The ultimate destiny of humans. (Given a couple assumptions)

bobcat

bobcat

Well-known Member
Location
Northern Calif
Assuming some humans are still alive a million years from now, and we haven't destroyed ourselves and the planet.
Assuming any deity hasn't interceded.
Assuming some giant asteroid hasn't come to crash the party.

Considering what has transpired in the last 100 years, it is mind-blowing to think what might happen in a million years. Granted almost all species have come and gone, but a few are still around, so humor me.

Perhaps we may have remote colonies on other planets that we can terraform. Humans surely won't be the humans we are now. We likely will be enhanced with robotics, implanted chips, and other inventions to overcome the limitations of the human body. Maybe rapid space travel would even be possible. No harm in imagining.
 

Cognitive dissonance. Our minds won't except that the earth won't be here forever, and judging by the current space program, we aren't going to Mars. We can't even land people on the moon anymore. The days of the 'Right Stuff' are gone.
 

Last edited:
The out of control human population explosion will lead to overcrowding, civil unrest if not civil war and possibly an uncontrollable disease to get the population in check which is natures way.

As the sun runs out of fuel it will expand and incinerate the inner planets including earth.

Escape by space travel will only be a temporary fix. Humans can't exist permanently in a non-earth environment.

Our galaxy, the Milky Way is on a collision course with Andromeda.

Eventually it will be like we never existed.
 
A million years is quite a long time.

It is pretty clear that we've eked through some serious collapses. We don't have a grasp on the deep time of the past, and that's probably only measured in a few hundred thousand years.

Many people struggle to accept that The Sphinx and Pyramids have nothing to do with those calling themselves Egyptians today and very likely not even the Dynastic "Egyptians" before them.

Don't worry about overpopulation, we're already in the beginnings of a global population decline that nothing has been able to reverse.
 
Oldeagle66 said:
Cognitive dissonance. Our minds won't except that the earth won't be here forever, and judging by the current space program, we aren't going to Mars. We can't even land people on the moon anymore. The days of the 'Right Stuff' are gone.
Click to expand...
I think most people have accepted that the earth won't be here forever, and hence the reason for eventually going to other planets. Everything I'm reading is that NASA and Space X are still planning on going to mars in the 2030's and tests are currently underway to do that.
 
A million years from now is unfathomable. However, if it came to pass, not much - other than human instinct - will remain. We won't look the same, value the same things, have the same demands. It'd be a totally alien environment. We wouldn't recognize humans a million years ahead. We couldn't communicate with that verbally. Our only hope is digitally (and only then because today we rely on binary).

We will be on other planets by then, for sure. Borders won't matter. Good knows what.
 
VaughanJB said:
We will be on other planets by then, for sure. Borders won't matter. Good knows what.
Click to expand...
As David777 pointed out, the distances are too great to reach another star. Yes, light from the closest one takes just 4 years. But photons have no mass. To accelerate any large object approaching light speed would take more energy than we could ever hope to produce. Unless our basic understanding of physics is wrong, it's not going to happen. Warp speed is science fiction. There is no planet B.
 
johndoe said:
The out of control human population explosion will lead to overcrowding, civil unrest if not civil war and possibly an uncontrollable disease to get the population in check which is natures way.

As the sun runs out of fuel it will expand and incinerate the inner planets including earth.

Escape by space travel will only be a temporary fix. Humans can't exist permanently in a non-earth environment.

Our galaxy, the Milky Way is on a collision course with Andromeda.

Eventually it will be like we never existed.
Click to expand...
Actually population in most Western countries (and in China!) is declining. Global population will top out at about 10.2 billion in the 2080s and start dropping slowly after that. The other stuff, we can't do much about.
 
Grampa Don said:
A million years is so vast a time period that it is hard to grasp. However, given your assumptions and seeing what has transpired in the last 100 years, my guess is that any survivors would be hunter gatherers or farmers in small tribes who will still be killing each other over resources. The fossil fuels that enabled our technology will be long gone.
Click to expand...
Well, I would hope that by then we wouldn't even remember fossil fuels. I would think fusion and solar and who knows what else would be powering the future. I hope you're not right about the hunter gatherer thing, but you very well may be.
 
VaughanJB said:
A million years from now is unfathomable. However, if it came to pass, not much - other than human instinct - will remain. We won't look the same, value the same things, have the same demands. It'd be a totally alien environment. We wouldn't recognize humans a million years ahead. We couldn't communicate with that verbally. Our only hope is digitally (and only then because today we rely on binary).

We will be on other planets by then, for sure. Borders won't matter. Good knows what.
Click to expand...
I never even thought of the communication thing. Perhaps that would be accomplished in the same way electronics communicate. Maybe we could think in real time as we are sending it telepathically by a chip in our speech center. That's scary.
 
David777 said:
IMO humans will never be able to survive very long outside of earth.

Why We'll Never Live in Space

Experts don't believe we will be able to travel beyond our Solar System to other system planets because distances are immensely beyond lifetimes.

Humans Will Never Live on an Exoplanet, Nobel Laureate Says. Here's Why.

What may be possible is for AI mostly if not all non-organic intelligent essentially immortal if not physically destroyed, entities we create to do so.
Click to expand...
Ha ha, Never say never. While I would agree it would be almost imaginable that we could travel to another solar system, I think it is within the realm of possibility that we could live on the outer planets or moons as they warm up from the sun expanding. JMO
 
Grampa Don said:
As David777 pointed out, the distances are too great to reach another star. Yes, light from the closest one takes just 4 years. But photons have no mass. To accelerate any large object approaching light speed would take more energy than we could ever hope to produce. Unless our basic understanding of physics is wrong, it's not going to happen. Warp speed is science fiction. There is no planet B.
Click to expand...

Based on current knowledge, current tech. A billion years is a long time. For example, the financial cost of launches could/would be greatly reduced if we were launching from, say, the Moon. Everything we have, everything we know, if based on 200,000 of knowledge. In two billion years from now? Who knows?
 
VaughanJB said:
A million years from now is unfathomable. However, if it came to pass, not much - other than human instinct - will remain. We won't look the same, value the same things, have the same demands. It'd be a totally alien environment. We wouldn't recognize humans a million years ahead. We couldn't communicate with that verbally. Our only hope is digitally (and only then because today we rely on binary).

We will be on other planets by then, for sure. Borders won't matter. Good knows what.
Click to expand...
The earth itself won't be around forever.
 

You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top