It has become a cliche to declare that the future is full of both "great promise and great peril." Nonetheless, this aphorism expresses an important fact about the Janus-faced nature of our increasingly powerful technologies. If humanity realizes the best possible future, we could quite possibly usher in an era of unprecedented human flourishing, happiness, and value. But if the great experiment of civilization fails, our species could meet the same fate as the dinosaurs.
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I find it helpful to think about what a child born today could plausibly expect to witness in her or his lifetime. Since the rate of technological change appears to be unfolding according to Ray Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns, this imaginative activity can actually yield some fascinating insights about our evolving human condition, which may soon become a posthuman condition as "person-engineering technologies" turn us into increasingly artificial cyborgs.In a billion years or so, the sun will sterilize the planet as it turns into a red giant, eventually swallowing our planet whole in—according to one study—7.59 billion years. If we want to survive beyond this point, we will need to find a new planetary spaceship to call home. But even more immediately, evolutionary biology tells us that the more geographically spread out a species is, the greater its probability of survival. Elon Musk claims that "there is a strong humanitarian argument for making life multi-planetary…in order to safeguard the existence of humanity in the event that something catastrophic were to happen." Similarly, Stephen Hawking—who recently booked a trip to space on Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic spaceship—believes that humanity has about 100 years to colonize space or face extinction.There are good reasons to believe that this will happen in the coming decades. Musk has stated that SpaceX will build a city on the fourth rock from the sun "in our lifetimes." And NASA has announced that it "is developing the capabilities needed to send humans to an asteroid by 2025 and Mars in the 2030s." NASA is even planning to "send a robotic mission to capture and redirect an asteroid to orbit the moon. Astronauts aboard the Orion spacecraft will explore the asteroid in the 2020s, returning to Earth with samples."
Martian Colonies
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Unprecedented Agricultural Production
Kardashev Transition
"The danger period is now because we still have the savagery."
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Right now, human civilization would qualify as a Type 0, although emerging "world-engineering technologies" could change this in the coming decades, as they enable our species to manipulate and rearrange the physical world in increasingly significant ways. But Kaku worries that the transition from a Type 0 to a Type 1 civilization carries immense risks to our survival. As he puts it, " the danger period is now because we still have the savagery. We still have all the passions. We have all the sectarian fundamentalist ideas circulating around. But we also have nuclear weapons. We have chemical, biological weapons capable of wiping out life on Earth." In other words, as I have written, archaic beliefs about how the world ought to be are on a collision course with neoteric technologies that could turn the entire planet into one huge graveyard.This is a primary goal of many transhumanists, who see aging as an ongoing horror show that kills some 55.3 million people each year. It is, transhumanists say, "deathist" to argue that halting senescence through technological interventions is wrong: dying from old age should be no more involuntary than dying from childhood leukemia.The topic of anti-aging technology gained a great deal of attention the past few decades due to the work of Aubrey deGray, who cofounded the Peter Thiel-funded Methuselah Foundation. According to the Harvard geneticist George Church, scientists could effectively reverse aging within—wait for it— the next decade or so. This means actually making older people young again, not just stabilizing the healthy physiological state of people in their mid-20s. As Church puts it, the ultimate goal isn't "about stalling or curing, it's about reversing." One possible way of achieving this end involves the new breakthrough gene-editing technology called CRISPR/Cas9, as Oliver Medvedik discusses in a 2016 TED talk.
Indefinite Longevity
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Catastrophic Environmental Collapse
Yet another major study claims that there are nine "planetary boundaries" that demarcate a "safe operating space for humanity." As the authors of this influential paper write, "anthropogenic pressures on the Earth System have reached a scale where abrupt global environmental change can no longer be excluded…Transgressing one or more planetary boundaries may be deleterious or even catastrophic" to our systems. Unfortunately, humanity has already crossed three of these do-not-cross boundaries, namely climate change, the rate of biodiversity loss (i.e., the sixth mass extinction), and the global nitrogen cycle. As Frederic Jameson has famously said, "it has become easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism".
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Nuclear Attack
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Machine Superintelligence
According to one survey, nearly every AI expert who was polled agrees that one or more machine superintelligences will join our species on planet Earth by the end of this century. Although the field of AI has a poor track record of seeing the future—just consider Marvin Minsky's claim in 1967 that "Within a generation…the problem of creating artificial intelligence will substantially be solved"—recent breakthroughs in AI suggest that real progress is being made and that this progress could put us on a trajectory toward machine superintelligence.This would be the most significant event in human history.
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