[ExI] BBC Future's timeline of the far future

[Anders Sandberg]

On 2014-01-13 21:17, Adrian Tymes wrote:
>
> On Jan 13, 2014 7:28 AM, "steinhoff" <steinhoff_j at hotmail.com 
> <mailto:steinhoff_j at hotmail.com>> wrote:
> >
> > 
> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140105-timeline-of-the-far-future?utm_source=DGM&utm_campaign=Affiliate
>
> The punchline is, of course, that this only happens if we don't do 
> something about it first.
>

Yup. Down the road from me there is a 1000-year old building, still 
standing and in good condition. The reason it is still standing and not 
just a pile of overgrown rubble is of course that people have been 
maintaining it.

The problem about talking about the long-term future is that it is so 
dependent on human decisions, not natural laws. If humans decide to 
maintain a building it can last indefinitely. If humans decide to make a 
species extinct (smallpox) or help it spread worldwide (ginkgo biloba), 
it will change the future evolution of that branch of the tree of life. 
If humans decide to colonize the universe it will become full of life. 
This makes the long-term fate of many systems contingent on nearly 
arbitrary cultural decisions rather than simple probabilities derived 
from the laws of nature.


[ In a sense cultural decisions can be viewed as derived from the laws 
of nature, but there is likely no way their probabilities can be 
practically estimated from the laws. They are highly dependent on 
several underlying layers of emergent complexity (biochemistry, biology, 
human psychology, human sociology) that have many degrees of freedom 
that can be randomly set by symmetry-breaking and contingency. ]

-- 
Dr Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Oxford University

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