The year: 4365...

[Javaman]

What kind of shape will the earth be in? Will we still be here? How will the people then look back upon our "ancient" civiliation?

your thoughts?

[htuttle]

1. In the year 4365, "You ain't gonna need your teeth, won't need your eyes"

"You won't find a thing to chew
Nobody's gonna look at you"

[Javaman]

2. Great old song. :) nt

[phantom power]

3. I think a great deal depends on the next 100 years.

If humans make it thru the coming train-wreck with a technological civilization intact, I think in another 4000 years we will be busy colonizing the solar system and the nearby stars. Or maybe we will have become post-singular. who knows.

If we lose our technological civilization, we may either go extinct, or in 4000 years, we may be a civilization something like pre-1900s China. A stable civilization that may be advanced in many respects, but is technologically stagnated due to the unavailability of fossil energy sources to kick-start an industrial revolution.

Or maybe an alternate non-fossil path to advanced technology will be found. I like to think that could happen, but it's hard to say.

So. Have I covered everything from total extinction to post-singular? Check.

[kestrel91316]

4. I think the earth will be starting to recover from all the harm we have done,

but climate change will have altered its appearance greatly. We might not recognize it.

If humans are still around, and that's a REALLY BIG IF, we will be greatly diminished as a people.

I'm sure we're gonna fall. Just not sure how far............

[NMDemDist2]

5. tiny pockets of pre industrial hunter gathers if that

if that.....

[kestrel91316]

7. With residual knowledge of basics like sanitation and some

engineering and science. If they're lucky. If it's fundies that survive, they will have elevated ritual stoning-to-death to high art.

[hunter]

6. Humans such as us are a temporary infestation...

... sort of like rats in a Greenwich Village KFC.

When the restaurant closes, when the easy natural resources are all dispersed, what's left of us will adapt or die. Those are the same rules all species must play by; human beings are no exception.

If we do survive, which seems unlikely, I think we will end up with a society that looks low-tech on the face of it, very Pre-Colombian America, with a few trappings of high technology, especially in communications and medicine. You won't have a flying car, or even a car, you'll live in a house hand built of local materials and eat food grown by you and your neighbors. But you'll have a good doctor, good medicines, and a nearly unbreakable wireless phone/computer/internet device that works anywhere in the world. You'll be able to chat with your friends and relatives anytime, no matter where they live, but if you want to visit them you'll probably have to walk. And people will walk across continents and sail across oceans, because that's what people have always done.

We won't ever become a space faring race. That's probably the domain of machine intelligences and creatures evolved in environments radically different than our own. It's possible some very good representations of the human mind will travel the stars and phone home with their discoveries and insights, but I doubt there will ever be a significant number of humans living away from the earth. In the year 4365 the Apollo moon landings will be seen as a historical oddity, and not as the first faltering steps of a space-faring civilization.

[Dogmudgeon]

8. Whiter. Colder.

The next Ice Age will be well under way, as part of the natural macro-scale cycle that will eventually "cure" the Earth of anthropogenic global warming.

The tundra will start at Toronto, Liverpool, Bonn, and Beijing; New York and Boston will be more like Helsinki, and the Philly-Balto-DC region will be like Edmonton. The same will be true of Berlin and Paris, respectively. All of Iberia, except for the Asturias and Basque Country, will be the Great Iberian Desert.

Scotland and Hokkaido (Japan's northernmost island) will have been abandoned to the ice for nearly 500 years, the Scots re-settling in Ireland and northern England. Scandinavia will have been abandoned around 3500 CE. Same for Moscow and points north in Russia. Iceland will be largely unchanged, unless isostatic volcanism has reclaimed it.

If we humans are still around, we'll either be safely in space (or maybe singularitized away in a techno-rapture), or safely regressed to an iron-age state. In any way, "safely" enough to be no significant threat to the Earth.

The animal die-off, on the other hand, will take longer to recover from.

--p!

[Xithras]

9. So many pessimists.

People tend to forget how danged many of us there are. To remind you, we're 6.6 BILLION strong. Even if you wiped out 99% of the human population, that still leaves 66 million people on the Earth.

I do expect that humanity will experience a population crash at some point, for two primary reasons. 1) Our completely interconnected world will make the transmission of fatal viruses quicker, and higher population density will help its spread. Statistically, that virus WILL hit us at some point. 2) Current human population growth rates are unsustainable. Eventually we'll hit the limits of what we can support, and that hit will be followed by several years of starvation. I don't expect it to last long, but you'd be surprised how many people can die in a few short years of global famine.

I find the suggestion that we'll revert to stone age hunting and gathering to be rather humorous. Technology isn't going anywhere, because technology CAN be manufactured locally. Even if we were to go into a global societal meltdown tomorrow, it would be trivial to throw up a small hydro plant to run electrical power, smelting metals is a rather straightforward process, and there will be enough scrap metal around for millenia to build just about anything the people could want. As long as the technological knowhow to build them doesn't get lost, even advanced modern electronics could be fabricated.

I WOULD expect the population to be more rural, and less urban. A reduction in overall population increases the value of labor, so low-wage immigrant farm laborers will be a thing of the past. People will need to play some role in the production of their food supplies, which necessarily means a move toward smaller towns more oriented toward their surrounding farmlands. In essence, imagine the U.S. and Europe in the 1800's, only with better medicine and technology.

And the Earth. I don't worry about the Earth, and I never have. The Earth has survived assaults far more devastating than anything we've thrown at it, and it has always recovered. I think it will be CHANGED, but once our population drops much of it will begin to revert to a natural state again. Some coastlines may be slightly changed, and I'm sure there will be some areas that are still so polluted that they will have to be avoided, but overall the Earth will probably be in better shape than it is today.

As for how they look at us, I'm sure they'll see it as a golden age, simply because that's our nature. "They didn't have to work", "They flew through the air for VACATIONS!", "They imported food from the other side of the planet!" History shows us that mankind tends to forget the uglier side of our history in favor of emphasizing its good points. The Roman Empire was a brutal, bloodthirsty, war-prone nation that slaughtered innocent neighbors, enslaved women and children from all around Europe, and got off on gladiatorial matches. Despite that, we still see them as one of the pinnacles of early civilization. I expect that our descendants will do the same.