The 21st Century: Our Journey to Immortality or Extinction

October 15, 2016 – It is the Ides of October and I have resolved after seven years of writing this blog to attempt a synthesis of much of its content into a book which will bear the title that heads up this posting.

The human journey in the 21st century is one that I believe could lead to amazing outcomes or devastating failures. It is in this context that I want to describe what we face today and what are our potential outcomes.

I intend to divide the book into the following broad subject areas:

1. artificial intelligence and robotics,
2. biomedicine and genomics,
3. human population growth,
4. declining biodiversity,
5. climate change,
6. space.

I am hoping that you my blog readers can help in this endeavor by sharing your thoughts and predictions about where and how we will be when 2100 arrives.

Will robots and artificial intelligence rule us or will we harness these two technological advances to improve life here on Earth and in space?

Will our biomedical and genetic breakthroughs end aging and disease and set us on the path to potential immortality?

Will we manage human population, develop smart cities, produce enough food, ensure we have sustainable water resources and put an end to poverty and hunger?

Will we stop the next wave of extinction and bring back species in the ocean, on earth and in the skies that have succumbed to our planet-wide appropriations?

Will we reverse the course of escalating greenhouse gas emissions so that we can limit the human damage we have caused to global climate?

Will we achieve childhood’s end among the stars and planets and become a species capable of sustaining ourselves off the Earth?

Over seven years I have dabbled in addressing all of these subjects. And now it is time to make sense of it all and project the immediate future that lies ahead in the remainder of this century.

When I began this journey of introspection and research seven years ago it was clear to me that the 21st century was a pivotal point in our human existence born of a 20th century that had truly produced revolutionary change on the planet.

We invented machines that could be programmed to do human tasks. We emulated human logic and then we went on to produce algorithms that gave machines the ability to learn and think on their own.

We made the Industrial Revolution a global phenomenon in the 20th.

We mastered our understanding of human biology, developed antibiotics to fight disease, and developed treatments to fight cancer and other incurable maladies.

We saw average human lifespan increase by more than double and our global population redouble putting incredible strain on the planet’s food producing and water carrying capacity.

We turned rockets that rained death on human populations in World War II into vehicles to take us to the Moon and beyond.

We witnessed the extinction of hundreds of species of animals and plants, a decline in biodiversity only equal to those we observed in the geological record as being catastrophic, and we determined that our human activities were prime contributors to this loss of life.

And we raised the temperature of the planet by exploiting the carbon energy sources we extracted from the Earth in ever increasing volume, burning through a hundred million years of coal, oil and natural gas.

In all these activities we have planted the seeds for our future success or our extinction.

Let the writing begin.