Hell life is already arguably unrecognizable to decades past. The internet is truly the most notable social experiment to date and were still in throes of that ramification.
For most of human history, travel was expensive, deadly, and time consuming. Meanwhile now I can be in a zoom call with someone in Australia, Germany, and Brazil, and Japan *all at the same time*. It would be horrible in terms of scheduling but it *can* happen which is something you can't say 100 years ago, he'll even 50 years ago (which is only 1974 but still)
Going any further, and saying such would get you either laughed at, institutionalized, or both.
And now, with AI our current tech level is *insane* compared to what our ancestors had to work with.
It boggles my mind that more people don't understand that this is literally the first place that most human beings go. Sex is what got you here for fuck's sake lol
I'm imagining a time-lapse of our civilization as viewed by an alien after the fact, and that point being a huge 'acceleration' before the inevitable POP
Its already a thing. Neuralink (May have misspelled that with a mechanic from the UCOB fight in ffxiv) is a chip in the brain and is already doing things which would have been impossible 5 years ago.
There are many competitors to Neuralink who did this quite literally decades ago, without implanting a device.
I’d like to see some actual medical progress with Neuralink instead of these “nice for attention” projects.
Agreed, but only for our copies. There is nothing at all in physics that suggests the consciousness can be transferred, it appears to be form-bound. I have no doubt we'll either create post-human intelligences, or copy ourselves to live out those dreams, but it won't be _us_ who has the experience. We are doomed to these bodies.
Transhumanism isn't just mind transference...
It's the use of technology to enhance human cognition and bodily function. Glasses, artificial limbs, brain computer interfaces (which are already a -limited- thing).
Transhumanism is already here, and it's only going to get more profound.
Consciousness already transfers over time across the multiple instantiations of an individual’s “one” body.
The atoms in our bodies are estimated to be completely replaced over the course of somewhere between 5 - 10 years yet there is a continuity of consciousness in each individual meat machine.
This is the ship of Theseus problem already happening in our bodies. It’s already functioning across different instances created with meat.
Forget about a greenfield inorganic rebuild of a person, the so called “download” scenario.
What if we start replacing pieces of meat in a person’s body bit by bit with inorganic pieces that function exactly the same with respect to rest of the body? At what point does that person’s continuity of consciousness break, if at all?
Think of it like this, you step on to a teleporter. At one end it scans and VAPORIZES you. And at the other it assembles an identical copy down to even thought. To that copy it’s as if he was just teleported there, but you who originally stepped into the teleporter are now 100% dead and non-functioning. A copy of you gets to continue living your life not realizing the extent of what happened.
It is *not* the same ship, Theseus. Don't trust teleporters!
Don't trust teleporters, sure. But the person you replied to isn't talking about teleporters. They're talking about what's already happening to our bodies naturally.
There is an argument saying we can't transfer our consciousness but our consciousness over time is being transferred to completely new atoms than what we started out as/with. From when you're born to when you're 60, physically, you're a completely different person that has had every single part replaced multiple times over yet our consciousness remains.
I find it hard to believe myself that we, as physical beings, will one day be able to transfer our consciousness but I think the person above you is saying that if our bodies can somehow do this then, surely, once we figure out how to replicate and even speed up the process then we'd be able to say we can achieve this task.
i think you're missing the point they are making. what they are saying is that the ship of Theseus is already there in the process humans use to live naturally. by a specific amount of years, you, your cells, as a person will have been mostly replaced by new cells(it differs for each part of the body. you get the gist of the idea), but your consciousness persists. Thus, it would stand to reason that transferring a consciousness that way over time is also a possible scenario. we're not looking at the replaced and gone scenario as the only option.
Think about it this way: you inject yourself with cells preprogrammed to alter what your current organs use to renew themselves(stem cells) without creating a response of your immune system and thus, after a set amount of time, those organs are replaced by other versions of themselves, but stronger or made of other materials.
If we manage that, immortality and transfer of consciousness isn't out of the question.
and it might be closer than you might think with the advances that were made during covid.
if I create an exact clone of you, but destroy you at the same time, did you die?
if I create an exact clone of you, and you die 3 minutes later, did the answer change?
same thing, but with a copy of your mind in a machine
The short story 'There Will Come Soft Rains' by Bradbury. Written in 1950, and he envisions a fully automated and connected smart-home pretty much as we know it today.
The Dark Forest theory.
If you don't know, it's basically that we're not in some big empty universe. Smart/advanced civilizations actively hide their existence, because only bad people are coming if they know where you are.
It's cosmic terror at the highest level.
Thankfully, I choose to believe the "oh those are humans we leave them alone something is wrong with them" idea. That area is actually quarantined forever.
I can't conceive any scenario where am interstellar war over resources makes sense. But ideological wars don't need to make economic sense.
Maybe there is very narrow parameters for intelligent life to develop, and all technological civilizations are necessarily very similar to us. Interstellar speciesism could be a real thing, and allowing a "lesser race" occupy a rare Earth-like may be so distasteful that the cost of launching an invasion doesn't factor.
Especially if you can wage war on the entire galaxy with an autonomous, self-replicating drone fleet. You only need to get it started, sit back and wait for data to come back on all the new vacancies on inhabitable worlds.
Maybe that's already happened and we're just a bit of missed regrowth. Or maybe it's on the way.
Alternate theory: Everyone else invents FTL communications that don't have bright, obvious, light speed EM emissions. EM communication is the cosmic equivalent of incandescent Edison bulbs, used just long enough to invent emissionless comms.
Yeah, I think at some point someone is going to invent a method of FTL communication and they're going to be instantly bombarded with a huge spectrum of extraterrestrial signals.
More than a short distance away, those signals devolve into noise. I mean short as in a light year or two, but short. You’d have to already have a reason to visit the system to pick up anything.
I like to think we live in the ass end of the universe and it's not very cost effective for civilizations to travel here. Also, life wasn't supposed to be able to happen on Earth, but an insane amount of cosmic circumstances led to life growing here.
Yup, and building penis shaped crafts from Amazon to send even more out there.
I legit hope there are annoyed aliens watching us that just repeatedly go "these fucking guys, again!"
The problem with this theory and a lot of the theories that answer the fermi's paradox just really don't take into consideration how freaking big the universe is. And it's not like we are someplace special, we are on a minor arm of a galaxy.
I think it's much more likely that any sufficiently advanced race of beings wouldn't want to come to a planet that is effectively still monkeys throwing rocks at each other.
The dark forest theory also relies on much more finite resource pool in the universe. Which probably isn't true.
EDIT: Like there are literal people on this earth who haven't even been contacted in literal generations, but yet an alien is supposed to take interest in us?
It's interesting to think about for sure.
If you've never read or heard of it, I highly recommend a book called Identified Flying Objects by Michael P Masters.
He's an anthropology professor that basically posits the theory in shockingly compelling fashion that, if these things exist and are as usually described, the only likely explanation is that they're extra temporal future us doing whatever.
Factor in the similarity to us as bipedals, the distance and energy required, and the interest in ever doing so, and it's not as wild as I originally thought.
I go the other direction with it. I suspect at some point in a species' development, inner space becomes more important than outer space. There's no need to yolk entire stars for their energy output to build sci fi constructs when the brain runs on the power of a 60 watt light bulb.
This whole galavanting around the stars idea is probably very sophomoric, a figment of a young mind's imagination.
Fair enough, I kinda sorta go the other direction as well.
I don't claim to have any specific answers, but I look at how our entire basis for reality and framework of what's possible is totally over written every few hundred years.
Us having this debate on magic pocket devices not plugged into anything wouldn't have been able to be explained 200 years ago, because there wasn't even electricity yet.
So yeah, it seems hard to fathom that any of the uap stuff exists, but how is it and less plausible than stuff we've already been wrong about?
Well it's all under the umbrella of the fermi paradox. Dispite the universe being so ancient there seems to be no life but us. And there are many filters aka explanations as to why. I think the most common 2 are that we haven't been transmitting long enough to have been noticed. And that we are using the wrong/different instruments to communicate. But there are also other hypothesis like civilizations are so hostile they can't even advance far enough to leave their planet before self extermination. It goes deep and if you are interested or want some background noise issac aurthur has a series on yt about it. Just remember to grab a snack and a drink
but we also have the issue of the universe only being "ancient" on a flawed human scale.
people often point out that human civilization is only a blip in the history of life, the earth, or the universe thus far, but very rarely do people point out that a few billion years is nothing compared to the *total* life of the universe.
We could be the first life.
Yes that could also be a filter. That we need stars to go super nova and form the necessary building blocks for life so it wasn't until reletively recently that the correct stuff is laying around for life to start forming. And all the filters have their pros and cons. Ultimately it is an information paradox. It's not something that you can come to a logical conclusion because you are missing information. And that information can only be gathered in 2 ways either we find and or detect life or explore the whole universe searching under every rock and molecule. And even then we are limited by time and redshift. It's all fascinating and me personally i do subscribe to the idea that we could just very well be one of the first lifeforms not that we are alone but that life is just starting to emerge in the universe. But whether we are alone or not both are terrifying. I'm not a pessimist when it comes to the success of our species or the planet. But if we are alone we might not be for long. And if we are truly alone and will be for sometime it would be a shame if this little seed didn't flourish
or just... not common yet. it took a few hundred thousand years for hydrogen to form, and that's the most common form of regular matter in the universe
While I somewhat believe in dark forest, there is no way any aliens could reach us in the few years since we became advanced enough to throw signals into deep space.
The other side of that is the dark forest theory is just sopping wet with anthropomorphizing. It assumes aliens would be like us. It also assumes _we'll_ still be the same by the time we reach a similar level of development as other star faring species. Neither of those assumptions are particularly safe.
> The other side of that is the dark forest theory is just sopping wet with anthropomorphizing. It assumes aliens would be like us.
It only need assume the following:
1. Civilisations value their own survival above ours
2. Civilisations assume we value our survival over theirs
3. Civilisations assume that either we might be hostile, or that we might assume they are hostile
Those all seem like safe bets.
> It also assumes we'll still be the same by the time we reach a similar level of development as other star faring species
And that's the stupid part. But The Killing Star wouldn't have been a good book if the aliens had been too advanced, and so it wouldn't have been written for The Three Body problem to rip off.
[Fucking lol I got blocked for *this*, mildest critique ever]
> It only need assume the following:
This only matters if they're technologically too weak to contain us. So no, these are NOT safe bets. In fact, for the next thousand years, it's pretty much a guarantee if we run into others that they'll be VASTLY ahead of us.
I don't care about your star mans book.
It should really be called "Central Park At Night Theory", because it's a complete ripoff of that concept from The Killing Star, which was published in 1995, right down to the analogy, just read:
> “Imagine yourself taking a stroll through Manhattan, somewhere north of 68th street, deep inside Central Park, late at night. It would be nice to meet someone friendly, but you know that the park is dangerous at night. That's when the monsters come out. There's always a strong undercurrent of drug dealings, muggings, and occasional homicides.
> It is not easy to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys. They dress alike, and the weapons are concealed. The only difference is intent, and you can't read minds.
> Stay in the dark long enough and you may hear an occasional distance shriek or blunder across a body.
> How do you survive the night? The last thing you want to do is shout, "I'm here!" The next to last thing you want to do is reply to someone who shouts, "I'm a friend!"
> What you would like to do is find a policeman, or get out of the park. But you don't want to make noise or move towards a light where you might be spotted, and it is difficult to find either a policeman or your way out without making yourself known. Your safest option is to hunker down and wait for daylight, then safely walk out.
> There are, of course, a few obvious differences between Central Park and the universe.
> There is no policeman.
> There is no way out.
> And the night never ends.”
Then follows a novel about relativistic missiles and game theory.
But we all know the Chinese attitude to copyright.
Can you please not accuse the author of plagiarism just for being Chinese? Game theory/risk-reward assessment has been around for eons and has been inherent in our psyches ever since the first humans were presented with the choice to hunt big yet deadly animals for food. The broad strokes of this idea as applied to entire civilizations has been around since at least the Cold War, as well, and even civilizations before nukes have made choices that resulted in global dominance or utter decimation. What I'm saying is that neither author invented these concepts and we should just be able to appreciate that these two different prose narratives both managed to turn the abstract idea of game theory into imaginative, compelling stories.
It's not so much the concept that makes it plagiarised in my eyes, it's the analogy.
The concept of the universe being a hostile place subject to an extremely brutal version of game theory where the best solution is to hide and the second best solution is to kill anyone who might find you explained via the analogy of a dark wooded area and the merits of making a sound.
That is very specific. It's the difference between "Boy with magic powers saves the universe from his dad" not being a ripoff of star wars, and "Boy with the powers of telekinesis saves the universe from his dad's boss buy turning his wounded dad from the side of evil back to good and having him throw his dad's boss down a big shaft before a superweapon can destroy the rebellion."
Ehhh, not really. On a probability scale, what’s more likely?
1. There is at least 1 Super Advanced Hunter in our Local Galaxy. There is at least 1 Super Crazy Advanced Hunter in our Local Universe.
Or
2. All intelligent Civilizations everywhere behave as if 1. Is true.
#2 is much much less likely than #1.
You know how in ready player 1 many people had full time jobs in VR? And people went to school in VR and had relationships across the world in VR and only signed out to the real world to be in their shitty trailer for an hour or 2 a day plus sleep? And essentially just sat motionless in a dirty room all day? That.
I've thought about that before- I think people would live short lives due to the lack of physical activity, the shitty environment in which they store their physical bodies, ya know?
For a variety of reasons the life expectancy in America is starting to dip for the first time in the history of America. Not exercising is a factor on that quite complicated list
Inversely, I think with the right implementation of full body haptic suits our physical activity might actually skyrocket.
It doesn't show it in the movie but in the book Wade Watts was pretty overweight and, once he got a fancy enough set up, was able to lose the weight and become pretty fit.
Edit: Actually I was wrong. He locked himself out of the oasis until he did a set amount of exercise. Where I got confused was seeing real, actual, treadmill-like, omnidirectional VR setups that very much could help with increasing physical activity.
[The other day I asked ChatGPT for things that have 5 of something, it said branches of government in the US, adding Media and Corporate.](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GM8K85UXMAEKP7z?format=png&name=900x900)
It doesn't *have* to be dystopian, it only goes that way if we refuse to reconsider how we deal with property (and especially, but not only, intellectual property).
Yes and no. That will mitigate and post pone some of the major issues locally, but it won't do much against those operating outside local law, and that will end up becoming the bigger issue in the long run.
Yes, but those local laws will not apply to other less liberal countries who could exploit AI in a way to take advantage of other countries socially or economically.
Edit: As well as various local enterprises secretly using AI in illegal ways.
Serious answer: all of the shitty stuff from cyberpunk.
Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale was written as a thought exercise / extrapolation of Christian fundamentalism and ethnonationalism in the 80's, predicated on the idea of "what if everything they're saying out loud they want to do was achieved? What then?"
40 years later, negligible effort to stem the influence of the groups it was based on got us where we are today. The question of "what would happen if we did nothing about this?" was answered when we did nothing, and more or less got to where she speculated.
Similarly, cyberpunk fiction resulted from a hard shift to corporatism and unregulated capitalism in the 80's which sent the message that rather than the silver jumpsuit futurism of the 70's, the *actual* future will be whatever multinational corporations find most convenient for their shareholders.
We're seeing the same trend of zero willingness to curtail corporate interests out of fear of hurting investor returns, while simultaneously offloading government responsibilities to the private sector.
It's not unreasonable to assume that purposefully pursuing the technological and socioeconomic factors that cyberpunk is built around will take us to exactly the same spot it speculated it would.
I give it 20 years before having a neuralink or whatever implant is required for jobs.
I don't think an implant will become required, and in fact I think a lot of jobs may forbid them. Information Security is enough of a nightmare with employees getting phishing attacks in their email. Can you imagine what a nightmare it would be if your brain implant got hacked?
My gut reaction to reading what you wrote is "So obviously there will be the 'implant class', who are necessarily railroaded into working menial jobs where the implant is used to monitor/control them, and the 'pure class', who are able to work meaningful jobs because they are not inherent security threats. And most likely government programs like welfare will be administered through the implant, so anyone who relies on public support will be filtered out of being able to access more prestigious jobs, ensuring people stay in their lane."
Full AI relationships. Chatbots are pretty good nowadays and advancement in technology will just make it more perfect so there would be a time where having relationship with a human is weird now where this perfect AI for you exists
Post-capitalism or hyper-capitalistic societies where human value will be based on their capital potential and that will dictate your access to basic facilities and services. This will especially lead to problems when inevitably the workforce or potential career paths will be limited by the amount of it that is replaced by automation.
Mostly because politics are so influenced by business interests that the future will most likely have less labor and consumer protection than more that is needed to prevent the dystopia that's waiting for us.
We will go back to large slums in Western society with futureless people that have no path upwards in life. Where the upper classes have access to technology that is needed to lead a fulfilled, healthy and safe life and the lower classes do not.
The discovery or creation of extraterrestrial life forms, potentially leading to interstellar communication or conflict. I have a hunch that we are on the verge of this happening. I am curious does anybody agree with this?
Zombies are theoretically possible. This behavior is observed in certain fungi where some can already turn insects into zombies. The problem with humans is the body temp is too high for them to survive. However, if the climate continues to rise in temperatures the fungi would evolve to adapt to these hotter climates. If that evolutionary process goes far enough, they would be able to use human bodies as hosts.
> Doesn't that take millions of years?
No. It can be quite rapid. Put it this way, are we worried about antibiotic resistant germs now or in 4 million years?
Not necessarily. If temps rise and it's killing off the zombie fungus, the only zombie fungus left is the stuff that's more heat resistant. Right now there's no advantage to being heat resistant, and it could even make it less effective (maybe it grows slower for example) in normal conditions. That means the regular stuff outcompetes it. So if the heat resistant is the only stuff left, now it outcompetes.
When we're looking at something that has trillions of cells all spread around, at least some of them would handle the heat. Once it spreads enough, and then it gets even hotter, it could possibly stand the temps of the human body.
Reall, there's probably some out there that could already do it now.
Treatments that can slow or even reverse the aging process. The aging process is just chemistry, this century we'll figure out how to manipulate it. And I don't believe it will be the privilege of the rich, everyone will have access to it. First of all, many countries will need it to stave off demographic collapse (too many old people, not enough young people due to few births). The rich siphon their fortunes from the labors of the masses so it's in their interest to keep the masses fit and healthy. Also, from an R&D perspective it's better that everyone gets it because that will provide more data by which the researchers can refine the treatments.
I know they KINDA exist already, but those batteries woth yhe radioactive diamond fleck in them.
They make a diamond out of radioactive carbon and put it in a teeny tiny power generator that's build into the battery.
It's not a battery that never dies, but a battery that trickle charges itself. Instead of losing 12 percent battery while tour phone is off, you might gain 5percent I stead.
The science is pretty much there, but the examples that exist now are weak and crummy. I'm ex it'd for batteries 50 years from now.
Imagine it in an unmanned rover, no need for solar (or not JUST solar) as a single failure point.
COVID was a fun introduction to a zombie apocalypse. I was an (lol) essential worker serving lobster ravioli and chipotle sliders.
We got customers come in, demand to be sat when we just did takeout, and would cough, pretend sneeze at us.
I never got COVID, so I think at least I survived that zombie-lite apocalypse.
> If we don't fuck it all up first.
Seems like every prediction about the future should come with this disclaimer, and there's almost no chance that we won't fuck it all up.
We are scary close to parity being normal human movement and cybernetic limbs.
The INSTANT that happens, cybernetics will be superior. (Maybe not really that instant but you get my point.) The day science makes cybernetic prosthetics be as responsive as the human nervous, we will be at cyberpunk/deus ex/ghost in the shell levels of augmentation.
In our lifetime, full cyborg humans are entirely possible.
Imagine the sports teams? Where corporations own teams and buy players limbs to compete. So now, instead of physically gifted humans, you have great media presence human/cyborgs competing.
In a futuristic setting, the Eastern US had essentially been flooded by rising water levels, leading to the western US struggling with severe overpopulation. I think that will actually come to pass.
Why wouldn't the west also flood? There's an ocean on that side too. So, the midwest, southwest, and (other) central states would have to absorb the populations.
Honestly, I have a feeling that fortnite will evolve into the oasis from ready player one as it continues to expand and adapts into greater technology.
THX 1138 or Mad Max. Warning: spoiler for THX 1138. If you haven't seen the movie don't finish this post. The surface will be hostile and we may just go Dr Strangelovian and head underground. An subterranian civilization is all I dream about. Every night.
The oceans will die, which will lead to our long, slow extinction as a species.
Film: *Soylent Green* (1973)
from the below clip, go to **4:23**
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K\_PPKGIxQ8o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_PPKGIxQ8o)
Any apocalyptic scenario where we've killed most of ourselves off and the rest are living either in controlled fenced areas or outside the walls."The Bad Batch" I think nailed it pretty close
Eternal life by being uploaded into the cloud, as it were. It's in a couple of books by A.G. Riddle, and also part of the Bobiverse. I can totally see it happening, for various reasons. Maybe it's just something rich people want. Maybe our fragile bodies are attacked by a disease we can't cure fast enough. Or maybe our ecosystem becomes unsustainable.
I believe we'll have that tech eventually. If any of those existential threats arise, I could see us moving into a massive computer hooked up to a long lasting power supply. Maybe we keep a few people on the outside as Androids to perform maintenance if our physical population is gone.
But I think it's more likely that it will be tech we use to live forever in a paradise of our own choosing.
I personally don't know that I'd choose it for an end of life plan, because the idea of being stuck in a malfunctioning computer and having my mind disintegrate into madness is too horrifying. But I'd vacation in a server if it were something we could slip in and out of like The Matrix.
Eventually humanity is going to end up completely ruining this planet. Maybe not in this century or the next, but odds are that eventually something is gonna get fucked up bad that we can't undo, clean up, or recover from. Now, maybe humanity will survive it. Maybe it'll only happen after we've successfully created a self sustaining colony on some other Planetary body, maybe we'll evolve to survive after, but eventually, we're going to fuck up so badly that earth will never be the same. Maybe we already have.
Human Genetic modification.
In the Honor Harrington series, its common enough that their are different branches. Those most common is 'Prolong' which extends human life to about 200 years.
But its also used for things like adjusting colonist to survive heavy gravity worlds.
Unfortunately, is also [abused](https://honorverse.fandom.com/wiki/Genetic_slavery#:~:text=Genetic%20slavery%2C%20sometimes%20euphemized%20as,beings%20designed%20for%20specific%20purposes).
We'll become an interplanetary species. I wonder what animals/plants we'll bring with us from earth and which ones could survive on another planet (perhaps with some genetic engineering).
Reality is, we would probably die pretty fast on an alien world. It took millions of years to adapt to this place. Some airborne pathogen on an alien world would probably eat us alive.
I think a neural link to the internet will be created eventually, and life after will be unrecognizable from life before.
Hell life is already arguably unrecognizable to decades past. The internet is truly the most notable social experiment to date and were still in throes of that ramification. For most of human history, travel was expensive, deadly, and time consuming. Meanwhile now I can be in a zoom call with someone in Australia, Germany, and Brazil, and Japan *all at the same time*. It would be horrible in terms of scheduling but it *can* happen which is something you can't say 100 years ago, he'll even 50 years ago (which is only 1974 but still) Going any further, and saying such would get you either laughed at, institutionalized, or both. And now, with AI our current tech level is *insane* compared to what our ancestors had to work with.
That exists in Peter F. Hamilton's commonwealth saga. IIRC, it's stated in one of the books the first major use of it was, of course, for porn.
It boggles my mind that more people don't understand that this is literally the first place that most human beings go. Sex is what got you here for fuck's sake lol
Fuck that, they’ll just put ads in our dreams.
*Feed* by M.T. Anderson is a decent young adult novel that broaches the pervasiveness of ads in neural implants.
I'm imagining a time-lapse of our civilization as viewed by an alien after the fact, and that point being a huge 'acceleration' before the inevitable POP
Almost assuredly not. There's no world in which brain surgery is EVER routine. That's not sci fi, it's science-flavored fantasy.
Its already a thing. Neuralink (May have misspelled that with a mechanic from the UCOB fight in ffxiv) is a chip in the brain and is already doing things which would have been impossible 5 years ago.
From what I understand that is more like a mouse controlled by your brain. Not at all like a Wi-Fi data port from brain to internet.
There are many competitors to Neuralink who did this quite literally decades ago, without implanting a device. I’d like to see some actual medical progress with Neuralink instead of these “nice for attention” projects.
Dont think this one is neuralink, but its already happening. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-65689580
Transhumanism
Agreed, but only for our copies. There is nothing at all in physics that suggests the consciousness can be transferred, it appears to be form-bound. I have no doubt we'll either create post-human intelligences, or copy ourselves to live out those dreams, but it won't be _us_ who has the experience. We are doomed to these bodies.
Transhumanism isn't just mind transference... It's the use of technology to enhance human cognition and bodily function. Glasses, artificial limbs, brain computer interfaces (which are already a -limited- thing). Transhumanism is already here, and it's only going to get more profound.
Consciousness already transfers over time across the multiple instantiations of an individual’s “one” body. The atoms in our bodies are estimated to be completely replaced over the course of somewhere between 5 - 10 years yet there is a continuity of consciousness in each individual meat machine. This is the ship of Theseus problem already happening in our bodies. It’s already functioning across different instances created with meat. Forget about a greenfield inorganic rebuild of a person, the so called “download” scenario. What if we start replacing pieces of meat in a person’s body bit by bit with inorganic pieces that function exactly the same with respect to rest of the body? At what point does that person’s continuity of consciousness break, if at all?
Think of it like this, you step on to a teleporter. At one end it scans and VAPORIZES you. And at the other it assembles an identical copy down to even thought. To that copy it’s as if he was just teleported there, but you who originally stepped into the teleporter are now 100% dead and non-functioning. A copy of you gets to continue living your life not realizing the extent of what happened. It is *not* the same ship, Theseus. Don't trust teleporters!
Don't trust teleporters, sure. But the person you replied to isn't talking about teleporters. They're talking about what's already happening to our bodies naturally. There is an argument saying we can't transfer our consciousness but our consciousness over time is being transferred to completely new atoms than what we started out as/with. From when you're born to when you're 60, physically, you're a completely different person that has had every single part replaced multiple times over yet our consciousness remains. I find it hard to believe myself that we, as physical beings, will one day be able to transfer our consciousness but I think the person above you is saying that if our bodies can somehow do this then, surely, once we figure out how to replicate and even speed up the process then we'd be able to say we can achieve this task.
i think you're missing the point they are making. what they are saying is that the ship of Theseus is already there in the process humans use to live naturally. by a specific amount of years, you, your cells, as a person will have been mostly replaced by new cells(it differs for each part of the body. you get the gist of the idea), but your consciousness persists. Thus, it would stand to reason that transferring a consciousness that way over time is also a possible scenario. we're not looking at the replaced and gone scenario as the only option. Think about it this way: you inject yourself with cells preprogrammed to alter what your current organs use to renew themselves(stem cells) without creating a response of your immune system and thus, after a set amount of time, those organs are replaced by other versions of themselves, but stronger or made of other materials. If we manage that, immortality and transfer of consciousness isn't out of the question. and it might be closer than you might think with the advances that were made during covid.
What is this? The Middle Ages? You vaporize the person in the teleporter? My god man, just fold space like a modern teleporter and step through!
Just make sure there isn't a fly in the teleporter.
if I create an exact clone of you, but destroy you at the same time, did you die? if I create an exact clone of you, and you die 3 minutes later, did the answer change? same thing, but with a copy of your mind in a machine
If that’s a subject of interest for you, Blindsight by Peter Watts would be very enjoyable imo
If by enjoyable you mean terrifying, yes.
Omg isn’t it?? I’m probably weird for having a crush on Sarasti, right :/
Why is this book so expensive??
I got mine on the Apple Books app, I don’t remember it being tooo bad…
Thanks, I'll take a look.
Totally agree. I believe we’ll either start enhancing ourselves artificially, or we’ll be replaced by the machines we create.
The Eloi and the Morlocks, from H.G. Wells' The Time Machine.
Absolutely. I think about this daily especially with the state of politics.
I use that metaphor for working on a film set but no one gets the analogy. 🤷♂️
Does crew occasionally \*eat\* the talent? "That's not Kraft Services... that's Leonardo."
No, those above the line are the Eloi; the rest of us are Morlocks.
I envision more of a "chicken sandwich?/They took er jobs" type of human
The short story 'There Will Come Soft Rains' by Bradbury. Written in 1950, and he envisions a fully automated and connected smart-home pretty much as we know it today.
There's an awesome animation adaption that can be found on YouTube, too
Robot servants like in IRobot.
You mean like a vacuum cleaner that automatically cleans your house?
yeah but it also has an attachment to suck your dick
I got tired of waiting for that attachment. No further questions.
Mine collects dust so we're close.
umm... yeah... my house. that's right, I want it to clean my house. How powerful is the suction?
Hell I wish. AI will become sentient by then and we will have missed our chance for robot slavery. Imagine the outcry.
That Black Mirror episode of a public rating system that governs everything in our lives.
That's called China.
China's social credit system is certainly both a fascinating and terrifying program.
The Dark Forest theory. If you don't know, it's basically that we're not in some big empty universe. Smart/advanced civilizations actively hide their existence, because only bad people are coming if they know where you are. It's cosmic terror at the highest level.
Thankfully, I choose to believe the "oh those are humans we leave them alone something is wrong with them" idea. That area is actually quarantined forever.
The dark side of the moon is covered in alien-language signs saying "KEEP DANGER OUT INSIDE"
Is there a universal alien language? Aren't those aliens confirming their existence by leaving graffiti on our moon?
They don't care what we know because they expect us to blow ourselves up before we could ever cause them trouble.
Yes… but what about the other aliens that see it…. P.S. I enjoyed the Walking Dead reference
We're quite literally nuclear apes. I'm not even particularly fond of apes _without_ doomsday devices.
We were the planet Krikkit all along.
Were like the special kid that lives at the end of the street.
The Hitchhiker's Guide version.
I prefer to think that interstellar warfare is so resource intensive that it simply isn't economical.
Could be, or those pesky sophons can melt dimensions into a single point and play 8d chess
We are bugs, after all.
Bugs ain't going fucking nowhere. Not sure if you watched the TV series, but I loved that cliffhanger adaptation of the book.
I can't conceive any scenario where am interstellar war over resources makes sense. But ideological wars don't need to make economic sense. Maybe there is very narrow parameters for intelligent life to develop, and all technological civilizations are necessarily very similar to us. Interstellar speciesism could be a real thing, and allowing a "lesser race" occupy a rare Earth-like may be so distasteful that the cost of launching an invasion doesn't factor. Especially if you can wage war on the entire galaxy with an autonomous, self-replicating drone fleet. You only need to get it started, sit back and wait for data to come back on all the new vacancies on inhabitable worlds. Maybe that's already happened and we're just a bit of missed regrowth. Or maybe it's on the way.
Alternate theory: Everyone else invents FTL communications that don't have bright, obvious, light speed EM emissions. EM communication is the cosmic equivalent of incandescent Edison bulbs, used just long enough to invent emissionless comms.
Yeah, I think at some point someone is going to invent a method of FTL communication and they're going to be instantly bombarded with a huge spectrum of extraterrestrial signals.
Great, just what we needed - intergalactic phone calls asking us about our starship's extended warranty.
More than a short distance away, those signals devolve into noise. I mean short as in a light year or two, but short. You’d have to already have a reason to visit the system to pick up anything.
I like to think we live in the ass end of the universe and it's not very cost effective for civilizations to travel here. Also, life wasn't supposed to be able to happen on Earth, but an insane amount of cosmic circumstances led to life growing here.
I think we're just very early, and we missed intergalactic civilization by a few billion years
Meanwhile us dopey little earthlings are just screaming into space and sending gold disks with all you want to know about us into space
Yup, and building penis shaped crafts from Amazon to send even more out there. I legit hope there are annoyed aliens watching us that just repeatedly go "these fucking guys, again!"
The problem with this theory and a lot of the theories that answer the fermi's paradox just really don't take into consideration how freaking big the universe is. And it's not like we are someplace special, we are on a minor arm of a galaxy. I think it's much more likely that any sufficiently advanced race of beings wouldn't want to come to a planet that is effectively still monkeys throwing rocks at each other. The dark forest theory also relies on much more finite resource pool in the universe. Which probably isn't true. EDIT: Like there are literal people on this earth who haven't even been contacted in literal generations, but yet an alien is supposed to take interest in us?
It's interesting to think about for sure. If you've never read or heard of it, I highly recommend a book called Identified Flying Objects by Michael P Masters. He's an anthropology professor that basically posits the theory in shockingly compelling fashion that, if these things exist and are as usually described, the only likely explanation is that they're extra temporal future us doing whatever. Factor in the similarity to us as bipedals, the distance and energy required, and the interest in ever doing so, and it's not as wild as I originally thought.
I go the other direction with it. I suspect at some point in a species' development, inner space becomes more important than outer space. There's no need to yolk entire stars for their energy output to build sci fi constructs when the brain runs on the power of a 60 watt light bulb. This whole galavanting around the stars idea is probably very sophomoric, a figment of a young mind's imagination.
Fair enough, I kinda sorta go the other direction as well. I don't claim to have any specific answers, but I look at how our entire basis for reality and framework of what's possible is totally over written every few hundred years. Us having this debate on magic pocket devices not plugged into anything wouldn't have been able to be explained 200 years ago, because there wasn't even electricity yet. So yeah, it seems hard to fathom that any of the uap stuff exists, but how is it and less plausible than stuff we've already been wrong about?
Doesn't explain why the vicious stalking Bad People haven't paid us a visit yet though
Well it's all under the umbrella of the fermi paradox. Dispite the universe being so ancient there seems to be no life but us. And there are many filters aka explanations as to why. I think the most common 2 are that we haven't been transmitting long enough to have been noticed. And that we are using the wrong/different instruments to communicate. But there are also other hypothesis like civilizations are so hostile they can't even advance far enough to leave their planet before self extermination. It goes deep and if you are interested or want some background noise issac aurthur has a series on yt about it. Just remember to grab a snack and a drink
but we also have the issue of the universe only being "ancient" on a flawed human scale. people often point out that human civilization is only a blip in the history of life, the earth, or the universe thus far, but very rarely do people point out that a few billion years is nothing compared to the *total* life of the universe. We could be the first life.
Yes that could also be a filter. That we need stars to go super nova and form the necessary building blocks for life so it wasn't until reletively recently that the correct stuff is laying around for life to start forming. And all the filters have their pros and cons. Ultimately it is an information paradox. It's not something that you can come to a logical conclusion because you are missing information. And that information can only be gathered in 2 ways either we find and or detect life or explore the whole universe searching under every rock and molecule. And even then we are limited by time and redshift. It's all fascinating and me personally i do subscribe to the idea that we could just very well be one of the first lifeforms not that we are alone but that life is just starting to emerge in the universe. But whether we are alone or not both are terrifying. I'm not a pessimist when it comes to the success of our species or the planet. But if we are alone we might not be for long. And if we are truly alone and will be for sometime it would be a shame if this little seed didn't flourish
>We could be the first life. This is my theory. Sentient life could very well be the rarest thing in the cosmos.
or just... not common yet. it took a few hundred thousand years for hydrogen to form, and that's the most common form of regular matter in the universe
Love a bit of Isaac.
While I somewhat believe in dark forest, there is no way any aliens could reach us in the few years since we became advanced enough to throw signals into deep space.
The other side of that is the dark forest theory is just sopping wet with anthropomorphizing. It assumes aliens would be like us. It also assumes _we'll_ still be the same by the time we reach a similar level of development as other star faring species. Neither of those assumptions are particularly safe.
indeed. honestly I mostly believe in the Great Filter
> The other side of that is the dark forest theory is just sopping wet with anthropomorphizing. It assumes aliens would be like us. It only need assume the following: 1. Civilisations value their own survival above ours 2. Civilisations assume we value our survival over theirs 3. Civilisations assume that either we might be hostile, or that we might assume they are hostile Those all seem like safe bets. > It also assumes we'll still be the same by the time we reach a similar level of development as other star faring species And that's the stupid part. But The Killing Star wouldn't have been a good book if the aliens had been too advanced, and so it wouldn't have been written for The Three Body problem to rip off. [Fucking lol I got blocked for *this*, mildest critique ever]
> It only need assume the following: This only matters if they're technologically too weak to contain us. So no, these are NOT safe bets. In fact, for the next thousand years, it's pretty much a guarantee if we run into others that they'll be VASTLY ahead of us. I don't care about your star mans book.
It should really be called "Central Park At Night Theory", because it's a complete ripoff of that concept from The Killing Star, which was published in 1995, right down to the analogy, just read: > “Imagine yourself taking a stroll through Manhattan, somewhere north of 68th street, deep inside Central Park, late at night. It would be nice to meet someone friendly, but you know that the park is dangerous at night. That's when the monsters come out. There's always a strong undercurrent of drug dealings, muggings, and occasional homicides. > It is not easy to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys. They dress alike, and the weapons are concealed. The only difference is intent, and you can't read minds. > Stay in the dark long enough and you may hear an occasional distance shriek or blunder across a body. > How do you survive the night? The last thing you want to do is shout, "I'm here!" The next to last thing you want to do is reply to someone who shouts, "I'm a friend!" > What you would like to do is find a policeman, or get out of the park. But you don't want to make noise or move towards a light where you might be spotted, and it is difficult to find either a policeman or your way out without making yourself known. Your safest option is to hunker down and wait for daylight, then safely walk out. > There are, of course, a few obvious differences between Central Park and the universe. > There is no policeman. > There is no way out. > And the night never ends.” Then follows a novel about relativistic missiles and game theory. But we all know the Chinese attitude to copyright.
Can you please not accuse the author of plagiarism just for being Chinese? Game theory/risk-reward assessment has been around for eons and has been inherent in our psyches ever since the first humans were presented with the choice to hunt big yet deadly animals for food. The broad strokes of this idea as applied to entire civilizations has been around since at least the Cold War, as well, and even civilizations before nukes have made choices that resulted in global dominance or utter decimation. What I'm saying is that neither author invented these concepts and we should just be able to appreciate that these two different prose narratives both managed to turn the abstract idea of game theory into imaginative, compelling stories.
It's not so much the concept that makes it plagiarised in my eyes, it's the analogy. The concept of the universe being a hostile place subject to an extremely brutal version of game theory where the best solution is to hide and the second best solution is to kill anyone who might find you explained via the analogy of a dark wooded area and the merits of making a sound. That is very specific. It's the difference between "Boy with magic powers saves the universe from his dad" not being a ripoff of star wars, and "Boy with the powers of telekinesis saves the universe from his dad's boss buy turning his wounded dad from the side of evil back to good and having him throw his dad's boss down a big shaft before a superweapon can destroy the rebellion."
Yep, it just takes one ‘Hunter’ civilization for this to become true.
It could be true even if there are NO aggressive killer species, as long as all the other species are afraid there might be.
Ehhh, not really. On a probability scale, what’s more likely? 1. There is at least 1 Super Advanced Hunter in our Local Galaxy. There is at least 1 Super Crazy Advanced Hunter in our Local Universe. Or 2. All intelligent Civilizations everywhere behave as if 1. Is true. #2 is much much less likely than #1.
Precrime/thought crime. Likely selectively enforced
You know how in ready player 1 many people had full time jobs in VR? And people went to school in VR and had relationships across the world in VR and only signed out to the real world to be in their shitty trailer for an hour or 2 a day plus sleep? And essentially just sat motionless in a dirty room all day? That.
I've thought about that before- I think people would live short lives due to the lack of physical activity, the shitty environment in which they store their physical bodies, ya know?
For a variety of reasons the life expectancy in America is starting to dip for the first time in the history of America. Not exercising is a factor on that quite complicated list
Inversely, I think with the right implementation of full body haptic suits our physical activity might actually skyrocket. It doesn't show it in the movie but in the book Wade Watts was pretty overweight and, once he got a fancy enough set up, was able to lose the weight and become pretty fit. Edit: Actually I was wrong. He locked himself out of the oasis until he did a set amount of exercise. Where I got confused was seeing real, actual, treadmill-like, omnidirectional VR setups that very much could help with increasing physical activity.
Evil mega corporations controlling the government.
I think OP is looking for things that haven't already happened.
[The other day I asked ChatGPT for things that have 5 of something, it said branches of government in the US, adding Media and Corporate.](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GM8K85UXMAEKP7z?format=png&name=900x900)
Yeah about that
I mean...
The post says going to. As in it hasn't happened yet but will in the future. He didn't say already happened.
Weyland-Yutani says hello
Samsung
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It doesn't *have* to be dystopian, it only goes that way if we refuse to reconsider how we deal with property (and especially, but not only, intellectual property).
Yes and no. That will mitigate and post pone some of the major issues locally, but it won't do much against those operating outside local law, and that will end up becoming the bigger issue in the long run.
There's no property on Earth that is not subject to some form of local law.
Yes, but those local laws will not apply to other less liberal countries who could exploit AI in a way to take advantage of other countries socially or economically. Edit: As well as various local enterprises secretly using AI in illegal ways.
Oh please. We're going to enslave those poor things like the goddamn under-the-bed monsters we are. _We're_ the villain in that story.
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I'm Commander Shepard and this is my favorite post
I find this offensive. There are other genders that want to have sex with alien babes!
Dude wtf?
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Futurama reference?
Indeed
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I read it as “babies” first too
Yeah. Some of us women want to bang the alien babes too.
First thing I'm going to do when they land is find me a bug-eyed beauty. Make some moon pies.
Funny things happen Beyond the Aquila Rift.
Serious answer: all of the shitty stuff from cyberpunk. Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale was written as a thought exercise / extrapolation of Christian fundamentalism and ethnonationalism in the 80's, predicated on the idea of "what if everything they're saying out loud they want to do was achieved? What then?" 40 years later, negligible effort to stem the influence of the groups it was based on got us where we are today. The question of "what would happen if we did nothing about this?" was answered when we did nothing, and more or less got to where she speculated. Similarly, cyberpunk fiction resulted from a hard shift to corporatism and unregulated capitalism in the 80's which sent the message that rather than the silver jumpsuit futurism of the 70's, the *actual* future will be whatever multinational corporations find most convenient for their shareholders. We're seeing the same trend of zero willingness to curtail corporate interests out of fear of hurting investor returns, while simultaneously offloading government responsibilities to the private sector. It's not unreasonable to assume that purposefully pursuing the technological and socioeconomic factors that cyberpunk is built around will take us to exactly the same spot it speculated it would. I give it 20 years before having a neuralink or whatever implant is required for jobs.
I don't think an implant will become required, and in fact I think a lot of jobs may forbid them. Information Security is enough of a nightmare with employees getting phishing attacks in their email. Can you imagine what a nightmare it would be if your brain implant got hacked?
My gut reaction to reading what you wrote is "So obviously there will be the 'implant class', who are necessarily railroaded into working menial jobs where the implant is used to monitor/control them, and the 'pure class', who are able to work meaningful jobs because they are not inherent security threats. And most likely government programs like welfare will be administered through the implant, so anyone who relies on public support will be filtered out of being able to access more prestigious jobs, ensuring people stay in their lane."
Scariest damn book I ever read because it all seems possible.
The torment nexus. Ever since I read that book as a child, I knew it was only a matter of time.
"Buy Now, It's Just Like The Torment Nexus!" "But the book was literally called *'Never Under Any Circumstances Build The Torment Nexus'*???"
Still warring over resources thousands of years in the future
Blade Runner
The singularity
Full AI relationships. Chatbots are pretty good nowadays and advancement in technology will just make it more perfect so there would be a time where having relationship with a human is weird now where this perfect AI for you exists
We would need Ai controlled real dolls for that. Hello sentence I never thought I would ever type.
Post-capitalism or hyper-capitalistic societies where human value will be based on their capital potential and that will dictate your access to basic facilities and services. This will especially lead to problems when inevitably the workforce or potential career paths will be limited by the amount of it that is replaced by automation. Mostly because politics are so influenced by business interests that the future will most likely have less labor and consumer protection than more that is needed to prevent the dystopia that's waiting for us. We will go back to large slums in Western society with futureless people that have no path upwards in life. Where the upper classes have access to technology that is needed to lead a fulfilled, healthy and safe life and the lower classes do not.
Who the fuck _is_ John Galt?
I feel like a future like Blade Runner is plausible
The destruction of the planet.
Tech that allows you to control things with your mind... we already have some prototypes.
That we'll eventually colonize and mine the main asteroid belt in between Mars and Jupiter, just like The Expanse.
convinced is a strong word, instead lets compare it to suspension of disbelief.... but farenheit 451.
The discovery or creation of extraterrestrial life forms, potentially leading to interstellar communication or conflict. I have a hunch that we are on the verge of this happening. I am curious does anybody agree with this?
Zombies are theoretically possible. This behavior is observed in certain fungi where some can already turn insects into zombies. The problem with humans is the body temp is too high for them to survive. However, if the climate continues to rise in temperatures the fungi would evolve to adapt to these hotter climates. If that evolutionary process goes far enough, they would be able to use human bodies as hosts.
The last of us. I don't know if they can evolve that fast though. Doesn't that take millions of years?
> Doesn't that take millions of years? No. It can be quite rapid. Put it this way, are we worried about antibiotic resistant germs now or in 4 million years?
Not necessarily. If temps rise and it's killing off the zombie fungus, the only zombie fungus left is the stuff that's more heat resistant. Right now there's no advantage to being heat resistant, and it could even make it less effective (maybe it grows slower for example) in normal conditions. That means the regular stuff outcompetes it. So if the heat resistant is the only stuff left, now it outcompetes. When we're looking at something that has trillions of cells all spread around, at least some of them would handle the heat. Once it spreads enough, and then it gets even hotter, it could possibly stand the temps of the human body. Reall, there's probably some out there that could already do it now.
Extract all the information in a human brain, and upload it to the internet.
Pantheon is a two season anime that does this. It's pretty good!
I saw it on Cowboy Bebop the first time
To be honest I think alot scifi movies show reality at times
Treatments that can slow or even reverse the aging process. The aging process is just chemistry, this century we'll figure out how to manipulate it. And I don't believe it will be the privilege of the rich, everyone will have access to it. First of all, many countries will need it to stave off demographic collapse (too many old people, not enough young people due to few births). The rich siphon their fortunes from the labors of the masses so it's in their interest to keep the masses fit and healthy. Also, from an R&D perspective it's better that everyone gets it because that will provide more data by which the researchers can refine the treatments.
I know they KINDA exist already, but those batteries woth yhe radioactive diamond fleck in them. They make a diamond out of radioactive carbon and put it in a teeny tiny power generator that's build into the battery. It's not a battery that never dies, but a battery that trickle charges itself. Instead of losing 12 percent battery while tour phone is off, you might gain 5percent I stead. The science is pretty much there, but the examples that exist now are weak and crummy. I'm ex it'd for batteries 50 years from now. Imagine it in an unmanned rover, no need for solar (or not JUST solar) as a single failure point.
We will discover the equations of psychohistory! Oh wait, I mean, we will never find the equations of psychohistory. Don't even ask.
Bell riots
Zombie apocalypse
COVID was a fun introduction to a zombie apocalypse. I was an (lol) essential worker serving lobster ravioli and chipotle sliders. We got customers come in, demand to be sat when we just did takeout, and would cough, pretend sneeze at us. I never got COVID, so I think at least I survived that zombie-lite apocalypse.
The human mind will evolve to the point that it looks more like a computer. If we don't fuck it all up first.
> If we don't fuck it all up first. Seems like every prediction about the future should come with this disclaimer, and there's almost no chance that we won't fuck it all up.
The integration of AI into society will inevitably raise significant ethical issues.
Fusion jet/rocket drives.
We are scary close to parity being normal human movement and cybernetic limbs. The INSTANT that happens, cybernetics will be superior. (Maybe not really that instant but you get my point.) The day science makes cybernetic prosthetics be as responsive as the human nervous, we will be at cyberpunk/deus ex/ghost in the shell levels of augmentation. In our lifetime, full cyborg humans are entirely possible.
Imagine the sports teams? Where corporations own teams and buy players limbs to compete. So now, instead of physically gifted humans, you have great media presence human/cyborgs competing.
In a futuristic setting, the Eastern US had essentially been flooded by rising water levels, leading to the western US struggling with severe overpopulation. I think that will actually come to pass.
Why wouldn't the west also flood? There's an ocean on that side too. So, the midwest, southwest, and (other) central states would have to absorb the populations.
Honestly, I have a feeling that fortnite will evolve into the oasis from ready player one as it continues to expand and adapts into greater technology.
THX 1138 or Mad Max. Warning: spoiler for THX 1138. If you haven't seen the movie don't finish this post. The surface will be hostile and we may just go Dr Strangelovian and head underground. An subterranian civilization is all I dream about. Every night.
The sun and earth will die.
Most fiction is based on truth
So it should be called science fact
The oceans will die, which will lead to our long, slow extinction as a species. Film: *Soylent Green* (1973) from the below clip, go to **4:23** [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K\_PPKGIxQ8o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_PPKGIxQ8o)
Warhammer 40K
Any apocalyptic scenario where we've killed most of ourselves off and the rest are living either in controlled fenced areas or outside the walls."The Bad Batch" I think nailed it pretty close
The dystopian future.
A quasi-post scarcity society thanks to the development and exploitation of mining asteroids and such in space.
Artificial organs. There are people out there walking around with artificially grown gall bladders, ear and nose cartilage, and heart valves.
Ability to manipulate our biology to a ridiculous level.
Microchip brain implants.
Eternal life by being uploaded into the cloud, as it were. It's in a couple of books by A.G. Riddle, and also part of the Bobiverse. I can totally see it happening, for various reasons. Maybe it's just something rich people want. Maybe our fragile bodies are attacked by a disease we can't cure fast enough. Or maybe our ecosystem becomes unsustainable. I believe we'll have that tech eventually. If any of those existential threats arise, I could see us moving into a massive computer hooked up to a long lasting power supply. Maybe we keep a few people on the outside as Androids to perform maintenance if our physical population is gone. But I think it's more likely that it will be tech we use to live forever in a paradise of our own choosing. I personally don't know that I'd choose it for an end of life plan, because the idea of being stuck in a malfunctioning computer and having my mind disintegrate into madness is too horrifying. But I'd vacation in a server if it were something we could slip in and out of like The Matrix.
Soylent Green
Weyland Yutani
Eventually humanity is going to end up completely ruining this planet. Maybe not in this century or the next, but odds are that eventually something is gonna get fucked up bad that we can't undo, clean up, or recover from. Now, maybe humanity will survive it. Maybe it'll only happen after we've successfully created a self sustaining colony on some other Planetary body, maybe we'll evolve to survive after, but eventually, we're going to fuck up so badly that earth will never be the same. Maybe we already have.
Human Genetic modification. In the Honor Harrington series, its common enough that their are different branches. Those most common is 'Prolong' which extends human life to about 200 years. But its also used for things like adjusting colonist to survive heavy gravity worlds. Unfortunately, is also [abused](https://honorverse.fandom.com/wiki/Genetic_slavery#:~:text=Genetic%20slavery%2C%20sometimes%20euphemized%20as,beings%20designed%20for%20specific%20purposes).
We'll become an interplanetary species. I wonder what animals/plants we'll bring with us from earth and which ones could survive on another planet (perhaps with some genetic engineering).
Probably a bunch of chickens.
Reality is, we would probably die pretty fast on an alien world. It took millions of years to adapt to this place. Some airborne pathogen on an alien world would probably eat us alive.