Do you ever wonder...

Emp_Fab

What life will be like in your vicinity in the year 11,542 ?  Well, not that actual date specifically, but massively into the future ?

Even 'massively' isn't an appropriate word....  'modern' humans have been around for five times that, so another nine thousand years is nothing, and in geological terms, it's the blink of an eye.

There will still be mountains and rivers, grassy fields, clouds, sunshine, birds and moonlit nights, but every single one of us, our children, our grandchildren - will be remembered by no-one.  We will have become nothing.  Our homes, our iconic buildings, our cathedrals of modern life all gone.  Our entire existences reduced to nothing more than the odd statistic in some rarely viewed encyclopaedia of ancient history.  It will be a completely different planet, with effectively, a different 'species' populating it - as removed from us as we are from the early humans drawing animals on cave walls.

Wouldn't you like to be able to see it ?...  I wonder what it will be like.

Sorry.... Existential Emp is at it again !

Edit: ...and nobody will ever have heard of Justin Beever. :-)

ICBM

Read 'Against The Fall Of Night' or 'The City And The Stars' (basically the same story, re-written) by Arthur C. Clarke - it's set a billion years in the future. I don't know of any sci-fi with a greater imaginative time leap.

... except possibly the last part of H.G.Wells' 'The Time Machine', which is truly astonishing given when it was written.

digitalscream

Emp_Fab said:

What life will be like in your vicinity in the year 11,542 ?  Well, not that actual date specifically, but massively into the future ?

No, but I do kinda wish I'd be able to make it to about 2150. Obviously that's a total non-starter no matter how you cut it (2060-ish is probably about as far as I can hope for), but I'd love to see how far we get in the medium term; it's an exciting time for the human race in terms of development. Assuming we don't bomb each other into oblivion, of course.

Emp_Fab

I'll be gone before you mate - in all probability.  Not that I'm getting all morbid about it, not at all, it just seems a shame that we'll never get to see the magical things that are undoubtedly on their way.

Who knows... we might be the ones living in the 'magical era' now.  It might all go tits-up in the next 50 years with some incurable deadly virus, or Kim Jong Tubby might get a rubbish present one birthday and decide to take it out on everyone with his nukes.

It might be like 'Escape from New York' - or it might be like Star Trek.  Talking of films, I love 'The Time Machine' - the 2002 remake...  it encapsulates what I'm getting at with the changes over such vast time periods.  It's not a great film, but it's better than the original with all that Captain Kirk, early Star Trek, cheesy macho vibe and over the top acting.

Wow... imagine having a time machine...  how awesome would that be ?!.. (in the true sense of the word)

Emp_Fab

@ICBM Cheers for the book recommendations - I'll check those out.

Edit:  It's funny when you think about it, given that "Our entire existences <will be> reduced to nothing more than the odd statistic in some rarely viewed encyclopaedia of ancient history." - it makes the 'importance' of all of your current worries and woes crumble into the nothingness they really are.  In less than a hundred years, you will be gone... forgotten forever - and it won't have made the slightest difference what you did with your life.  Nobody will care - they'll all be too busy focussing on their own 'important' lives.

Fuck... I'm even quoting myself now.  I think I need to up the dose of some of my tablets.

Have you ever stuck a banana in a BADGER ?

Badger...

Badger........

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIyixC9NsLI

chillidoggy

Also, John Varley's "Millenium" I found to be entertaining, and slightly worrying. The book, not the film, though.

chillidoggy

Also, John Varley's "Millenium" I found to be entertaining, and slightly worrying. The book, not the film, though.

Emp_Fab

Didn't Robbie Williams write that ?

Emp_Fab

Didn't Robbie Williams write that ?

randomhandclaps

My prediction is by 11,542 laminate flooring will be a thing of the past.

Phil_aka_Pip

If humans are around there are unlikely to be any grassy fields, or birds or sunshine or moonlit nights. The mountains will still be there (unless we dug them up for minerals), the rivers will be sludgepits of pollution, the clouds will be likewise toxic waste, obscuring the sunshine and the moonlight.

On the other hand if we blew each other to kingdom come by 2150, then maybe the other orders of animal and plant life could have taken over and left the scenario that @Emp_Fab first posited ...

digitalscream

Phil_aka_Pip said:

If humans are around there are unlikely to be any grassy fields, or birds or sunshine or moonlit nights. The mountains will still be there (unless we dug them up for minerals), the rivers will be sludgepits of pollution, the clouds will be likewise toxic waste, obscuring the sunshine and the moonlight.

I'm not convinced...if humans have managed to survive that long, then we'll either have figured out how to manage the ecosystem in a more sensible manner to preserve it, or wipe it out entirely and put a more efficient, human-centric one in its place to avoid pollution and the like.

ICBM

I saw that 'Life After People' documentary a while back - the idea being to see what would be left (or at least visible above the surface) after various amounts of time if humanity was suddenly wiped out.

The human artifact most likely to survive the longest was reckoned to be Mount Rushmore, at around a quarter of a million years or more. So they used the wrong monument in the original Planet Of The Apes - the Statue Of Liberty would disappear completely within a few hundred years.

What's possibly more worrying is that the radioactive signatures of nuclear power stations and waste processing plants will survive for a *lot* longer than that.

maltingsaudio

Too early to contemplate eternity need my fourth fag and third cup of tea in the meantime here's some on hold music

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yesyhQkYrQM

ESBlonde

In our short history many civilisations have come and gone, yet each thought they were king of the hill. Even in our own times we can see recent history of the British Empire ascend and fall, the American Influence rise and now begin to fall, next will be the Asian/Chinese ascendancy. How long that last is anyone's guess but predicting how the human beings will be based on our modern western perception is probably deeply flawed.

Phil_aka_Pip

suspiciousminds

I think we'll be long gone by then.
If we havent destroyed the planet by our own doing, then i really think nature will find a way of putting us in our place.

bertie

Emps flooring might just be down by then

Phil_aka_Pip

and a toaster that satisfies Chilli's requirements might have been invented

mike_l

bertie said:

Emps flooring might just be down by then

Bit optimistic...

johnnyurq

The problem is that mankind is not a coherent and non belligerent entity and as long as we cannot work together to solve the bigger issues that could end our reign on Earth, we will become a footnote like most of the previous so called civilizations.

Of course even if we get all "Star Trek" in our limited way the Universe and mother nature may very well end us whatever we do.

Unless of course we can put tribal violence, pursuit of wealth and the old dog eat dog manta and principles behind us our time here is limited I reckon.

Like @Emp_Fab the fact I will not be around to see whatever wonderful or dystopian future lies ahead saddens me, not death per se.

But as an optimist I hope we can evolve to a higher state where we can work together as a species and add good husbandry of the planet we are on, I reckon we have a shot at it.

But we need to keep one eye on Space travel in case we "screw the pooch" any further than we have and have to GTF ASAP..