[HN Gopher] The Future is Vast: Long-term perspective on humanit...
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The Future is Vast: Long-term perspective on humanitys past,
present and future
Author : gmays
Score : 70 points
Date : 2022-03-18 17:33 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ourworldindata.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (ourworldindata.org)
| davedx wrote:
| Somewhere, sometime, the Great Filter lies waiting for us...
|
| It is patient beyond our fathoming
| xwdv wrote:
| The great filter could presently already be on it's way to us.
| Perhaps in the form of a gamma ray blast crawling across vast
| swathes of space. Or a vacuum metastability event rapidly
| expanding and destroying reality from some point in the
| unobservable universe.
| 323 wrote:
| Technically vacuum metastability would not be a great filter,
| since it will wipe out the whole universe, not just one
| civilization.
| pellmellism wrote:
| unless there is more then 1 universe
| nkoren wrote:
| Still not the Great Filter, which by definition is the
| explanation for why there's so little evidence of
| intelligent life in _this_ universe.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| Unless we have already passed it. Thats a possibility right?
| echelon wrote:
| Only in the bad sense, as we're still subject to the dangers
| of nuclear annihilation, cosmic disaster, vulnerable world
| hypothesis, etc. at pretty much every moment.
|
| We could have already exhausted all of the easy to obtain
| energy and resources, and that would make growth very hard to
| sustain at a level where we can expend extra effort on space
| exploration.
|
| Imagine an alien civilization that didn't have a
| Carboniferous period where energy was just left sitting
| around and accumulating for future use.
|
| Now imagine us exhausting it before we expand beyond our
| planet. That's the worry. Will we be able to tap into
| renewables in a way that sustains growth? Maybe. We're not
| there yet, though.
| alcover wrote:
| I hear many minerals and fuels are past/near peaking.
| Recycling and thriftness will ease the descent a bit but I
| share your urgency. We have to go full-bore on space and
| nuclear.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| That's the most plausible alternative by many orders of
| magnitude.
|
| In fact, the filters on our past are things with odds of
| survival that we estimate by counting orders of magnitude. At
| the same time, you will have a hard time getting estimates of
| survival lower than 1% for the known filters on our future.
|
| Unless there is something really surprising with space
| travel, we are past the Great Filter.
| stormbrew wrote:
| I think you have this precisely backwards? When humanity
| was scattered across the globe and unable to do any large
| scale geo-engineering or deliberately induce fission or
| fusion, we were largely incapable of dying by our own
| sword, so the only things that _could_ eliminate the
| species are things that essentially would wipe out all
| medium-sized mammalian life on earth. Meteor strikes,
| absurdly large solar flares, a planetoid crashing into the
| moon, whatever.
|
| Now we still have basically all of those -- because
| realistically we're still not at the point where we have
| anywhere to colonize and survive long term without a living
| earth, even if we had the tech to try -- but we also have
| the ways in which we can eliminate ourselves, like causing
| our own climate crisis (which we are gleefully doing right
| now) or nuclear annihilation.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| There was a paper here on HN recently that estimated the
| odds of abiogenesis. OF course they are not certain, but
| his best guess was around 10^-100 for the Earth.
|
| Now tell me, what odds do you place on humanity killing
| itself before we learn to live in space?
| stormbrew wrote:
| I guess I think you're underestimating the scale of the
| problem of _independently_ living in space? In theory we
| already know how to just live in space -- people live on
| the ISS, and before that on Mir, for decently long
| amounts of time.
|
| But if we kill earth before we've fully worked out how to
| terraform somewhere for permanent living without
| restocking from a living planet, of which we know of only
| one for sure, that might extend human living for like..
| 50 years or something but certainly not a million.
|
| I think we're realistically a long long long way away
| from that, and most of the ways in which we might "kill
| the earth" will have a negative impact on our ability to
| achieve it to begin with.
|
| And again, the odds of a planet-killing asteroid hitting
| the earth haven't changed materially in probably like a
| few million years. We're no less vulnerable to that than
| we were 20k years ago. So I don't see why you think we're
| _less_ vulnerable now just because we 've managed to
| throw some tin cans in orbit.
| jl6 wrote:
| That graph showing poverty reduction in the last 20/40/60 years
| is wild, and very encouraging. This is so important, because it's
| almost impossible to get people to cooperate on solving long term
| existential risks while their own short term existence is at
| risk.
| d0mine wrote:
| The very first plot is a textbook and misleading. If we consider
| only recorded history (~10k) then today the more people alive
| than ever lived
| xorfish wrote:
| No, halve of the people that ever died, did so in the last two
| thousand years.
|
| Less than 9 billion people lived before the agricultural
| revolution.
| [deleted]
| fritzo wrote:
| This reads like a 1950s ad envisioning a future filled with
| unimaginably many vacuum tubes.
| 323 wrote:
| Given recent events, I'm starting to think we are going to blow
| ourselves up one way or another.
|
| First a lab leaked virus, then one man with a giant ego and a
| nuclear button.
|
| As tech becomes more powerful, it becomes easier and easier for
| one accident or deranged person to kill us all.
| techer wrote:
| Maybe kill...but probably enslave??
| rmah wrote:
| Civilization is far more resilient than most people today seem
| to believe. History shows that utter devastation can tear
| through a civilization, killing as much as one in three people,
| but civilization will rebound within a generation or three. If
| an apocalypse happens, it will certainly be horrific for those
| who experience it, but humanity will not just survive, it will
| rebuild quite rapidly. You may not live to see the new
| renaissance, but will happen.
| thicknessing wrote:
| stormbrew wrote:
| I think we're still far more likely to kill ourselves slowly
| than quickly, though the slow but accelerating erosion of our
| ecosystem could certainly accelerate things that would lead to
| a quicker end.
|
| Either way, 800k years feels very optimistic right now. We need
| to stop thinking about a trillion potential future people over
| a million years and start making things better for the few
| billion or so who will live in the next 20-100 years if those
| trillions are ever going to exist. We're really really bad at
| this near-medium horizon, endlessly shuffling the costs of our
| choices onto them and their children as if we can amortize it
| forever.
| somewhereoutth wrote:
| Lab leaked? I'm more concerned with the rise of 'Idiocracy' to
| be honest
| wussboy wrote:
| I definitely understand your sentiment. But I can't help but
| think whatever nuclear angst we are experiencing right now
| can't have been anything compared to what was experienced in
| the 50s and 60s.
| deepzn wrote:
| That is a rather large caveat..."if we avoid a major
| catastrophe", have you looked around the world?
| apocalypstyx wrote:
| The evolutionary urge for reproduction is all-consuming.
|
| So much for humanity's claims to have transcended nature.
|
| EDIT:
|
| (stealing a half-remembered quote from someone else)
|
| "Humans beings are unique in that they are the only known species
| who produce offspring in order to subsidize their fantasies."
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| And yet, industrialized countries fall below replacement level
| and world population plateaus.
|
| Clearly, it _isn 't_ all-consuming.
|
| Also your quote is blatantly false. Consider bees. The queen
| produces offspring literally to build her hive and feed her
| young.
| AlgorithmicTime wrote:
| Kye wrote:
| I always wonder about what goes on in the heads of people who
| claim that. I've never had _any_ desire to have kids. Is it a
| case of something like pluralistic ignorance, or do they
| really feel a strong overriding drive here?
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| How many of us who didn't want children have siblings that
| had children in our place? The drive for reproduction wins,
| even without considering that without the drive for
| reproduction of our parents we wouldn't even exist.
|
| More so, the drive for reproduction isn't necessarily about
| kids, but sexuality. Sex sells. A big chunk of our
| civilization is about food and sex.
| jl6 wrote:
| Not having children is very common and always has been,
| and yet seems to me a somewhat radical decision when you
| think that you represent an unbroken line of reproduction
| going back 4 billion years, and somehow that line ends
| with you.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| A branch. A tiny, insignificant, microscopic branch is
| ended when one doesn't reproduce, the main line keeps
| going strong.
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| If you fail to reproduce (voluntarily or otherwise), only
| a small mutation in a giant cross-breeding pool is lost,
| not some great bloodline of ancestry. Provided, of
| course, that you're not literally the last living
| descendant of some genetic bottleneck.
|
| The total genetic consciousness of humanity cares for
| your particular genes about as much as you care for a
| single hair or cell of skin falling off the greater
| whole.
| apocalypstyx wrote:
| There's a difference in the individual level and the
| species level. An individual does not necessarily _have_ to
| be concerned with direct propagation to participate in
| propagation. A bee that kills itself stinging something
| that is attacking the hive potentially increases the
| overall survival of the genes which it shares with the
| hive, even at the expense of its own particular genes. An
| individual human who assists in the aid of other adult
| members or children in the group, even though they
| themselves do might not mate successfully, does something
| similar.
|
| It is all-consuming in the sense that it is fundamental to
| life by definition. (Unless we are to posit some organism
| arising from proto-life and just 'hanging out' until the
| end of the universe.) And it is the second half fundamental
| to evolution -- the other being death.
| [deleted]
| panzagl wrote:
| First you get married, then one day you run out of things
| to talk about. Nine months later, kids!
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| I'm assuming you're male. The desire comes from both sexes
| but some women _need_ babies.
| apocalypstyx wrote:
| > And yet, industrialized countries fall below replacement
| level and world population plateaus.
|
| Yes. Reproductive rates vary over time and due to
| environmental conditions.
|
| See Calhoun's Mouse Utopia Experiments for an extreme example
| of this. (Though simplistic applicability of this to human
| society, in the ways that have been done in the past, should
| probably be discouraged.)
|
| > Also your quote is blatantly false. Consider bees. The
| queen produces offspring literally to build her hive and feed
| her young.
|
| Other animals act in collective ways. Yes. But it's not
| talking of collectivism in terms of bees, ants, or wolf
| packs.
|
| So far as I understand the quote, or the sentiment, it refers
| to the seeming fact that bees, ants, wolfs, etc, reproduce as
| a series of drives that function to that end without them
| needing to be cognizant of that end. Whereas humans, in
| addition to the compulsive drives of pleasure, etc, require
| justification. A queen bee does not concern itself (so far as
| we understand the mental processes of other animals) with
| prospects a billion years from now. A queen bee doesn't have
| to justify that more bees are good. Eggs are just cared for,
| fertilized, hatched in relation to the functioning of the
| hive and the processes which occur to regulate such. The
| seeming distinction with human beings is that the course of
| evolution has perhaps instilled them/us with a sort of, if
| not a 'meta drive', then a drive to override other aspects of
| our evolved intelligence which might undermine reproduction.
| In short, humans don't just 'get horny', they/we also have to
| 'get religion[1]'. Other animals (again, so far as we are
| aware, which is admittedly not very far sometimes) don't seem
| to require any justification on top of 'the mating dance
| makes me horny', they just 'do it'.
|
| [1] This, of course, should be considered in terms of
| ideology broadly, rather than just religion specifically. (In
| addition, I would also contend here that ideology is not an
| external addition, but a fundamental of human psychology, and
| to paraphrase Zizek 'the most thoroughly ideological
| environment is the post-ideological one.'
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| > A queen bee does not concern itself (so far as we
| understand the mental processes of other animals) with
| prospects a billion years from now.
|
| Of course it does! Bees gather honey literally to _survive
| through winters._
| apocalypstyx wrote:
| Does a bee think about winter? Does a tree? Or do they
| react in response to stimuli with evolved, complex
| behaviors? Does a bear go out and gorge itself to gain
| weight because it thinks that's the best way to get
| through winter or does it do so because changes in
| weather/seasons signal a set of immediate compulsions
| which have broader survival advantages?
|
| We can even grant that honey bees, for instance, do
| appear to have some type of awareness of time and space,
| as indicated by their communicative 'dances'. However,
| there is a vast gap between encoding approximate seconds
| to kilometers (in human terms) and the time relations of
| the heat death of the universe.
|
| Intelligence, self-awareness, these are all things that
| have developed in various species to varying degrees. And
| new data generally keep showing that we have previously
| underestimated just to what degree that is the case.
|
| However, it has yet to be shown that bees (or any other
| animal) are compelled to instantiate and perpetuate
| social interactions with the point of advancing
| propositions such as "people who live in the future
| matter morally just as much as those of us who are alive
| today."
|
| > billions of years ... survive through the winter
|
| That's G.R.R Martin levels of winter.
|
| EDIT:
|
| I don't want to make it seem as if am I discounting the
| ability for the deployment of forethought by other
| animals. There is, however, the issue of any 'horizon of
| time'. Bees can work to restore a hive in the middle of
| winter because it is potentially conceptualized, in some
| fashion, to be necessary. A crow can interface with
| multiple interlocking scenarios in order to achieve an
| outcome (usually food). We have cooperative behavior: one
| monkey distracts the tourist, the other steals the food,
| etc. However, there seems to be little evidence for any
| other species having such a notion of time as to extend
| much more beyond immediate concerns in an active sense.
| Longer phenomena, such as the reproductive cycles of
| cicadas, is more linked to environmental factors and
| internal molecule clocks than it is to what could be
| defined as conscious relations.
|
| This is not also to say that some species may also have
| (or in the future have) undergone convergent evolution
| with regards to this type of mental processing, just that
| it doesn't generally seem to be the case.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > See Calhoun's Mouse Utopia Experiments for an extreme
| example of this.
|
| Calhoun's experiments are kinda sketchy and likely are not
| reproducible. [0] They were extensively promoted as PopSci,
| especially by Calhoun, but only limited papers where
| actually published, never the full results, and attempts at
| reproduction have called into question many of the
| findings.
|
| [0] https://www.gwern.net/Mouse-Utopia
|
| Until we have good reproductions, it's probably good to
| write this experiment off.
| apocalypstyx wrote:
| Which is in part why I stated: _Though simplistic
| applicability of this to human society, in the ways that
| have been done in the past, should probably be
| discouraged._
|
| But you are likely correct; I should have been stronger
| in my warnings.
|
| Unfortunately, however, it could be taken that I was
| indicating the wholesale applicability of a possibly one-
| off event as explanation to broader and seemingly
| repeated phenomena (leveling and/or declining population
| rates in so-called developed countries), rather that just
| as a possible single extreme instance of population and
| reproductive instability as generalized example.
|
| My interest is confined strictly to the rat populations
| themselves. The particulars of the designs involved and
| for the issues that were introduced by them, I think that
| to be the more interesting part.
|
| Any applicability to human sociology I would regard as
| ridiculously erroneous at this stage. (Or perhaps any
| stage. We tend to cross-associate species too much
| sometimes.)
|
| Though, I wonder if reproducibility may not, here, be as
| useful as we think. It is of course necessary for such to
| scientific, or at least scientifically studied.
| Repeatability, however, is not a prerequisite of
| existence. It is a question of how high a degree of
| variability exists within the flow and inter-relation and
| outcomes of population-wide phenomena among social
| species.
| greenonions wrote:
| Maybe there are situations where the best thing for the
| reproduction of our species is an individual deciding to not
| reproduce.
|
| If you live in a developed nation, you probably feel secure
| that humanity will not perish without you having kids. You
| are allowed to simply enjoy life as you wish and not have
| kids if you choose (at least, that is my ideal).
| swayvil wrote:
| Morlock-Eloi style division of species. Except the Eloi will be
| billionaire supermen. And the Morlocks will exist within a
| totally controlled, synthetic, optimized THX1138-style reality
| where _they work hard, but at least they have their pride._
|
| All progress will be bent to that end.
|
| The only alternative is something completely different. Wizards
| or something.
| rmah wrote:
| The scenario where the destitute masses toil for the crazy rich
| few does not make economic sense in the post-industrial age we
| currently live in. That scenario only makes sense in low-
| productivity societies (and that was essentially how most pre-
| industrial societies were structured).
|
| Why? Because it is mass consumption of goods and services by
| the many that allows for the massive wealth of the few on top.
| If not for this mass consumption, the very rich would be orders
| of magnitude poorer in an absolute sense (though they may be
| much richer than the median in a relative sense). It is only by
| skimming from a huge economy that allows for the very rich as
| we understand them today to exist. And if the mass consumption
| exists, that means, by definition, that the majority are not
| destitute.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Republicans and democrats more like it. They don't breed, after
| all.
| [deleted]
| shadowofneptune wrote:
| > A catastrophe that ends human history would destroy the vast
| future that humanity would otherwise have. > > And it would be
| horrific for those who will be alive at that time. > > The people
| who live then will be just as real as you or me. They will exist,
| they just don't exist yet. They will feel the sun on their skin
| and they will enjoy a swim in the sea. They will have the same
| hopes, they will feel the same pain.
|
| I agree with the idea of preserving opportunity in the future,
| but the way it is posed in this article is strange. It treats
| these unborn billions as if they exist right now, and to change
| the future is to betray them. Focusing so much on the number of
| unborn people also makes it seem like the author thinks a larger
| world population is inherently better, morally better. Say the
| world population instead stabilizes at six billion by the year
| 2700. That leads to trillions less people being born than in the
| author's scenario. Is that a lost world? Would the people alive
| then care?
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" Focusing so much on the number of unborn people also makes
| it seem like the author thinks a larger world population is
| inherently better, morally better."_
|
| From a utilitarian perspective, which values the greatest
| happiness for the greatest number of people would consider more
| happy people to be a good thing.
| stormbrew wrote:
| I think you're reading some moral judgements in that aren't
| there. We have very little control over the future population
| of the world, especially over a 1 million year time scale.
| Nothing in the article says "it would be good for there to have
| been 100 trillion people in 800 million years", it just says
| there might be.
|
| However you tweak the numbers, unless you assume a much more
| significant depopulation than just the current 8 or so to 6
| billion people, it's many trillions of people either way. Even
| _with_ a massive depopulation, if human life continues until
| then the number will unquestionably dwarf the current
| population.
|
| So it's posing the simple question: If your actions cause pain
| for future generations, how many people will it effect? What's
| an acceptable number of future people to hurt for whatever
| you're doing now?
|
| This is a moral question, a kind of ultra scale trolley
| problem, not an answer.
| boringg wrote:
| Comment irreversibly edited. Placeholder now.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> Universe has 5 Billions years per recent physicists
| estimates_
|
| Where are you getting that from? Are you sure you're not
| mistaking this for the expected lifetime of the Sun as a normal
| star?
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Nat Geo article: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/a
| rticle/101027-sc...
|
| What it references: https://arxiv.org/abs/1009.4698v1
|
| It's not the definitive sort of statement that GP initially
| (now deleted) implied it was.
| boringg wrote:
| Nat geo
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