eight o'clock in the morning...
But there is more. If we take the sun's ability to nurture life as the measure of time available in the future, we can just forget about it. Long before our sun dies, we will have become independent of it with our ability to move routinely from one star system to any other that is more able to support life. In other words, there is not one cosmic day in which the future of life unfolds, but many more. |
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