| | Thanks, Jim and Bill. Thanks, also, Jim for this: "I voted "much worse", since I'll be dead then, and that is a downgrade from my current status." There is a lot to that relative to other discussions here and I will remind you of your words later. But you are right. We cannot do much about this. It is only an open question for discussion. We never have enough responses to actually measure anything.
Myself, I expect it to be much better, but, really, just the same only moreso. I compared life in 1010 to today. Well, OK, life where? I mean in 1010, China was interesting, even if Europe was not. The Mayans were gone, the Aztecs not yet arrived. Well, there was Baghdad....
So, you look at that and look at today and then imagine tomorow.
I expect that humans will populate the solar system. What "human" means might not meet today's definitions. We speak of a successful person being "self-made" but that will take on even deeper meanings as people design bodily organs to do things we cannot imagine or cannot imagine doing with a bodily organ. (It would take a pressure cooker to make the acid in your stomach, except that your stomach does with no pressure and very little heat, mostly via enzymes.) Think of orbiting Callisto or Triton and ingesting debris like a whale sucking in krill for raw materials and processing them into things to trade with others.
I agree with Bill that Objectivism will have replaced religion about 900 years before 3010. But 900 years later, we will be arguing over new problems. (Philosophers may not be, though: consider the arguments here right out of the middle ages.) Politics as we know it will be dead. Imagine trying to explain our system to some knights and priests from Normandy -- You guys started this when you invaded England. But negotiating alliances person to person, cluster to cluster, that, will remain. Some things are eternal: Do you have a right to build a ring around the sun? A sphere? Can we get a consensus out to the Kuiper Belt and encapsulate the sun, say, out to Mars?
Meanwhile on Earth ... In a 1000 years... the continental shelves, the sea floors, the seas, the antarctic, under the antarctic... humans will be settled everywhere and will have made modifications to themselves to enable that.
Along the way ... Imagine that everyone can be internally connected at once, like being online but in your head. But you would want some way to block that out ... if it was legal -- and especially if it was not. When you do see that as a conflict? Within 100 years? Maybe. So, being off-planet might be the best chance to literally "know your own mind." Individualism will be stronger off planet than on because those distances limit the effectiveness of the speed of light. It's like 8 light hours across the orbit of Pluto. The thing is with electro magnetic radiation is that when you "see" it it has arrived. So, that can be interesting, like when we had to invent time zones for train travel. It was unexpected and hard to explain before the fact. I think that within the next generation Earth will have one time. China does already. The nation crosses five zones, but has one universal time. What the clock says when you get up is arbitrary, really. We will be on UTZ by 2050 if not sooner. In 1000 years, all clocks will be on the same standard system wide.
(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 7/31, 8:26am)
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