GENIUS FORUMS

Today, when people talk of the future...they are speaking in reference of 10-50 years, perhaps even 100 for kicks. It is seldom that people seriously talk about 1000 years from now or even more. According to science, we have a relatively vast amount of time left before the sun expands and cooks the earth. It is then evident that, barring any complete self-destruction or any other means of extinction for our race, the year 10,000, 100,000, and more absurdly 500,000,000 will occur. Whatever happens, however unalterably questionable to us here and now, it is certainly one distinct future. Keeping in mind each conversation that's taken place on the board in regards to human nature and the workings of existence, my question to you is simple: What will the future be like when our current existence is considered far more than ancient? For consistency's sake, we'll say around a million years from now. I'm not asking what you think should happen, or what you want to happen, but what do you expect to happen if you had to make a guess? Have fun.

If you make the effort to comprehend what is happening now, the future is self-evident, and becomes irrelevant.

Isn't it within our nature to ponder the irrelevant details of imagination, to yearn to understand what is incomprehensible? Isn't that why most of us are here (this board) in the first place?

Your response, it seems, shows a lack of understanding the point of my question (other than the word "future") and in turn takes every avenue to avoid answering it.

I think by then the planet will either be a gigantic pile of waste or it will be the same but we won't be remembered. We haven't built anything that will last a long time, such as the pyramids of Giza...all of our structures are bound to break apart because of their shape.

So we will for the most part be forgotten...my day today will be completely lost to everyone living in a few million years.

It's not our buildings that need be remembered. The Mayans and Egyptians did so because it was the most forthright method of expression. We, on the other hand, have developed a complex and extensive system of information. If our buildings collapse or are replaced by different ones, there will always be ways to remember them without looking directly at them.

If we don't destroy the atmosphere and our race...
FIRST we overcome the aging process
then
we learn to transfer consciousness to android bodies to reduce possibility of accidental death.

My idle conjecture about this is that part of the reason there were seemingly so few people after the last ice age, from which point we gradually grew from there to our current numbers, is that even before then there was some huge planetary catastrophe, such as a flood. I read a simple article recently about how one 'tipping point' theory is that for whatever reason, the earth flipped its axis, the entire thing taking less than 24 hours, during which movement the core's rapid movement caused the mantle to slide, a little like how you can make the skin on your arm ride up and down along the bone. This wobble raised mountain ranges rapidly (the jetties for sea-going craft on the top of South American mountain lake), sank other landmasses (the sunken city off Japan) and so forth. There are also human fossils and technological artifacts found deep in undisturbed geological formations hundreds of millions years old. How did they get there, half a mile down? Obviously, the world's crust on which we live is no more a stable, solid platform as we imagine than our egos.

I suspect there is a good chance that the global warming cycle - if true - leading to the great lessening of the weight concentrated in the poles in the form of ice might engender such a tipping point. Then there are things like large asteroids or god knows what else.

If such a cataclysm happens, most of us will die. But some will remain, for some always do, and at some point people once again approaching multi-billion populations, will look back to what they imagine to be the beginning of human emergence from primitive species of only ten or so thousand years ago.