Where Do You Think Humanity Will be in 100,000 Years?

Where Do You Think Humanity Will be in 100,000 Years? 1,000,000?

I find this question interesting and ask myself this occasionally when world-building for stories/RPGs. Originally I pondered the question when reading works like Steven Erikson's Malazan series. The history spans a massive amount of time, 300,000 years is mentioned at one point. Yet they never managed gunpowder or steam engines. (I haven't finished this series btw) I get a bit irritated when you see things like 10,000 years histories with absolutely no concrete reasoning for why the technology has been stunted. Some authors have used prodigious magic as a work-around to the tech problem. I get it magic could very easily replace technology in some ways. Certainly stunt it. But it's a cop out now if it's not well done. Other authors (better authors) like Brandon Sanderson outright plan for it and utilize it in their series.  Then you have J. Michael Straczynski who creates an episode of Babylon 5 set so far in the future we're incorporeal and watching Sol die. You have Christopher Nolan posing the question in Interstellar from our viewpoint. (Actually I got that it was future-humans pretty early on.)

Will we reach a breakthrough that makes humanity laugh at our previous complete dependence/belief that Math is a universal language?

Will we all be dead? (Why?)

Will anything be recognizable from now to our earlier selves?

Whatcha think?




Shoot your shit.