In 250M years we have probably killed ourselves 249,9M years ago anyway.
But in the unlikely scenario that we have not, we probably can fix both tectonic plate movement and/or suns energy output with 250M years of technological progress.
I believe we are at a juncture in human history where technological progress is so fast that it will eclipse any natural evolution that would normally occur. On a 250-million-year scale, we're nearing breakthroughs in halting aging, manipulating DNA on demand, printing body parts, and potentially even achieving mind uploading. Natural selection will soon have run its course for our species. We will keep evolving but it won't be driven by random DNA replication errors: it will be driven by technology and culture. I agree however that "they" will be completely unrecognizable to the modern us.
If 65M years of random DNA mutations caused small rodents to evolve to homo sapiens, what do you think 65M years of human technology can do? Hint: technology progresses a lot faster than natural evolution. Think about how much of an impact evolution had on us in the last 1000 years vs how much technology did. We will probably become capable of editing DNA within a few generations. Death by aging will become a relic of the past. And I'm talking about what will happen within a few generations, not 250M years. In 250M years, DNA-based life will probably be mentioned in museums.
Tomorrow people will be better at remembering passwords and navigating virtual environments, by exactly the same process as any other organism adapting to it's environment.
My point was that the "same process as any other organism adapting to its environment" won't continue for very long for humans. Once you have people that don't die, DNA that can be edited at will, or even entirely non-biological bodies, you no longer have the ingredients required for natural selection.
Even non-biological bodies are subject to accidents, disasters, sheer neglect, or perhaps willful termination (for personal reasons, as punishment, kill for hire, ...). Everything dies at some point - no exceptions.
So essentially that would mess with the timescales. But you'd still have evolution somehow. Perhaps even fashion in what's considered desired physical format. Everybody bio/tech enhanced cyborg one year, everybody flying around as a drone the next year.
Indeed, by natural selection I meant evolution based on random DNA mutations. Of course, technological and cultural evolution (aka memetics) will persist.
The most likely scenario for some time is at most a few thousand people that don't die a natural death, that can afford to edit DNA, and perhaps even transfer their mind into a tin can ... along side some greater than a few billion others who continue to practice natural selection.
How that works out in the long term will be .. interesting *.
Difference is rodent ancestor had to adapt to its environment. We haven't had to adapt to shit in millennia, that's the whole point of tech - to remove the discomfort of selective pressure.
We don't evolve anymore. Natural selection doesn't happen anymore.
Only way for that to happen would be interplanetary travel (particles and radiation in space affecting DNA for one, space colonies slowly changing over many generations to suit other planet's conditions more likely).
In our resource-abundant modern world, you should expect genes that cause people to want kids to do very well. Fertility is low in most developed countries, but that masks particular sub-populations that are growing at a rapid rate. See this article for instance: https://medium.com/migration-issues/how-long-until-were-all-...
Similarly, expect future generations to be full of people who just can't stand wearing a condom during sex.
Anecdotally, it was my more risk taking and carefree friends that had kids first. I can see why - with just a little effort it's very easy not to have kids in the modern world, and the cost-benefit analysis for children is pretty bad.
What that means for the future of humanity, I don't know.
It's not necessarily that simple though. Maybe if you have an unplanned child early, you realize that thing about the cost-benefit analysis being bad, stop having kids, and reproduce at below replacement.
> We don't evolve anymore. Natural selection doesn't happen anymore.
Of course we do. Why would we not? Evolution is just a fact of life. For it to stop happening, we’d need all humans to have strictly the same number of children who live long enough to have children themselves. As soon as you have something affecting fertility rates, you have selection pressure.
> particles and radiation in space affecting DNA for one
What makes you think this does not happen on Earth? Radiation is everywhere. So is chemistry: there are more ways to alter DNA. On top of that, DNA has intrinsic mechanisms for mutation, in the form of transcription errors. Mutations happen all the time.
Well, evolution doesn't happen nearly as much based on disease resistance, now that we have antibiotics. It doesn't happen nearly as much based on ability to survive famine, now that we have modern agriculture. It doesn't happen nearly so much based on ability to survive childbirth, now that we have hospitals. And so on.
Sapiens has only been around for 300k years. Writing and, arguably, civilization is only 5.000 years old. If you subtract 5k from 300k, you still have about 300k left.
If you subtract 300k from 10 million years, you still have about 10 million years left.
The point here is that we are notoriously bad at gauging how big numbers are. We are also bad at intuitively gauging how fast/slow evolution moves.
We are very much still evolving and adapting to our surroundings. It's just that the big changes only become visible way beyond the horizon of a future we are able to conceive.
Women (on average) have preferences for taller guys (on average), where do you think the average height of people are headed? Artificial selection.
Most reproduction is monogamous in modern society. Artificial selection.
I don't mean to offend anyone with those examples by the way, apologies if I did. I also realize the irony that those examples might be opposing forces for the same phenotype I'm referencing.
In my understanding Dyson spheres harvests energy but won’t stop stars expansion. Though peer commenter xlance propose to use that energy to changes earth orbit, which address the goal.
But as far as I know building a Dyson sphere would also require a quantity of material resources that we don’t have on earth. Some options to get those:
A. energy to mass, but we don’t know if that’s even theoretically achievable. Also it probably would require a Dyson sphere itself to have enough energy.
B. convert other abundant elements (O, Si, Fe…) into required elements using known atomic reactions. But harvesting that much elements from earth could transform it in a state that does not worth the pain to try “saving” it.
There are serious physical issues about Dyson spheres. Things like constellations of satellites orbiting a star are much more practical solutions than a solid sphere.
Space is big and interstellar travel is slow, but 7.6bn years is a long time, during which we should have become adept at hopping between desirable stars as they come and go.
> A new model suggests that in 250 million years, all land will collide into a supercontinent that boosts warming and pushes mammals to extinction.
I mean, if in 250 million years we haven’t become multi-planetary, sure. We landed on the moon for the first time just 54 years ago. NASA is planning to send people back in 2 years. If in 3023 we aren’t colonizing Mars or something similar, I think something horribly wrong happened. On a much shorter timescale than 250 million years.
It doesn’t account for humans staying alive through technology, yes. But the earth is still likely to be more habitable than anywhere else in the solar system for the next billion years even as the sun increases its output 10%, the oceans evaporate, and natural plant life dies out.
> I mean, if in 250 million years we haven’t become multi-planetary, sure
I think that's optimistic. Who know what could happen in that time. Many many doomsday scenarios come to mind, all of which I personally feel are more likely than us surviving that long.
Climate crisis + global warming being the most realistic, given we don't fix our shit or find a way around it (underground?). Massive collisions from objects in space, solar flares, nuclear winter, Christian rapture + doomsday?.
The core question is which biological kindom will flurish between the next 250 years (when humans go extinct dragging most mammals with them) and the next 250 million years that this article is so rightly concerned about.
My money is on Fungi. In about 1 mln years intelligent Fungi will be roaming the earth, building large fungi language models and pondering the meaning of it all.
Sometimes, scientists get too much time on their hands so much so that it doesn't do a service to science.
I mean you can have fun in your free time predicting the end of mammals' life. But what's the point of writing a publication about this? At best, this is going to be completely useless. At worst it's going to be read as: "mammals will go extinct anyways in 250M years, what's the point in reducing carbon footprint now?" Or worse: "look at the crap the government is funding, we should end government funding for scientists".
Plus it's a complete disservice to the word "expert". These guys are true experts in their field and they know a lot of stuff that other people dont, but predictions like this are so random, it's almost certain that these guys are quite wrong. This gives ammunitions to the anti vax and flat earthers saying "experts" don't know shit anyways.
Sorry for the bad feelings, but that kind of research really annoys me. I only see negative outcomes from this kind of studies.
We're presently headed to a desert Earth with nothing bigger or more complex than a gecko roaming endless sand within 1000 years. Before that, hypercanes will flatten whole regions. We've already reached 38 C SST this year. Give it 20-25 years and some regions will be unlivable using conventional A-frame above-ground construction.
I had the same reaction. At what point does this cease being science? Because making predictions about the world in 250 million years is a tiny step above fortune telling.
At some point speculating about what happened 10000 years ago was “a tiny step above fortune telling”. There are several factors to consider:
- some people are interested in different things than you are;
- you only need so much time to write such an article, it’s not like someone set millions of dollars on fire;
- this is fundamentally just extrapolation of the movement of tectonic plates, which is a perfectly legitimate question to ask.
- things that are considered futile now might not be in the future, and we have no way of knowing that right now.
In the end, complaining about what gets published in the literature is about as productive as complaining about what ends up on HN’s front page: things are here because someone wrote it and others found it interesting.
What a strange comment. I am complaining about the misapplication of science toward predicting the future, not that the article is on the home page. “Some people are interested in different things than you are” has literally nothing to do with it.
As a side note, I’ve noticed that comments like this, which have basically nothing to do with the parent and are instead just functioning as weird hobby horse put downs, are becoming more and more common. Very strange phenomenon.
I am complaining because in today's world where rationality is under siege, articles that cite "science" as a way to turn divination into fact don't do service to true scientific method.
If anyone thinks we have done a good job in our time here they are deluded. We’ll be wiped out and it’s all our own stupid, selfish fault.
…now let me get back to planning Christmas presents for my kids and what is our next holiday.
To combine a few other comments: in 250m years, we are unrecognizable by today's humans, and easily have the technologies to inhabit other planets. That's assuming we haven't already destroyed ourselves many times over by them.
Yep. The extreme far future (i.e., tectonics, magnetic field weakening, the moon receding, liquid water loss, GRBs, GCRs, and the expanding sun) is inconsequential compared to the existential threat of the anthropogenic global warming emergency now.
But in the unlikely scenario that we have not, we probably can fix both tectonic plate movement and/or suns energy output with 250M years of technological progress.