
The Next Ten Billion Years - IsaacL
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/the-next-ten-billion-years.html
======
cousin_it
I feel there's a much higher chance that humanity will drastically change its
own fate (for better or worse) in the next hundred years, and any forecasts
beyond that have very wide error bars. Artificial intelligence is the big one
(it ends the current era of "business as usual" no matter whether it's
friendly or not), but there's also nanotech, superviruses coming from desktop
bio-hackery, mind uploading, good old nuclear terrorism, etc. For "business as
usual" to continue and things like climate change to stay relevant, we need to
dodge all of the above, which is difficult.

For a more thoughtful take on the future of humanity, Google for the keywords
"existential risk". Bostrom's writeup is a good start:
[http://www.nickbostrom.com/existential/risks.html](http://www.nickbostrom.com/existential/risks.html)

~~~
clord
Earlier generations could have said the same thing before each of: the
internet, petroleum, flight, biotech, robotics, atomic bombs, the electric
grid, the automobile, etc.

AI, nanotech, biohacking, and other possible future technologies just don't
seem anywhere near as disruptive as that first list. They'll get incorporated
into the "business as usual" machine if they come to pass at all — and much
more easily than, say, atomic bombs were.

~~~
cousin_it
A world with cars and electricity looks like "business as usual" to us, but
not to the people who lived before cars and electricity. The rate of change is
now much faster than they were accustomed to. The technologies I listed will
make it faster still. You can't talk meaningfully about what happens a
thousand years from now, because accelerating change implies that at a certain
point in imagining the future you just _run out of imagination_ , and that
point might be a hundred years away or even closer.

------
didgeoridoo
Great, I love to start my day with a bit of existential horror.

I had some stuff to do, but now I think I'll just stare into the middle
distance and contemplate the pointlessness of it all.

~~~
sedev
There's a follow-up post[1] where he talks more about the reactions:

"A vision of a future in which civilizations, species and worlds follow life
cycles like those of all other natural things didn’t leave them furious or
depressed. Their comments instead featured such words as “comforted,”
“delighted,” and “awed.” It’s easy, and also common, to mischaracterize such
feelings as simple schadenfreude at the failure of humanity’s overinflated
ambitions, but there’s something rather more significant going on here. Not
one of the readers who made these comments made gloating remarks about the
fate of humanity or the Earth. Rather, what comforted, delighted, and awed
them was the imagery of Nature’s enduring order and continuity that I wove
throughout the narrative, and brought to the tightest focus I could manage in
the last two paragraphs. "

[1]: [http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2013/09/a-sense-of-
ho...](http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2013/09/a-sense-of-
homecoming.html)

------
wavefunction
This brings up a thought I've had repeatedly (an admittedly unscientific one)
when considering human history.

Considering that it "only" took us several thousand years to transform
ourselves from hunter-gatherers to our current technologies, it makes little
sense that this is the first human culture to reach the point we've reached.
Then I try to dissuade myself from such a notion, rationalizing that if that
were the case, we'd know it from some sort of evidence by this point.

And yet, I still can't shake the notion that this "shouldn't" be the first
time around. Weird, especially since I consider myself a hardcore skeptic.

~~~
wging
What about artificial satellites? If their orbits were stable, shouldn't any
satellites from previous civilization still be around? Do you have an estimate
on the attrition rate from random meteor collisions and the like? We should be
able to do pretty well just from our own experience.

~~~
johnchristopher
It's as likely that a different civilization would go all-wired/wired-only for
mass communication and only use satellites for observation purposes and GPS
purposes. Then the number of potential satellites to be found is much lower
than our current civilization.

------
z92
Relevant

Timeline of far future from Wikipedia

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future)

To me the most interesting point in the future is 120 trillion years: when all
the stars in the universe have exhausted their fuel, and the Universe has gone
dark.

~~~
coldtea
> _To me the most interesting point in the future is 120 trillion years: when
> all the stars in the universe have exhausted their fuel, and the Universe
> has gone dark._

Sorry, but doesn't that sound like the LEAST interesting point in the
universe?

~~~
iliis
Well, you may never have read Asimov's "Last Question":
[http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm](http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm)

~~~
shijie
I have somehow never read that. It was stunning in its breadth. I loved it. It
made me ponder the significance of the series of self-perpetuating chemical
reactions that comprises my biological existence. Now I'm sitting here at my
computer, waxing existential, when I'm supposed to be building the auth and
permissions section for an API...

------
jere
>Ten years from now... Among those who recognize that something’s wrong, one
widely accepted viewpoint holds that fusion power, artificial intelligence,
and interstellar migration will shortly solve all our problems, and therefore
we don’t have to change the way we live.

Oh, of course. Dontcha know that, during that time, we'll be no more than 6
years away from a computer passing the Turing Test?
[http://longbets.org/1/](http://longbets.org/1/)

And we'll be only ~20 years away from the singularity which solves everything.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity)

But in all seriousness, this was quite entertaining. I don't know if we have
any reason to expect another (highly) intelligent species to arise in the next
100 million years. Were there any obstacles in the _past_ 100 million years
that prevented an intelligent species from developing before humans?

~~~
protonfish
Just because they don't make jewelry and weapons doesn't mean some other
animals (elephants, whales, other apes) are not highly intelligent. I prefer
to call civilizations like ours "technological" and not pass judgement on the
smarts of other creatures because they don't like building things.

~~~
jere
I wasn't sure what phrasing to use (and I definitely didn't like the simple
term "intelligent species"). I kind of agree with you, but I think it's a
little silly to say _only_ our technology distinguishes us. I'm reminded of
_Anathem_ here: even if we all lived like monks shunning technology, we'd
still be set apart by our mathematic, scientific, and philosophical reasoning.

~~~
maxerickson
The monks in Anathem are technologists that shun distraction.

~~~
jere
It's been a while since I read the book, but I don't believe that is an
accurate description:

>The law of the Second New Revised Book of Discipline that governs the lives
of the avout at the time of the narration... bans the avout from owning
anything but two pieces of clothing and a sphere with multiple uses, and bans
them from using or even knowing how to use any technology but paper and pen
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anathem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anathem)

Unless you want to argue about whether those limited items are worth calling
technology, at which time I will have to point out that we are not the only
species to use tools.

~~~
maxerickson
It's also been a while since I read the book, but my recollection is that I
viewed those rules as the set of preconditions that were settled on to allow
them to continue to have monasteries.

------
wobbleblob
I wonder on what basis the author assumes that the next glacial period is a
million years from now.

This would be a clear break with the last million years (100k year severe
glaciations separated by 10-15k year interglacials), or of the first half of
the pleistocence (mild glaciations every 40k years).

If the holocene interglacial really is extended to a million years, it would
likely be enough time for the polar ice caps to disappear completely, ending
the quarternary ice age altogether.

~~~
bradleyland
I thought that at first too, but then I realized that there is no explicit
declaration that there weren't many glacial periods in-between. It just so
happens that a million years from now, the earth is in a glacial period. Then
again, I don't know what the "holocene interglacial" is, so your other points
are probably well founded.

~~~
wobbleblob
The holocene interglacial is what we are living in now. It started 12000 years
ago, at the end of the last glacial period. This extended period of
glaciations and interglacials together is called the quarternary ice age, also
known as the current ice age.

Ice ages are the periods in earth's geological history when permanent ice caps
and glaciers existed at the poles and in mountain ranges. We think of that
situation as normal, but it has only existed for the last 2 to 2.5 million
years. The high albedo (reflection of sunlight) of the ice sheets at the poles
cools the planet down further, so an ice age reinforces itself. In other
words, we are now living in a warmer period inside an ice age.

There have been other ice ages before, but the last one before the current
ended about 100 million years before the first dinosaurs evolved.

------
arethuza
This reminds me of a Time Team special where they pointed out that the island
of Great Britain has completely lost its human population and be re-populated
at least _seven_ times so far.

~~~
arcadeparade
[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1528151/Humans-tried-and-
fai...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1528151/Humans-tried-and-failed-to-
colonise-Britain-seven-times.html)

~~~
wobbleblob
"It reports that sea level rises and cold climates intervened to push
pioneering groups of humans out again and again until our ancestors were
finally established some 12,000 years ago."

I wonder if the word finally is misplaced there. During the next glacial
period, the area may become uninhabitable again. In those past 700k years they
talk about, there may have been periods much longer than 12k years that the
area was inhabited. Each of those previous 7 settlement attempts would
probably have seemed like the finally successful attempt to the people at the
time.

~~~
wavefunction
The article mentioned one gap of 100,000 years between colonization attempts.

------
gonvaled
Great reading! Things could of course play out like this but, since we have no
really no clue, aiming for the stars is the most exciting alternative.

The biggest mistake we could be making right now is to waste the current free
oil reserves that are probably necessary to move to the next technological
level.

But I guess capitalism leaves no other option: we need the profit motive to
keep things running. Maybe another economic system would be better suited to
reach grand goals, but which one?

~~~
LogicalBorg
Utopianism, of course. Imagine a civilization fueled entirely by hopium!!

~~~
gonvaled
I am not suggesting that capitalism is not the economic system most suited for
human nature: it probably is (at least more suited than communism, if we
accept that the theory of evolution can be applied to historical processes,
and thus capitalism has survived as the fittest alternative)

What I am suggesting is that _precisely_ because human nature is only
compatible with capitalism, we are not going to be able to tackle long term
existential problems.

~~~
LogicalBorg
That is a sensible criticism. I agree that the human race is wasting absurdly
vast quantities of oil and that they seem to display no more awareness of this
issue than the average monkey. I'm not sure if "capitalism" is the problem
though, since greed and waste existed long before its ideas were articulated.
I sometimes thing our economic system should be overhauled with better
accounting techniques so we actually count the expenditure of resources as a
loss rather than as a profit as we currently do, under the rather dubious
assumption that more consumption is always better. I guess we'll find out how
badly we have erred when the future teaches us. I hope its lessons are
gentle...

~~~
gonvaled
It has nothing to do about articulating the ideas of capitalism. Capitalism
exists whether or not we articulate it , the same way that the Andromeda
Galaxy existed before we saw it in our telescopes. My point is that human
nature seems to be very much correlated to capitalism.

And the important question is whether this is a fundamental characteristic of
life, or is it just a feature of this particular version of intelligent life
that we have in planet Earth? Or maybe is just a consequence of the evolution
of our social system?

To state it clearly: is it possible to conceive an intelligent society
collaborating by other means than the ones that we are currently using? Could
catastrophe be averted by working together in other ways? Are we humans at all
capable of this?

Currently, the answer seems to be _no_ , but who knows.

------
jbattle
Interesting, but how does humanity rise from a non-industrial dark age to high
technology without any reserves of fossil fuels? I say we get only one shot at
this - if we our our grandchildren blow it, we remain at ... ok this is stupid
... ewok levels of civilization forever after.

~~~
mfringel
Actually, you just have to wait until the planet "generates" more oil via
geological processes.

You're just going to be waiting a very very long time.

~~~
xerula
When our great deposits of fossil fuels were being laid down in the
Carboniferous, efficient decomposers / recyclers of dead wood and plant
material (chiefly higher basidiomycete fungi) had not yet evolved. Nowadays
there is much less opportunity for dead organic material to accumulate in the
kind of quantities that geological processes can turn into significant oil
reserves.

------
lettergram
I think the author ignores several important facts. For one, humans are high
on the food chain and in turn may not be as robust as say roaches, but we can
construct pretty much everything. We will evolve and change, but the
extinction of the human race would require several Unprecedented events. Even
a large meteorite striking Earth would have trouble killing off humanity
(obviously if it's big enough...). Furthr, algae reduce carbon much MUCH more
efficiently than plants and can reproduce much faster. Even more we already
have processes of turning algae to oil (although the oil is of poor quality).
All that being said the more carbon dioxide is released the quicker/more algae
will grow and the more oxygen and oil can be produced. In other words,
obviously there are limits and I challenge you (the author or reader) to do
research, but although humanity has problems. As a species we are doing
alright.

------
kazagistar
Artificial intelligence not being practical is a silly conclusion. We already
have intelligence: in a few million years of fucking around with existing
intelligence, I am pretty sure we can make some significant progress. The
insistence on it being silicon is what causes people to get the wrong idea.

------
nezumi
Reading the follow-up article he talks more about the 'folk mythology of
progress' and speaks of the cycle of nature (intelligent species and
civilizations) as a more fundamental truth. Here's a counter proposition: yes,
the processes of nature are supremely powerful and yes, humans are apt to make
life difficult for ourselves and yes, progress isn't a given. What we call
progress is really just humanity fulfilling our ecological destiny of adapting
to new niches, just like every other species. But by destroying our
environment, we are creating the very evolutionary pressure necessary to force
our own adaptation - which we will continue to rightly term 'progress'.

------
prithee
If you are at all interested in constructing these timeline focused thought
experiments I highly recommend "microscope" an RPG by Ben Robbins.

[http://www.lamemage.com/microscope/](http://www.lamemage.com/microscope/)

------
vlucas
This is pretty bleak and pessimistic. As an optimist, I'd like to think that
our advancements in technology will save us eventually. We have made
significant advancements in clean energy like wind and solar, and those
advancements won't stop. We have also made significant advancements in crop
yields, etc. Of course, by the time those power sources are so widespread,
there will be much more pollutants in the atmosphere from fossil fuel power
sources, so who knows.

Anyone have a future that is a little more rosy than this? Not looking for a
utopia here, but just something other than the complete fall of civilization
thousands of times over.

------
nkarpov
Although not completely related, this reminds me of Asimov's famous story...
The Last Question. Must read.

[http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm](http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm)

~~~
fennecfoxen
It reminds me of only-partially-related C.S. Lewis poetry.

[http://allpoetry.com/poem/8508345-Re-adjustment-by-
C_S_Lewis](http://allpoetry.com/poem/8508345-Re-adjustment-by-C_S_Lewis)

------
Houshalter
Contrary what reading the news might lead you to believe, the world is better
off than it's ever been and continuing to get better. Why does the author
believe technological progress will halt tomorrow?

------
chsonnu
If you liked this you may like Asimov's The Last Question:
[http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm](http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm)

~~~
GrantS
True, and even more similar to Olaf Stapledon's 1930 novel "Last and First
Men"
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_and_First_Men](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_and_First_Men)

And on a much shorter time-scale, similar to Clifford Simak's novel-ish
collection of stories "City" from the 1940s onward:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_(novel)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_\(novel\))

------
ebertx
The most fascinating part about this post is seeing how differently people
react to it: nihilism, awe, wonder, etc. The story seems to be a rorschach
test of sorts.

------
mathattack
Very interesting work. I find it very hard to imagine that a society capable
of building skyscrapers and venturing into space won't leave more clues of
it's existence to subsequent societies. Certainly it will be much more
permanent than what the Mayans are leaving us. Perhaps the clues will be
cities, perhaps it will be radiation, perhaps it will be stripped land.

~~~
ekianjo
I don't share the vision of the author but you'll be surprised how quickly any
building may collapse once not maintained: plants will grow under concrete and
end up breaking it over years and years, and erosion will progressively do the
job as well. And sidementation will end up covering all that's left over
centuries: look in Egypt, most of the ruins we found were deep under several
dozens of meters of sand.

~~~
mathattack
I think the point of the article is not the end truth of what he says, but
just to encourage speculation, so I think all of us will draw different end
conclusions. I doubt that we'll have as many iterations of society as he
suggests. At some point we'll do something that kills all of us, and will then
hand it off to the next species.

If you look at Detroit, it doesn't take long for nature to take back
buildings. I would just think that there are certain artifacts or clues that
would be somehow visible. We are leaving much more artifacts than every
civilization before us put together. But I might just be inserting my short
term bias into the situation.

------
userulluipeste
I like better the version in which a civilization could colonize the entire
galaxy in about 5 to 50 million years (with low-speed means of space travel):
[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=where-
are-t...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=where-are-
they&page=3)

------
friggeri
Great read, reminds me a lot of Last and First Men.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_and_First_Men](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_and_First_Men)

------
roc
This projection seems to hinge entirely on the idea that you can't build solar
panels, wind farms and hydro dams without cheap oil.

As those have only become _more_ economical as oil has become more expensive,
I find it particularly difficult to buy into long-run projections based upon
that unexplored/unexplained/unjustified assumption.

Setting up humanity as reliant on fusion, or massive increases in new energy
generation in general, also strikes me as a red herring. Likely: we just won't
need it.

Even if (this time) it really is ready in ~50 years, guess what? Population is
going to peak and begin to fall in ~50 years as more countries become wealthy,
healthy and secure enough to make large families a poor reproductive strategy.

And is there any reason to expect that energy demand is going to increase fast
enough with a static-to-falling population (in the future) to match or
outstrip the growth of energy demand with a growing population (today)?

Western per-capita energy use is _flat_. [1] So I don't see how.

Absent some trend of every nation transitioning to US-level per-capita energy
use [2], the energy needed by the ~9B humans living in 2050 likely represents
the _peak_ of world energy _demand_.

If you're going to predicate the collapse of civilization on a shortfall of
energy _generation_ , you need to show how that happens in the next 50 years,
which is well within the capability of existing coal, oil and gas resources.

Further, an assumption of a war-wracked world hand-waves away the question of
how on earth nuclear-armed powers are _able_ to go to war with one another.
This has been an unsolved problem in modern geopolitics for nearly 70 years
now. These powers can certainly squabble via proxies. But, by definition, no
major harm can be on the line lest it escalate directly into the conflict no-
one can win. And existential threat is _the_ major harm. So how could a nation
decide that _certain destruction_ is at all preferable to _incremental
destruction_?

[1] Some countries are at a higher level than others, but all the western
countries are essentially flat. chart:
[http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/international/en...](http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/international/energy%20per%20capita.png)
from:
[http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/08/its...](http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/08/its-
official-western-europeans-have-more-cars-per-person-than-americans/261108/)

[2] Any assumption that every nation will transition to US-levels of per-
capita energy use seem unjustified by the data. European and Japanese levels
have been flat to falling-modestly for some time. It's much more likely that
US energy use will begin to fall, as suburban sprawl and huge houses become
increasingly uneconomical and we move closer together, drive less, build more
sensibly, telecommute more, etc.

~~~
pilom
_" 2050 likely represents the peak of world energy demand"_

I guess I'm a Sci-Fi dreamer about energy use. There are some REALLY cool
things you can do if you have an infinite supply of free energy. Some of the
cooler ones: Magnetic force fields with superconducting coil generators. If
you had enough energy, you could create a magnetic force strong enough to stop
bullets. Heck, with enough energy you could build magnetic tractor beams and
capture passing meteors. (Remember, infinite and free energy). Railguns to
launch us to space. Water desalination on a scale big enough to purify the
world's water supply.

------
CmonDev
A perfect example of a naive linear prediction. The thing is that progress is
not linear.

------
alexeisadeski3
What's so wrong with solar power?

~~~
rbosinger
Ask the Corbicules!

------
rbosinger
That was strangely relaxing.

------
melloclello
This is awesome

