As science and technology continue to rapidly advance, how is humanity predicted to fare?
As AsapSCIENCE points out in a video, over the last century and a half, the average height of a human being has shot up by about 10 centimeters (4 inches), and within the last 65 years, the global lifespan has jumped nearly 20 years.
Breakthroughs in science and technology are largely responsible for advancing humanity to the point it’s at today, but as both fields continue to develop at increasingly rapid rates, where will we be in 1000 years?
AsapSCIENCE tackles the question in their video below, and these are some of their key points:
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Scientists predict that in the next few decades, computers will reach the computational speed of the human brain — this entails speaking, interacting, listening, and remembering.
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Nanotechnology may bring about an era of “transhumanism.” As Ray Kurzweil, Google’s chief futurist, predicts, nanobots will be injected into the bloodstream in the future, essentially morphing our brains into part biological and part nonbiological organisms. Humans will then evolve a new type of thinking, called hybrid thinking.
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The 7,000 languages that are spoken today will likely dip under 100.
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Darker skin may become an evolutionary advantage, protecting humans against the added UV radiation reaching the planet.
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New traits from mutations may arise — perhaps a new eye color or the ability to see hundreds of thousands more colors than we can today (a condition called tetrachromacy, which a small group of people living today already have).
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We may be able to scan our brains, atom for atom, and upload our consciousness into computers. Theoretically, this would enable us to live forever in infinite virtual worlds.
