THE HUMAN FUTURE: A Case for Optimism

foreigner foreigner we find ourselves at a crossroads of accelerated change unlike anything seen before in the history of life, it seems as if the

future

could tilt between utopia and apocalypse, the risks we face are intimidating, but beneath the rampant pessimism about our

future

there is evidence that

human

ity can not only survive in the centuries to come, but also thrive deep into the future. No one knows what will come next, but there are three broad paths our future could take. The first is collapse. A major catastrophe threatens the fall of civilization and possibly even the extinction of the

human

race. the second is the plateau where humanity avoids collapse but reaches an upper limit of progress and the third is Transcendence where Humanity reaches its maximum potential multiplies into billions or transforms along the way into something completely unimaginable.

Imagining that these Futures will clarify the risks we face and the promise we promise. We have as we move towards an unpredictable New Age for planet Earth for ourselves humanity is no stranger to catastrophes our ancestors have survived asteroid impacts ice ages volcanic supereruptions and deadly plagues time recovers to new heights but Our greatest threats no longer come from the natural world of ourselves. Since the dawn of nuclear weapons, the threats of self-destruction have come to eclipse all others. By some estimates, the risk of causing our own extinction is more than 300 times greater than the Life Institute's Natural Causes Extinction Identifies Four Major Risks to Our Survival Nuclear War Climate Change Biotechnology to AI To understand the severity of these risks we have to imagine the worst possible outcomes the soot from a large-scale nuclear war could cool global temperatures in almost 10 degrees and wipe out up to 63 percent of the population We have made progress in reducing nuclear stockpiles, but almost 10,000 warheads still exist.

We are currently on track to warm the Earth by around 2.7 degrees by 2100, which could displace more than a billion people, but in the worst

case

we could cause a drop in CO2. points and cause up to 12 degrees of warming in the coming centuries biotechnology has the potential to solve major crises such as food shortages and disease could give small groups of people the power to cause a global disaster Theory that the release of a designer pathogen could have an even greater impact (more deaths than a global nuclear war, but the most difficult risk to measure comes from AI: it is the first threat we face and we may not be able to outwit it, it could become a powerful ally or, ultimately, it could outcompete us for the world's resources and push us away.

Humanity in the Dark Navigating this new risk landscape will be the greatest challenge we have faced yet, and new, unknown threats are likely to materialize as we move forward, but despite the potential for large-scale human tragedy, it is Few of these risks alone are likely to lead to our total extinction; in fact, we may be one of the least endangered species on Earth. Our large numbers and wide distribution have given us a geographic buffer against extinction. We inhabit all corners of the Earth from the desert to the tundra and small isolated islands that could act as natural. quarantines in the event of a global disaster, even if 99.9 percent of humans were wiped out in some catastrophe, eight million of us would still be more than existed for most of our history and, although we are slow to reproduce We no longer rely on the glacial pace of natural selection to adapt technology to adapt thousands of times faster than any other species in the history of life.

Finally, our generalist diets allow for wide flexibility in food sources, a A trait that was critical for survivors of past mass extinctions abroad, ultimately the threat of collapse hinges on one question: How resilient is civilization? How big a hit can we take and move forward? The Black Death of 1347 killed half the population of Europe and a tenth of the world's population, but even this did not derail human progress and was followed by the Scientific Revolution. Just 200 years later, the same proportional blow today would wreak havoc on our interconnected global economy, but as long as our infrastructure and knowledge remained, we could still recover and maintain upward momentum if we suffered a collapse steep enough to extinguish global industry. a much longer and more precarious recovery lost the capacity for agriculture and was pushed towards hunter-gatherer lifestyles.

The Earth could only support 10 million of us. Our population as it was a hundred centuries ago. Abroad, we would need between one hundred and five thousand. survivors to successfully repopulate the Earth the bottleneck would be too narrow and we may never recover understand what is at stake we have to face what extinction would really mean our biggest threat comes not from a single disastrous event but from the effects Compounds of disasters that overlap and blend unpredictably In 2009, two researchers conducted a thought experiment to see what it would take to push humanity toward complete extinction. The first phase sees a rapid decline in human population due to global war and the collapse of global industry and agriculture.

Phase Two sees the depletion of remaining natural resources over the next two centuries and Phase 3 envisions a downward spiral of ecosystem collapse punctuated by a supervolcano eruption that will leave the last remaining groups of humanity unable to hold on any longer. time. Such an outcome would not only be tragic for the loss of life. If not for the loss of potential future life, billions or even trillions of our potential descendants would never materialize, distant planets would be left unexplored, it would mark the end of music, poetry and art in our corner of the galaxy, possibly in the entire universe, thank you, foreign global seed.

A bank in Norway now holds more than a million seed specimens from more than four thousand plant species that could one day be a critical resource for rebuilding civilization, but there is an even better place to build a vault like this. Some have proposed lunar arcs that would store genetic samples. In lava tubes beneath the moon's surface here they would be protected from micrometeorites, global disaster erosion and solar radiation, but the best way to ensure our long-term survival is to take the leap that no other life form has made. given until it became a multiplanetary species.

Once a self-sustaining civilization is established on another planet, the chances of our extinction will plummet. We will carry our flaws with us. We will face new and unknown risks the further we go from Earth, but it will be worth it. Sustainable interplanetary civilization will be the foundation for a long and prosperous future, but is this higher future really within our reach or are we at the peak of our powers? Can we go abroad? It is possible that Civilization maintains the status quo for an indefinite future, avoiding both the collapse and the transformation that could occur. unforeseen barriers that keep us in a kind of uncomfortable stasis, but in reality Plateau will be, at best, a temporary state in the short term.

Exponential changes in Earth's technology and climate will force civilization in new directions. The further we move into the future, the greater the disruptions we will experience. We will face in the next hundreds of thousands of years, we will face supervolcano eruptions and a new Ice Age, even if we burn every gram of fossil fuels and bake the Earth without active climate management, the glaciers will have their revenge as soft, thick layers of In huge swaths of North America and Europe it is believed that approximately every 27 million years the Earth experiences a cyclical mass extinction caused by the Sun's passage through the asteroid-dense central region of our galaxy and that within about a billion In years the Sun's brightness will make the Earth too hot for photosynthesis and the oceans will slowly evaporate, extinguishing all life on our planet.

Modern civilization will not survive these events without a profound transformation that allows nature to take its course on Earth and move to off-world habitats. They could house more than a billion people They could provide more than 3 million square kilometers of land As much as India or Argentina They could be built with lightweight carbon nanotubes and their rotation would generate enough gravity to maintain their own atmosphere and remain on Earth, not We are at the mercy of our planet can write its future despite all the dangers we face. Utopian futures are within our reach sooner than we think.

To our ancestors our current powers would seem divine, but everything we have achieved so far may pale in comparison to what is to come. Furthermore, since the Industrial Revolution, technological progress has been radically improving the human condition in all critical aspects. The quality of life around the world is at an all-time high. The trends are clearly due to our negativity bias, which evolved to make us more attentive to negative information, but not negative information. The momentum is undeniable The course correction towards a sustainable civilization now appears The unstoppable costs of solar and wind energy are falling faster than experts' predictions, making them often cheaper than fossil fuels, at the same time that converging advances in AI and biotechnology point toward a radical improvement in human well-being. -Projects like Alpha Fold are already discovering pathogen structures and cancer treatments much faster than humans.

There could be over ten thousand diseases caused by single gene mutations and gene editing tools like Crispr have the potential to cure them all. Trends are multiplying human potential many times over. We are now the healthiest, wealthiest, freest, most educated, and most advanced population of humans that has ever existed. Trends hold that we could gain the power to regenerate limbs, eliminate all diseases, and possibly extend our lifespans indefinitely, putting ourselves in danger. On the brink of the most radical transformation in our history, achieving these advances will require technological leaps that the human mind alone cannot make, but NASA has already begun using AI to design Mission Hardware, which surpasses human designs by a factor of three.

It is also pioneering development. of cleaner biofuels and drought-resistant crops that could be critical in the fight against climate change and this is just the beginning, we are witnessing the beginning of an intelligence explosion that could lead to artificial superintelligence that far exceeds human capabilities capable of solving complex problems. that have challenged Humanity, aligning it with human values ​​will be a huge and novel challenge, but it will be a vital step not only for the enormous prosperity it could bring, but to counter the threat of malicious AIS. Safely aligning superintelligence should be a primary goal for human progress.

We can safely harness the power of AI for human betterment. Then we can paint a utopian future that our ancestors could hardly imagine. A future free of disease and hunger where the biotechnology has stabilized the climate and biodiversity we are abundant clean energy is developed in conjunction with artificial intelligence, foreign rockets and materials science have propelled humans to distant planets and moons and where new tools for artistic and musical expression open new frontiers of experience and understanding of beauty, and all of this could be just the prologue to an even grander foreign future. If our energy use continues its exponential growth, we could eventually control more energy than the Earth itself receives, becoming a type 1 civilization.

A recent study shows that this could occur as early as the year 2371 and if we maintained three percent annual growth we would reach type 2 in just a few. thousand years capable of controlling all the foreign energy of the Sun if our species survives until the death of the Sun within 5 billion years it could lead to the existence of about 600 thousand billion people and by colonizing space many more could still come to exist something like a hundred thousand billion billion people in the Milky Way the more we expandin space and time, the more different we will be We may fragment into multiple species Different tolerance for change Some may choose to merge with our machines into a new hybrid species that rejects natural selection in favor of technological evolution While others may choose to remain completely biological, the fragmentation would mark the first time since the Neanderthals that more than one human-like species walked the Earth, and if we ever digitize our consciousness, human identity could branch into an infinite number of varieties as we As we grow into new, more powerful forms, we will eventually have to face a profound question: what is our ultimate purpose in the universe.

We could aspire to the lofty goal of colonizing the entire galaxy to become a Type 3 civilization and reorder the galaxy. The Milky Way according to their own designs The stars themselves about 100 billion years from now, but these distant dreams are not for us to realize that they will ever be achieved, it will be by some distant descendant of ours who evolved far beyond their roots Instead, it may be humanity's ultimate goal. It should be more personal to save Earth, the small rocky planet where it all began. By moving Earth away from the expanding Sun, we could prolong The Game of Life for billions of years by building a giant conducting counterweight on the other side of the planet.

In his mind, the Moon process would take millions of years, but it would be a truly worthy goal to offset the destruction we have caused and keep life flourishing for eons. More a final Act of redemption for Humanity. potential to see the vast new branch of life that could grow larger than Earth and spread throughout the universe. If there is one lesson our history can teach us, it is to never underestimate the human race. Thank you.