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skeptical_lurker comments on Open Thread, May 25 - May 31, 2015 - Less Wrong
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I'd say well over 80%. The probability of the whole of humanity deciding to stop technological development, and actually successfully co-coordinating this is minimal. Even if the human mind cannot be run on a classical computer, we would still tile the universe with quantum computronium.
You people sound awfully sure about far-off future. How well, do you think, an educated Egyptian from, say, 2000 BC would have fared at predicting the future path of the society?
Was there any noticeable technological progress back in 2000 BC?
Looking at science fiction from the 19th century, aerial warfare, armoured land warfare, space exploration were all predicted. The details were all wrong, and I doubt we can predict the details of the future with any great accuracy. But the general theme of humanity expanding across the universe seems a safe extrapolation, even if I don't know whether the starships will be beam riders or ramscoops or wormhole navigators or Alcubierre drive or some other technology that has not yet been conceived.
Shitloads. Empires rose and fell as they obsoleted each other's military technologies, architecture evolved tremendously, crop plants diversified and became more nutritious, extractive farming techniques gave way to those that preserved the fertility of the soil rather than stripmining it, new naval technology was partially responsible for the late bronze age collapse... (yes I'm aware these gradiate towards 1000 BC)
What makes you think that in 4000 years people will think there was noticeable technological progress in the XXI century?
Actually, no, if the limit of the speed of light holds, either there won't be much expansion or the result of the expansion won't be very human.
Fairly well for the next 3000 years since not a lot changed.
Well for starters his decedents would no longer be ruled by someone (purporting to be) a living incarnation of the sun god. Something he would no doubt consider extremely shocking.
So we have gone from worshiping the sun god to worshiping the son of god.
Nice pun. Now do you have a serious response?
The life of a typical Egyptian didn't much change from 2000 BC to 1000 AD. And for most of this time the leaders claimed to have a strong connection or endorsement from the divine. An educated Egyptian living in 2000 BC would be aware of the diversity of religion in the world and would probably expect that over the next 3000 years religious practices would change in form in his country.
And yet I feel you don't want to follow that example of success :-P
Are you joking?
No, the life of the average human didn't much change from 2000 BC to 1000 AD.
Jim
If not for the Fermi paradox, I would agree.
Good point! I would have thought the great filter probably lies in our past, most likely with the origin of life or perhaps multicellular life, but the Fermi paradox is still information against space colonisation.
It's also unfortunately a distinctly uninformative piece of evidence about anything but space colonization and exponential expansion. All it tells us is that nothing self-replicates across the galaxy to a scale we could see in sheer infrared emissions or truly ridiculous levels of active attempts to be visible. There are so many orders of magnitude and divergent possibilities of things that could exist that we simply wouldn't know about right now given the observations we have made.