Wheres the human race headed

Lirange wrote: »

(Hu)Man and Machine will become one.

We'll eventually live forever. Consciousness will be downloaded to new hosts just like you move your rubbish to a new hard drive. Imagine the processing power merged with human creativity. Fascinating and foreboding.

Scoff if you like. But it's coming.

Cool if it happens but I still feel were not even close yet. Our knowledge of how the brain works when it comes to the mind and memories is at a very early stage of understanding. Yes computers are moving forward at a crazy rate, but IMHO they're diverging more from the brain model in a lot of ways. It may happen but it's a long way off. Hope I'm wrong.

Even if there is an apocalypse or dark age humanity will pick up the pieces and use the foundations of knowledge to rebuild. Just like the Renaissance stood on the shoulders of the Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, etc after the nadir of the middle ages.

true but there big gaps in between where knowledge was lost. Every civilisation is convinced they will go on. Every single major civilisation has crumbled. The more complex they become the more likely it is. One follows the other throughout history. The more complex they become the more vulnerable they are. The byzantine empire survived for longer than most mainly because they became less complex over time.

Zillah wrote: »

Wibbs, in relation to your earlier comments on evolution: We're not evolving faster at all,

Sorry but I'm afraid you're wrong, we are. The changes in the genes are evidence of that. Just because we don't have a third eye or bigger heads doesn't mean we've stopped evolving.

the large amount of variation currently seen within humanity was largely due to geography, as we spread across the planet populations became isolated, which leads to variation.

Actually the variation in the human genome is pretty narrow. We're incredibly "inbred" and far more related as a species when compared to other great apes. You're closer in genetic terms to a Kalahari bushman, than two populations of chimps separated by a few miles. A couple of bottlenecks in our population in the past saw to that. Now with the larger populations involved we've seen a burst of evolution on the genetic level(it's pretty much a given that genetic changes and drift occur faster in bigger populations). Far more than expected. It's easy to think that now with greater apparent movement of peoples that we'll somehow breed to a more homogenous group, but we won't. Yes there is movement now, but in comparison to the size of the populations involved the genetic impact of that movement is practically pretty tiny.

The speed of evolution is massively outpaced by that of technology. For all intents and purposes, our natural evolution is finished, the future of our race will be determined technologically.

Possibly in which case it could be seen as another evolutionary pressure. New technology and it's effects on our culture and social needs may micro evolve behavioural changes which may cause physical changes(in the brain at least). There has been some evidence of that already. There are genetic changes related to sperm production that seem to have shown up when we started to come together in bigger groups. The social/reproductive pressures of a small extended tribal unit are different to those pressures in a big city say. A technology like reliable contraception may bring more.

Ten thousand years is a drop in the ocean in evolutionary terms...

That's only partially true. Yes in the case of macro evolutionary changes but, in micro changes it's quite a long time. Even speciation can occur in such timeframes in situations of extreme pressures. We can see huge changes "overnight" even in our own history. Look at the explosion of art around 50,000 years ago. Yes there is some evidence of art before that, in particular ochre production and even geometric patterns scratched on ochre(modern humans in south africa 80,000 years ago), but it is very rare and isolated in time and geography. 50,000 years ago for whatever reasons(and I have some mad theories on that one) a massive and global cultural change involving a major rejig of our abstract and symbolist thinking happened very very quickly. The humans of 60,000 years looked the same in the bones as the humans from 40,000 years ago, but they were a very different animal.

Another change happened overnight at around 30,000 years ago. We started to live longer. The amount of humans that could live long enough to be grandparents shot up in numbers in a very noticeable way. Again they look the same, their cultures, their stone tools etc show no change.

Populations in places effected by malaria, a relatively new disease(20,000yrs old AFAIR) evolved changes to cope with it. Sickle cell anemia being the bad side of that change.

Closer to the present day. As I said in a previous post, agriculture and the new diets and lifestyle that came with it caused evolution in the populations(and in individual populations too), so they could capitalise on the new foods. That could still happen today. Western types eating soya for the first time in our evolutionary history may adapt to that. I'm not one of those though as soya goes through me like a certain well known pear cider....

just imagine what genetic modification would be like at that point. Hell, we cannot fathom the technologies that will exist at that time, assuming we survive that long. There may be nothing like humanity left, human sentiences may live in city sized nanite clouds that fly through the galaxies, the universe their infinite playground.

It's possible, or we could be a tiny population still stuck on planet earth.

You're talking about political constructs more than anything. In the vast majority of cases the people of those civilisations survived, as did a great deal of their technology and culture, though under the rulership of another variety.

Actually not true. A great deal of those cultures and their technology went the way of the dodo. After rome fell, we lost the ability to make concrete for nearly a 1000 years. Social and political structures changed massively. Most of europe seemed to stop producing even something as everyday and seemingly simple and useful as pottery for 100's of years. It seems they suddenly didn't need it anymore. We could have lost even more if the bunch of irish types in beehive huts hadn't held on to a lot of it. Ditto a big thanks to the Muslim lads for saving the rest of it.

How a society survives or falls has a lot to do with it's complexity. The black death a good example. It decimated europe. You would think it would have had an even bigger effect than it obviously did. The reason it didn't was the society was more resilient. You had a pretty simple hierarchy. A few at the top, a bigger bunch but still small in the middle and a large population below them with resources going up. Now if half of all those die, you still have the structure in place(although the bottom half suddenly become more powerful as labour becomes valuable). Today that structure is more like a web with many many more weak points in that web(often for economic efficiency reasons). One weak point; from an objective point of view who would you rate as more valuable? Doctors or truck drivers? Many if not most would say doctors. They'd be wrong though. If all doctors disappeared tomorrow, yes death rates would go up and longevity would go down, but not by much. Longevity is more down to clean water and antibiotics and immunisation than doctors per se and anybody could be trained to administer the latter two. If truck drivers disappeared? Pandemonium. No petrol in your car, no food on your supermatket shelves, no medical supplies, many power stations would shut down, the economy would collapse, the list is long. And that would happen within weeks. Food would be gone within two weeks for a start.

Even if the United States and the EU get wiped out as political entities, the technology of our species will survive...in that example almost certainly in the hands of the Chinese.

That's a good example. Let's say we never learned the secret of concrete after rome fell. The chinese had the technology and could have taught us(as they did with paper), but they were isolated from europe. Now we're more interrelated technology wise. There's no spare culture hanging onto the basics. Now the usual cry of "technology will save us there too" doesn't really cut the mustard on a few levels. The very pace of change is partially a problem. Can you read the data on a 1970's hard disk, or one of the original floppies? As more and more of our knowledge goes to digital the less robust it is. If the book of kells had been a PC we would not know how to access it's info, nor would it work after a very short time.

The ebb and flow of political power is no way to gauge the overall advancement of a given species.

I would disagree entirely with that. It's part of our species and an important part. Without political power and will we wouldnt have gone into space, nor gone to the moon. We haven't been back there simply because there hasn't been the political need to do so. Politics(in a larger sense) built the pyramids, writing, the Parthenon, gave us law, built Rome etc.

I know TL DR I felt a need for a ramble. :D

waitinforatrain wrote:

Way to dodge the question

OK, we're likely to get more gracile, not more robust. Less muscle. and such. We may adapt to the higher sugar and fat diet most in the west eat. Our brains may rewire, though unlikely they'll get bigger. Issue with that. We'll become more hairless and taller. A trend towards both earlier and later reproduction.

We need to colonise beyond this planet. It's an insurance policy. If something does take us out our colonists would continue on. Any island species is vulnerable. We're sitting on a great big island. If after the americas was colonised, europe got wiped out, european civilisation would continue. I remember someone making the point that "One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind" was in english, not because the english went to the moon, but because they and others established a colony. The first humans to stand on a planet outside our solar system may come not from earth but from one of her colonies.

Mars is an obvious destination. Has all the building blocks going on. Water and such. Terraforming it to anything like the degree the sci fi stuff suggests is unlikely as it's gravity is too low and the solar energy is a bit lacking, but we could get some of the way there. Build underground, avoid the worst of the radiation and tap into the water. Even with the radiation we would well live long enough to reproduce.

Maybe as others have said we will become machine intelligences. I don't see an issue with that. It would be another evolutionary step. A step taken by the only technological species on this planet, to ensure their "children" continue on.

I have always agreed with the notion that the first contact we may have with any alien civilisation will be a "machine" civilisation. Biology is much more limited as far as energy use and entropy is concerned. We can't go to the stars for many reasons. Primary among those reasons is time. Time means little to a machine system. 30,000 years traveling is nothing if you're switched off for the trip. If you were supercooled(easy in deep space), entropy would be bugger all of a problem.

Do I honestly think we'll upload our individual minds into a machine? No, for many reasons, but I do think we will upload part of who we are into the replacements we build for ourselves. It does raise questions about what it is, will be or was to be human.