What Will Happen in the Next One Billion Years
The recent Covid crisis has made one thing extremely clear: the state of human civilization is fickle and fragile. The world is faced with a pandemic, climatic disaster, economic downturn, and an array of other problems.
Technological progress in vaccine development may have helped us out of the current crisis, but will we be able to survive through the onslaught of disasters that await us far into the future?
Today, humanity may recuperate, but hundreds of generations later, will we continue to pave our way out of the trials and tribulations that nature thrusts onto us? If we travel a billion years into the future, will an advanced human civilization greet us, or will we be faced with a bleak dystopian wasteland?
An Uninhabitable Earth: Ice and Fire Will Take Over
A mere 10,000 years into our collective future, the natural structures that adorn the Earth will begin to change rapidly. Some suggest that the Earth could largely be covered in ice, whereas others believe that the Earth will be filled with giant volcanoes that spew lava akin to a dragon that breathes hellfire.
From a technological perspective, the year 10,000 could be the year that a software problem, the Deca Millennium Bug, renders most computational systems obsolete.
Around the same time, the genetic variation amongst humans will become so low that the phenotypic differences across the different regions of the world will cease to exist. Essentially, humans around the various parts of the world will begin to look similar to each other.
Life After 20,000 Years
A bit further, around 20,000 years into the future, the languages we use to communicate today, will be unrecognizable to future humans. Scientists prophesize the 50,000-year mark to be the start of a new ice age, the second of its kind in Earth’s history. Even the rotation of the Earth will begin to change, creating a one-second…
