1,000 years from now

[Prince_Imrahil]

God was a dream of a good government. We will soon have our God and we will make it with our own hands.

Awesome Cleric! Just, awesome!

And I just noticed your avatar as well! Sheer brilliance!

.... um, everyone else ya I'm just gushing about an obscure reference Cleric made, thumbs up to anyone who gets it.

Heh though talk about predictions for the future eh?

 

[El_Machinae]

Constant acceleration?! Heck no! Accelerating acceleration!

This will only happen if people are sufficiently proactive. We need to:
- increase our investments and savings
- personally contribute to the expansion of knowledge and resources
- decrease our wasteful consumption
- increase our charity.

I think that pushing for second-order acceleration is the only real way to achieve it.

 

[innonimatu]

Of course. We'll still be human in 1000 years, right?

You know, I very much doubt it.

Technological progress has increased the ability of any single human to change the planet to an enormous extent. If the trend continues soon (a couple of centuries at the most) any single human may be able to access and use the means to destroy the planet. And we don't seem to be getting anywhere with projects to expand into other planets. Imagine how long the planet would last if most current humans living in our society had this kind of power available.

We either:
- Change human nature to eliminate this risk. Humanity as it has existed throughout historical times disappears, in order to survive!
- Destroy ourselves sooner or later, by the action of any dissatisfied individual or group.
- reach some king of technological limit before arriving at this "self-destruction" threshold, and future won't be much different?

 

[mdwh]

any single human may be able to access and use the means to destroy the planet.

How would they do this?

 

[Kozmos]

How would they do this?

Small toaster sized programmable nanofactories capable of producing unlimited quantities of potent aerosol spread nanomechanical viruses. That's just one way.

 

[bhsup]

I don't know about 1,000 years, but I know what the half way point will be like.

 

[RubricousMidget]

1000 years from now, we'll be posting here remembering this thread, and everybody will remember how they mocked this comment and how it wasn't that stupid, after all.
Oh, yeah, and remembering those of us unfortunate enough to perish along the way.

Humanity overall will have matured a heck of a lot.

 

[Prince_Imrahil]

Small toaster sized programmable nanofactories capable of producing unlimited quantities of potent aerosol spread nanomechanical viruses. That's just one way.

...or spread through the water system. Cholorine contamination my @$$!

 

[innonimatu]

How would they do this?

Ok, not the planet, it's a bit hard to do that

But most life upon it, anyway. Just see how much energy any single person could use, throughout history, and especially for the past two centuries. This is just the simplest of measures of how increasingly greater the impact of a single person on the world is becoming. And because we need the means to provide for the demand of more and more people, we are certainly setting the stage for some big disasters. Not to mention all new technologies not related to energy.

Personally I think technological evolution will slow down.