Thread: What will our technology be like in a million years?

Human history starts off with some very boring years. Even the last 2000 years, until around 1900, nothing significant happened. But since 1900, things started happening, and i would say our technology is improving exponentially.



We just found out that it is possible for at least some particles to go faster than light. We are working on nuclear fission (which has already been done: Nuclear fission - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) which would make most of our energy problems go away if perfected. Same goes for creation of antimatter, which would give us more or less infinite power if/when perfected.

My question to you is: Assuming the human race survives for another million years, without any totally devastating wars, what would our technology be like?

My answer:I think that the issues of health and death is gone. I think our consciousness will no longer be restricted to one body, so that you cannot die. I believe that the human race is settling new planets often, using terraforming. Most people have spaceships that can go faster than light. Energy is not even an issue. There will be some kind of playing around with time, as no laws of nature prevents it. But I do not think it is possible to travel into the future. We have contact and good relations with aliens. (or else we would already be extinct) There are no significant wars, although I believe there will be some kind of problems, maybe robots? This is just some thoughts, I know this is just guessing, but it would be nice to hear what you think.

The FTL neutrino experiment isn't confirmed yet.
As for technology in the future, there will be probably a stopping point after which technology won't develop much because it would be too difficult/dangerous/expensive.
We are working on nuclear fusion. Fission has already been developed.

I think in a million years, we'll all be a bunch of 1/2 cyborg mutants that re-animate each other. :D

Azitox, you are wrong. As I said, fission has already been done to some degree, but todays nuclear powerplants use fusion, because todays fission is not very efficient.

If we get past our suicidal tendencies than probably we will have migrated to new planets since the population will be far more than 7 billion. The planets will probably be terraformed since most are not habitable for humans and the procedure will be handled by unmanned spaceships finding suitable "rocks".

The problem is that the closer you get to technological perfection, the harder it gets. Since the human race is so hungry for perfection and/or power, we will probably forget what true feelings are and evolve into something better technologically but worse concerning our inner selves. I certainly hope not to be honest..

Actually you can't say that nothing happened before 1900 (very important discoveries in physics (Newton), Chemistry, Math(Euler)), it may seem so because human technolgy and scientific growth has been exponential (maybe this was also influenced by the fact that the human population grows exponentially). So I think it's quite impossible to predict what will happen in 1 million years.

But even today, the average Joe is not very familliar with all those scientific concepts and humans' main concern is not scientific progress, in this corporate world. They only want profit. And when you develop your patents in a closed system, progress doesn't take place.

Even though it's impossible to predict what would happen in a million years, I hope that the human race will have achieved the followings by that time :
-controlled human population
-100% green energy, not affecting the natural environment of our planet,or the environment of other planets
-controlled (lower) human population
-coming up with a unified theory of nature that would bind together the quantum theory, relativity and that would describe perfectly the subatomic world
-coming up with a powerful simulator of a universe, 1:1 in scale, that would confirm and predict the future
-coming up with a better political system worldwide, or wherever we would be at that time
oh, and as the OP said, it would be nice to be able to store a person's brain in a computer so that he can live forever, but not actually using the power to sustain all the dead. Why would we want to do that? In nature there's a cycle , just like the water cycle, and we are part of nature. It's natural to die and it's of utmost importance to the ecosystem. So that's why I don't think people are going to live forever.

Anyway, 1m years is a very short period in cosmology. Theoretically, the Earth could still sustain life for a few billions years, before the Sun becomes a red giant(5 billions I believe).

The thing is, there are very important things that need to be changed right now in our society. And by looking into the future, we expect our descendents to do that. This is a problem.

Originally Posted by MajorNil

Azitox, you are wrong. As I said, fission has already been done to some degree, but todays nuclear powerplants use fusion, because todays fission is not very efficient.

Well... no. There is no nuclear power plant in existence that uses controlled nuclear fusion. In the fission plants they use the decay of radioactive elements to create heat, which drives a turbine that produces electricity. All of the current power plants and working reactors are fission based.
A fusion reactor would be much more complex. The reaction has to be done in a plasma field heated to millions of degrees and controlled by superconductors. The fusion reaction produces neutrons which the escape the plasma field because they aren't magnetically charged.

Originally Posted by MajorNil

Azitox, you are wrong. As I said, fission has already been done to some degree, but todays nuclear powerplants use fusion, because todays fission is not very efficient.

They use fission not fusion... But in a million years considering we never colonized space by then... Like total crap I say this because unless we can create synthetic materials to replace silicon, gold, and numerous other elements. we wouldn't be able to make anything. but if we do then idk since im not a fortune teller...

fission: splitting an atom... Fusion: joining atoms into a extremely hot plasma...

If you listen to Michio Kaku's theoretical physics talks and how the evolution of humans is about to go from type 0 to type 1...and what type 3 civilizations would be able to achieve... it seems reasonable.