I'm always fascinated by the extremely long term horizon concerns that people bring up in discussions about the future of humanity.
200 to 300 years out there is no humanity as we know it today. Whatever we are at that juncture, it won't be "human" as we now define it. Our self directed evolution has long since taken over, and it's accelerating at an extraordinary clip. You can debate the merits of that, the details of it, but it's happening either way.
In the next two or three decades we'll have begun to completely take over genetic alteration / evolution / improvement / etc, of our species. Within a few decades after that, we'll be severely altering what we are. Within 150 or 200 years, it'll be very hard for modern humans to relate to the ancestor humans from 2012.
Concerns about asteroids or global warming and so on are moot. We won't be here as a species pumping CO2 into the atmosphere or waiting around helplessly for a rock to crash into the surface. It's not an issue of if, it's just an issue of how long it takes and how many competing models of our self directed evolution become options.
The sole threat to that future is super virus / disease, most likely man-made. It's the only thing that could stop our evolution and wipe out our species in that couple hundred year time frame. Even nuclear war isn't a threat to species survival, you could detonate thousands of nukes simultaneously and it wouldn't come close to killing us off.
Any claims about our "self-directed evolution" seem to either: define it so loosely as to include purely social conventions or uses of technology (we keep our information in the twitterspheres!, or to assume some magic breakthrough in bioengineering that overnight allows us to start jailbreaking our genome.
The sad, sorry fact of the matter is that in the time it takes to accomplish that, we could blow ourselves up.
Or, we could blow enough of ourselves up to render that future unachievable. The nations that are capable of carrying out this research, and supporting the societies that can support this sort of thing logistically and culturally, are very precarious in their positioning. As a thought exercise, consider how far food on your table had to travel, how many things had to work correctly for that to happen, and how fucked you are if they don't (and how tricky it is to find a replacement, and how many other people would be doing the same).
It would not be unreasonable to believe that a collapse of civilization could set back your scheme several hundred years--for example, consider how difficult it would be to get back to a point where you could use existing machines, much less make new ones. A semiconductor foundry--required for computers, in turn required for any meaningful engineering these days--would be practically unattainable in dire times, even if you find people alive who still knew how to run it!
Or, even more likely, nothing goes wrong, and simple social forces render stagnation even with advanced bioengineering. Read "The Calorie Man" by Paolo Bacigalupi for a recent take on this. There is no reason to expect that we're going to fare any better.
So, no, this isn't an unreasonable pessimism on the rest of our parts.
> The sole threat to that future is super virus / disease, most likely man-made.
I remember reading somewhere (maybe one of Cliff Stoll's books?) that the author, a computer person, thought that a biological virus was the greatest threat to humanity. He mentioned this to a biologist friend of his, who assured him that the popular doomsday scenario is essentially impossible, and that his greatest fear was a computer virus!
Tim Ferriss, on the Joe Rogan podcast [1], predicts a pandemic in the near future (around 28:45). Basically, he knows a guy who runs a biotech company who claims that they, if they wanted to, could engineer a virus within six months that could wipe out humanity.
I wouldn't say that it's the sole threat, however. Yudkowsky seems to take the threat of runaway AI quite seriously. These are crucial times.
I think you vastly overestimate our ability to understand genetics. The genome (any species' genome) evolved so haphazardly and with such deep and interconnected causal spiderwebs I think it's going to take centuries to understand it to the extent that we'll be able to intentionally influence it more than genetic drift and selection currently do.
NINJA EDIT: Regardless, the certainty with which you seem to regard your claims is hardly justified (unless you've got some concrete evidence you can share). If you're wrong, we'll have wished we were thinking about these things all along.
People tend to overestimate the change that can happen in 50 years and underestimate the change that can happen in 10 years. The overestimation is an interesting one, it is an overestimation of how consistent future trends will be with current. It is impossible to know in detail what the future of engineering and science will entail. It is possible to know the general outline of the next 10 years but it is impossible to know which of those changes will start an exponential cascade of changes and which things will be left to grow polynomially.
> I think it's going to take centuries to understand it to the extent that we'll be able to intentionally influence it more than genetic drift and selection currently do
If this process can be understood mathematically, computers at ever-increasing speeds can come to these understandings for us.
Unless we come up with a way to completely simulate genetic chemistry and embryonic development in order to link phenotypes with genotypes, I don't see how it's a computable problem.
What we're doing now is a pretty haphazard introduction of non-nature genes into plants and animals often with unexpected effects.
Look up histone acetylation and DNA methylation. We're barely scratching the surface of how gene expression works.
To say we're going to rebuild the human genome in the next 100 years is a little fanciful. Reminds me of the "trains to the moon" that Popular Mechanics said we would all be riding in the 1980s.
Strictly speaking, we've been doing it to plants and animals--in one way or another--for hundreds if not thousands of years. That's an entirely different problem than engineering humans.
You mean like engineering Roundup-resistant crops, inadvertently (but quite effectively) selecting for Roundup-resistant weeds in the process [0]? We're infants with building blocks right now.
On what basis do you make this statement "Even nuclear war isn't a threat to species survival, you could detonate thousands of nukes simultaneously and it wouldn't come close to killing us off."
It estimates that a nuclear war in 1988 would have dropped world population from ~5 billion to ~3 billion (this includes estimates of death due to famine etc).
You can argue with each individual estimate, but it's hard to argue that a nuclear war would actually kill off the human race.
(As noted elsewhere, you can argue that it would be possible to kill off the human race if someone with control of a super-power nuclear arsenal tried to do it. That's a different argument, because you'd have to discuss the likelihood of that circumstance occurring)
Accoridng to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba, Tsar Bomba was over 1400 times as powerful as (Hiroshima+Nagasaki), and that was not even remotely close to killing us of.
Thousands of modern devices would be different in many ways: bombs would likely be more powerful on average than the '45 ones, but they could also be cleaner, and they would likely not be used all in the same place. I would guess the species would survive it, if only because the ones starting it would likely be in a good shelter.
Saying that they'd likely be more powerful on average than the '45 ones is a huge understatement. Fat Man was 20 kt, every Trident II missile can carry 12 475 kt warheads. Also, if you distribute nuclear explosions across the world, it's much different than having one meganuke in terms of its effect. Meganukes are very inefficient with their power due to the diameter of an explosive sphere relating to the cubic root of the power. I think the original commenter is way off in their proclamation that we couldn't nuke ourselves to extinction.
It also created a shock wave measured at over 5 on the Richter scale, despite being detonated 4km above the Earth, that travelled at least three times around the globve. What would it have done if it had been detonated at touch down. What would happen if you detonate 10 of those at the same time?
I think it would take worse than that to kill the species, but our civilization is more fragile.
I agree about the civilization part, but this was about the huge gray area between "surely to not make homo sapiens extinct" and "surely to make homo sapiens extinct".
I am an optimist, so I keep thinking that 'we' would survive. I also think we will not be that stupid to do that 'experiment'.
Concerns about asteroids or global warming and so on are moot. We won't be here as a species pumping CO2 into the atmosphere or waiting around helplessly for a rock to crash into the surface.
Unless a rock the size of Texas hits tomorrow.
Extinction only a generation before it's possible to avoid it.
It would be ironic except there won't be anyone left to appreciate the irony.
200 to 300 years out there is no humanity as we know it today. Whatever we are at that juncture, it won't be "human" as we now define it. Our self directed evolution has long since taken over, and it's accelerating at an extraordinary clip. You can debate the merits of that, the details of it, but it's happening either way.
In the next two or three decades we'll have begun to completely take over genetic alteration / evolution / improvement / etc, of our species. Within a few decades after that, we'll be severely altering what we are. Within 150 or 200 years, it'll be very hard for modern humans to relate to the ancestor humans from 2012.
Concerns about asteroids or global warming and so on are moot. We won't be here as a species pumping CO2 into the atmosphere or waiting around helplessly for a rock to crash into the surface. It's not an issue of if, it's just an issue of how long it takes and how many competing models of our self directed evolution become options.
The sole threat to that future is super virus / disease, most likely man-made. It's the only thing that could stop our evolution and wipe out our species in that couple hundred year time frame. Even nuclear war isn't a threat to species survival, you could detonate thousands of nukes simultaneously and it wouldn't come close to killing us off.