[link] New Scientist, on the distant future

[fortyeridania]

The magazine has a bunch of articles dealing with what the world may be like 98,000 years hence. What with the local interest in the distant future, and with prediction itself, I thought I’d bring it to your attention.

http://​​www.newscientist.com/​​special/​​deep-future?cmpid=NLC|NSNS|2012-0503-GLOBAL|deepfuture&utm_medium=NLC&utm_source=NSNS&utm_content=deepfuture

[Kevin]

Interesting. This is like a bizarro version of the future where it is both impossible to destroy the world and to do anything interesting with an enduring human civilization. Or maybe more concretely, a bizarro future created by an enduring but linearly progressing society that stagnates shortly before Kardashev Type 1.

Even the article on space exploration seems to ignore the various modern-ish ideas for fusion engine spacecraft (or older but still practical nuclear pulse propulsion designs) instead talking about how the stars might be just out of reach, instead of mentioning that we could send a probe to Alpha Centauri within a decade or two if we as a global civilization actually cared to devote the resources.

I mean, the series starts by linking to the FHI Global Catastropic Risks conference and then summarily dismissing it.

WHAT are the odds we will avoid extinction? In 2008, researchers attending the Global Catastrophic Risk Conference in Oxford, UK, took part in an informal survey of what they thought were the risks to humanity. They gave humans only a 19 per cent chance of surviving until 2100. Yet when you look more closely, such extreme pessimism is unfounded. Not only will we survive to 2100, it’s overwhelmingly likely that we’ll survive for at least the next 100,000 years.

[[deleted]]

What’s interesting is that the survey report actually says something quite different:

Overall risk of extinction prior to 2100: 19%

Now, who managed to be more confused by the presented fiction than actual reality? I totally failed.

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Aw.

[bramflakes]

Global effects come from an impact roughly every 500,000 years, so the odds are about 20 percent for a catastrophic, civilisation-threatening impact within 100,000 years.

That doesn’t reassure me.

[advancedatheist]

It seems to me that the literature about “the future” we have access to suffers from cultural & linguistic biases. From what I’ve read, for example, Russia has an independent tradition of transhumanist-sounding speculation going back to the late 19th Century, yet language barriers and the lack of diligence in translating it have kept much of it from entering the West. Russia has its own cryonics movement, for example, which Mike Darwin has written about on his website. Mike even claims to notice spooky similarities to what he witnessed in the American cryonics movement back in the late 1960′s:

http://​​chronopause.com/​​index.php/​​2011/​​03/​​17/​​1968-ad-cryonics-reboot/​​

So I have to wonder what Russian transhumanists, or that society’s equivalents, have written about the future of humanity 100,000 years from now.

[gwern]

http://​​www.antipope.org/​​charlie/​​blog-static/​​2011/​​07/​​federovs-rapture.html

[vi21maobk9vp]

Maybe it is a good idea to have a cross-language inquiry threads once in a while… Some things of transhumanism type seem to be represented in the so-widely-known-it-is-considered-trivial science fiction in Russian.

Also, in Russia it seems to be typical to have read a lot of Stanislaw Lem (as translated from Polish to Russian in Soviet Union times).

[Larkus]

Unfortunately, Lem’s most thought provoking book, Summa Technologiae (1964), was never (completely) translated into English.

There is only a partial translation into English: http://​​web.archive.org/​​web/​​20041012053805/​​http://​​wwwnlds.physik.tu-berlin.de/​​~prengel/​​Lem/​​contents.htm

Russian translation: http://​​lib.ru/​​LEM/​​summa/​​summtitl.htm