The Last Human – A Glimpse Into The Far Future

The

future

of

human

ity seems insecure.  Rapid climate change, political division, our greed and our failures make it difficult to look at our species with much optimism, and many people think our end is in sight. But

human

s have always thought that they lived in the end of times. Each generation assumes they are important enough to witness the apocalypse and then life goes on. This is a problem because it leads us to think short-term and prevents us from creating the best world for ourselves and our descendants. What makes this worse is that we may actually BE living in an extremely critical time in human history.   To understand why, let's look at the time window of humanity and ask ourselves: When will the

last

human being be born and how many people will there be?

These types of estimates carry many uncertainties, so take them with a large grain of salt. To get an idea of ​​how many people there will be, let's see how many have already lived. Modern humans emerged about 200 thousand years ago.   They were exceptionally good at making tools, telling stories, thinking abstractly, planning, and working together in large groups beyond their immediate family. There weren't that many of us yet. Food surpluses were scarce, survival was difficult, and life expectancy was low. It took us 150,000 years to reach a population of 2 million.   The improvements were gradual and eventually led to the agricultural revolution, possibly the greatest change in our history.  That's when our numbers really started to grow.

It took ten thousand more years to reach 300 million. But that increase was eclipsed by the industrial revolution. In 1800 we were one billion. The human population doubled in just 120 years and then again in fifty. Today we are around 8 billion. In total, over the

last

two hundred thousand years about 117 billion humans were born and lived, and 109 billion also died. Which means that about 7% of all humans who ever lived are alive right now. As many as were born in the first 150,000 years of human history. Every minute, 270 babies join the party. But not only are there more people: we have never before been so healthy and so well, nor have we lived longer.

As living standards rose, our birth rates plummeted.   The UN estimates that around the year 2100 we will reach our peak population and 125 million people will be born each year.  It is quite unlikely that birth rates will remain stable forever, but let's simplify our thought experiment. The number of people there will be in the

future

depends on when our species will become extinct.   And here we find many uncertainties.  We can destroy ourselves through our own inventions, but we can also find solutions to avoid catastrophic risks. We can change the direction of planet-killing asteroids, but we have also invented nuclear weapons.   We discovered antibiotics, but we also spread diseases around the world in a matter of days.

Our industrial system gave us an incredible standard of living, but it also changed the atmosphere in the process. It is very difficult to say whether human ingenuity will prolong or shorten the life of our species. If things go wrong our end could come suddenly. But if we can avoid it, we may be able to stay that way for a long time. So every day that we do not destroy ourselves can mean life for an unfathomable number of humans. How many people are we talking about?   It depends on how far our species is going to expand. Scenario 1: Humans will never leave Earth If we stay on our home planet, a good metric to consider is the animal extinction rate we get from the fossil record.

The average lifespan of mammal species is around 1 million years, with some surviving up to 10 million years.   Our close relative, Homo erectus, survived for about 1.9 million years. Let's be conservative and assume that humans will survive for a million years, which leaves us with 800,000 more years to waste time. Assuming a stable birth rate of 125 million people each year, this means there are approximately 100 TRILLION human beings waiting to be born.   850 times greater than the number of people who have ever lived.   This would make everyone alive today only 0.008% of all the people who will ever live. Think about where this leaves you.

Instead of placing you at the end of the chaotic chaos that was our past, it would mean that you live at the beginning of something great.   The beginning of human history rather than the end. Doesn't it seem incredibly different to you? And now let's consider that this may be an extremely pessimistic estimate.   If we match the survival time of the most successful mammals, then our future numbers rise to 1.2 billion people yet to be born. And even this seems far from our potential: as the sun slowly warms and shines, the Earth will remain habitable for about 500 million years, giving many more potential people the chance to become real people.

And now let's start thinking big. Scenario 2: Humans Will Leave Earth We went from humans worshiping the Moon to humans walking on it, so who knows how far we can go? If we don't become extinct in the next few hundred years, ideas that seem outlandish now will become serious considerations. If we think we have a chance of surviving perhaps millions of years, then we could expand to other planets or our own artificial worlds. Life needs three things: a surface, resources and energy.   Our Sun provides energy for billions of years and there is so much water and material floating in the asteroid and Kuiper belt that we could support many times our current population.

Instead of living on planets, we could decide to build our own artificial worlds and habitats.   With such abundant resources and energy, we could try different types of society and ways of life. An interconnected civilization spanning the entire solar system would create the basis of existence for an absurd number of individuals, orders of magnitude more than if we stayed on Earth, even if it only existed for a few million years. This future does not have to be gloomy and dark as science fiction likes to paint it. With billions of people waiting to be born, we will have billions of doctors working to cure cancer, billions of problem solvers working to end poverty, and billions of video game developers making life fun.

In reality, more humans can mean more progress. Another advantage of leaving Earth and expanding is that it becomes much harder for us to go extinct, since it takes a solar system-wide catastrophe to catch everyone.   So, aside from nearby supernovae or gamma-ray bursts, humanity would be relatively safe from extinction, perhaps for billions of years. If we manage to survive that long, slow evolution or genetic engineering could split us into multiple species, or we could intentionally stay the same as we are now.   So to take that into account, from now on we'll only talk about people, rather than humans.

OK. Now let's really think big. Scenario 3: People leave the Solar System As huge as the solar system is, it is just one star system among billions in the Milky Way.   If people in the future can colonize, say, 100 billion stars and live there for 10 billion years, each generating 100 million births per year, then we can expect something like a hundred octillion stars to live in the future. lives. This is a 1 with 29 zeros, one hundred thousand billion, billion. We can spin this around as much as we want. The Andromeda galaxy will merge with the Milky Way, adding another trillion stars for us to settle on.  Red dwarfs remain active for up to a billion years, and future civilizations could even find energy for their habitats around black holes.   A sufficiently advanced civilization of our descendants could even try to reach other galaxy groups.

While these numbers are mind-boggling, they may underestimate the number of unborn people by many orders of magnitude. If we divide the total energy available in a galaxy by the average energy needs of a single person, we get a tredecillion potential lives.   A million, a billion, a billion, a billion potential people. Conclusion Hopefully what has become evident is that if we do not commit suicide in the coming centuries or millennia, almost all human beings who will ever exist will live in the future.   Which brings us back to us, to the present.  We exist at a climax in human history, with incredible possibilities within our reach.  Technological, environmental and social.   What we do matters to all the people who don't yet exist.

So while it's not fashionable to think about humanity's long-term future with optimism – or to think about it at all – perhaps this has given them a bit of perspective.   If we screw up the present, many people may never come into existence.   Trillions of unborn human beings are at our mercy. Even if we rely on fairly conservative estimates, the unborn are by far the largest group of people... and the most disenfranchised. Someone who could be born a thousand or even a million years from now is deeply dependent on us today for their existence. That is why it is important to think about the distant future and why our presence is so crucial, why what we do today is important.

One day the last human being will be born. We don't know when.   But if we change our perspective from living at the end of human history to living from the beginning, we can not only build a wonderful world for ourselves and them, but also for countless people. HUGE announcement: we are launching Kurzgesagt in six more languages! Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, French, Hindi, Japanese and Korean, plus our English, German and Spanish channels. Bring new perspectives and love of science to as many people as possible, especially to some languages ​​that are underserved because it is not profitable to translate into them.   If enough people watch our new channels, we hope we can run them for many years to come!

This is where we need your help. It takes us a lot of time, effort and yes, money to translate our videos correctly and run so many channels. So, to make this sustainable, help us spread the word! If you are a native of one of these languages, share our videos on social networks and tell your friends and family; let people in your native language know it exists. This multilingual expansion is supported by Open Philanthropy, an organization trying to do as much good as possible. They want to help us spread awareness about science and ideas about how YOU can help humanity thrive.

Their values ​​align with ours in many key ways, so we will be working with them on more projects in the future. So help us spread the word and thanks for watching.