If scientists only just figured out that germs cause disease about 200 years ago, what kinds of things will we have figured out 500 years from now?
Assuming humanity still exists 500 years from now, or we haven't blown ourselves back to the stone age.
Sorry...my cynicism came out.
Sorry...my cynicism came out.
Katia wrote:
Assuming humanity still exists 500 years from now, or we haven't blown ourselves back to the stone age.
Sorry...my cynicism came out.
Sorry...my cynicism came out.
Lol. That's okay. I knew someone was going to say that. The thought crossed my mind too. But that's what everyone said back when nuclear power was discovered, and yet, we're still here. Maybe the desire to survive outweighs the desire to make war, after all.
The problem with such prognostication, as you've cited, is that everything you see today is barely more than a hundred years old. The first skyscraper was elected in 1884 after all.
Additionally, scientific progress has proven exponential and we are on the verge of the fourth industrial revolution. Automation is coming for everyone's jobs, literally everyone's, including creators.
Twenty years from now, perhaps even sooner, the only job available to humans will be service positions and jobs where we supervise teams of hive mind linked automatons.
(Think I'm kidding? New small assembly robots teach each other how to assemble products. Each one tries over and over to grasp and combine two items, hundreds of bots experimenting, until one figures it out. Immediately they then all know.)
In 500 years, with the accent of fusion power and megastructures we could propel robots into space via a gauss gun assembly for them to mine the moon and asteroids in order to build more of themselves.
This could then be followed by the slow centuries long building of a Dyson sphere.
The big question is if we'll be able to surpass the speed of light. If not we'll have to construct city sized generational ships because there is one thing every scientist will agree upon. Sooner or later, Earth will run out of resources and the sun will eventually collapse into a red giant and engulf the earth.
Either way we have to leave the Earth or mankind will be nothing more than a curiosity in an alien anthropologist's electronic notebook.
Additionally, scientific progress has proven exponential and we are on the verge of the fourth industrial revolution. Automation is coming for everyone's jobs, literally everyone's, including creators.
Twenty years from now, perhaps even sooner, the only job available to humans will be service positions and jobs where we supervise teams of hive mind linked automatons.
(Think I'm kidding? New small assembly robots teach each other how to assemble products. Each one tries over and over to grasp and combine two items, hundreds of bots experimenting, until one figures it out. Immediately they then all know.)
In 500 years, with the accent of fusion power and megastructures we could propel robots into space via a gauss gun assembly for them to mine the moon and asteroids in order to build more of themselves.
This could then be followed by the slow centuries long building of a Dyson sphere.
The big question is if we'll be able to surpass the speed of light. If not we'll have to construct city sized generational ships because there is one thing every scientist will agree upon. Sooner or later, Earth will run out of resources and the sun will eventually collapse into a red giant and engulf the earth.
Either way we have to leave the Earth or mankind will be nothing more than a curiosity in an alien anthropologist's electronic notebook.
Well electricity wasn't discovered until around 150 years ago, and now we have all this stuff, so id imagine in 500 years we'll really be taking to colonizing space, who knows what we'll find out there, we might even discover things that revolutionize everything we do, just like electricity did.
A lot of the things we'd expect will still be out of reach or just plain bypassed. Instead, we'll have lots of things that few people, if anyone, would have ever even seen a point in. Any aesthetic idea we might try assigning will, at most, get a surge in the fairly immediate future instead, and moved past long before the time we try assigning it to, leaving that aesthetic a historic relic by that time.
Slain wrote:
.
That was a very compelling answer!
Acb wrote:
Well electricity wasn't discovered until around 150 years ago, and now we have all this stuff, so id imagine in 500 years we'll really be taking to colonizing space, who knows what we'll find out there, we might even discover things that revolutionize everything we do, just like electricity did.
Indeed.
Zelphyr wrote:
A lot of the things we'd expect will still be out of reach or just plain bypassed. Instead, we'll have lots of things that few people, if anyone, would have ever even seen a point in. Any aesthetic idea we might try assigning will, at most, get a surge in the fairly immediate future instead, and moved past long before the time we try assigning it to, leaving that aesthetic a historic relic by that time.
Yep!
I think using CRISPER to change people's features if the want, and/or to cure a bunch of genetic diseases might be a thing by then. Hmm.
You are on: Forums » Smalltalk » Thought-provoking question!
Moderators: Mina, Keke, Cass, Auberon, Claine, Ilmarinen, Ben, Darth_Angelus