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This is an excerpt from Mark Hotz's Human Knowledge.net
http://humanknowledge.net/Thoughts.html#Futurology
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5.7.1. Social Science / Futurology / Impossible Advances
Divine Salvation. Humans will never experience either collective or individual salvation by any divine or supernatural agency.
Paranormality. The paranormal phenomena alleged in 2000 by many humans will never prove to be real and will over time be recognized as delusions, hysteria, myths, nonsense, and hoaxes.
Reanimation. There will never be any reanimation of humans whose brains have suffered any of the degradation that occurs at normal temperatures when metabolism ceases. Human personalities may someday be crudely simulated, but such simulations will never have significant fidelity and would not in any event have the identity of the simulated personality.
Explanation of Somethingness. Humans will never have a definitive answer to the question of why there is something rather than nothing. Humans may, however, eventually be able to show that no definitive explanation of existence is possible.
Superluminal Communication. There will never be a way to travel or communicate through space at speeds greater than that of light. Nor will there be a way to warp spacetime to circumvent this restriction.
Temporal Travel. There will never be a way to travel or communicate backwards in time. While time travel is not explicitly impossible under the known laws of physics, the proposed wormhole mechanism for it would require energies and technologies that are simply not achievable. Note also that a wormhole time machine would not allow travel back to before the wormhole was created.
Teleporter Travel. There will never be a way for humans to travel via transmission of information describing their physical constitution. Quantum considerations almost certainly preclude the extraction of a sufficiently detailed description, and such a discontinuous process would not preserve personal identity. The only possible way would be a gradual and continuous disassembly and reassembly with an ongoing causal link between the two separated halves.
Uploading. Like teleportation, transferal of a human mind from a brain to an artifact is almost certainly impossible and would nevertheless not preserve personal identity. Were either technology possible, then a minor improvement would be a non-destructive version that preserves the original body and brain, thus revealing the technology to be a duplicator rather than a teleporter or uploader. The possible technology closest to uploading would be a (relatively) gradual and continuous transformation of the functioning human brain into another substrate.
Energy and Momentum Non-Conservation. There will never be a way to increase the available energy or change the net momentum in a closed system.
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5.7.2. Social Science / Futurology / Improbable Advances
Designer Contact. In his novel Contact, Carl Sagan suggested that the universe could have been designed and that its designer could have encoded a message in a transcendental number such as pi or e. Such a situation does not seem logically impossible, in that it would not be on its face a logical contradiction if for example the Bible turned out to be so encoded. The existence of any such message would in fact have to be considered a logical necessity. If so, it could not be considered an act of designer volition, unless one granted degrees of freedom in the design of mathematical logic itself. Such freedom seems incompatible with the very notion of logic: rules of inference that are binding in all possible worlds.
Super-Intelligence. Cognitive ability can increase quantitatively in efficiency, flexibility, speed, capacity, bandwidth, and network associativity, but not qualitatively in its kind of reasoning or knowing. There are no forms of reasoning or kinds of knowledge that are in principle inaccessible to regular intelligence.
Human Evolution. Humanity is very unlikely to undergo significant further natural evolution. Since the beginning of the Neolithic Age, the development of humanity has been influenced much more by changes in culture than changes in genes. This will continue indefinitely, even considering genetic engineering.
Singularity. The Singularity is what Vernor Vinge describes as a moment in the future when the ongoing exponential increases in technological capability culminate in a discontinuity beyond which predictions based on continuous extrapolations do not apply. One candidate for the Singularity is when humanity improves artificial intelligence to the point that it is better than humans at improving artificial intelligence. Another candidate is when the world's computers are networked into a single self-conscious mind. A third is when runaway productivity is achieved through artifactual life or nanotechnology, perhaps provided by extraterrestrial intelligence.
The Singularity will not happen. First, the limits to intelligence apply to artificial intelligence as much as to natural. Second, intelligence is likely not to vary qualitatively as a function of things like processing speed or memory that are increasing exponentially. Third, the effort to make minds faster or smarter will quite likely be subject to diminishing returns. Fourth, artificial minds will at first not be designed but rather grown and evolved, and will be subject to most of the same limits as minds that are naturally grown and evolved.
Antigravity. There will never be a way to repel matter by virtue of its mass, or even to just shield the attractive gravitational force of mass. Nor will there be an inertial drive -- a way to accelerate an object uniformly, as in a gravitational field.
Vacuum or Zero-Point Energy. It is unlikely that humans will ever be able to extract useful amounts of energy from the vacuum or zero point.
And for your enjoyment - his take on the timeline of the universe
http://humanknowledge.net/Thoughts.html#Timeline
Spoiler: click to toggle 5.7.9. Social Science / Futurology / Timeline
2010 Automatic translators allow monolingual humans to converse with any speaker of any major human language.
2015 Bandwidth has increased enormously due to fiber optics and spread-spectrum radio.
2020 Almost all overt tyranny has been eliminated.
Physicists have confirmed that the fate of the universe is asymptotic expansion.
Most text, images, audio, and video is produced and consumed digitally. Unauthorized reproduction and distribution of such media is routine.
1st Martian sample return has revealed no conclusive fossil evidence of life.
2030 20% of former fideists have become mystics.
Radio astronomers have discovered signals from extraterrestrial intelligence.
Computer display technology plateaus with cheap flat panels and retinal projectors.
2040 Physicists have completed a quantum unification theory.
Personal bodily flight has become commercialized.
Transonic flight still serves just a few intercontinental routes.
2050 Molecular biologists have detailed description of how life on Earth began.
Computing is limited not by processing, storage, or bandwidth but by heat, latency, and batteries.
Fresh water availability is now limited only by energy costs of transportation and desalinization.
Automated vehicle/traffic control gives rail-like traffic flow to roads.
Privacy is curtailed by commercial availability of mobile remote-controlled microsensors.
2075 Physicists have reached limits of knowing why fundamental physical laws are as they are.
Hydrogen fuel cells are replacing internal combustion of fossil fuels.
VTOL aircraft are as widely owned as RVs in 2000.
2100 Expected and maximum human longevity have increased by 30 years.
Humans are able to record and archive all they ever see, hear, and say.
Most of humanity is using a common currency descended from the American dollar.
Unmanned radio observatory has been established on far side of moon.
2150 Remaining fideisms have diluted into agnostic mysticism; true fideists dwindle.
Fusion provides major parts of humanity's power.
Most psychotropic drugs are legal; addiction is prevented neurochemically.
2200 Permanent manned space stations in Earth orbit have been established.
1st artifactual life and artificial intelligence systems have been created and enfranchised.
Obesity and other nutritional diseases are curable.
2300 1st Von Neumann probes have been dispatched from Earth.
Most genetic, infectious, immunological, and cancerous disease is preventable or curable.
Most of humanity enjoys Western standards of living and productivity.
Earth's population has stabilized at around 20 billion.
The workweek has stabilized at around 20 hours.
2400 Extropian positivism has displaced most other belief systems.
2500 Heat pollution has become the last significant environmental problem.
A truly global federal government exists.
2880 Asteroid 1950DA (1km wide) has a 1/300 chance of hitting Earth March 16.
3000 Humans have created on the moon their 1st self-sustaining extraplanetary colony.
Earth has received 1st telemetry from unmanned probes to nearby stars.
Neurotechnologists have started to modify and augment natural human intelligence.
Genetic engineers have designed first artificially-created species.
English is the native language of 90% of humans.
Floating communities and estates have become increasingly popular.
4000 1st embarkation of mobile space habitat toward nearby star.
Humans culture animal tissue in bulk rather than raise animals en masse.
As the next ice age begins, Earth is about 0.5C cooler (relative to 2000CE) than it otherwise would have been.
10K 1st terraforming(of Mars or a Jovian moon) has started to show progress. Another 90Kyr-long ice age has begun, and Earth is about 3C cooler (relative to 2000CE) than it otherwise would have been.
16K The precession of Earth's axis has made Vega the northern pole star.
23K The 1679-bit 1974 Arecibo interstellar message finally covers the 21Kly distance to its target, the globular cluster M13 (300K stars).
100K A majority of persons descended from H. sapiens lives beyond Earth.
250K An object more than a kilometer wide will probably have struck Earth.
Earth's magnetic will by now probably have reversed, as it does every few hundred thousand years and as it last did 780Kya.
1M A majority of persons descended from H. sapiens lives beyond the Solar system.
The red dwarf Gliese 710, currently 63ly away, will pass within 0.5 ly of Sol and appear at 0.6 magnitude.
2M Pioneer 10 (launched in 1972, 68 ly away) passes near Aldebaran at 44 Mm/h.
50M Africa has collided with Europe (closing the Mediterranean), Australia has merged with SE Asia, and California has slid up the coast to Alaska. Mars' moon Phobos is destroyed as its orbit finishes decaying.
100M Earth has information from probes to the Andromeda galaxy.
226M Sol has completed one more orbit around the Milky Way's center.
250M The Americas merge with Afro-Eurasia, reducing the (formerly growing) Atlantic to an inland sea.
1B Earth has information from probes to every star system in the Milky Way.
2B Increased Solar output has extincted any remaining Earth life due to runaway greenhouse effect.
6B Sun ends its main-sequence life as a red giant large enough to engulf and possibly swallow Earth, and then cools into a white dwarf.
Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies collide.
10B Milky Way galaxy's intelligent population stabilizes at its maximum.
100B Living systems are huddled around red dwarfs for light and warmth.
The charred and frozen Earth-Moon system (if not already swallowed by Sol's red giant phase) has stabilized to a 47-day rotation/revolution at a distance of 560,000 km.
150B Due to the universe's accelerating expansion, the view of everything outside the gravitationally-bound Local Group of galaxies stops changing and fades away.
10^14 Almost all stars stopped shining, having become brown or white dwarfs. Little or no life remains.
10^15 Planets have been dislodged from their solar systems by stellar close encounters.
10^20 The remaining stars (brown or white dwarfs) have all either been dislodged from their galaxies, or collapsed into central galactic black holes. Dwarf collisions cease, and the last few stars formed thereby stop shining.
10^40 Proton decay has left the universe with only black holes and subatomic particles.
10^100 The last black hole evaporates, emitting the cold dark universe's final flash of visible light.
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7:30 PM Jul 13