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Progress is already winding down. Deisel engines, airplanes, splitting the atom, computing, antibiotics...all huge but not recent developments. With the exception of the internet, what have we done recently? Maybe human genome project? Renewable energy? Practical neural networks?

Now, we've spent the last few decades refining these ideas, but we're hitting some peaks. How much more efficient can we make an engine? Can we really get off fossil fuels when they're used for everything ranging from fuels to plastics to fertilizers. We've been working on solving cancer for decades and haven't made much progress. We're still nowhere near widespread nuclear fusion and have abandoned nuclear technologies almost altogether outside of the US Navy. Computing is all about shrinking things, but we're starting to hit walls and practical quantum computing still appears to be a distant dream. AI is still nothing like we'd hoped it would be. We're no closer to understanding the brain in a way that would lead to an AGI. More physics research occurs in a matter of months than a decade at the turn of the century. Have we reconciled relativity and quantum mechanics yet? Are we any closer to GUT? I suppose there have been some advanced in our understanding of the universe due to the new instruments we've put into orbit. Nanotechnology is still essentially science fiction outside of some nanotube devices.

> genome project? Renewable energy? Practical neural networks?

Isn't that enough? (And you left out quantum computing. Smart phones. GPS. Composite materials. Autonomous vehicles. I could go on.)

Not to mention a whole new JavaScript framework every other week.

Laughed out loud at this. Nailed it.

Humans: A short lived species that produced some interesting grammars.

Yes the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we figured out how to center HTML elements both horizontally AND vertically!

Indeed. Half the things on this list happened after 2010.

https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2016/04/12/the-singula...

I wrote it in 2016. I should make a new list.

I did not leave out quantum computing which is nowhere near practical right now and maybe never will be.

GPS is a good technology. Autonomous vehicles work fine for the 90% use case, but will likely never reach that last 10%.

Quantum computers and autonomous vehicles are more promise than fact, otherwise you might want to throw fusion energy in there as well.

> The year 300,000 will look similar to year 301,000 - despite being separated by a millennium - this is unthinkable at this point in time.

The Fermi Paradox is rooted in the idea that if alien intelligences were doing things that we could recognize, we should have seen them by now.

Perhaps they do exist, but have progressed so deeply into the unthinkable that we can't even.

Perhaps we will as well.

You may have seen this resolution to the Fermi Paradox, but if not I thought I'd post it: https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404

"The Fermi paradox is the conflict between an expectation of a high {\em ex ante} probability of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe and the apparently lifeless universe we in fact observe. The expectation that the universe should be teeming with intelligent life is linked to models like the Drake equation, which suggest that even if the probability of intelligent life developing at a given site is small, the sheer multitude of possible sites should nonetheless yield a large number of potentially observable civilizations. We show that this conflict arises from the use of Drake-like equations, which implicitly assume certainty regarding highly uncertain parameters. We examine these parameters, incorporating models of chemical and genetic transitions on paths to the origin of life, and show that extant scientific knowledge corresponds to uncertainties that span multiple orders of magnitude. This makes a stark difference. When the model is recast to represent realistic distributions of uncertainty, we find a substantial {\em ex ante} probability of there being no other intelligent life in our observable universe, and thus that there should be little surprise when we fail to detect any signs of it. This result dissolves the Fermi paradox, and in doing so removes any need to invoke speculative mechanisms by which civilizations would inevitably fail to have observable effects upon the universe."

Another explanation for the Fermi paradox I had heard, which certainly is less rigorous than the linked article but easier to understand is:

The root of the paradox is that with so many planets in the universe (in the order of 10^24), there must be more life in the universe. But even with this unbelievably large number of potential planets, if creation of intelligent life on a planet requires only 24 independent parameters to be favourable, and each of them are favourable with a probability of 10%, then we should expect intelligent life in just one planet: ours.

There is a slim chance that we are the first ones with sentience ever. That would totally explain Fermi paradox.

Why not? We are definitely the first on this planet, and we don't try to dispute this fact using probability measurements.

The planet has an observable fossil record, whereas extra-solar heavenly bodies are still largely inscrutable.

Of course. But if we didn't have this evidence, the logic of the Fermi paradox would lead to conclusions that we just can't be the first ones because the probability for it is so impossibly low.

Low probability compared to what though? This makes less sense to me on closer inspection. I agree that there may be some meaningful observation in there, but it's hard to even figure out what the paradox or observation is.

An individual (or hive mind, whatever) living in the year 300,000 AD may very much dispute the claim that progress has stagnated. It's entirely possible that civilization has continued an exponential expansion (within limits) from now until then. As such, history is one continued exponential.

Provided that this civilization still is not bumping against the thermodynamic computational limits of space by several orders of magnitude, then the Fermi paradox is still a paradox.

That's how an exponential works, every point sees itself as a privileged point, right before it increases massively.

Right, on one hand I feel blessed to be alive, as with all of you, in what is certainly the most important time in human history. Beside the effects of every technological advancement which currently exists at a transitional period, the greatest moment of birth and rebirth in history could be upon us, thanks to the Holocene extinction event we have triggered. Whether or not we capitalize upon our special place in history remains to be seen.

But I also know I'm missing out on the true space-faring age, the Humanitarian Revolution, the Quantum Age where we begin to fully exploit the laws of QM, the Last World War, extra-solar colonization, etc.

Eventually, if we don't kill or exhaust ourselves with impatience, technology will be solved with respect to providing enough energy and resources for every conceivable human. Then, the real challenge begins. Providing for a population beyond its basic needs becomes an entirely political affair. We may be arrested on the lower levels of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs for quite some time.

Will humanity observe a similar exponential advancement in humanitarianism as it has with technology? How important is humanitarianism to Fermi's Paradox and the Drake Equation?

Enough energy for every human individual is already a solved problem, although not necessarily sustainably. It's not even economically prohibitive to switch to sustainable options, there's just insufficient incentives at this time. The great travesty is that, when incentives are put in place, the Holocene damage will be difficult to stop and impossible to reverse.

Our own survival chances seem to be a fraction not close to unity, but not close to 0 either. Give it 75% to be optimistic. After that, robotic seed space ships could be a buffer to protect from subsequent cataclysms. That does nothing to answer the questions of Fermi's paradox, unless you low-ball to 1.0e-6% chance of survival. Doomsayers guessing such a number are not generally taken seriously.

Looking elsewhere, we have almost unlimited wiggle room in the chance of photosynthesis evolving. Traits that evolved multiple times in Earth's history are inadmissible to this discussion, but several critical traits evolved only once. Fertile but desolate planets are, based on current science, probably abundant. As a typical reasonable human, this is a perfectly sufficient speculative answer.

As I understand your remarks, you basically believe what Fukuyama stated in The End of History and the Last Man. This has largely been proved to be wrong on many counts and even Fukuyama himself disavowed many of his earlier ideas.

Humanity is currently facing, and is going to face in the near future, multiple very hard challenges, which are unlikely to be solved purely by technology, the most serious of which is the changing climate.

The more likely future, in my opinion, looks like a regress to an earlier state of "progress" with long-term fluctuations as the changes manifest themselves with various degrees of severity.

> We live in the most interesting 200 year period of Earth so far in its 4.5B year history.

People have been saying this for centuries now. And they will probably continue to do so in the future. Our rate of progress looks so high because we are living in it. Cut to another two hundred years and 2000 will look just like 1800.

For the last few centuries maybe. Your underestimating how utterly anomalous has been the last about 200 years. There's a clear contrast between that and all prior 200 year periods. The idea of progress is relatively recent, 2 thousands years ago it basically didn't exist (from the book Sapiens).

From where I am standing, 1800 doesn't look anything like 1600.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/22/1960-the-year-the-sing...

This is the optimistic scenario!

There's no shortage of reasons why there might not be humans at all in 300,000 AD.

Progress matters, but not as much as one would think. On the grand scheme of things, it's grossly overrated. When a human is brought to this world, everything is new to him or her, whether it's seeing a bird in the sky, meeting people, creating a family, growing crops or reading a story to a child. There is no reason to believe that in a lifetime a person would be able to enjoy all of the ever growing number of things that are available to experience in any meaningful way.

The length of a lifetime itself is subject to progress, and with hope it'll eventually grow longer. And arguably, it's only due to progress that we now have more things to experience than we have time for; it wasn't true for vast majority of human history.

For a more detailed description of the future, see Stapledon's Last and First Men.

> we'll gradually enter an equilibrium in which things won't change much

Why?

> The year 300,000 will look similar to year 301,000

Why?

> You can't keep inventing novel technology and art at current pace for a million years.

Will we run out of technologies to discover and art to create? Why? When?

We live in the most interesting 200 year period of Earth so far in its 4.5B year history

Even granting you the anthropocentric premise, the idea that the last 200 years are more interesting than any other similar period is not at all obvious.

The progress in the last 200 years is completely incomparable with anything prior to that. Per the book Sapiens, the idea of progress is relatively new, people used to believe that things would stay the same or decline.

The progress in the last 200 years is completely incomparable with anything prior to that.

Again, rather an unobvious claim. A greater leap than the Industrial Revolution, the Renaissance, the budding of Western Civilisation with the Greeks?

Perhaps it is, but unless you have a link to proof of this, it's best not to speak in such dogmatic terms, and accept that this is just a view you hold.

Human history will probably look like a sudden, massive, and apparently-inexplicable upward spike in global atmospheric CO2 content accompanied by mass extinction.

> After that, we'll gradually enter an equilibrium in which things won't change much (or a period in which history will just repeat with minor variations).

Not necessarily: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

Not even GAI can beat known physics unless new physics come into play.

I do not see how physics prevents huge changes in our technology. We cannot say we know almost everything about nature at all.

Examples: room temperature superconductivity, efficient solar cells, quantum computer and much more.

>You can't keep inventing novel technology and art at current pace for a million years.

Or can you?

Even the sigmoid is a somewhat optimistic picture. Another possibility is a bell curve, where due to resource depletion we eventually end up back near where we started. It's interesting to imagine how over time the scientific knowledge we've obtained with our particle accelerators and space telescopes and electron microscopes would decay in the absence of high technology. If it has been 800 years since anyone has directly observed a Higgs particle or a molecule of DNA, what reason would there be to remember accurately what it was, or even to remember it at all? People of the future might end up thinking that the Higgs was a deity worshipped by us people of the past, given all of our references to the "God particle".

You assume we will lose all record of our discoveries so far, which has some precedence with Roman sewage treatment being forgotten, but we are much better at keeping records and we have too many artefacts from this period that will naturally prompt curiosity to future generations.

Even if some unforseen solar event disables our electronics for a millennia, and we devolve into infighting, the winners will still be those with the technological superiority, mechanically gas-powered or otherwise.

The only threat I can envision is a wild asteroid, but then it's game over for all of us.

Not being facetious, but how do you define progress?

I mostly mean technological progress, I don't have a precise definition.

"You can't invent", AI might.

I don’t know what about “200 year period” is particularly exciting. For us humans, maybe... but the 4.5 billion year time-span suggests you’re taking a wider view. From the planet’s point of view there’s just a mass extinction going on whilst the anthropogenic climate change gets into full swing. It’s neither exciting nor unprecedented.