Lecture 47: The Next Millennium and the Remote Future
an entire new epoch of human history. Innovation may generate sustainable
technologies that we can barely imagine. They may include new energy
sources (such as hydrogen fusion) and biotechnologies that create new food
sources, eliminate most forms of ill-health, and prolong human life. New
social structures may include mechanisms for reducing violent conÀ ict and
generating more sustainable notions of progress and well-being.In reality, of course, the future will probably fall between these extremes.
What new things will we learn? Here are areas where there could be
profound scienti¿ c and technological breakthroughs in the next millennium.
Quite soon, we may ¿ nd evidence for the existence of planets similar to the
Earth. Will we also ¿ nd evidence for the existence of life elsewhere in the
Universe? At present, the speed with which bacterial life appeared on our
planet makes it seem likely that life of some kind is widespread.We are less likely to ¿ nd evidence for creatures like us, capable of collective
learning. On Earth it has taken almost 4 billion years to evolve such a
species. And a lot of luck was involved. In a famous study of the Cambrian
fossils of the Burgess Shale (in the Canadian Rockies), Stephen Jay Gould
argued that biological evolution can take many utterly different pathways.
On the other hand, Simon Conway, another specialist on the Burgess
Shale fossils, has argued that the number of evolutionary pathways may be
limited, which makes the evolution of species like us more probable. If our
descendants survive disaster, are there new thresholds of complexity waiting
to be crossed? Perhaps, like eukaryotic cells in the Cambrian era, they will
become so interdependent that they will turn into a single Earth-spanning
organism, capable of managing “Gaia.”Our descendants might start migrating again, leaving this Earth just as
our ancestors migrated from Africa and through the Paci¿ c. Many of the
technologies already exist for migration to the planets and moons of our
solar system. But we have none of the technologies needed to reach other
star systems. If our descendants do migrate to distant star systems, will they
create a vast archipelago like the colonies of Polynesia? If so, will collective
learning occur at stellar scales? Or will the distances be so huge that human
communities will become isolated culturally, and even genetically? If so,
our species will split by allopatric speciation into numerous closely related