Slowly dying out as our descendants evolve into divergent races and species and stop being technically classifiable as human.
People who think doom is upon us really don’t understand just how hard it is to kill all of us, it would take a confluence of several extinction level events at this point to completely wipe us out just because of how resilient we’ve made our society to collapse factors.
We’re gonna live, we’re not gonna escape living with the world we’ve made as easily as just all dying because of it, and someday one of your descendants is gonna regard you the same way we do the savannah apes that figured out how to walk upright to get a better vantage over the tall grass.
As for what our descendants will evolve into, honestly, it’s gonna be a much more designed process as we continue to master gene editing tech. I could genuinely see several branches just being different “forks” of the base human body plan that try to resolve “design flaws” like disconnecting the respiratory and digestive systems or restoring partial water breathing or fully activating our potential for bioluminescence.
I think 40k is on to something too, the practice of the mechanicus of augmenting their bodies with tech to the point of even enabling their own brains to perform mass data analysis akin to a binary computer will be where a lot of folks end up too.
In fact I believe that the moment a “third hemisphere” implant to the brain is successfully developed will be the actual singularity point for humanity rather than the development of an independently intelligent artificial being. Unlocking the potential of human pattern recognition in harmony with binary number mastery would instantly change so much about how people even understand the world let alone interact with it that predicting beyond that point is more an experiment of speculative evolution than of more standard futurism.
As for immediately, I believe we’re a lot closer to a solar punk world than anyone’s really comfortable with accepting, because doing that means giving into fatalism means them having personally failed a goal within reach instead of “just accepting reality.”
Can you explain the last part (about solarpunk) what fatalism do you mean and what goal did they fail? And who are “they”?
I would like to suggest the Wayward Pines trilogy by Blake Crouch. (The books, not the television adaptation). It’s a great scifi read. There he took the same idea of humans evolving beyond being human, but not in a controlled manner like you describe, but naturally and a bit bleaker.
Here’s the blurb for the first book:
The first book of the smash-hit Wayward Pines trilogy, from the New York Times bestselling author of Dark Matter, Recursion, and Upgrade
One way in. No way out.
Secret Service agent Ethan Burke arrives in Wayward Pines, Idaho, with a mission: locate two federal agents who went missing in the bucolic town one month earlier. But within minutes of his arrival, Ethan is involved in a violent accident. He comes to in a hospital, with no ID, no cell phone, and no briefcase.
As the days pass, Ethan’s investigation turns up more questions than answers: Why can’t he get any phone calls through to his wife and son in the outside world? Why doesn’t anyone believe he is who he says he is? And what is the purpose of the electrified fences surrounding the town? Are they meant to keep the residents in? Or something else out?
Each step closer to the truth takes Ethan farther from the world he knew, from the man he was, until he must face a horrifying fact—he may never get out of Wayward Pines alive.
The nail-bitingly suspenseful opening installment in Blake Crouch’s blockbuster Wayward Pines trilogy, Pines is at once a brilliant mystery tale and the first step into a genre-bending saga of suspense, science fiction, and horror.
I think that’s what people really ought to fear about our future. Once there are enough of us, once we’ve spread out widely enough, horrors and disgusts the likes of which we speak of in hushed tones praying we never find ourselves even adjacent to them will be cut loose into the universe.
Until we develop means of consistent and viable FTL travel and communication, we’re going to all live with knowing that any heinous act we can possibly imagine is not only playing out somewhere, but the victims of it were probably bred for the purpose of making the show as enjoyable as possible for whatever freaks arrange for it.
Even when we regain the proper footing of being able to enforce basic rules of prevention of the worst things we can imagine, the sickos will always be finding another remote world, another star at the fringes where justice can’t reach reliably yet.
We will live in a universe of untold prosperity, and yet also one of an eternal game of whackamole against the worst kinds of us that could ever exist, and some that can’t yet but will come into existence with what we learn going forward.
Even colonizing the solar system, we will regularly see headlines that force us to ask if we are doing enough to protect others, if everyone can live like kings while some are made to be the victims of Caligula, or of Pol Pot, or of Jim Jones, or of any of the other depraved madmen of history who made those underfoot their playthings for the worst impulses that not even the call of the void dares give an ear to.
Climate change at this rate.
This is why I as a multi billionaire believe we need to work on plan B on Mars.
I know that won’t help the billions of people left on Earth, but at least they can die peacefully, knowing that the richest people will have a chance.
/sYes, you should all go to Mars and have abortions.
Viruses - H1N1 is gonna be bad
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.-Robert Frost
End of mankind - nothing, really. Even with climate change or nuclear war, the rich will live on. It will be a shitty, greedy, undeserving populace that lives on, but mankind will live on.
End of the world as we know it - climate change. I don’t know of anything else more existential
The “end of the world as we know it” happens every day though. Maybe a bit philosophical, but humans are actually very good at handling change. So we will adapt, for better or worse.
PFAS will render us unable to reproduce, while at the same time the ecosystem will collapse to the point we can’t feed ourselves. It’s already begun.
pollution. im not even talking climate change but that we continue to survive generally by polluting more. even when we do things better we just grow more and end up polluting more and eventually we will drop but we will continue by eating our own tale but the result will not be infinite.
the very few who have the wealth and power to raise all of humanity, instead choose to hoard it.
their behaviour and actions will be the eventual end of humanity
I vote starvation. I think a big percent of the world will starve, with a few countries holding out. A bit later I think all those people will starve too, with only like 20 billionaires surviving. And then when THEY run out of food a few years later, I dunno, they’ll OD on drugs?
My prediction is that as pressures mount on all industries, especially food supplies, we’ll start to see large civil unrest leading ultimately to wars which will wipe most of us out first, then famine takes the rest. Agree on a few well off holdouts for a while.
We will evolve beyond mankind into something new…
Man-erkind?
Mannerkind?
Cactus Jack? Mick Foley? Dude Love?
ensuring profits for the next generation of shareholders
Mankind.
“The worst threat to man is man himself” Bangambiki Habyarimana, The Great Pearl of Wisdom
A year ago I would have said climate change for sure, but now WWIII is making a comeback so it’s up for debate.
WW3 isn’t going to wipe out humans, just the largest population & production centers and with that society as we know it. Or it will be underwhelming as fuck and nothing major happens before everyone sits back down.
I think populations will crash, either gently through fewer kids, or violently through war and disease. That will likely throw us backwards technologically, maybe not.
Or, who knows, maybe the population will stabilize and we get everything going in the right direction, then an asteroid hits.
