The Next Ten Billion Years | Hacker News Reader

The Next Ten Billion Years

thearchdruidreport.blogspot.co.uk

85 pointsIsaacL87 comments

I feel there's a much higher chance that humanity will drastically change its own fate (for better or worse) in the next hundred years, and any forecasts beyond that have very wide error bars. Artificial intelligence is the big one (it ends the current era of "business as usual" no matter whether it's friendly or not), but there's also nanotech, superviruses coming from desktop bio-hackery, mind uploading, good old nuclear terrorism, etc. For "business as usual" to continue and things like climate change to stay relevant, we need to dodge all of the above, which is difficult.

For a more thoughtful take on the future of humanity, Google for the keywords "existential risk". Bostrom's writeup is a good start: http://www.nickbostrom.com/existential/risks.html

Technology, even AI, is only a tool - whether it is used for good or evil depends on the hand that wields it. There is no reason to believe that any new technology will help humankind as a whole as long as those that desire power are lavishly rewarded for their malevolent acts. Our society today is defined by war, authority that refuses accountability, and oppression of anyone with less power than ourselves.

We have plenty of technology to solve all of our problems already - more will not save us.

Strong AI is more than a tool - it's life, created by humans and more intelligent than we are. How could that not change everything?

That is if Strong AI is not just a myth. I think that intelligence is simply a process that determines behavior to accomplish a goal. The question becomes, what goals will people program these genius machines to accomplish?

Earlier generations could have said the same thing before each of: the internet, petroleum, flight, biotech, robotics, atomic bombs, the electric grid, the automobile, etc.

AI, nanotech, biohacking, and other possible future technologies just don't seem anywhere near as disruptive as that first list. They'll get incorporated into the "business as usual" machine if they come to pass at all — and much more easily than, say, atomic bombs were.

Just the first item on your list is enough to change everything. If we can make computers as smart as humans, we can automate so many jobs, and then vastly scale them simply by building more computers. If you make those computers faster, you speed up the entire world's economy that much more (which speeds up the computers that are designing better computers.)

If you make those AIs smarter than human, who even knows what is possible.

A world with cars and electricity looks like "business as usual" to us, but not to the people who lived before cars and electricity. The rate of change is now much faster than they were accustomed to. The technologies I listed will make it faster still. You can't talk meaningfully about what happens a thousand years from now, because accelerating change implies that at a certain point in imagining the future you just run out of imagination, and that point might be a hundred years away or even closer.

Vernor Vinge, the man who coined the phrase "Technological Singularity", gave an interesting talk describing three scenarios if the Singularity does not happen. He calls them A Return to MADness, The Golden Age, and The Wheel of Time. He still regards the Singularity as the most likely non-catastrophic outcome for our near future.

"What If the Singularity Does NOT Happen" text: http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/longnow/

Great, I love to start my day with a bit of existential horror.

I had some stuff to do, but now I think I'll just stare into the middle distance and contemplate the pointlessness of it all.

Makes one wonder "why" and become very nihilistic. What's the point of anything? (Which obviously results in the answer of 'nothing'.)

This was a very well-written story. Let's remember, it's just a story, just a conjecture, just a spinning of a tale. Perhaps it's logical or perhaps it's not, but in the end humans have tenaciously clung to the idea it all has meaning, and I expect we will until the end, for better or worse.

There's a follow-up post[1] where he talks more about the reactions:

"A vision of a future in which civilizations, species and worlds follow life cycles like those of all other natural things didn’t leave them furious or depressed. Their comments instead featured such words as “comforted,” “delighted,” and “awed.” It’s easy, and also common, to mischaracterize such feelings as simple schadenfreude at the failure of humanity’s overinflated ambitions, but there’s something rather more significant going on here. Not one of the readers who made these comments made gloating remarks about the fate of humanity or the Earth. Rather, what comforted, delighted, and awed them was the imagery of Nature’s enduring order and continuity that I wove throughout the narrative, and brought to the tightest focus I could manage in the last two paragraphs. "

[1]: http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2013/09/a-sense-of-ho...

I guess it's horror in a very wide sense. But me and any memory of me will be long gone before any of this even begins to happen. I had my time here, enjoyed it, and it'll come to an end, as all things eventually do.

The spiritual tradition from which the author of this piece speaks -- and it's more warmed-over quasi-hippiedom than anything genuinely Pagan or Druidic -- is a repeated affirmation of precisely that.

This brings up a thought I've had repeatedly (an admittedly unscientific one) when considering human history.

Considering that it "only" took us several thousand years to transform ourselves from hunter-gatherers to our current technologies, it makes little sense that this is the first human culture to reach the point we've reached. Then I try to dissuade myself from such a notion, rationalizing that if that were the case, we'd know it from some sort of evidence by this point.

And yet, I still can't shake the notion that this "shouldn't" be the first time around. Weird, especially since I consider myself a hardcore skeptic.

Even stranger, our sun has collapsed and been rebuilt at least once (estimates are 3 times). Makes you wonder how many civilizations could have been built.

More specifically to your comment, even on our planet, the evidence of civilization would be hard to find if there was a civilization several million or even a few hundred thousand years ago.

"Dust to dust"

Our sun has collapsed and been rebuilt at least once?

Google search for "sun collapsed rebuilt 3 times" lists Stonehenge, which seems to indicate Google can't find anything on the subject. I really don't understand what you're saying.

Can you please elaborate?

I think it's a reference to the supernova that occurred before our sun existed, which created the seed material for the sun to form from. It had to have happened because there are heavy elements on earth that only form in a supernova.

You can probably determinate the number of supernovas/hypernova/etc that happened before the sun by analyzing the proportions of different elements in the solar system and then use the various equations to compute how many explosions you would need to create the heavy elements (heavier than iron) that are observable since they are mostly created in these situations.

You probably can get these equations by analyzing nebula composition and the type of star which was there.

Also, the type of star gives an indication of it's history.

What about artificial satellites? If their orbits were stable, shouldn't any satellites from previous civilization still be around? Do you have an estimate on the attrition rate from random meteor collisions and the like? We should be able to do pretty well just from our own experience.

It's as likely that a different civilization would go all-wired/wired-only for mass communication and only use satellites for observation purposes and GPS purposes. Then the number of potential satellites to be found is much lower than our current civilization.

Unless previous civilizations deliberately left no trace a la Star Trek Prime Directive. Or we're unable to perceive their interactions because of some perceptual blindness. Fun to think about.

I don't think even our current civilization could rebuild what we have. The easily-extracted fossil fuels are spent. Even if we haven't reached Peak Oil, we need increasingly more advanced technology to find and extract fossil fuels.

I can't think of the name of the theory, but the general idea is that it would be very difficult to rebuild to our current level of technology after a cataclysm event because all of the easily reached surface resources required to bootstrap it have been picked clean. Even the near-surface resources are gone, requiring us to use massive open-pit mines or deep mining/drilling.

Some material could be recycled from crumbling cities I imagine, but even recycling most modern materials requires a certain minimal level of technology, no?

When I was a kid I remember imagining that the dinosaurs managed to create an advanced civilization, reaching the moon, creating cities, tried to harvest asteroids but accidentally wiped themselves out after a major mistake, eliminating the evidence for their civilization in the process.

This was after reading The Crucible of Time by Brunner (one of my favourite books)

Can you elaborate? Before we were hunter & gatherers, we were monkeys, before that there were dinosaurs, before that there were one-cell organisms.

If there were human civilizations a million years ago or before that, there would be significant evidence of cities, just as there is evidence of dinosaurs, no?

I guess the way I'd put it best in terms of what you've asked is: "what if we (humans) are on our second, third, or nth attempt to create a sustainable technological culture, all previous attempts met with ruin or we were forced back into a 'pre-technological' hunter-gatherer lifestyle."

It's hard to put into words because it goes against everything I know or believe, and yet there's this little thought in my head that won't go away: "this cannot be the first time." Normally with UFOs or other sorts of "pseudo-reality" I would just write the thought off as an interesting weirdness of our world, but for some reason I can't. Might just be a personal failing ;)

Relevant

Timeline of far future from Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future

To me the most interesting point in the future is 120 trillion years: when all the stars in the universe have exhausted their fuel, and the Universe has gone dark.

>To me the most interesting point in the future is 120 trillion years: when all the stars in the universe have exhausted their fuel, and the Universe has gone dark.

Sorry, but doesn't that sound like the LEAST interesting point in the universe?

Well, you may never have read Asimov's "Last Question": http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm

I have somehow never read that. It was stunning in its breadth. I loved it. It made me ponder the significance of the series of self-perpetuating chemical reactions that comprises my biological existence. Now I'm sitting here at my computer, waxing existential, when I'm supposed to be building the auth and permissions section for an API...

[SPOILER] If he was going to invoke a biblical narrative where an infinite number of immortal humans, having evolved past the need for their material bodies, merge into a single, ultra-creative consciousness, he could have at least tipped his cap to the duality of the nature of man and had a large number of those minds (1/3 for maximum compatibility with the biblical narrative) reject cohesion with the singular consciousness and descend into the chaos to fuel its contrarian existence to the ultimate plan of the universe. [/SPOILER]

Or, you know, whatever.

I've actually read it many times.

How does a fictional story becomes an argument about the heat death of the universe being "interesting"?

You expect the same things as in the story to happen then?

>Ten years from now... Among those who recognize that something’s wrong, one widely accepted viewpoint holds that fusion power, artificial intelligence, and interstellar migration will shortly solve all our problems, and therefore we don’t have to change the way we live.

Oh, of course. Dontcha know that, during that time, we'll be no more than 6 years away from a computer passing the Turing Test? http://longbets.org/1/

And we'll be only ~20 years away from the singularity which solves everything. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

But in all seriousness, this was quite entertaining. I don't know if we have any reason to expect another (highly) intelligent species to arise in the next 100 million years. Were there any obstacles in the past 100 million years that prevented an intelligent species from developing before humans?

Just because they don't make jewelry and weapons doesn't mean some other animals (elephants, whales, other apes) are not highly intelligent. I prefer to call civilizations like ours "technological" and not pass judgement on the smarts of other creatures because they don't like building things.

I wasn't sure what phrasing to use (and I definitely didn't like the simple term "intelligent species"). I kind of agree with you, but I think it's a little silly to say only our technology distinguishes us. I'm reminded of Anathem here: even if we all lived like monks shunning technology, we'd still be set apart by our mathematic, scientific, and philosophical reasoning.

The monks in Anathem are technologists that shun distraction.

It's been a while since I read the book, but I don't believe that is an accurate description:

>The law of the Second New Revised Book of Discipline that governs the lives of the avout at the time of the narration... bans the avout from owning anything but two pieces of clothing and a sphere with multiple uses, and bans them from using or even knowing how to use any technology but paper and pen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anathem

Unless you want to argue about whether those limited items are worth calling technology, at which time I will have to point out that we are not the only species to use tools.

It's also been a while since I read the book, but my recollection is that I viewed those rules as the set of preconditions that were settled on to allow them to continue to have monasteries.

Without the ability to communicate or observe a physical technology, how do we measure the level of reasoning in an intelligent being?

Well, I'd say let's give communication a chance. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_ape_language

Fact that intelligence is very expensive in terms of energy consumption. Brain is already very expensive, highly intelligent species would need to dedicate more energy. So unless evolution will evolve cheaper way of representing high intelligence (which might be possible, our brain chemical structures are artifacts of time we lived in the oceans), it is unlikely that a species would evolve substantially higher intelligence compared with humans.

So to evolve superior intelligence: need a lot of food at regular intervals with strong evolutionary pressure for being smarter, instead of faster, tougher, bigger, or more violent. Generally unlikely to happen in nature.

I wonder on what basis the author assumes that the next glacial period is a million years from now.

This would be a clear break with the last million years (100k year severe glaciations separated by 10-15k year interglacials), or of the first half of the pleistocence (mild glaciations every 40k years).

If the holocene interglacial really is extended to a million years, it would likely be enough time for the polar ice caps to disappear completely, ending the quarternary ice age altogether.

I thought that at first too, but then I realized that there is no explicit declaration that there weren't many glacial periods in-between. It just so happens that a million years from now, the earth is in a glacial period. Then again, I don't know what the "holocene interglacial" is, so your other points are probably well founded.

The holocene interglacial is what we are living in now. It started 12000 years ago, at the end of the last glacial period. This extended period of glaciations and interglacials together is called the quarternary ice age, also known as the current ice age.

Ice ages are the periods in earth's geological history when permanent ice caps and glaciers existed at the poles and in mountain ranges. We think of that situation as normal, but it has only existed for the last 2 to 2.5 million years. The high albedo (reflection of sunlight) of the ice sheets at the poles cools the planet down further, so an ice age reinforces itself. In other words, we are now living in a warmer period inside an ice age.

There have been other ice ages before, but the last one before the current ended about 100 million years before the first dinosaurs evolved.

This reminds me of a Time Team special where they pointed out that the island of Great Britain has completely lost its human population and be re-populated at least seven times so far.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1528151/Humans-tried-and-fai...

"It reports that sea level rises and cold climates intervened to push pioneering groups of humans out again and again until our ancestors were finally established some 12,000 years ago."

I wonder if the word finally is misplaced there. During the next glacial period, the area may become uninhabitable again. In those past 700k years they talk about, there may have been periods much longer than 12k years that the area was inhabited. Each of those previous 7 settlement attempts would probably have seemed like the finally successful attempt to the people at the time.

The article mentioned one gap of 100,000 years between colonization attempts.

And the population was always reaching millions.

Great reading! Things could of course play out like this but, since we have no really no clue, aiming for the stars is the most exciting alternative.

The biggest mistake we could be making right now is to waste the current free oil reserves that are probably necessary to move to the next technological level.

But I guess capitalism leaves no other option: we need the profit motive to keep things running. Maybe another economic system would be better suited to reach grand goals, but which one?

Utopianism, of course. Imagine a civilization fueled entirely by hopium!!

I am not suggesting that capitalism is not the economic system most suited for human nature: it probably is (at least more suited than communism, if we accept that the theory of evolution can be applied to historical processes, and thus capitalism has survived as the fittest alternative)

What I am suggesting is that precisely because human nature is only compatible with capitalism, we are not going to be able to tackle long term existential problems.

That is a sensible criticism. I agree that the human race is wasting absurdly vast quantities of oil and that they seem to display no more awareness of this issue than the average monkey. I'm not sure if "capitalism" is the problem though, since greed and waste existed long before its ideas were articulated. I sometimes thing our economic system should be overhauled with better accounting techniques so we actually count the expenditure of resources as a loss rather than as a profit as we currently do, under the rather dubious assumption that more consumption is always better. I guess we'll find out how badly we have erred when the future teaches us. I hope its lessons are gentle...

It has nothing to do about articulating the ideas of capitalism. Capitalism exists whether or not we articulate it , the same way that the Andromeda Galaxy existed before we saw it in our telescopes. My point is that human nature seems to be very much correlated to capitalism.

And the important question is whether this is a fundamental characteristic of life, or is it just a feature of this particular version of intelligent life that we have in planet Earth? Or maybe is just a consequence of the evolution of our social system?

To state it clearly: is it possible to conceive an intelligent society collaborating by other means than the ones that we are currently using? Could catastrophe be averted by working together in other ways? Are we humans at all capable of this?

Currently, the answer seems to be no, but who knows.

Capitalism has already solved the problem using nuclear power. This solution has been back-burnered to get votes in the system we call democracy.

Was there much involvement of private capital in the initial development of nuclear power? Or indeed in ongoing attempts to investigate fusion power?

No, but because the initial development was a crash-priority war time project. The later generations of fission reactors were privately funded.

General Fusion (lead vortex compression) is venture backed. Bussard's fusion company is private, although the get lots of funding from government contracts.

Interesting, but how does humanity rise from a non-industrial dark age to high technology without any reserves of fossil fuels? I say we get only one shot at this - if we our our grandchildren blow it, we remain at ... ok this is stupid ... ewok levels of civilization forever after.

Well, there are worse fates than being cuddly.

Actually, you just have to wait until the planet "generates" more oil via geological processes.

You're just going to be waiting a very very long time.

When our great deposits of fossil fuels were being laid down in the Carboniferous, efficient decomposers / recyclers of dead wood and plant material (chiefly higher basidiomycete fungi) had not yet evolved. Nowadays there is much less opportunity for dead organic material to accumulate in the kind of quantities that geological processes can turn into significant oil reserves.

Solar?

I think the author ignores several important facts. For one, humans are high on the food chain and in turn may not be as robust as say roaches, but we can construct pretty much everything. We will evolve and change, but the extinction of the human race would require several Unprecedented events. Even a large meteorite striking Earth would have trouble killing off humanity (obviously if it's big enough...). Furthr, algae reduce carbon much MUCH more efficiently than plants and can reproduce much faster. Even more we already have processes of turning algae to oil (although the oil is of poor quality). All that being said the more carbon dioxide is released the quicker/more algae will grow and the more oxygen and oil can be produced. In other words, obviously there are limits and I challenge you (the author or reader) to do research, but although humanity has problems. As a species we are doing alright.

Artificial intelligence not being practical is a silly conclusion. We already have intelligence: in a few million years of fucking around with existing intelligence, I am pretty sure we can make some significant progress. The insistence on it being silicon is what causes people to get the wrong idea.

Reading the follow-up article he talks more about the 'folk mythology of progress' and speaks of the cycle of nature (intelligent species and civilizations) as a more fundamental truth. Here's a counter proposition: yes, the processes of nature are supremely powerful and yes, humans are apt to make life difficult for ourselves and yes, progress isn't a given. What we call progress is really just humanity fulfilling our ecological destiny of adapting to new niches, just like every other species. But by destroying our environment, we are creating the very evolutionary pressure necessary to force our own adaptation - which we will continue to rightly term 'progress'.

If you are at all interested in constructing these timeline focused thought experiments I highly recommend "microscope" an RPG by Ben Robbins.

http://www.lamemage.com/microscope/

This is pretty bleak and pessimistic. As an optimist, I'd like to think that our advancements in technology will save us eventually. We have made significant advancements in clean energy like wind and solar, and those advancements won't stop. We have also made significant advancements in crop yields, etc. Of course, by the time those power sources are so widespread, there will be much more pollutants in the atmosphere from fossil fuel power sources, so who knows.

Anyone have a future that is a little more rosy than this? Not looking for a utopia here, but just something other than the complete fall of civilization thousands of times over.

Although not completely related, this reminds me of Asimov's famous story... The Last Question. Must read.

http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm

It reminds me of only-partially-related C.S. Lewis poetry.

http://allpoetry.com/poem/8508345-Re-adjustment-by-C_S_Lewis

Contrary what reading the news might lead you to believe, the world is better off than it's ever been and continuing to get better. Why does the author believe technological progress will halt tomorrow?

If you liked this you may like Asimov's The Last Question: http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm

True, and even more similar to Olaf Stapledon's 1930 novel "Last and First Men" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_and_First_Men

And on a much shorter time-scale, similar to Clifford Simak's novel-ish collection of stories "City" from the 1940s onward: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_(novel)

The most fascinating part about this post is seeing how differently people react to it: nihilism, awe, wonder, etc. The story seems to be a rorschach test of sorts.

Very interesting work. I find it very hard to imagine that a society capable of building skyscrapers and venturing into space won't leave more clues of it's existence to subsequent societies. Certainly it will be much more permanent than what the Mayans are leaving us. Perhaps the clues will be cities, perhaps it will be radiation, perhaps it will be stripped land.

I don't share the vision of the author but you'll be surprised how quickly any building may collapse once not maintained: plants will grow under concrete and end up breaking it over years and years, and erosion will progressively do the job as well. And sidementation will end up covering all that's left over centuries: look in Egypt, most of the ruins we found were deep under several dozens of meters of sand.

I think the point of the article is not the end truth of what he says, but just to encourage speculation, so I think all of us will draw different end conclusions. I doubt that we'll have as many iterations of society as he suggests. At some point we'll do something that kills all of us, and will then hand it off to the next species.

If you look at Detroit, it doesn't take long for nature to take back buildings. I would just think that there are certain artifacts or clues that would be somehow visible. We are leaving much more artifacts than every civilization before us put together. But I might just be inserting my short term bias into the situation.

Sand is not sedimentation.

I like better the version in which a civilization could colonize the entire galaxy in about 5 to 50 million years (with low-speed means of space travel): http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=where-are-t...

Great read, reminds me a lot of Last and First Men. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_and_First_Men

This projection seems to hinge entirely on the idea that you can't build solar panels, wind farms and hydro dams without cheap oil.

As those have only become more economical as oil has become more expensive, I find it particularly difficult to buy into long-run projections based upon that unexplored/unexplained/unjustified assumption.

Setting up humanity as reliant on fusion, or massive increases in new energy generation in general, also strikes me as a red herring. Likely: we just won't need it.

Even if (this time) it really is ready in ~50 years, guess what? Population is going to peak and begin to fall in ~50 years as more countries become wealthy, healthy and secure enough to make large families a poor reproductive strategy.

And is there any reason to expect that energy demand is going to increase fast enough with a static-to-falling population (in the future) to match or outstrip the growth of energy demand with a growing population (today)?

Western per-capita energy use is flat. [1] So I don't see how.

Absent some trend of every nation transitioning to US-level per-capita energy use [2], the energy needed by the ~9B humans living in 2050 likely represents the peak of world energy demand.

If you're going to predicate the collapse of civilization on a shortfall of energy generation, you need to show how that happens in the next 50 years, which is well within the capability of existing coal, oil and gas resources.

Further, an assumption of a war-wracked world hand-waves away the question of how on earth nuclear-armed powers are able to go to war with one another. This has been an unsolved problem in modern geopolitics for nearly 70 years now. These powers can certainly squabble via proxies. But, by definition, no major harm can be on the line lest it escalate directly into the conflict no-one can win. And existential threat is the major harm. So how could a nation decide that certain destruction is at all preferable to incremental destruction?

[1] Some countries are at a higher level than others, but all the western countries are essentially flat. chart: http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/international/en... from: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/08/its...

[2] Any assumption that every nation will transition to US-levels of per-capita energy use seem unjustified by the data. European and Japanese levels have been flat to falling-modestly for some time. It's much more likely that US energy use will begin to fall, as suburban sprawl and huge houses become increasingly uneconomical and we move closer together, drive less, build more sensibly, telecommute more, etc.

"2050 likely represents the peak of world energy demand"

I guess I'm a Sci-Fi dreamer about energy use. There are some REALLY cool things you can do if you have an infinite supply of free energy. Some of the cooler ones: Magnetic force fields with superconducting coil generators. If you had enough energy, you could create a magnetic force strong enough to stop bullets. Heck, with enough energy you could build magnetic tractor beams and capture passing meteors. (Remember, infinite and free energy). Railguns to launch us to space. Water desalination on a scale big enough to purify the world's water supply.

I think drinkable water may become a huge issue in relation to energy demand. While I think it is an absolutely solvable problem, I'll bet that it will blow the peak energy use prediction out of the <<ahem>> water.

A perfect example of a naive linear prediction. The thing is that progress is not linear.

What's so wrong with solar power?

Ask the Corbicules!

That was strangely relaxing.

This is awesome

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