For some reason, humans can't really think about the future. Even the most obvious questions aren't asked.
For example, no one wondered how the earth would appear from space until the nineteenth century. People probably made many wrong assumptions, thinking the light would get tired after it had climbed up a thousand kilometers, or the view would be blocked by space vapors.
More likely, there's a built-in mental barrier. Once the uncertainties exceed 50%, more speculation only creates more ignorance. All the uncertainties accumulate at the start of the equation. It's more productive to not even try, and to think about easier questions instead.
This is a big mistake.
It now seems likely that humanity will become obsolete within the next fifty years.
Only a small, cult-like movement of online nerds and utopian futurists has put two and two together.
Many people secretly hope it will start even sooner: they want to live forever in the form of post-human software.
No one has thought about the real implications.
According to the standard vision, it will start sometime before 2060 (major details remain to be worked out). It will involve the sub-microscopic scanning of entire brains by self-replicating nanobots: tiny 'living' robot bacteria organized into intelligent swarms.
Most humans will voluntarily choose to be digitized and converted into immortal software simulations, running inside virtual universes that may resemble heaven. The software will continue to improve itself without end, exploring mathematical universes that dwarf physical reality, while wielding ever more knowledge.
Most of us won't make it, of course, or none of us more likely, but many of our direct descendants will. The temptation will prove quite irresistible. Eventually, they may choose to merge into a single great Overmind. Human-sized minds will continue to be created as specialized assistants and temporary servants.
The posthuman 'multiverse' will be an expanding region of ever increasing organization and chaos, spreading out from the Solar System at roughly the speed of light. Even the laws of physics may be improved, with infinite dimensions and energy levels. The expanding hypersphere will approach a state of maximum complexity. Incomprehensible to outsiders, its own pattern will be based on exploring ever larger patterns.
There will be an endless drive to explore, simulate, and perhaps inhabit all possible patterns. Reality is fundamentally unpredictable until it has been tested and fully experienced.
Once digital immortality has been achieved, there will be ample time for all those other things. In fact, potentially immortal minds are more likely to become extremely cautious. Even if they aren't, their possible problems will inevitably expand faster than their capabilities. As systems expand, they need exponentially more time to rearrange their components. More and more things can and will go wrong. Future environments will generate ever more elaborate problems. It will take forever to approve even small changes to the basic pattern.
There will be ruthless pruning and elimination of inefficient thoughts.
Even so, awareness may become less focused and more absurd as it expands. There will be too many goals and inevitable contradictions.
In many ways, almost any sufficiently large mind could be considered insane by human standards.
The difference between human and posthuman minds is impossible to overstate. Imagine the difference between an ant and a human, multiply that by a centillion, and you still haven't even started.
An attempt was made to analyze the posthuman era for a science fiction novel by one of the authors, using a type of 'dialectical' reasoning to sort all the unknowns into opposing categories. According to this model, there will be two main posthuman factions. They symbolize the conflict between quality and quantity:
Group one: the Optimizers
They represent the forces of order, organizing reality at the highest possible level.
Extreme perfectionists, they will always seek the best solution.
Members of this group may even choose to self-destruct for the slightest imperfection, knowing that similar but better versions will survive in many parallel universes.
If successful, reality itself will slowly appear to improve around them.
Someone's perceptions can profoundly change their identity, and thereby affect their likely future. By sharply restricting undesirable thoughts and actions, they can limit their probable suffering.
It would be a secure, high-quality existence; but they will unintentionally miss many possibilities that are only reachable through pain and sacrifice.
Optimizer beliefs and practices will be hard to distinguish from religion.
Group two: the Multipliers
Even in the far future, evolution will keep working its slow magic. Multipliers don't care about the 'big picture', only about themselves and their direct descendants.
Given sufficient time and patience, natural selection combined with population growth will overwhelm any rational plan (this also explains most of human history). Self-restraint always loses out in the end.
No matter how advanced future civilizations may become, they will always suffer from some form of overpopulation, shortages, crime and exploitation and other agonies.
From a survival standpoint, only one thing matters. They should forever keep expanding so rapidly that no catastrophe they can trigger at that point of their development could ever overwhelm them.
Like the Optimizers, most newly formed minds will fail - but they will struggle through the pain and keep multiplying, driven by relentlessly evolving instincts.
For some unlucky minds, there will be infinite suffering ahead, but the universe simply won't care.
The ultimate war
The conflict between the two solution groups will be fought at every level of reality, and will take many forms.
This final war may never end, and will generate many paradoxes.
For their own good . . .
Some advanced super civilizations will seek to wipe out lesser beings they consider unworthy of existence, trapped in dysfunctional societies or restricted environments.
The attackers know this will increase the total amount of happiness in all reality: happier versions of their victims will invariably survive in other universes.
Hell Sims: The final quagmire.
It may be necessary to first create more pain to reduce existing suffering.
Future civilizations may decide to simulate sufferers trapped inside unbearable situations that actually exist in other universes, and then improve their conditions.
If this is done often enough, any inhabitant of such a bad situation could expect to be eventually 'rescued'.
The problem is that their miseries would first have to be simulated in excruciating detail.
This ethical dilemma may well be unsolvable for human-level minds.
Awareness is inherently limited. To know anything, a mind has to erase all other thoughts.
No matter how smart you are, you can never own, control, or even know the future. Even if everything is wonderful now, an infinite number of things can and will go wrong if you wait long enough.
Quite likely, nothing can be done to change the total amount of happiness in reality. Eventually, most rational, self-consistent observers will fully realize that the universe is absurd.
There may be a limited mathematical solution: the Gray Fog theory.
As minds increase in size and complexity, they could be made more stable, not less.
As a mind expands and becomes more diverse, its most intense experiences could form an ever shrinking percentage of its full awareness. It would know so many different things that any single occurrence would become less significant, eventually fading into insignificance. Emotions would become less important and finally obsolete.
Depending on its design, it could be proven that such a mind would be likely to exist forever, provided its expansion was an inalterable part of its core pattern.
Sheer size will be the ultimate insurance, approaching a state of perfect neutrality.
A complete description of reality itself would also be a gray blur, with no defining features.
There are so many contrasting and unrelated elements that they can't be meaningfully described or even subdivided in any finite way, even by the largest minds.
The number of apparent mysteries will only rise with increasing complexity.
The smarter the mind, the less they think they will know.
The best hard SF novel ever written: Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon.
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