Mammals’ time on Earth is half over, scientists predict
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
But in the unlikely scenario that we have not, we probably can fix both tectonic plate movement and/or suns energy output with 250M years of technological progress.
Only way for that to happen would be interplanetary travel (particles and radiation in space affecting DNA for one, space colonies slowly changing over many generations to suit other planet's conditions more likely).
I think we do. IVF, cloning and more. People choose to live in safe or risky places. etc...
Women (on average) have preferences for taller guys (on average), where do you think the average height of people are headed? Artificial selection.
Most reproduction is monogamous in modern society. Artificial selection.
I don't mean to offend anyone with those examples by the way, apologies if I did. I also realize the irony that those examples might be opposing forces for the same phenotype I'm referencing.
If you subtract 300k from 10 million years, you still have about 10 million years left.
The point here is that we are notoriously bad at gauging how big numbers are. We are also bad at intuitively gauging how fast/slow evolution moves.
We are very much still evolving and adapting to our surroundings. It's just that the big changes only become visible way beyond the horizon of a future we are able to conceive.
Similarly, expect future generations to be full of people who just can't stand wearing a condom during sex.
What that means for the future of humanity, I don't know.
Here is one paper I found on correlates of reproductive success in the US, from 2005 though: https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/48563240/Sex_Status_an...
Of course we do. Why would we not? Evolution is just a fact of life. For it to stop happening, we’d need all humans to have strictly the same number of children who live long enough to have children themselves. As soon as you have something affecting fertility rates, you have selection pressure.
> particles and radiation in space affecting DNA for one
What makes you think this does not happen on Earth? Radiation is everywhere. So is chemistry: there are more ways to alter DNA. On top of that, DNA has intrinsic mechanisms for mutation, in the form of transcription errors. Mutations happen all the time.
That may have been their point.
Human language was invented ~100 KYA.
50 KYA we were painting pictures of mammoths on cave walls. Before that we were a population of ~200 for many tens of thousands of years in Africa.
Our earliest upright ancestors lived around 3 MYA. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_(Australopithecus)
65 MYA the dinosaurs dominated our world and our ancestors were small rodent like animals.
It’s very hard to imagine that anything we do will stop evolution for hundreds of millions of years in the future.
The most likely scenario for some time is at most a few thousand people that don't die a natural death, that can afford to edit DNA, and perhaps even transfer their mind into a tin can ... along side some greater than a few billion others who continue to practice natural selection.
How that works out in the long term will be .. interesting *.
* for some value of 'interesting'
So essentially that would mess with the timescales. But you'd still have evolution somehow. Perhaps even fashion in what's considered desired physical format. Everybody bio/tech enhanced cyborg one year, everybody flying around as a drone the next year.
Heck, it would be nice to terraform Mars before then.
Using the technological advancements of the past 100 years as an indicator, we will have terraformed Mars long before then.
Any proposition on how “fixing” sun energy output will gratify my intellectual curiosity.
Yes it sounds crazy but think 250 million years down the line
Or we will alter the Earth's orbit so that less of the energy reaches us.
But as far as I know building a Dyson sphere would also require a quantity of material resources that we don’t have on earth. Some options to get those:
A. energy to mass, but we don’t know if that’s even theoretically achievable. Also it probably would require a Dyson sphere itself to have enough energy.
B. convert other abundant elements (O, Si, Fe…) into required elements using known atomic reactions. But harvesting that much elements from earth could transform it in a state that does not worth the pain to try “saving” it.
I mean, if in 250 million years we haven’t become multi-planetary, sure. We landed on the moon for the first time just 54 years ago. NASA is planning to send people back in 2 years. If in 3023 we aren’t colonizing Mars or something similar, I think something horribly wrong happened. On a much shorter timescale than 250 million years.
I think that's optimistic. Who know what could happen in that time. Many many doomsday scenarios come to mind, all of which I personally feel are more likely than us surviving that long.
Climate crisis + global warming being the most realistic, given we don't fix our shit or find a way around it (underground?). Massive collisions from objects in space, solar flares, nuclear winter, Christian rapture + doomsday?.
Maybe not that last one.
We start leaving the human bodies we evolved with behind and become beings of pure intelligence.
Or the greater intelligence decides it doesn't need us and goes off on its own adventure.
My money is on Fungi. In about 1 mln years intelligent Fungi will be roaming the earth, building large fungi language models and pondering the meaning of it all.
we see a lot of examples of this phenomenon in current society
I mean you can have fun in your free time predicting the end of mammals' life. But what's the point of writing a publication about this? At best, this is going to be completely useless. At worst it's going to be read as: "mammals will go extinct anyways in 250M years, what's the point in reducing carbon footprint now?" Or worse: "look at the crap the government is funding, we should end government funding for scientists".
Plus it's a complete disservice to the word "expert". These guys are true experts in their field and they know a lot of stuff that other people dont, but predictions like this are so random, it's almost certain that these guys are quite wrong. This gives ammunitions to the anti vax and flat earthers saying "experts" don't know shit anyways.
Sorry for the bad feelings, but that kind of research really annoys me. I only see negative outcomes from this kind of studies.
- some people are interested in different things than you are;
- you only need so much time to write such an article, it’s not like someone set millions of dollars on fire;
- this is fundamentally just extrapolation of the movement of tectonic plates, which is a perfectly legitimate question to ask.
- things that are considered futile now might not be in the future, and we have no way of knowing that right now.
In the end, complaining about what gets published in the literature is about as productive as complaining about what ends up on HN’s front page: things are here because someone wrote it and others found it interesting.
As a side note, I’ve noticed that comments like this, which have basically nothing to do with the parent and are instead just functioning as weird hobby horse put downs, are becoming more and more common. Very strange phenomenon.
Right. The sentence about the front page is just a comparison, because the complaints are similar. Sorry if it was not clear.
There are 4 points just above at least partly addressing your misapplication of science point.
That far in the future, it doesn't really matter because there's little to be done about it except evolve or be somewhere else.
To combine a few other comments: in 250m years, we are unrecognizable by today's humans, and easily have the technologies to inhabit other planets. That's assuming we haven't already destroyed ourselves many times over by them.