

Visions of our far future - troystribling
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v454/n7205/full/454696b.html

======
mixmax
Man usually has a tendency to overestimate technological advance in the short
run and underestimate it in the long run. I think tha speculation about what
will happen in a million is, at best, an interesting intellectual exercise.

~~~
geuis
Sorry I downvoted by accident. I wanted to say I agree completely. It's good
to see someone else who reads Kurzweil.

~~~
mixmax
No worries - that's what happens :-)

And yes, blatantly stolen from Kurzweil, I should have given credit where
credit is due.

------
Herring
It has to have happened already. The universe is too big; we need bigger
telescopes.

------
sh1mmer
Requires a Nature login.

~~~
troystribling
I almost did not post it because of that but you can read most of the article
without a login.

------
time_management
_The Victorians' discovery of deep geological time was unsettling._

To them. Eastern religions already had, and used, words to describe billion-
and trillion-year time spans. For example, time spent in even the worst of
Buddhism's narakas (hells) is not eternal, but is posited to stretch beyond
10^19 years. Somehow, 10^19 years of agony sounds more frightening than
"eternal hell".

 _Only one author, Dougal Dixon, thinks it probable that humans will be
extinct within a million years._

Unless humanity evolves dramatically, as a collective, the odds do not favor a
million-year lifespan for the species. I don't envision a war or environmental
disaster rendering the whole species extinct, but I could see one leading to a
genetic bottleneck that opens the species up to disease. Also, fully modern
humans are rather like the (now extinct) passenger pigeon in terms of being
requiring a huge flock to survive.

Personally, I think there will be dramatic improvements in artificial
intelligence, and I expect technological progress to continue throughout my
entire lifetime, but I tend to doubt that we'll ever reach the Singularity. I
think the greatest discovery-- disappointing from a Singularitarian's point of
view-- of the 22nd century will be a strong evidential argument, as close as
humanly possible to proof, that consciousness is, in part, nonphysical, ruling
out the possibility of a full-on Singularity.

