I’m not sure “evolution” is on the table for humanity any longer. For one thing, evolutionary pressures don’t really exist for humanity, outside of the most undeveloped areas.
Not making it to “breeding age” (feels weird to say that in the context of humans) doesn’t really have anything to do with fitness any longer, more just luck.
Add in the fact that we basically already have the ability to manipulate human genes - and I think it’s far more likely that we’ll just start tinkering with our genetic code deliberately, as opposed to what we think of as evolution
Humans will go through a period of devolution now, where the population will get even lazier and dumber. It’s clearly one of the goals to dumb people down so they can be controlled by their simple urges.
I feel sorry for kids today. It’s going to be rough growing up in this shit hole.
Everyone is getting stupider except you right? Like you’re not one of the dumbed down lazy people are you? or your loved ones?
People have said this shit since we have written records.The whole idea of fallen man is the foundation of the Abrahamic religions, probably others I don’t know of too.
People are doing alright, actually go talk to some. Yeah yeah a lot aren’t crazy educated but even the most educated intellectual titans of our age are uneducated in the overwhelming majority of things.
We do alright, there are many problems but they’re not because people are getting less intelligent. We are no smarter or stupider than the first humans, or at least we have no reason to believe otherwise. We have better access to information and we’re also facing some very large problems, but so did bronze age people.
Read the epic of Gilgamesh, it’ll chill you out some.
The youth is doomed, it’s been known since the dawn of time.
I don’t think there will be one. We’re extremely close to taking control of our genes in a very direct way, why would we continue leaving it up to nature?
Also, there’s just really no longer any natural selection in humans. Basically all of us last through breeding years now. So other than selecting out acute health issues and normal mate selection, there’s not much going on.
I think there IS still natural selection in humans, and it is relatively new: birth control.
I suspect that those with religious/conservative beliefs who will not take morning-after or birth control pills AND those irresponsible people who theoretically might – but didn’t think about it until too late – will be two groups that increase their numbers while more responsible/fore-thinking people and those without moral objection to the pill (or perhaps WITH moral objection to overpopulating the planet) will be more likely to cap their number of offspring. Yes, this was kinda covered in the movie Idiocracy, but I don’t think it was that far off.
Most likely women will be able to give birth much later in life.
With equality on the rise, many women are joining the workplace instead of having kids at a young age. By the time they want to, for some, it’s too late - But for those who can give birth into their early 40s and beyond, they’ll still have kids. Evolutionarily, those kids will then have a higher chance to give birth into their 40s, and so on.
I personally don’t think humans will be around long enough to naturally evolve given the climate crisis.
In an alternate future, I imagine humans live digitally and build themselves their own universe where they can control their own laws of physics and create simulations in that universe and live inside those. Never ending simulation in simulation so that they can outlast the heat death of the universe.
Humanity survived ice ages, it’s plausible any climate catastrophe will just be a bottlenecking event.
You’re right, but I want to note that climate collapse is a little more serious than an ice age. For one thing, the ocean is turning into acid. That’s because CO2 reacts with seawater to make carbonic acid. The pH of the ocean is balanced by calcium carbonate which can neutralise acids, but once the carbonate runs out, the pH will change WAY faster. Also, calcium carbonate is needed by crustaceans to make their shells. No carbonate means no crustaceans, which means no krill, which means the entire ocean food chain will collapse.
@PerogiBoi you still have the problem of hardware. Once that gets destroyed, every bit of information on that is lost forever. Maybe if we could find a way to be stored in rocks or trees or something like that. We would likely share some space with bacteria in that situation lol.
I sure hope it’s not extinction!
