Humans will have also evolved into new kinds of immortal/superintelligent beings that would be totally unrecognizable to us.
It may be the case once a civilization reaches "max level" they universally decide to "reset the game" because there's nothing left to do. Maybe self-destruction or maybe they "spawn" a new universe. The possibilities are wild.
There’s no reason beyond wishful thinking to believe any of that is true.
Your statement that progress or intelligence is binary has no basis outside of intentional and ignorant pessimism.
In what basis do you presume our progress will continue exponentially?
I’ll take pessimism over wishful thinking.
We've only been in "technological takeoff" for ~250 years and are already using spaceships and computers to deliver and operate drones on Mars.
Now imagine 250 years + 1,000,000 years.
Even if 99.99% of people died from an asteroid, it might only take a few hundred (or thousand) years to rebuild the population and the world.
And once humans live on multiple planets, which is likely within 100 years, the odds of permanent extinction become remote.
It's not just that we need to have people living on another planet, we need a fully self-sufficient civilization on another planet which is at least 200+ years of sustained effort probably more because it took that long under the relatively ideal and easy conditions of simply settling another continent. Then factor in that their civilization would be even more precarious than ours and face many more dangers.
Life is still likely (not guaranteed) to escape Earth one way or another, however long it takes and however many attempts it takes.
Not sure what your definition of "cohesive" is but we've had our civilization going for ~5000 years with only regional setbacks.
We know how much ice is on land, people have spent decades drilling the ice and calculating it's volume etc, we know it's melting because there's way less of it now than there was just decades ago and we know how much that melted ice will influence water levels.
We know the effect greenhouse gases have on the atmosphere and global temperatures, people have made scientifically informed charts predicting how the temperature will rise decades ago and we are right on track.
The prediction happened when I was a child, and all my life I've watched the prediction come true. The fact that there's still millions if not billions of people out there who are living through the same situation and still think climate change is a hoax is absolutely baffling to me. Just look at a fucking global average temperature chart for the past few decades holy shit man it's not a secret the planet is cooking. It's not maybe going to cook 500 years from now it's cooking right now and it's getting worse every year how can you possibly look at these simple clear facts and not understand that it's going to continue?
You guys annoy me so much holy shit open your eyes and just look at the world we live in
You're not using "science" to predict the future. You're just expressing a pessimistic belief that we're doomed for some specific reason.
To me, optimism seems far more justified based on our track record, we've more-or-less solved some big problems:
- "Population growth is going to cause worldwide famine"
- "We are going to run out of oil and civilization will collapse"
- "The ozone hole is going to expose everyone to dangerous radiation"
- "Acid rain is going to destroy forests and kill lakes"
- "City air pollution is going to make major cities unlivable"
- and smallpox/polio/HIV/leaded gasoline/etc