My Predictions for the Future

Humans are probably going to reach a point, perhaps pretty soon, where we hit the ceiling of just how much we can understand about the universe. We’re just so smart and no smarter, and there is no reason to believe that we have an unlimited capacity for understanding the mysteries of being. Perhaps our machines will be smarter than us and can understand for us, or perhaps some emergent property of mass communications will be a collective mind that understands much more profoundly than any one of its constituent parts. Probably not. We are going to have to do some serious evolving if we’re going to make it off world.

I reckon that our best bet for seeding the universe will be von Neumann probes, self-replicating machines that carry instructions for terra-forming planets and making humans from scratch from genetic information. These will go into space and find suitable planets to transform, and when the transformation is far enough along they will plant humans on them. Having human colonists travel in person will be too arduous and costly unless some Star Trek faster than light trick is found. Also, it might take centuries to get the planets up to snuff.

I predict that, while we will never exceed say 90% of light speed for objects to travel, we will one day figure out a way to transmit information faster than light. If we can convert ourselves into information we will be able to travel faster than light.

I predict that in the next few centuries humans will colonize the inner solar system, living mostly in self contained space stations. There will be trillions of us; therefore, we will have lots of Einsteins and Newtons. On the other hand, we will have billions of Kagans being wrong about everything all the time. Perhaps we can establish a planet for the Kagans to inhabit and screw up without troubling the rest of us.

Eventually, the Earth will be abandoned almost entirely and turned into a park.