These YouTubers are obsessed with what humans (and humanity) will look like in the future
Humans could begin colonising the universe. They could also go extinct.
What will it mean to be human 100 years from now? How different will the world be 1,000 years from now? And for the vain amongt us, what will people look like 5,000 years from now? These videos attempt to explain the answers to these questions.
In the trailer for Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World, German filmmaker Werner Herzog's upcoming film about the internet, one of the scientists interviewed talks about a future where we can tweet thoughts. In the past, futurist Ray Kurzweil, known for making bold predictions that often come true, said that humanity will attain immortality by 2045. Elon Musk, who has claimed it was very unlikely that human beings were not living in a computer game, too, added to this bombastic talk of the future when he unveiled a plan to make an express train to Mars.
With so many technological changes planned to take place over the next few years, it has become a major pasttime for YouTubers to envisage what the Earth and humanity will look like decades and millennia from now.
The video above offers a vision of humanity, a century from now. By 2116, what can be said with certainity is that "our lifespans will be enhanced dramatically and we will be healthier longer".
ASAP Science talks about humans in 3116. In a nutshell, technology will reach the computational ability of human brains, with growing urbanisation, something called "utility fog" will come into vogue. A group of "countless microscopic robots that can be rearranged into virtually anything".
There is also the process of evolution to consider. Something that is happening slowly but steadily over hundreds of thousands of years. As a result of this, humans will look vastly different from what they look like right now. Mathew Skinner, paleoanthropologist from the University of Kent, imagines how humans might evolve in three future scenarios: in a globally warmed future world where humans have retreated underwater, in colonies on other planets, and an ice age caused by a drastic reduction in the Earth's temperature.
What would a future race, who arrives 100,000,000 from now, find on Earth? There would be on chemical signature that these future explore would not miss. Residue from the detonation of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.