astronomer
Albert einstein
Human beings are the only intelligent life on Earth and the only intelligent civilization in the universe known at present. After human beings entered the era of science and technology, with the help of science and technology, they had a preliminary understanding of this world and this universe. Through the study and exploration of life on earth, we have found a very cruel fact, that is, any kind of life cannot last forever, and there is a day to disappear.
It should be known that the earth has a long history of life for 4 billion years, and in such a long period of time, I don't know how many biological races have been born, and these races have disappeared in later development. Even the dinosaurs that dominated the earth for 65 million years ago did not survive, but disappeared in the ecological upheaval caused by the asteroid's impact on the earth.
So can humanity escape the fate of disappearing? Many people may think that human beings are intelligent beings, and they have also formed a civilization, which is essentially different from other creatures, so other creatures will disappear one day, while humans will not.
J. Richard Gott, an astrophysicist at Princeton University, boldly predicted the future of mankind in 1993 using a mathematical formula based on the Copernican principle, and published the paper in the journal Nature, in which he pointed out that there is a good chance that humans will disappear before 2779.
Why did J. Richard Gort make such a bold prophecy? Is it unfounded speculation? Of course not, this is a bold prediction made by scientists through rigorous mathematical reasoning, which suggests that humanity may disappear in 2779. This disappearance is different from the disappearance pattern of species extinction, and it is a possible result of our own active choice after the development of human technology to a certain extent.
Some people may ask, what is going on? Let's briefly carry out some scientific reasoning. We all know that mankind has now entered the era of science and technology, and in the future we will continue to move forward in the direction of science and technology. While science and technology bring us beauty, it also brings us a series of ecological and environmental problems.
With the rapid development of human science and technology, the ecology of the earth is also deteriorating rapidly, and scientists expect that by 2045, the average temperature of the earth will rise by 1 degree Celsius, but do not underestimate this, when the ecological environment of the earth will face the risk of collapse. By this time, humanity around the world had realized the magnitude of the problem and was actively using cleaner energy sources.
However, because the earth's ecology has been destroyed too badly, although more and more people have begun to use clean energy at this time, the core of scientific and technological development is still inseparable from fossil energy, so the trend of global warming is still unstoppable. Extreme weather is beginning to sweep the globe, and by 2056 millions of species could disappear as a result.
At the same time, some areas of the earth are no longer suitable for human survival, more than 140 million human beings have been forced to migrate, and the population of the earth has reached 10 billion at this time, reaching a limit that the earth can withstand. By 2080, biogen technology and nanotechnology have developed rapidly, and human beings have been freed from the problem of disease, while life expectancy has also increased significantly.
By the end of the century, global temperatures had risen further, sea levels had risen dramatically, and large amounts of land had been submerged by seawater. Only this time, with the joint efforts of humans, global warming was controlled, and humans began to build bases on the moon and Mars to prepare for future human migration.
By 2180, the long-awaited controlled nuclear fusion was finally completed and put into use. The full application of controlled nuclear fusion also marks that human civilization will usher in a qualitative leap, and we have more powerful power technology to build a new home beyond the earth. At this time, the lunar base had been fully completed, and the first lunar inhabitants were also transferred from the Earth to the moon.
With controlled nuclear fusion, human beings have completely abandoned fossil energy, and the earth has truly ushered in an era of pollution-free. The ecological environment is also improving, and in the years that followed, humans began to expand into the solar system, constantly transforming Mars to become the second habitable planet. At the same time, human beings have also built many giant space stations in the solar system that use nuclear fusion to convert energy, and built large space cities.
When human beings fully developed into space, in order to adapt to the complex and harsh space environment, human beings began to consciously and continuously modify their bodies, through genetic optimization and integration with machinery. By 2500, humans had become a true interstellar civilization, with more powerful biological genetic technology.
Human beings at this time may have been very different from our current human beings, they have higher intelligence, stronger strength, and longer lifespans, but in exchange for the semi-mechanization of the body. The rapid development of science and technology has also allowed us to develop a real sense of quantum computers, and after the quantum computer, scientists began to focus on exploring the problem of consciousness transfer.
Consciousness is the greatest secret of the human body, from ancient times to the present, we all expect to be able to achieve eternal life, and from the perspective of science, the body can never be immortal. Although immortality cannot be achieved through the body, scientists have taken a new path and begun to study the possibility of immortality from the perspective of consciousness.
The main reason why human beings call it intelligent life is because we have a different consciousness. As long as the mystery of consciousness is solved, perhaps we can achieve immortality, with the help of quantum computers, human beings have only spent more than 100 years to crack the mystery of consciousness hidden in the brain, making the transfer of human consciousness a reality, in order to realize the dream of immortality, people have chosen to upload their consciousness to the cloud, or transfer to a more robust mechanical body.
By 2779, the consciousness of all human beings had been transferred, and we had finally achieved an alternative immortality. But can humans at this time still be called human beings? If we compare with today's human beings, the human beings of 2779 are a kind of mechanically conscious life, which is no longer the human life we know. So, at that time, human beings may already be another kind of intelligent life, in a sense, the human beings in our cognition have disappeared.
According to rigorous mathematical reasoning and the future direction of human scientific and technological development, the above development process is basically achievable. Although there may be some obvious differences in time, in the future, whether it is controlled nuclear fusion, biological gene technology, gene mechanical technology, consciousness transfer technology, etc., we need to achieve on the road of scientific and technological development.
If human beings have cracked the mystery of consciousness in the future, with the technology of consciousness transfer, who can resist the temptation of eternal life?