There are three primary highways our future can take and an infinite number of detours possible along each path. The greatest number of these possibilities are just a repetition of our past, with enumerable rises and falls along the way (the higher the rise the harder the fall), spanning into the distant future. In this grouping of possibilities the present level of our civilization would be nothing more than a blip in history, receding in importance with the passage of time, probably acquiring the status of legend and myth, as did the Roman Empire throughout the subsequent dark ages.
Then there is the much smaller set of possibilities in which homo sapiens become extinct. As much as this scenario is predicted and discussed among doomsdayers, the fact is we are a hard lot to kill. All it takes is a small pool of humans to survive and repopulate the gene pool. It is probable that in past ice ages our numbers dwindled dangerously low at times, but each time the ice receded and the archaeological evidence becomes rich with human expansion and development. It is important to emphasize, however, that when greater and greater lengths of time are considered, this remote possibility increases, until it reaches a point in the distant future when it becomes an absolute certainty. The only way to escape the certainty of our racial mortality is to move into the third highway of possible futures, transcendence.
Transcendence is a low-probability set of scenarios in which we acquire a form of civilization which can outlive our planet and any set of catastrophes which would eventually destroy us. This highly desirable future can take many forms, but all have several characteristics in common. All must be highly stable, but cannot be static or without ability to adapt and evolve. All must eventually take us away from a solar system which has a long but finite future. And any possible future in this category must allow us to develope a much higher state of mind and intelligence.
Following is an outline of all the possible futures I can envision and a few of their subsets.
Highway 1: Extinction (Highly unlikely, but becoming more probable over great lengths of time unless we find our way to Highway 3).
A. Extinction by Natural Event
(1) Climate Change Has to be catastrophically extreme to achieve total extinction.
(2) Impact by asteroid or comet
(3) Change in Solar Output, resulting in an uninhabitable Earth.
(4) Disease or Catastrophic Pandemic
B. Extinction Through Man-Made Event
(1) Human-Induced Climate Change Once again this would have to be extreme.
(2) Nuclear Holocaust
(3) Man-Made Illness
(4) Unforeseeable Catastrophic technology
Highway 2: Status Quo (This will inevitably deadend at Highway 1 given enough time, unless
a path to Highway 3 is found).
A. Repetitious Rises and Falls
B. Stable civilization held together by some unforeseen social science or social philosophy,
but falling short of the third highway.
Highway 3: Transcendence (Highly desirable)
A. Interstellar Travel, maintaining our present physical form or biologically similar.
B. Transfer of ourselves to an artificial form, capable of surviving independent of our planet and sun.
C. Evolution, either natural or artificial, into a higher biological form able to devise new
and unforeseeable methods of survival.
Possibility 1 , Extinction by Natural Event. As I stated before, the possibility of extinction is extremely remote in the short term but dead certain in the long term without Transcendence. Of the two methods of extinction- man-made or natural- a natural event is much more likely to be the causative event. Excepting the biological or disease possibility, the amount of energy release required to wipe out 100% of the population is so enormous that until recently the human race could not have come close to matching it. Climate change by the natural cycles that shape our planet have long been thought to occur over long periods of time. Scientists are just now beginning to speculate that abrupt climate change, on an order that can reshape the world and in the span of fifty or a hundred years, is the norm and not the exception. To this author, this makes sense. I tend to side with the theories that massive climate change occurs when critical factors, such as ocean temperature and CO2 levels reach a certain point. I believe that when levels are reached in certain critical systems, chaotic effects rapidly escalate until a new equilibrium is reached: new average temperatures, new average rainfall, and different weather patterns. Is this enough to cause an extinction event? The fact is, many climate shifts have occurred since anatomically modern humans came into existence some 200,000 years ago. Enough survived to continue an adequate gene pool, and any shift we experience in the short-term we would likely survive again. Catastrophic climate changes, such as the one which is supposed to have occurred some 250 million years ago (it made the dinosaur event look like a picnic) are much rarer and their occurrence much more mysterious. It is much more likely that in the short-term (10,000 years or so) we would see our descendants reduced to the hunter-gatherer clans of 15,000 years ago than not see them at all due to climate change.
Mass extinctions by impact from asteroid or comet are exceedingly rare, and have probably occurred only a few times in the past 500 million years or so. Depending on the extraterrestrial body's density and content, it would require an object some ten miles in diameter to achieve this level of destructive force. Once again, however, we are talking averages and probabilities, and given a span of time long enough this will almost certainly occur again.
As for a change in solar output large enough to make the planet uninhabitable current astrophysical models hold that this will not occur for between 1.1 billion and 3.5 billion years as its energy output slowly increases through natural stellar evolution. That is more than enough time either to achieve transcendence or die from some other means.
Large pandemics can cause huge misery, create enormous social upheaval, and bring down civilizations, but natural diseases are not known to cause extinction in higher mammals. This is a very improbable scenario, long or short-term.
Which brings us to man-made extinction events. This can be summed up nicely by stating that any such event would most probably bring society down to small enough numbers in isolated pockets that any such destructive event would rapidly lose potency to finish the job. This is not to say this could not occur but it is not a likely scenario.
In summary, an event catastrophic enough to bring our species to extinction is VERY unlikely in the short-term. The probability would remain high that pockets large enough to maintain the gene pool would survive most events. However, in the long-term the possibility becomes an absolute certainty that something, probably some large-scale natural extinction event, will end our occupancy of this planet. By then we will probably have evolved to one degree or another, we can only hope that we have found a road to the third highway mentioned here.
Possibility 2, Status Quo.
This is statistically the most probable path our future will take for the foreseeable future. Looked at in a historical light, it is highly unlikely that our present level of civilization will continue beyond a few hundred years or so. History is rich with examples of rises and collapses. The pattern has always been in our ten thousand years or so of recorded history that it is inherent in our present nature that the societies we build are unstable in the long-term. The good news is that when a people or nation eventually do rebuild a new civilization they build upon the knowledge and experience gleaned from a previous one. "From the ashes rose...". Our present status as the greatest civilization ever built in our geologically short history is already showing signs of the same instabilities and cracks which began to show in another of history's greatest societies, the Roman Empire. To the people of the time, it must have seemed an indestructible part of the world they lived in. However, within a two century span of time, the Romans pulled back from every part of the world they occupied and in the struggle to find equilibrium within their own borders, slowly lost every manifestation of the great nation they had been. What followed were the centuries of barbarity, feudal kingdoms, and intellectual morass known as the dark ages. This period of history was earmarked by the Crusades, the Black Death, and an overall population decline from the richer period preceding it.
There are two possible branches in the Status Quo scenario. One is a continuum of the repetitious cycles which have dominated the human race for thousands of years. A global, or near global, civilization followed by collapse as its flaws encompass and devour it. Then centuries of a drastically reduced population fully occupied by day to day subsistence. Some centuries later another light of civilization, repeating the cycle again and again down the ages until chance or nature brings us to extinction- ten thousand years from now or 100,000 years from now.
The other branch is a stable civilization held together by a philosophy or religion. This can be envisioned by remembering the great eastern societies of ancient China and Japan. The disciplined philosophies they lived by brought a great deal of stability to those societies and enabled them to survive virtually unchanged for thousands of years. Even so, this is a stagnant state of existence, and in the end leads nowhere.
Possibility 3, Transcendence
This one is left entirely to our imagination.
Science fiction is the richest source of ideas on where our road may possibly lead. The only limitation on our future, aside from our destructive tendencies, is the intelligence required to get there.
In the end, unbridled Mind and intellect are the only things that will let us bypass the eventual fate of every species ever to exist on this planet. Natural evolution has brought us to a point in time where we are almost capable of dramatically altering our own future and world for the better. It seems that just enough flaws and short-comings have been left with us to always fall short of our loftiest goals. At this point we can no longer be dependent on nature to guide us the rest of the way to the finish line. We will have to take control of our own destiny now, with whatever that entails. The technologies we have created can both destroy us and lift us higher than we could dream. It is up to us to determine which it will be, and we will live or die by the results of our decisions.
Or we will continue indefinitely into the future, repeating the same mistakes and rebuilding what we eventually always destroy, until the next asteroid or catastrophic climate change ends the existence of the only self-aware species in the solar system's five billion year history.
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