Our World in 50 000 years?

[Allo Allo]

Our World in 50 000 years?

Just pretend we might still be here in 50 000 years time. How might our bodies have developed as part of our evolution? What physical aspects might we be without? What might we be able to do then in terms of consciousness? Might we be more intelligent? What is happening to our physical form now (in evolution) that might develop further in the future?

Will Medicine enable us to live for 600 years or more? Would we be genetically engineered for total health? Might we select the time of our death? Would we still fear death? Might we store extra intelligent brains so that they may be consulted in the future? Or would we just transplant them into specially engineered artificial bodies?

Could we be able to speak many other languages like “Horse” or “Dog”? Might consciously evolved animals sit on committees or police our streets?

Technologically we will live in techno homes, self sustaining – maybe monitored each second by nanotechnology implanted in our bodies? Will money still be used? Will we dispense with exterior equipment like mobiles etc and have them implanted directly into our brains? Will we be served by intelligent machines?

Which land masses might still be here? How hot will the sun be? Might cities have to be built under cover?

I dunno…. – what are the trends now, in evolution, geography, science, medicine and technology etc which might lead to an extraordinary future?

(Leave out stuff like alien invasion or collision with comets and currently non predictable events!)

[Aston]

The thing is, the fact that human beings have everything given to them, ie not having to hunt for food, protection against diseases with medicines etc. Evolution of the degree you mention in 50,000 years would probably be little change. The fact that the fastest get more food and therefore thrive and the mutation in cells that fight common diseases in individuals will be an advantage are largely ineffective than that of many wild animals.

Of course this is a theory off the top of my head but you can see what I'm saying, in essence we have become so intelligent over the last 1000 years we do not use our 'wild' insticts enough to constitue any real change in this domain as anyone, for example a smaller/weaker human being can go and acquire food the same a stronger larger human. Thus the smaller/weaker human does not suffer the set back like in the wild of say animals and so the abnormally stronger human does not 'take-over' as in evolution


Going with recent trends however (http://www.plasticsoldierreview.com/Features/Size.html) we may get taller, but again this is merely speculation.

Apologies for the lack of clear explination (im at work, tired!), if you can wade through all this prose and gather what I am saying I appluad you!

[Matt]

Homo sapiens has been around for 250,000 years. Thet is to say that if your travelled back in to to visit your ancestors 250,000 years ago you'd find them to be essentially the same species as we are today. You'd not expect any biological difficulty mating with them and producing viable offspring.

Improvements in nutrition, public health and medicine have lead us to be bigger and brighter than our ancestors and other parts of our cultural inheritance are responsible for the other major differences between us and the inhabitants of our late paleolithic ancestors.

You'd therefore not expect evolution to have much effect on us in the space of the next 50,000 years.

However evolution reacts to changes in environment. Species spend long periods in a dynamic equilibrium until evolution is needed and then rapid evolutionary changes are observed.

Should we managed to maintain our artificial environment for the next 50,000 years we may well see evolutionary change though what direction that might take is hard to predict.

Furthermore our understanding not only of the mechanisms of natural selections but the genetic material upon which it operates allow us to make inteligently guided alterations to our genome.

Whether we should or will do so is a question for another day. I will limit myself to saying that if our descendants in 50,000 years time are significantly different to us on a biological scale then it will not be due to the simple natural selection that has acted on us over the last 50,000 years. We may even give rise to a number of descendant species some of which may not even be biological descendants.

[Allo Allo]

Quote......"Fifty thousand years from now– if all goes according to plan– a bright streak will smudge the sky as a man-made meteor plunges into the Earth's atmosphere.

KEO's makers (http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=410)decided on its transit time based on the fact that it has been 50,000 years since mankind first began drawing on cave walls, which represents the earliest forms of symbolic expression. Sending the time capsule forward an equal number of years seemed fitting to its designers, perhaps because it the nature of the human ego to think of one's own time as the midpoint of history.

It seems that an obscene amount of luck will be necessary to deliver the contents of KEO to future souls who can reach its bounty and understand what they have found, but it's best to mark your calendars for 52,007 A.D. just in case… if KEO does arrive on schedule, it should be quite a sight."

[Admin]

Unless an evolutionary selection pressure acts on us as a species we probably won't change a lot.

If anything we will become less robust as a species as all the genetic deficiencies we have will be allowed to propagate due to better medical care.

I do wonder though whether we'll still have a belief in psychics and things like homeopathy with people stating that we need to keep an 'open mind' and that these things need to be tested for that elusive evidence.....