The humans species: 50,000AD

CrazyRabbit

The 'Evolution and a supreme being' thread got me thinking...to what extent will humans have evolved if we survive for the next 10,000 or 50,000 years?

We know that intelligence is increasing slowly with each generation. Will this continue at the current rate, speed up, or reach a plateau? Exactly how smart can we get?

Now add in the fact that we are very probably, at most, only a few decades away from having bionic/compulter implants as the 'norm', and that these could greatly affect our lifespan, intelligence, abilities etc. Could we eventually become more machine than biological?

What about social evolution? Will we socially always lag behind our tecnhnology (i.e, always have technology that we do not use responsibly)?

FatherLen

we will be able to breath under the duvet for longer and climb walls with our arses

Where To

Will we still like cake?

kincsem

The hot ones will look like Cartman in South Park, the others like Homer Simpson when he stayed at home and put on a bit of weight.

Then the guys will look like ...

krudler

comic book super powers will be attainable. mmm, spidey-sense

kincsem

Jabba the Hutt

golden lane

and look like chinese........with massive walls, everywhere...

Pushtrak

CrazyRabbit wrote: »

We know that intelligence is increasing slowly with each generation.

As a species? I'm not really sure that is the case. Maybe I think this because of the continual proliferation of nonsense. Our technology is certainly constantly improving, though, that isn't debatable.

Well, one of the most interesting things to look at for the future will be the use of nanomachinery, and its utility in things like, say medicine, for one. Not that nanotechnology would be limited to that, there are other areas that will reap just as much benefit from them.

It will be interesting what comes of genetically modified crops, and how it could be a solution to food crisis.

Obviously, it will be interesting what the landscape will be like in terms of what form of energy we will be using as we adapt to renewable energies.

This could be a great thread.

GordonCole

The human being finds himself, or herself, in the middle. There is as much space outside the human, proportionately, as inside

RichieC

we will get increasingly stupid from here on out. At some point we will no longer be able to maintain nuclear reactors and we will go extinct.

krudler

ever see that movie Idiocracy? thats the future

the purple tin

Well humans might get smarter but I don't think they will ever lose their violent/aggressive streak. The biggest breakthroughs in technology will all be weapons based.

RichieC

the purple tin wrote: »

Well humans might get smarter but I don't think they will ever lose their violent/aggressive streak. The biggest breakthroughs in technology will all be weapons based.

So we're told by those with an interest in maintaining their profits.

im invisible

just watch the first few mins

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMkrJOOTjj4

kincsem

The lower life forms will have Phds. My guess is people will be educated more intensively, and in narrower specialisations. Then people will not have a clue what other people are talking about ... just like After Hours.

tony_soprano

in thirty thousand years , some of us will probabley be living on pandora , having destroyed mars ten thousand years previous , earth by that stage will be one big rubbish dump with little robots picking up trash

im invisible

how is it may 2012 and no-one had the name tony_soprano registered before now?

Catch_22

CrazyRabbit wrote: »

We know that intelligence is increasing slowly with each generation.

dont confuse education and intelligence

tony_soprano

im invisible wrote: »

how is it may 2012 and no-one had the name tony_soprano registered before now?

cause they know better

Sykk

CrazyRabbit wrote: »

We know that intelligence is increasing slowly with each generation.

No... Technology has improved which has made things easier for us to understand the sciences, doesn't make us more intelligent than people 200 years ago, just more open to learning and researching.

opinion guy

Kids, we know a song about this don't we ?
Lets all sing along.......

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izQB2-Kmiic

Wibbs

Barring catastrophe I reckon we'll be more "machine" than man and sooner than 50,000 years too. Functionally immortal with IQ's beyond today's comprehension with abilities to change our environments, indeed the very building blocks of existence in unimaginable ways. The "human" experience will become very different. There may be some "wild" humans around who don't plug into this, though will still likely be living significantly longer than we do today. It'll sneak up on us. Just like computers and the interweb we all(in the west) have access to did.

Laika1986

Read this OP

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale

Not sure how long it would take but thats the way we'l probably progess. oh and moon discos will probably be quite popular

Wibbs

Sykk wrote: »

No... Technology has improved which has made things easier for us to understand the sciences, doesn't make us more intelligent than people 200 years ago, just more open to learning and researching.

...which in turn makes us smarter. Hunter gatherers around today have lower IQ's on average, even when adjusting for culture.

Nothingbetter2d

if humans do live in colonies in space they will all look different due to adaptations to suit the colony they live on. people on planets with higher gravity will look shorter but stouter... people on planets with low gravity will be taller and thinner

also how their eyes work will change too... people on planets further from the sun or orbiting red dwarf's (proxima centauri being one such nearby red dwarf star) will have bigger eyes to process more light then those on planets with hotter stars than our sun

batm!ke

Laika1986 wrote: »

Read this OP

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale

Not sure how long it would take but thats the way we'l probably progess. oh and moon discos will probably be quite popular

It doesn't have a diagram or even a pie chart so for that reason I'm out.

nozzferrahhtoo

CrazyRabbit wrote: »

The 'Evolution and a supreme being' thread got me thinking...to what extent will humans have evolved if we survive for the next 10,000 or 50,000 years?

To be pedantic, admittedly my forte, Evolution does not actually work like that. We are not evolving "towards" anything in particular. It is a common error to think of evolution as always heading towards a "better" version of something that exists now. In fact evolution and selection is based entirely on the environment the organism is in which is also constantly changing. As we can not really predict what the world will be like in 50,000 years we also can not really predict what evolution will do in that time either.

Often quite the opposite happens. Brains can get smaller, some creatures which evolved eyes lose them again later, things that evolved towards size go smaller and vice versa, some birds become flightless.... so on so on.

Essentially evolution selects a best fit for a current environment and it will always tend towards a simpler version requiring less materials and energy. If eyes, intelligence, strength or size are all redundant in a particular environment... to name but a few... they will tend to evolve out.

While Idocracy does paint a bleak future (both in terms of our evolution and in terms of hoping Hollywood movies will ever improve) where the stupid far out reproduce the intelligent... leading to a natural evolution towards stupidity over time.... it is just a movie thankfully and we can hope such a thing is not really our future.

In terms of evolution we have used our technology to counteract much of natural selection and so there is little reason to expect much "natural" evolution except over extended periods. Things that would have been massively selected against for example are now alleviated using our technology. One must only look at the contributions of those like Stephen Hawking to the world despite his massively debilitating illness to see this. One might expect, as technology does much of our work for us, that we will become a physically weaker species.

From what I have read on the subject most of the evolution people in the field picture for our species over the coming ages tends to be related to how our immune systems will evolve in the constant war against bacterial and viral evolution. A war we have no firm reasons for expecting to win without the aid of technology.

Canis Lupus

I think in 100/150 years we'll be going backwards. We might discover some new funky technology but realise too late that we've wasted too much of the worlds resources to put it into effect (never mind the fact that I think we need to work together as a planet to survive as a species and I don't see that happening as well till it's too late). I reckon our childrens children will read in history books about how now was the golden age of technology.

From an evolutionary POV if we lived that long I don't think we'll have changed much apart from maybe little things. From an aesthetic side you generally won't find 4 armed people getting much sex and thus passing on their 4 armed genetic traits for the betterment of humankind.

Stiffler2

Tbh, I'm surprised we've survived for this long.

We won't be around in another 5,000 years though unless we can find another Earth

spankmaster2000

CrazyRabbit wrote: »

Now add in the fact that we are very probably, at most, only a few decades away from having bionic/compulter implants as the 'norm'

I sincerely doubt that!
Where was my jetpack and hover-car back in 2000? I don't think these advances are often as close as people seem to accept. Eventually; maybe yes; but "a few decades"; no.

I'd say that over the next few thousand years you'll be likely to see things like far less people having wisdom teeth; smaller jawbones/muscles (from eating processed food); and overall less body hair, etc.

opinion guy

spankmaster2000 wrote: »

I sincerely doubt that!
Where was my jetpack and hover-car back in 2000? I don't think these advances are often as close as people seem to accept. Eventually; maybe yes; but "a few decades"; no.

BBC news TODAY (I love the irony :pac:):
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-17936302


The future of humanity (it has already begun):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyenRCJ_4Ww

allibastor

we will look like tall skinny aliens.

it is not a joke, by the way. if you read Darwin you will notice that as a people we need less and less physical mass to survive. as you loss mass you tend to grow taller for more efficient bipedal motion. we will have to get smarter as we need a greater understanding of how things work to maintain our less physical nature. we will have less teeth, hair skin will be easier to break as we require less protection and less effort to process food.

humans have come from stocky bred smaller people with strength roughly 30% greater than we have now to our current general physical stature. it is just that we don't need it any more.


all that is subject to of course a race of machines not killing us first. if anything was to gain intelligence it will, in the words of agent smith, classify us a virus, a continual user of resources which are not replenished, and therefore a threat to careful planned and continued survival

OneArt

The Dune novels are all I need to know what it will be like in 30, 000 years. We will have an epic war against the thinking machines and get high off spice that comes from a sandworm's ass.

Also we'll be controlled by an Illuminati-like order of nun-witches.

All hail Muad'Dib!

Shiner11

I attended a lecture about two years ago where a guy talked about the resources of planet earth. He said that by the 25th of September of 2010, we had used 100% of the natural resources the planet produces per annum. He also said due to increasing population growth, we will need roughly three or four Earths within the next 100 years if we are survive and decide not to make any changes to the way we live.

Also there's some Wikipedia page that roughly outlines what scientists believe the future will hold if we continue as we do. Human's will be extinct by the year 7000AD, supposedly due to our own fault.

On the bright side at least we can look forward to seeing hover cars and bumping into Marty McFly in 2015. Everyone keep an eye out for him now!

token56

I think we'll see speciation due to a combination of advances in technology and the gaps between different socio economic classes. As technology and health care advances, those who care afford it will be able to live longer maybe even indefinitely and those that can't quiet simply wont. Given a large enough time scale and large technological advances different socio economic classes would likely evolve along different paths. I think this is the most likely outcome if we were to survive that long, however I dont think we will.

Battered Mars Bar

Here's what I think. Medicine will advance to the point of nanomachines that are injected at birth. These will throughout a persons life, replenish organs on a daily basis and eleminate any threat of diesease. These machines will also destroy the part of our DNA which causes us to age.

So no one dies, unless by accident. Everyone is made sterile. Our population expands to 50 billion +, An ingenius invention which is like a 3d printer, manipluates atoms to make whatever the user wants. Whether it be a tv, car or food. So commercialism ends as there's no need to make these products anymore. Money and gold itself becomes meaningless.

Perpetual motion is harnassed and everyone can survive perfectly in their own self contained environment. Which is perfect since social skills vanish as a result of successive generations relying on Facebook for commmunication.

The political system would be replaced, and everything is debated and voted on, online. There are no leaders. Everyone has an equal say, anyone can propose a debate on anything but the issues are trivial and revert to whether the next person born should have brown or blonde hair, whether it's ethical to euthanize robots once their technology is surpassed or whether people who still enage in sex are a threat to society.

War breaks out, as a mad futuristic version of Hitler thinks everyone is imperfect and that a perfect race of people should be cloned identically from a single source. Some hippy do gooders think people should still be individuals and have free choice, another Hitler type who is a cyborg, we'll call him Hitbog thinks humans are a worthless waste of space.

Everyone gets blown up, the end.

HazDanz

We won't get to 50,000AD. I fancy us to fcuk our survival up before then.

ScumLord

Humans haven't evolved much in the past 50000 years and I don't think we'll change much over the next 50000 years. The human body has already shown its ability to survive in just about any environment. Its an excellent body type and if it ain't broke nature won't kill it off. Unless women start having children with tall super intelligent bug eyed men we won't end up like grey aliens either.

Min

Our genes will decide what we are good at. People with negative attributes in their genes will be neutered.
Marriage will be arranged to enhance positive features in the offspring - like superior intelligence, in sport people with the more positive athletic genes will be bred and so on.

ok that might only be 10 years away or less.

We will all be tested genomically.

spankmaster2000

opinion guy wrote: »

BBC news TODAY (I love the irony :pac:):
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-17936302

Aye, sure there's stuff like that around at the moment, but it's not the "norm".

For example; this was around 20 years ago, and now again today it's appearing again. It's still not common though. Even if the Google Glass does take off; that's over 30 years of a difference.

It's the same with those retinal implants. I honestly can't imagine that your granny will be able to pop to the local hospital to get a pair of Bionic eyes to replace her own any time in the near future.

Pedant

CrazyRabbit wrote: »

The 'Evolution and a supreme being' thread got me thinking...to what extent will humans have evolved if we survive for the next 10,000 or 50,000 years?

We know that intelligence is increasing slowly with each generation. Will this continue at the current rate, speed up, or reach a plateau? Exactly how smart can we get?

Now add in the fact that we are very probably, at most, only a few decades away from having bionic/compulter implants as the 'norm', and that these could greatly affect our lifespan, intelligence, abilities etc. Could we eventually become more machine than biological?

What about social evolution? Will we socially always lag behind our tecnhnology (i.e, always have technology that we do not use responsibly)?

Computer will over take human intelligence in the next 100 years. After that, humans will begin to use machine implants in their bodies to improve bodily function and intelligence. In the next 10,000 years, human will realise that the body is a drawn back to their desired rate of progression. Humans will be genetically engineered before birth to produce only a brain, containing the human mind, which will then be placed into a cybernetic carrier. Humans will become cyborgs, the only biological element being the human brain. In evolutionary terms, our genes will realise that the brain is the only useful part of our biological bodies - therefore the brain will be improved gradually via evolution over each generation.

Pedant

im invisible wrote: »

how is it may 2012 and no-one had the name tony_soprano registered before now?

Because The Sopranos was shhhiiittteee!!!

newport2

CrazyRabbit wrote: »

The 'Evolution and a supreme being' thread got me thinking...to what extent will humans have evolved if we survive for the next 10,000 or 50,000 years?

We know that intelligence is increasing slowly with each generation. Will this continue at the current rate, speed up, or reach a plateau? Exactly how smart can we get?

Now add in the fact that we are very probably, at most, only a few decades away from having bionic/compulter implants as the 'norm', and that these could greatly affect our lifespan, intelligence, abilities etc. Could we eventually become more machine than biological?

What about social evolution? Will we socially always lag behind our tecnhnology (i.e, always have technology that we do not use responsibly)?

To a large extent society has probably killed evolution. Weak or strong, virtually everyone survives and reproduces in todays world, not just the fittest. Not to mention the fact that the people who are deemed the "fittest" in the eyes of society today are having less children than those who are not.

newport2

Pedant wrote: »

Because The Sopranos was shhhiiittteee!!!

:mad:

newport2

Domo230 wrote: »

In the modern age knowledge is power and so is the ability to co-operate and lead people will become more useful and is important for success. I can see people in the future inheriting better interpersonal skills as well as being better able to exchange ideas. I think overall people will be more charismatic/better with people.

Good post, but success doesn't mean more offspring. In todays society, it usually means less, due to career demands, etc. So while these type of people will survive, they will not necessarily thrive. People from disadvantaged backrounds with poor education are multiplying at a far higher rate. So will we just end up with more of these?

newport2

Domo230 wrote: »

We still live in a society where those best adapted breed the most. The difference is the skills that allow a person to be successful.

If this is true, then uneducated people from disadvantaged backrounds are the best adapted.

sebastianlieken

ScumLord wrote: »

Humans haven't evolved much in the past 50000 years and I don't think we'll change much over the next 50000 years. The human body has already shown its ability to survive in just about any environment. Its an excellent body type and if it ain't broke nature won't kill it off. Unless women start having children with tall super intelligent bug eyed men we won't end up like grey aliens either.

I do agree with you to the extent that natural evolution will not have enough time to drastically re-arrange our physiology in 50,000 years, BUT consider this: In the last hundered years or so, mankind has begun to evolve intellectually and develop technologically at a rate that far surpasses our biological evolution. i.e. Technology has given us the ability to perform complex surgery, organ transplants, prosthesis, laser eye surgery etc...

We were never designed to sit at a PC for 9 hours a day, result is that eyesight cannot adapt and hence gets strained and fades. Solution; we self correct with laser eye surgery. Another example is the appendix... we, modern humans have no use for it anymore, but the body hasn't had time to expel it from our genome. Solution, we remove it ourselves.

Essentially, nature has outsourced evolution into our own hands.

My belief is that our own human evolution is comparable on the same scale as general technological evoltion. 50,000 years... yeah we're gonna be enhanced. definatly. (assuming we dont destroy the planet before then)

If we find a never-ending source of all the resources we need - something like a mix between Idiocracy and the people in Wall-E.

If we don't, we'll all be long dead by then.

Nothingbetter2d

sebastianlieken wrote: »

Essentially, nature has outsourced evolution into our own hands.

this is very true... since scientists successfully mapped the human genome they have created many cures, with more on the way.

its even possible (scientifically) to engineer your child to look tall, pick what colour eyes and hair the child has, have no genetic disorders, and even choose the gender of your child.

the only reason it hasn't been done yet is because people have deemed it morally wrong.


they have proved this ability with animals... they can now even reverse engineer animals and reactivate dormant genes

Dino chicken

sebastianlieken

Nothingbetter2d wrote: »

its even possible (scientifically) to engineer your child to look tall, pick what colour eyes and hair the child has, have no genetic disorders, and even choose the gender of your child.

the only reason it hasn't been done yet is because people have deemed it morally wrong.

Not only would this be morally ethical, but favorable in two re-occuring human conditions:

1./ Uglyness
2./ Gingers

Wibbs

nozzferrahhtoo wrote: »

To be pedantic, admittedly my forte, Evolution does not actually work like that. We are not evolving "towards" anything in particular. It is a common error to think of evolution as always heading towards a "better" version of something that exists now. In fact evolution and selection is based entirely on the environment the organism is in which is also constantly changing. As we can not really predict what the world will be like in 50,000 years we also can not really predict what evolution will do in that time either.

Very true. However human are unique in the living world because we shape our environment and most of all we have and continue to externalise our evolution. No other animal has or does this. We turned ourselves from largely vegetarian apes to the planets apex predator and didn't wait for evolution to do it for us. We adapted externally to our environment. Cold climate? Make clothes, artificial fur, again not bothering to wait around for natural selection to give us fur. We can fly faster and higher than the most highly adapted bird. Hell James Cameron can go deeper in the ocean than any other mammal. Most of all we became aware that evolution exists and we are beginning to shape it in the lab. That's huge.

ScumLord wrote: »

Humans haven't evolved much in the past 50000 years and I don't think we'll change much over the next 50000 years.

Funny enough we have. There have been more changes in the modern human genome in the last 15,000 years than in the previous 100,000. Much of it to do with diet, but also changes in sperm production and immuno response. EG more of us can metabolise milk, gluten and alcohol than say 10,000 years ago. Give a CroMagnon man a ham sandwich and a beer and he'd be running to the nearest bush with a bad dose of the liquid sitdowns. Sneeze on him and likely he and his tribe would be wiped out. Externally we've changed too. A modern human of 50,000 years ago was on average shorter, much more robust, with bigger teeth and larger more dense skulls.

The human body has already shown its ability to survive in just about any environment.

Well our brains have shown their ability to externally adapt to just about any environment. A naked human would have very few habitats where it could survive.

sebastianlieken wrote: »

BUT consider this: In the last hundered years or so, mankind has begun to evolve intellectually and develop technologically at a rate that far surpasses our biological evolution.

More like 100,000 years, at least. The incredible stuff we can do now is an acceleration on an existing trend.