Human beings are the only intelligent life on the earth and the only intelligent civilization in the universe currently known. After entering the technological era, with the help of technology, mankind has a preliminary understanding of the world and the universe. Through the research and exploration of life on earth, we discovered a very cruel fact, that is, any kind of life cannot last forever and will disappear one day.
We must know that the earth has a long life history of 4 billion years, and in such a long time, I do not know how many biological races were born, and these races were extinct and disappeared in the later development. Even 65 million years ago, the dinosaurs that dominated the earth for 160 million years did not survive in the end. Instead, they disappeared in the ecological upheaval caused by the impact of the asteroid on the earth.
So can human beings escape the fate of disappearance? Many people may think that human beings are intelligent life and have formed civilization, which is fundamentally different from other creatures. Therefore, other creatures will disappear one day, but human beings will not. Is this really the case?
Astrophysicist J. Richard Gott of Princeton University used a mathematical formula based on the “Copernicus Principles” to boldly predict the future of mankind in 1993, and published relevant papers in the journal Nature On the above, he pointed out in the article that there is a great chance that humans will disappear before 2779.
Why did J. Richard Gott have such a bold prediction? Is it a wild guess without any basis? Of course not. This is a bold prediction made by scientists through rigorous mathematical reasoning. This prediction suggests that humans may disappear in 2779. This disappearance is different from the disappearance mode of species extinction. It is a possible result of our own active choice after the development of human technology to a certain extent.
Someone may ask, what is going on? Let’s briefly make some scientific reasoning below. We all know that mankind has now entered the age 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 have brought us beauty, it has also brought 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. Scientists predict that the average temperature of the earth will rise by 1 degree Celsius by 2045. Don’t underestimate this. At that time, the earth’s ecological environment will be at risk of collapse. At this time, human beings all over the world have realized the seriousness of the problem and have begun to actively use cleaner energy sources.
It’s just that the ecology of the earth has been destroyed too severely. Although more and more people are beginning to use clean energy at this time, the core of technological development is still inseparable from fossil energy, so the trend of global warming is still unstoppable. Extreme weather is beginning to sweep the world, and by 2056, millions of species may become extinct.
At the same time, some areas on the earth are no longer suitable for human survival. More than 140 million humans were forced to migrate. At this time, the population of the earth reached 10 billion, reaching a limit that the earth can bear. By 2080, biological gene technology and nanotechnology have been rapidly developed, human beings are free from the troubles of diseases, and their life expectancy has also increased significantly.
By the end of this century, global temperatures have further increased, sea levels have risen sharply, and a large amount of land has been submerged by sea water. But at this time, with the joint efforts of mankind, global warming has been brought under control, and mankind has begun to build bases on the moon and Mars to prepare for future human migration.
In 2180, the long-awaited controlled nuclear fusion was finally completed and put into use. The full application of controllable nuclear fusion also marks a qualitative leap in human civilization. We have more powerful power technology and can build new homes outside the earth. At this time, the lunar base has been fully completed, and the first batch of lunar residents have also moved from the earth to the moon.
With controllable nuclear fusion, mankind has completely abandoned fossil energy, and the earth has truly ushered in an era of pollution-free. The ecological environment is constantly improving. In the years that followed, humans began to expand into the solar system, constantly transforming Mars, making it the second habitable planet. At the same time, humans have also built many giant space stations in the solar system that use nuclear fusion to generate energy, and built large space cities.
When mankind develops into space in an all-round way, in order to adapt to the complex and harsh space environment, mankind has begun to consciously and continuously reform its own body, the method is through genetic optimization and integration with machinery. By 2500, mankind had become a true interstellar civilization, with more powerful biological gene technology.
Humans at this time may be quite different from our current humans. They have higher intelligence, stronger power, and longer lifespan, but in exchange for the semi-mechanization of the body. The rapid development of science and technology has also allowed us to study quantum computers in the true sense. With quantum computers, 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 have all hoped to achieve immortality, and from the perspective of science, the body can never be immortal. Although it is impossible to achieve immortality through the body, scientists have explored a new path and began to study the possibility of immortality from the perspective of consciousness.
The reason why human beings call it intelligent life is mainly because we have a distinctive consciousness. As long as we crack the mystery of consciousness, perhaps we can achieve immortality. With the help of quantum computers, it only took more than 100 years for humans to crack the mystery of consciousness hidden in the brain, making the transfer of human consciousness into In 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, all human consciousness had been transferred, and we finally realized an alternative immortality. But can human beings at this time still be called humans? If compared with the current human beings, the human being in 2779 is a kind of mechanical consciousness life form, and it is no longer the human life in our cognition. Therefore, at that time, human beings may have been 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 science and technology development, the above development processes are basically achievable. Although there may be some obvious differences in time, in the future, whether it is controllable nuclear fusion, biological gene technology, genetic machinery technology, consciousness transfer technology, etc., we need to realize on the road of scientific and technological development.
If human beings crack the mystery of consciousness in the future and have the technology of consciousness transfer, let me ask, who can resist the temptation of immortality?