Possible Future Scenarios that Humanity could come across in the future: How do you measure progress of Human Civilization

1. Humanities
The Future?

2. Future of Humanity
Future of Religion
Future of Government
Future of Money
Future of Art
Future of Architecture
Future of Science and Technology
Future of Society
Future of Humans

3. The most instructive way I know to express this cosmic
chronology is to imagine the fifteen-billion-year lifetime of the
universe (or at least its present incarnation since the Big Bang) compressed into the span
of a single year.
Then every billion years of Earth history would correspond to about twenty-four days of our
cosmic year, and one second of that year to 475 real revolutions of the Earth about the sun.
On this scale, the events of our history books-even books that make significant efforts to
deprovincialize the present-are so compressed that it is necessary to give a second-by-
second recounting of the last seconds of the cosmic year.
Even then, we find events listed as contemporary that we have been taught to consider as
widely separated in time.
In the history of life, an equally rich tapestry must have been woven in other periods-for
example, between 10:02 and 10:03 on the morning of April 6th or September 16th. But we
have detailed records only for the very end of the cosmic year.
-Gardens of Eden by Carl Sagan

4. PRE-DECEMBER DATES
• Big Bang ~January 1
• Origin of the Milky Way Galaxy ~ May 1
• Origin of the solar system ~ September 9
• Formation of the Earth ~ September 14
• Origin of life on Earth ~ September 25
• Formation of the oldest rocks known on Earth ~ October 2
• Date of oldest fossils (bacteria and blue-green algae) ~ October 9
• Invention of sex (by microorganisms) ~ November 1
• Oldest fossil photosynthetic plants ~November 12
• Eukaryotes (first cells with nuclei) flourish ~ November 15

5. DECEMBER 31st
• Origin of Proconsul and Ramapithecus, probable ancestors of
apes and men ~ 1:30 P.M.
• First humans ~ 10:30 P.M.
• Widespread use of stone tools ~11:00 P.M.
• Domestication of fire by Peking man ~11:46 P.M.
• Beginning of most recent glacial period ~11:56 P.M.
• Seafarers settle Australia ~11:58P.M.
• Extensive cave painting in Europe ~11:59 P.M.
• Invention of agriculture ~11:59:20 P.M.
• Neolithic civilization; first cities ~11:59:35 P.M.
• First dynasties in Sumer, Ebla and Egypt; development of
astronomy ~11:59:50 P.M.
• Invention of the alphabet; Akkadian Empire ~11:59:51P.M.
• Hammurabic legal codes in Babylon; Middle Kingdom in Egypt
~11:59:52 P.M.
• Bronze metallurgy; Mycenaean culture; Trojan War; Olmec
culture: invention of the compass ~11:59:53 P.M.

6. DECEMBER 31st
• Iron metallurgy; First Assyrian Empire; Kingdom of Israel;
• founding of Carthage by Phoenicia ~11:59:54 P.M.
• Ahsokan India; Ch'in Dynasty China; Periclean Athens; birth of
Buddha ~11:59:55 P.M.
• Euclidean geometry; Archimedean physics; Ptolemaic
astronomy; Roman Empire; birth of Christ ~11:59:56 P.M.
• Zero and decimals invented in Indian arithmetic; Rome falls;
Moslem conquests- ~11:59:57 P.M.
• Mayan civilization; Sung Dynasty China; Byzantine empire;
Mongol invasion; Crusades ~11:59:58 P.M.
• Renaissance in Europe; voyages of discovery from Europe and
from Ming Dynasty China; emergence of the experimental
method in science ~11:59:59 P.M.
• Widespread development of science and technology; emergence of a
global culture; acquisition of the means for self-destruction of the
human species; The first steps in spacecraft planetary exploration
and of the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. ~ Now: first second
of New Year's Day.

7. Understanding Time
The construction of such tables and calendars is inevitably humbling.
It is disturbing to find that in such a cosmic year the Earth does not
condense out of interstellar matter until early September; dinosaurs
emerge on Christmas Eve; flowers arise on December 28th; and men
and women originate at 10:30
P.M. on New Year's Eve.
All of recorded history occupies the last ten seconds of December 31;
and the time from the waning of the Middle Ages to the present occupies
little more than one second.
But because I have arranged it that way, the first cosmic year has just
ended. And despite the insignificance of the instant we have so far
occupied in cosmic time, it is clear that what happens on and near Earth
at the beginning of the second cosmic year will depend very much on
the scientific wisdom and the distinctly human sensitivity of mankind.

8. Future Shock – Culture Shock
The parallel term "culture shock" has already begun
to creep into the popular vocabulary.
Culture shock is the effect that immersion in a
strange culture has on the unprepared visitor.
The culture shock phenomenon accounts for much of
the bewilderment, frustration, and
disorientation that plagues people in their dealings
with other societies. It causes a
breakdown in communication, a misreading of reality,
an inability to cope. Yet culture shock
is relatively mild in comparison with the much more
serious malady, future shock.
Future shock is the dizzying disorientation brought
on by the premature arrival of the future. It may well
be the most important disease of tomorrow.

9. Future Shock – Culture Shock
Future shock is a time phenomenon, a product of the greatly
accelerated rate of change
in society. It arises from the superimposition of a new culture
on an old one. It is culture
shock in one's own society.
Take an individual out of his own culture and set him down
suddenly in an environment sharply different from his own,
with a different set of cues to react to different conceptions of
time, space, work, love, religion, sex, and everything else
then cut him off from any hope of retreat to a more familiar
social landscape, and the dislocation he suffers is
doubly severe.
Moreover, if this new culture is itself in constant turmoil, and
if—worse yet—its values are incessantly changing, the sense
of disorientation will be still further intensified.
Given few clues as to what kind of behaviour is rational under
the radically new circumstances, the victim may well become
a hazard to himself and others.

10. Future Shock Time frame
Painting with the broadest of brush strokes, biologist
Julian Huxley informs us that "The tempo of human
evolution during recorded history is at least 100,000
times as rapid as that of pre-human evolution."
Inventions or improvements of a magnitude that took
perhaps 50,000 years to accomplish during the early
Palaeolithic era were, he says, "run through in a mere
millennium toward its close; and with the advent of
settled civilization, the unit of change soon became
reduced to the century."
The rate of change, accelerating throughout the past
5000 years, has become, in his words, "particularly
noticeable during the past 300 years."

11. Future Shock “Technology”
To most people, the term technology conjures up images
of smoky steel mills or clanking machines. Perhaps the
classic symbol of technology is still the assembly line
created by Henry Ford half a century ago and made into
a potent social icon by Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times.
This symbol, however, has always been inadequate,
indeed, misleading, for technology has always been
more than factories and machines.
The invention of the horse collar in the middle ages led to
major changes in agricultural methods and was as much
a technological advance as the invention of the
Bessemer furnace centuries later.
Moreover, technology includes techniques, as well
as the machines that may or may not be necessary
to apply them.
It includes ways to make chemical reactions occur, ways
to breed fish, plant forests, light theatres, count votes or
teach history.

12. Future Shock “Acceleration”
The old symbols of technology are even more misleading today, when the most
advanced technological processes are carried out far from assembly lines or open hearths.
Indeed, in electronics, in space technology, in most of the new industries, relative silence and clean surroundings are characteristic—even sometimes essential. And the
assembly line—the organization of armies of men to carry out simple repetitive functions—is an anachronism. It is time for our symbols of technology to change—to catch
up with the quickening changes in technology, itself.
This acceleration is frequently dramatized by a thumbnail account of the progress in
transportation.
It has been pointed out, for example, that in 6000 B.C. the fastest transportation available to man over long distances was the camel caravan, averaging eight miles per
hour.
It was not until about 1600 B.C. when the chariot was invented that the maximum speed was raised to roughly twenty miles per hour. So impressive was this invention, so
difficult was it to exceed this speed limit, that nearly 3,500 years later, when the first mail coach began operating in England in 1784, it averaged a mere ten mph.
The first steam locomotive, introduced in 1825, could muster a top speed of only thirteen mph, and the great sailing ships of the time laboured along at less than half that
speed.
It was probably not until the 1880's that man, with the help of a more advanced steam locomotive, managed to reach a speed of one hundred mph. It took the human race
millions of years to attain that record.
It took only fifty-eight years, however, to quadruple the limit, so that by 1938 airborne
man was cracking the 400-mph line. It took a mere twenty-year flick of time to double the
limit again. And by the 1960's rocket planes approached speeds of 4000 mph, and men in
space capsules were circling the earth at 18,000 mph.
Plotted on a graph, the line representing progress in the past generation would leap vertically off the page.

13. Future Shock “Are we blind to change?”
• “You would make a ship sail against the winds and currents by lighting a bonfire under her decks? I have no time for such nonsense.” -
Napoléon Bonaparte
Within a few years ships with sails got replaced by steam ships.
• In 1865 a newspaper editor told his readers that "Well-informed people know that it is impossible to transmit the voice over wires and
that, were it possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value.“
Less than 10 years later Telephone was invented.
• Famous American astronomer, Simon Newcomb, had not long before assured the world that "No possible combination of known
substances, known forms of machinery and known forms of force, can be united in a practical machine by which man shall fly long
distances.“
Just a few years later Wright brother made the first flight.
• "nothing less than feeblemindedness to expect anything to come of the horseless carriage movement.“
6 Years later 1 Million Ford Model T cars were made in Detroit.
• Rutherford, himself, the discoverer of the atom, who said in 1933 that the energy in the
atom's nucleus would never be released.
In 1942 First controlled Chain reaction took place.
Again and again the human brain—including the first class scientific brain—has blinded itself to the novel possibilities of the future, has
narrowed its field of concern to gain momentary reassurance, only to be rudely shaken by the accelerative thrust.
-Future Shock by Alvin Toffler

14. Future of Humanity
▪ Most science fictional and futurist visions of the
future tend towards the negative - and for good
reason. Our environment is a mess, we have a
nasty tendency to misuse technologies, and
we're becoming increasingly capable of
destroying ourselves.
▪ But civilizational demise is by no means
guaranteed. Should we find a way to manage the
risks and avoid dystopic outcomes, our far future
looks astonishingly bright. Here are seven best-
case scenarios for the future of humanity.
▪ But before we go forward it's worth noting that
many of the scenarios listed are not mutually
exclusive. If things go really well, our civilization
will continue to evolve and diversify, leading to
many different types of futures.
Dystopia is an imaginary community or
society that is undesirable or frightening.
It is literally translated as "not-good
place", an antonym of utopia.

15. Status quo
▪ While this is hardly the most exciting
outcome for humanity, it is still an
outcome. we may not be around to see
the next century.
▪ Our ongoing survival even if it's under
our current state of technological
development could be considered a
positive outcome.
▪ Some have even suggested that we've
already reached our pinnacle as a
species.

16. A bright green Earth
▪ Visions of the far future tend to conjure
images of a Cybertron-like Earth, covered
from pole-to-pole in steel and oil. It's an
environmentalist's worst nightmare — one in
which nature has been completely swept
aside by the onslaught of technology and the
ravages of environmental exploitation.
▪ Yet it doesn't have to be this way; the future
of our planet could be far more green and
verdant than we ever imagined.
▪ Emerging branches of futurism, including
technogaianism and bright green
environmentalism, suggest that we can use
technologies to clean up the Earth and
create sustainable energy models, and even
to transform the planet itself.

17. Watched over by
machines of loving grace
▪ Regrettably, it's very possible that the technological
Singularity will be an extinction event. The onset of
radically advanced machine intelligence — perhaps as
early as 30 years from now — will be so beyond our
control and understanding that it will likely do us in,
whether it happens deliberately, accidentally, or by our
own mismanagement of the process.
▪ But the same awesome power that could destroy us
could also result in the exact opposite. It's this
possibility — that a machine intelligence could create
a veritable utopia for humanity
▪ If future AI designers can guide and mould the
direction of these advanced systems and most
importantly their goal orientation it's conceivable that
we could give rise to what's called ‘friendly AI' — a
kind of Asimovian intelligence that's incapable of
inflicting any harm. And in fact, it could also serve as a
supremely powerful overseer and protector.

18. The Three Laws of Robotics or
Asimov's Laws
1. A robot may not injure a human being
or, through inaction, allow a human
being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it
by human beings, except where such
orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence
as long as such protection does not
conflict with the First or Second Law.

19. To boldly go where no one has
gone before...
• We need to get off this rock and start
colonizing other solar systems — there's no
question about it. Not only does our ongoing
survival depend on it (the ‘all our eggs in one
basket problem'), it's also in our nature as a
species to move on.
• Indeed, by venturing beyond our borders and
blowing past our biological limitations we have
continually pushed our society forward — what
has resulted in ongoing technological, social,
political, and economic progress.
• Even today, our limited ventures into space
have reaped countless benefits, including
satellite technologies, an improved
understanding of science — and even the
sheer thrill of seeing a high-definition image
streamed back from the surface of Mars.

20. Inner space, not outer
space
• Alternatively (or in conjunction with
space travel), we could attain an ideal
existential mode by uploading
ourselves into massive
supercomputers.
• It's an idea that makes a lot of sense;
given the computational capacity of a
mega scale computer, like a
Matrioshka Brain (in which the matter
of entire planet is utilized for the
purpose of computation) or Dyson
Sphere (which can capture the energy
output of the sun), there would be
more to experience in a simulated
universe than in the real one itself.

21. Eternal bliss
• Virtually every religion fantasizes
about a utopian afterlife. This only
makes sense given the
imperfections and dangers of the
real world; religion gives people the
opportunity to express their wildest
projections of an ideal state of
existence.
• Given our modern materialist
tendencies, many of us no longer
believe in heaven or anything else
awaiting us in some supposed
afterlife. But that doesn't mean we
can't create a virtual heaven on
Earth using our technologies.
The elimination of all suffering and the onset of perpetual pleasure. This
could be as simple as eliminating pain and negative emotional states, or
something far more dramatic and profound, like maximizing the amount of
psychological, emotional, and physical pleasure that a single
consciousness can experience.

22. Cosmological transcension
• This is basically a place for those far-off
future states we can't possibly imagine —
but are desirable nonetheless.
• While this line of speculation tends to
venture into the realms of philosophy and
metaphysics (not that many of the other
items on this list haven't done the same),
it's still interesting and worthwhile to
consider some super-speculative
possibilities.
• For example, futurist John Smart has
suggested that human civilization is
increasingly migrating into smaller and
smaller increments of matter, energy,
space, and time (MEST). Eventually, he
argues, we'll take our collective intelligence
into a cosmological realm with the same
efficiency and density as a black hole —
where we'll essentially escape the universe.

23. Quantifying The
Development of
Civilization
▪ Kardashev and Barrow Scale
• The Kardashev scale is a
method of measuring a
civilization's level of technological
advancement, based on the
amount of energy a civilization is
able to utilize.
• The scale has three designated
categories called Type I, II, and
III. A Type I civilization uses all
available resources on its home
planet, Type II harnesses all the
energy of its star, and Type III of
its galaxy.

24. Quantifying The
Development of
Civilization
▪ Kardashev and Barrow Scale
• The Barrow Scale is a method of
measuring a civilization's level of
technological advancement, based
on the scale of objects we can
manipulate. i.e. Measurement of
Miniaturization.
• It starts from Humans being able to
manipulate things similar to their
scale and somewhere midway is
human’s ability to manipulate atoms.
• It ends with the Planck constant
where civilization are able to
manipulate space and time’s
structure.

25. The end?