Your opinion: is the present, merely the future's primitive and barbaric past?

With consciousness and knowledge we are the most advanced species, but I believe our knowledge of things far surpasses our consciousness. As in, we've advanced ourselves amazingly in science, technology, arts, and so many other things yet compassion for others, communication with others, good intentions, helpfulness, we haven't advance ourselves far enough to ensure a nice outlook of the future. However, I'm very optimistic and supporting of people, I think that people are becoming better humans beings and that there is a huge possibility of a much, much better tomorrow. Everyone just needs to see a little more of the whole than just themselves. Although, there still is the possibility that people won't straighten themselves out in time and we'll one day destroy all that's beautiful in the world as we are in our hearts, I just prefer to see that better sides of things.

I am neither here nor there on the future of humanity. It has potential, but it may not live up to it. If humanity does live up to its potential, then the present certainly is the future's primitive and barbaric past. The way I see it though, we have to evolve as a species to the point where we are inherently moral and, perhaps by means of technology, without major flaw or disease.

I think the times we are living in now are somewhat special actually. Never before the 20th/21st Century could we communicate with people all over the world in an instant, but then again the advancements to come may make that look like nothing in comparison.

@ Jude: I think the question, "Is progress continuous and never ending, or unavoidably limited?" is a meaningless one because the end of progress is when perfection is achieved, and if it is achieved then it will never cease to be otherwise it will not be perfection.

All life as we know it is trial and error. It will constantly evolve in every dimension. Charles Darwin gave us a template that the survival of every species is determined by its genetics and environment. Even our technology has an evolution. As new improvements are developed so the old becomes redundant. This is apparent in medicine also. Thus the wealth of knowledge we have in this 21st century thus far, will also evolve through trial and error. Survival of the best and fittest will always survive its inferiors.

As a species, we are superior and although always under threat from backward thinking nations, the west if necessary will impose its forward thinking template of progress on those it can subordinate and recruit in the name of survival. Safety of the species being priority over everything else. Achievement will be by nuclear or persuasive diplomacy. Either way it will be achieved.

We have come a long way from the primeval soup and our planet earth being billions of years old has seen the demise of millions of primitive species.[visit the science and history museums in London to see some we know about].

Humans are slowly changing physically and psychologically. Life spans are being extended rapidly and so is the technology that seduces us to change. Thus forward we go, leaving behind the fossils of yesterday in everything that has become redundant.

Religions will become the legends of fairy tales, and like the cancers they are will evaporate as a meaningless entity unfit for modern thinking man. Our destiny depends on knowledge and challenge with all the tools we have created via technology and education. We are the masters and masons who will continue to shape the vision of our choosing.Try to imagine what our ancestors would think if they could see us today?

There is every reason to be optimistic of our evolution. We have already survived billions of years as a life form to become who we are today. We should rejoice and celebrate each day and remember that our personal extinction is forever. For in the grand big scheme of life we are truly no more important than an ant or one micro grain of sand in a desert.Once gone, we shall not be missed in future generations.So enjoy all that brings you comfort and whatever constitutes happiness for you now. Tomorrow will be to late!

Just look at your parents high school pictures and there will be no doubt. If religion does not succeed in setting us back again, then the future of Humanity is beyond our wildest scifi imagination. The great thing about life today is we are witnessing the ignorance of religion in its death throes.

It depends on one thing. Is progress continuous and never ending, or unavoidably limited? And even if it is limited, does that mean that civilization will plateau at some point or become destroyed?

Sorry I answered your question with more questions!

i try to be optimistic but then i think. we are cutting down trees, running out of room, population is increasing. i doubt that by the time our world is holding all that it can, we will be able to get to anohter planet....

i hope that our race survives, i hope that we achieve faster than light travel, meet aliens of another world and share information and knowledge but .......

There are only two possibilities on what can happen, the world will turn out better or it'll turn out worse, but whichever it will be, we just need to be ready.

I suspect that when you look at the last 12000 years or so of human history & prehistory that we can reasonably know about, there are some themes that carry forward.

The idea of the city and working in communities on the basis of agriculture is STILL the major way people live. Our cities are larger only because we can transport more goods into them more rapidly than previously.

In this way, I view the Kardashev scale on energy use as instructive but not necessarily "complete", in that we have an increasing mastery of our use of energy and also of the effectiveness of our utility of the things around us, based on the application of that energy.

That stems from our inventiveness and creativity which has been our constant inheritances, Robert Heinlein famously remarked that "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch", and to a large extent he is correct, but not completely.

Because we have acquired the accumulated knowledge of thousands of years of human advancement - each generation - gets an endowment - if not a free lunch - we get a substantially cheap deal, vs. the deep history of our species, before we learned to pass our knowledge onward.

In this way, a race like the Chimpanzee's is forever ... I'll call it "Heinlein's Trap", because they are a species - forever trapped at "page 1" of their cultural and civilization's ascent, because they do not have the ability to communicate in anything beyond the immediate sense and pass on accumulated knowledge to future generations.

So they perpetually live - as we did - 20,000 or so years ago - itinerant tribes of chimps with tribal culture and limited artifacts or knowledge beyond daily ingenuity of the smartest among them.

So while we are marginally more creative, and have language, technology and history as tools at our side, we are - a bit more social but beyond our communities and other "constructs" like nations or states, we are EVERY bit as short-sighted and indifferent to the well being of others.

So while our technology has allowed us to reach off-world, and the size of our tribe has increased and the amount of work we do has increased with our ability to use energy, we still carry some of the very same baggage forward.

We are - profoundly linked to our ancestors, our primate precursors and the forest / savanna we came from.

Many, particularly in the US, see the strain caused by hyper-individualism which has become so distorted that it has started to encumber the very capitalist system that it was born from. However, this does not mean we should reject capitalism and become socialists or try to abandon an economic system which brought us to the brink of space.

One thing that is profoundly masked by our current - ideological impediments - be they socialist, communist, capitalist or otherwise, is that we tend to fall into the same trap as Ayn Rand intellectually, thinking that the world's resources are infinite or inexhaustible or WORSE, that our cleverness will ever save us as it "always" has.

This is perhaps one of the worst biases we posess, because it is the bias of devaluing those times when civilizations DID fail. Sometimes, they fail for reasons of military conquest, where state A conquers state B. But that's actually not that common. Far MORE common is economic failure, due to "imperial" overstretch. That's what did in the Greeks, the Romans, and has caused a Chinese Dynasty or two to fall.

In the next 200 years, then we need to learn to manage ourselves MUCH better than we currently do, we need to learn - in a very profound way, how to balance our economic wellbeing against the real constraints imposed by nature.

Until - (or unless) we can successfully build significant off-world industrial capabilities - off-world manufacture of goods, energy production, food production etc.

We stand at the threshold as islanders having to manage our situation. Failure to do so could signal a major hardship if not the decline of our species.

Given enough time, there are technologies, such as nano-technology and artificial intelligence which is at least equal in intelligence to our own.

Both of these technologies are in their infancy, and in the future could utterly transform or destroy our civilization. I suspect they will be used - like any other tool, and will be used for both harm and for good.

So while I think machine or human designed organic intelligence is potentially the "last" invention we need to create - in a way, there is nothing to necessarily prevent a situation where we don't create a race similar to the Cylons from BSG or the machines from the movie "I Robot".

But even in the optimistic sense of things, presuming that machine intelligence and or nano-technology allows us to transcend the current limits of a scarcity based economics, we end up in the situation where We largely speaking will live in an ever expanding "shell" of our machines, exploring for us, surveying, colonizing and setting up habitats for us or whatever becomes of us.

In a way, I forsee a situation much like the one that we live in today.

Consider the ideal state of say 5000 years ago.

Some literate, city dwelling merchant or scholar of some ancient school may have had every bit as much insight philosophically to the universe that we do, but they lacked the ability to use energy or have machines to do work for us.

Perhaps a few inches taller & few IQ points higher as well, on account of diet. And perhaps a little less hairy based on sexual selection, but beyond that, I suspect that "WE" have actually changed very little in real terms.

Even today, we are inextricably linked to our machines, our cars, computers, and factories could not be discarded. Peak Oil, the most obvious of the previously mentioned resource constraints threatens to return us to a pre-industrial state, and not in a good way, but we certainly COULD choose to manage that and similar problems.

5000 years hence, we will likely be utterly dependent upon machines, as we live in off-world colonies or transit in machine controlled generational hive-ships, traveling as unwitting passengers/cargo in the darkness between star-systems, but still those same smart primates from old Earth - millennia ago.

After the next comet will be an interesting time to be....a cockroach.

How dare you call us humanity, to tarnish such dreams!!!!!!!!!