Venus has the runaway greenhouse effect, but it is much closer to the sun and has a much thicker, carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere that traps more heat than Earth's, Live Science previously reported.
The truth is bad enough, and reason enough to take dramatic action. According to Mann, a global temperature increase of 5. One way climate change could trigger a societal collapse is by creating food insecurity. Warming the planet has a range of negative impacts on food production, including increasing the water deficit and thereby reducing food harvests, Live Science previously reported. Food production losses can increase human deaths and drive economic loss and socio-political instability, among other factors, that may trigger a breakdown of our institutions and increase the risk of a societal collapse, according to a study published Feb.
Related: Has the Earth ever been this hot before? Kemp studies previous civilization collapses and the risk of climate change. Extinctions and catastrophes almost always involve multiple factors, he said, but he thinks if humans were to go extinct, climate change would likely be the main culprit.
Then climate change, no doubt," Kemp told Live Science. All of the major mass-extinction events in Earth's history have involved some kind of climatic change, according to Kemp. And more recently, climate change affected the fate of early human relatives. The human species has existed for a mere two hundred thousand years or so, and this is far from enough time for it to have experienced all possible conditions and permutations of which the system of humans and their environment is capable.
More fundamentally, the reason why the cyclical view is false is that the universe itself has existed for only a finite amount of time. The history of the universe has its own directionality: an ineluctable increase in entropy. During its process of entropy increase, the universe has progressed through a sequence of distinct stages. In the eventful first three seconds, a number of transitions occurred, including probably a period of inflation, reheating, and symmetry breaking.
These were followed, later, by nucleosynthesis, expansion, cooling, and formation of galaxies, stars, and planets, including Earth circa 4. The oldest undisputed fossils are about 3. Evolution of more complex organisms was a slow process. It took some 1. The agricultural revolution began in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East 10, years ago, and the rest is history.
The size of the human population, which was about 5 million when we were living as hunter-gatherers 10, years ago, had grown to about million by the year 1; it reached one billion in AD; and today over 6. All techno-hype aside, it is striking how recent many of the events are that define what we take to be the modern human condition. If compress the time scale such that the Earth formed one year ago, then Homo sapiens evolved less than 12 minutes ago, agriculture began a little over one minute ago, the Industrial Revolution took place less than 2 seconds ago, the electronic computer was invented 0.
Almost all the volume of the universe is ultra-high vacuum, and almost all of the tiny material specks in this vacuum are so hot or so cold, so dense or so dilute, as to be utterly inhospitable to organic life. Spatially as well as temporally, our situation is an anomaly. Given the technocentric perspective adopted here, and in light of our incomplete but substantial knowledge of human history and its place in the universe, how might we structure our expectations of things to come?
Unless the human species lasts literally forever, it will some time cease to exist. In that case, the long-term future of humanity is easy to describe: extinction. An estimated There are two different ways in which the human species could become extinct: one, by evolving or developing or transforming into one or more new species or life forms, sufficiently different from what came before so as no longer to count as Homo sapiens; the other, by simply dying out, without any meaningful replacement or continuation.
Of course, a transformed continuant of the human species might itself eventually terminate, and perhaps there will be a point where all life comes to an end; so scenarios involving the first type of extinction may eventually converge into the second kind of scenario of complete annihilation. We postpone discussion of transformation scenarios to a later section, and we shall not here discuss the possible existence of fundamental physical limitations to the survival of intelligent life in the universe.
This section focuses on the direct form of extinction annihilation occurring within any very long, but not astronomically long, time horizon — we could say one hundred thousand years for specificity. Human extinction risks have received less scholarly attention than they deserve. In recent years, there have been approximately three serious books and one major paper on this topic.
As I introduced the term, an existential disaster is one that causes either the annihilation of Earth-originating intelligent life or the permanent and drastic curtailment of its potential for future desirable development.
It is possible that a publication bias is responsible for the alarming picture presented by these opinions. Scholars who believe that the threats to human survival are severe might be more likely to write books on the topic, making the threat of extinction seem greater than it really is.
The greatest extinction risks and existential risks more generally arise from human activity. Our species has survived volcanic eruptions, meteoric impacts, and other natural hazards for tens of thousands of years.
It seems unlikely that any of these old risks should exterminate us in the near future. By contrast, human civilization is introducing many novel phenomena into the world, ranging from nuclear weapons to designer pathogens to high-energy particle colliders. The most severe existential risks of this century derive from expected technological developments. Advances in biotechnology might make it possible to design new viruses that combine the easy contagion and mutability of the influenza virus with the lethality of HIV.
Molecular nanotechnology might make it possible to create weapons systems with a destructive power dwarfing that of both thermonuclear bombs and biowarfare agents. The same technologies that will pose these risks will also help us to mitigate some risks. Biotechnology can help us develop better diagnostics, vaccines, and anti-viral drugs. Molecular nanotechnology could offer even stronger prophylactics.
Extinction risks constitute an especially severe subset of what could go badly wrong for humanity. There are many possible global catastrophes that would cause immense worldwide damage, maybe even the collapse of modern civilization, yet fall short of terminating the human species. An all-out nuclear war between Russia and the United States might be an example of a global catastrophe that would be unlikely to result in extinction.
What distinguishes extinction and other existential catastrophes is that a comeback is impossible. A non-existential disaster causing the breakdown of global civilization is, from the perspective of humanity as a whole, a potentially recoverable setback: a giant massacre for man, a small misstep for mankind.
This takes us to the second family of scenarios: recurrent collapse. Environmental threats seem to have displaced nuclear holocaust as the chief specter haunting the public imagination. Current-day pessimists about the future often focus on the environmental problems facing the growing world population, worrying that our wasteful and polluting ways are unsustainable and potentially ruinous to human civilization.
The credit for having handed the environmental movement its initial impetus is often given to Rachel Carson, whose book Silent Spring sounded the alarm on pesticides and synthetic chemicals that were being released into the environment with allegedly devastating effects on wildlife and human health.
In recent years, the spotlight of environmental concern has shifted to global climate change. The final estimate is fraught with uncertainty because of uncertainty about what the default rate of emissions of greenhouse gases will be over the century, uncertainty about the climate sensitivity parameter, and uncertainty about other factors. The IPCC therefore expresses its assessment in terms of six different climate scenarios based on different models and different assumptions.
Tainter notes that societies need to secure certain resources such as food, energy, and natural resources in order to sustain their populations. At some point, Tainter argues, the marginal returns on these investments in social complexity become unfavorable, and societies that do not manage to scale back when their organizational overheads become too large eventually face collapse.
Diamond argues that many past cases of societal collapse have involved environmental factors such as deforestation and habitat destruction, soil problems, water management problems, overhunting and overfishing, the effects of introduced species, human population growth, and increased per-capita impact of people.
We need to distinguish different classes of scenarios involving societal collapse. First, we may have a merely local collapse: individual societies can collapse, but this is unlikely to have a determining effect on the future of humanity if other advanced societies survive and take up where the failed societies left off.
All historical examples of collapse have been of this kind. Second, we might suppose that new kinds of threat e. Suppose that a global societal collapse were to occur. What happens next? If the collapse is of such a nature that a new advanced global civilization can never be rebuilt, the outcome would qualify as an existential disaster.
However, it is hard to think of a plausible collapse which the human species survives but which nevertheless makes it permanently impossible to rebuild civilization. Supposing, therefore, that a new technologically advanced civilization is eventually rebuilt, what is the fate of this resurgent civilization? Again, there are two possibilities.
The new civilization might avoid collapse; and in the following two sections we will examine what could happen to such a sustainable global civilization. Alternatively, the new civilization collapses again, and the cycle repeats. If eventually a sustainable civilization arises, we reach the kind of scenario that the following sections will discuss.
If instead one of the collapses leads to extinction, then we have the kind of scenario that was discussed in the previous section. The remaining case is that we face a cycle of indefinitely repeating collapse and regeneration see figure 1. While there are many conceivable explanations for why an advanced society might collapse, only a subset of these explanations could plausibly account for an unending pattern of collapse and regeneration.
An explanation for such a cycle could not rely on some contingent factor that would apply to only some advanced civilizations and not others, or to a factor that an advanced civilization would have a realistic chance of counteracting; for if such a factor were responsible, one would expect that the collapse-regeneration pattern would at some point be broken when the right circumstances finally enabled an advanced civilization to overcome the obstacles to sustainability.
Yet at the same time, the postulated cause for collapse could not be so powerful as to cause the extinction of the human species. A recurrent collapse scenario consequently requires a carefully calibrated homeostatic mechanism that keeps the level of civilization confined within a relatively narrow interval, as illustrated in figure 1.
We turn now to the second of these possibilities, that the human condition will reach a kind of stasis, either immediately or after undergoing one of more cycles of collapse-regeneration. Figure 2 depicts two possible trajectories, one representing an increase followed by a permanent plateau, the other representing stasis at or close to the current status quo.
The static view is implausible. If the world economy continues to grow at the same pace as in the last half century, then by the world will be seven times richer than it is today. World population is predicted to increase to just over 9 billion in , so average wealth would also increase dramatically. A single modest-sized country might then have as much wealth as the entire world has at the present.
Over the course of human history, the doubling time of the world economy has been drastically reduced on several occasions, such as in the agricultural transition and the Industrial Revolution. Should another such transition should occur in this century, the world economy might be several orders of magnitudes larger by the end of the century. Figure 2: Two trajectories: increase followed by plateau; or stasis at close to the current level. Another reason for assigning a low probability to the static view is that we can foresee various specific technological advances that will give humans important new capacities.
Virtual reality environments will constitute an expanding fraction of our experience. The capability of recording, surveillance, biometrics, and data mining technologies will grow, making it increasingly feasible to keep track of where people go, whom they meet, what they do, and what goes on inside their bodies. Among the most important potential developments are ones that would enable us to alter our biology directly through technological means.
If we learn to control the biochemical processes of human senescence, healthy lifespan could be radically prolonged. A person with the age-specific mortality of a year-old would have a life expectancy of about a thousand years. The ancient but hitherto mostly futile quest for happiness could meet with success if scientists could develop safe and effective methods of controlling the brain circuitry responsible for subjective well-being.
Nanotechnology will have wide-ranging consequences for manufacturing, medicine, and computing. Institutional innovations such as prediction markets might improve the capability of human groups to forecast future developments, and other technological or institutional developments might lead to new ways for humans to organize more effectively.
Those who believe that developments such as those listed will not occur should consider whether their skepticism is really about ultimate feasibility or merely about timescales. Some of these technologies will be difficult to develop. Does that give us reason to think that they will never be developed? Not even in 50 years? Looking back, developments such as language, agriculture, and perhaps the Industrial Revolution may be said to have significantly changed the human condition. There are at least a thousand times more of us now; and with current world average life expectancy at 67 years, we live perhaps three times longer than our Pleistocene ancestors.
The mental life of human beings has been transformed by developments such as language, literacy, urbanization, division of labor, industrialization, science, communications, transport, and media technology. The other trajectory in figure 2 represents scenarios in which technological capability continues to grow significantly beyond the current level before leveling off below the level at which a fundamental alteration of the human condition would occur.
This trajectory avoids the implausibility of postulating that we have just now reached a permanent plateau of technological development. Nevertheless, it does propose that a permanent plateau will be reached not radically far above the current level. We must ask what could cause technological development to level off at that stage. One conceptual possibility is that development beyond this level is impossible because of limitation imposed by fundamental natural laws.
It appears, however, that the physical laws of our universe permit forms of organization that would qualify as a posthuman condition to be discussed further in the next section. Moreover, there appears to be no fundamental obstacle to the development of technologies that would make it possible to build such forms of organization. Another potential explanation is that while theoretically possible, a posthuman condition is just too difficult to attain for humanity ever to be able to get there.
For this explanation to work, the difficulty would have to be of a certain kind. If the difficulty consisted merely of there being a large number of technologically challenging steps that would be required to reach the destination, then the argument would at best suggest that it will take a long time to get there, not that we never will.
Provided the challenge can be divided into a sequence of individually feasible steps, it would seem that humanity could eventually solve the challenge given enough time. Since at this point we are not so concerned with timescales, it does not appear that technological difficulty of this kind would make any of the trajectories in figure 2 a plausible scenario for the future of humanity.
In order for technological difficulty to account for one of the trajectories in figure 2, the difficulty would have to be of a sort that is not reducible to a long sequence of individually feasible steps. If all the pathways to a posthuman condition required technological capabilities that could be attained only by building enormously complex, error-intolerant systems of a kind which could not be created by trial-and-error or by assembling components that could be separately tested and debugged, then the technological difficulty argument would have legs to stand on.
Charles Perrow argued in Normal Accidents that efforts to make complex systems safer often backfire because the added safety mechanisms bring with them additional complexity which creates additional opportunities for things to go wrong when parts and processes interact in unexpected ways.
Each of these arguments about complexity barriers is problematic. Rather, it would have to be shown that all technologies that would enable a posthuman condition biotechnology, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, etc.
That seems an unlikely proposition. Because the flight time of a ballistic missile is only 15 to 30 minutes, decisions that could result in hundreds of millions of deaths would have to be made within minutes. This creates a significant possibility of an accidental nuclear war or even hackers causing launches.
The U. If there is a nuclear war, however, U. So the cold war may be over, but the Doomsday Machine that came out of the confrontation with the Soviets is still with us—and on a hair trigger.
Will sex become obsolescent? This will allow easy preimplantation genetic diagnosis on a large number of embryos—or easy genome modification for those who want edited embryos instead of just selected ones. Could we one day replace all of the tissues in the human body through engineering? Vacanti; Scientific American, September ]. All of these are coming to pass, either as real products or in clinical trials.
Over the next few centuries it is quite possible that nearly every tissue in the body may be able to be replaced by such approaches. Creating or regenerating tissues such as those found in the brain, which is extremely complex and poorly understood, will take an enormous amount of research.
The greatest cause of species extinction is loss of habitat. Overall, an extension of environmental science to include the living world should be, and I believe will be, a major initiative of science during the remainder of this century. Can we feed the planet without destroying it? Will we ever colonize outer space? Even some limited degree of reproduction might be feasible, recognizing that primates will be primates.
We currently have a very inadequate understanding of how to build closed ecosystems that are robust to perturbation by introduced organisms or nonbiological events Biosphere 2 , for example , and I suspect that the contained ecosystem problem will turn out to be much more challenging than the vast majority of space colonization advocates realize. There are a wide range of technical problems to solve, another being air handling.
Conley, NASA planetary protection officer. Will we discover a twin Earth? We just have to look for them. We have now started prevention trials that are testing biological interventions even before people show clinical symptoms of the disease.
Estimates show that a five-year delay in the terrible and expensive dementia stage of the disease would reduce Medicare dementia costs by nearly 50 percent. The future is here and we do not know how to deal with it.
The EU is beginning to address these and holding these companies to account, but our citizens in North America are not as well versed, and arguably, our governors seem generally less interested in our well-being, or perhaps are more ignorant of the implications. Information will flow more freely between services. Internet services will become more decentralized again as network bandwidths will not be sufficient for the data volumes that users will produce by then.
Applications and services will not be coupled to devices anymore but will follow us freely between different contexts shared car, home, work, mobile devices. When asked to look ahead to , respondents largely agreed that connectivity will be both more pervasive and less visible.
Today, the only time we really reflect on electricity and plumbing is when they break down. I believe we will look to digital tools in much the same way. We walk into a room and turn on our digital streams much like we turn on a light. I told you. The only time we reflect over any of this is when the Net, for whatever reason, cuts out.
It usually lasts only a few minutes, but for those minutes we become like children, stumbling around unsure what to do when not surrounded by endlessly helpful technology. But, barring a catastrophe — epidemic, war — extrapolating from recent history suggests the internet will become more pervasive, more powerful and less expensive.
Think of electricity, or electric motors; they are ubiquitous, noticed mainly when they cease to function.
It will be ubiquitous, always on, always available and invisible. Access will be worldwide. What will change will be our means of interacting with it. Augmented reality will be ubiquitous much sooner than 50 years , with essentially everything interconnected, including the human body — and possibly the human mind.
We will go through ups and downs, but there will be significant advances in security. The future version of the internet will be more ubiquitous and more seamless building on the Internet of Things , but it will also be much less secure, with people suffering damage from various kinds of hacking on a daily basis.
The internet cannot be divorced from the progress of society itself. In an enlightened democracy the effect of the internet will have been positive, enhancing freedom and choice, but in a dictatorship the opposite could well be true.
When asked four years later to look ahead to , these expert respondents predicted the further rise of networked devices and extended the concept to include the technical hybridization of the natural world.
It will not be possible to see the internet as a huge network of connected devices, but instead it will be something unique that works in a pervasive and transparent way — like air that exists everywhere so we forget about its existence. We will use the environment to transmit information, via plants, soil, water, etc.
We will develop new processes to take advantage of all resources available in the environment, e. Humans will be naturally adaptable to this pervasive environment. This will make identity theft more difficult but not impossible, as no matter what system or technology people create, other people will immediately develop ways to deviate or breach it.
Then robots will pack your order and self-driving cars with robot delivery staff will restock your kitchen. Later, groceries will appear in your kitchen in much the same way Capt. Kirk and Mr. Social networking sites like Facebook will be holographic. People will likely have one or more implants to allow them to access the internet and to access whatever the future computer will be. So we can expect the same with our predictions.
Stephen Abram , principal at Lighthouse Consulting Inc. The networked information, entertainment and social world will be fully integrated into biology and networked appliances not toasters but a full range of new appliances that may be stand-alone like Google Home but are more likely fully integrated devices into architecture and spaces. The Internet of Things will grow to trillions of things — and all factories, cities and communities…. I do expect pop-up networks will permit people even in the most remote locations, or communities with limited means, to access and share services and internet bandwidth from literally anywhere on this planet, as well as from our Mars colonies and moon bases.
What, you thought there would be just one? Forecasting the way we interact with software and hardware is too limited a starting point, as we must assume biochemistry wetware will also increasingly take its place in human-machine interaction environments and platforms.
While science fiction is comfortable imagining all kinds of scenarios, the future-realist in me can only see good, bad and ugly wetware interacting with all of us, at all times, in This will mean all electronic devices will have some form of built-in intelligence and many systems will layer on top of this massively interconnected intelligent mesh. We will be able to just think of a question and the answer will immediately come to mind!
The Mindternet is the future! A professor and director at a major U. These services are the result of collective interactions happening locally with no central servers. Ethics and privacy [are] granted by default.
A share of respondents explored the possibilities and challenges of living in a fully networked world where it is difficult, or even impossible, to disconnect. The following comments illuminate some of their expectations in the future of constantly connected life. The issue is whether people will be allowed, by regulation or by practical exercise, to opt out, and what the effects of that action will be, as well as what efforts will be required to bring services to those at the fringes.
Does government have an obligation, such as led to the creation of the Rural Electrification Administration or Essential Air Service, that extends to the requirement or provision of broadband and beyond to the services it enables? There will grow to be even more dependence upon big platforms e. The marketing industry will grow. The internet will just be one more, marketing-dependent medium — as press or TV.
Yes, in the future there will be many information technology and artificial intelligence applications and commodities to simplify our lives. But it is possible that we will not be able to function properly without them.
Physical infrastructure will be entirely pervasive and wireless perhaps non-electronic and digital elements will be directly interfaced with human brains. And the minds of different individuals may be directly linked. This will be a new era for humankind, which is difficult to hypothesize about.
Just as cloud computing disintermediated PC operating systems and created new key intermediaries, such as hypervisor leader VMWare, these new functions will shake up existing industries and inevitably displace incumbents that are too slow to innovate. Now I talk with my devices, giving instructions, dictating, etc. I already have the feeling that one of my senses is cut off when I am unable to connect to the internet. We are therefore all the more likely to be distracted from asking questions that really matter.
On balance, greater knowledge leads to greater happiness — though there is a lot of distraction to get through along the way. Humans will be entirely dependent on information systems, just like our generation got used to being dependent on electricity or transport systems.
Also, expect radical innovations in neural connection i. The effects of this remain highly unpredictable. Although a significant majority of survey respondents expected the rate of technological advancement to remain steady or increase in the next 50 years, a vocal minority argued that humanity may be entering a cooling-off period when it comes to digital evolution.
I suspect the internet has already reached, or will shortly reach, that state. For any technical area, we see a slow uptake, then a kind of exponential in which the limits seem infinite, but by then things are often already slowing down. For me, the current boom in cloud computing has created the illusion of unbounded technical expansion in certain domains, but in fact we may quickly reach a kind of steady state. By , I think the focus will have shifted to robotics in agriculture and perhaps climate control, space engineering, revolutionary progress in brain science and other biological sciences.
This is not to say that we will cease to see stunning progress in the internet and cloud, but rather that the revolutions we are experiencing today will have matured and yielded to other revolutions in new dimensions they will surely leverage the network, but may no longer be quite so network-centric.
I did not believe it … and here we are today. The advances in technology are based on continued availability of electricity that makes technology and connectivity possible.
I have a feeling that while many advances are made, some in our society will want to separate themselves. Like in the s the big thing was canned goods, instant meals, and now 50 years later many are going back to cooking from scratch.
These new players will have succeeded in re-centralizing something that earlier generations had de-centralized. Combined with human-computer interfaces, the prospect of single-vendor control over the operating system of a substantial portion of your brain is rather frightening. Just like railroads or highways, infrastructure sees short periods of time of great innovation, and then a long plateau.
A breakthrough there in the next 20 years would lead to unimaginable consequences in 50 years. That leaves substantial room for increased capability as cloud computing and the Internet of Things get worked out with modest assists from data science and machine learning, and as our attentional balance shifts from novelty and eye-catching visual design to utility and productivity. A number of respondents shared colorful descriptions of what they expect the world might look like in On the third day machines began to talk directly to machines and this was seen as excellent indeed.
On the fourth day, machines began to design their own network of networks e. On the fifth day humans began to leave their homes and assemble at the town square to talk among themselves face-to-face and this brought great joy to the multitudes. On the seventh day the people rested because that was all they could do.
And so endeth the lesson. Congress was replaced with a dynamic network model accounting for the concerns of citizens yet bound by resource constraints and established laws. This happened too late to save Miami, which is now only accessible by automated submarine, historical tours or VR re-creations, but it did help rally the resources required to halt The Ten-Year Burn in California and restore much of Lower Manhattan.
Americans now spend roughly 30 percent of their waking hours in SR simulated reality environments. Many spend this time reliving revised personal histories which make them the most popular students in high school even though industrial school farms were abolished 25 years ago and replaced by personalized Mental Training Plenaries that dynamically adjusted to the learning styles and needs of each student.
In order to maintain social cohesion, however, these personalized narratives have overlapping characters, plot points and themes so that people have something to talk about when they encounter their fellow humans. Americans split the rest of their time between eating, picking up litter and serving on the obligatory Algorithmic Oversight Committees. Advertising has been banned. Once we launched the Accounting Project to measure the impact of nearly all human endeavors and score them on various elements, the practice of advertising was found to have a negative social, financial, emotional, ecological and moral return on investment.
Any human or hybrid engaged in advertising is disconnected from The Prime Network for six hours on a first offense, one day for a second offense and permanently for a third offense. Amazon is exempt from the advertising ban per the Terms of Service that govern all Prime citizens.
Autonomous systems under the direction of governance institutions which may not be actual governments will be adapting our physical spaces and behaviors to be able to deal with persistent heat waves, droughts, wildland fires, category 6 hurricanes, etc. Our routines will be shaped by a drive to a minimal footprint and a need to make better longer-term decisions.
AI is a climate-protective Jiminy Cricket with an attitude. There will be mistrust of AI-based systems, and strong pushback against any kinds of human-displacement. This likely results from political and economic disasters in the s-ish linked to giving too much control to AI-based systems: institutional decisions driven by strategies to maximize profits and control, while minimizing uncertainty and risk.
AIs messing around with elections, overriding community decisions and otherwise pushing aside fuzzy emotional thinking with algorithmic logic goes swiftly from being occasionally annoying to infuriatingly commonplace.
The dominant design language for AI here is submissive. AI is still around, but generally whimpering in the corner. In this scenario, AI systems focus on helping people live well and with minimal harm to others. By , the only jobs performed by humans in the post-industrial, post-information world require significant emotional labor, unique creative gifts or are simply done out of the pleasure of doing them.
The newly developed world is still adapting, but what amounts to the end of 19th century industrial capitalism forces this change. AI-based systems are dealing with climate, global health, and the like, but in ways meant to increase human well-being over the long term. A time frame ending in ? So, robots and drones with the Evil Eye to watch and control the people.
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