If you believe in evolution and assuming there won't be a catastrophic event that'll wipe out all of humanity,

Question

how do you think humans will evolve in the next 100,000 years? 1 million years?

If you don't believe in evolution, where do you think humans will be technologically speaking in these time frames?

I'm not looking for a religious debate, just your thoughts on how humans will evolve physically or technologically hundreds of thousands of years from now.

Answer 1

I don't think it matters since you and I won't be here that long.

Answer 2

Physically the unused and redundant body parts will be bred out of us, like the appendix and the small toes.

Technology will provided us with all the health care, with nano robots in our blood stream, repairing damaged cells and fighting viruses.

Technology will also enhance the brain with bolt on accessories to improve cognitive stimuli.

But all of the above is happening NOW, and research into nano technologies is today's science, and direct brain stimuli is also still in the research stage.

So a million years?

Who knows!

But I bet someone will still be asking, does God exist?

Answer 3

We'll be extinct from either nuclear war or climate change by then.

Answer 4

its beyond our wildest imaginations , we cant even think that far ahead

Answer 5

OMG I was just wondering this same question a couple of months ago!

I asked someone who replied that we probably have already stopped evolving for the most part.

My thoughts are that things that are ingested or things that externally affect us PRIOR TO our having babies WILL affect the future generations.  For example, if, say, hydrogenated oils somehow accumulate in the eggs of preteens and then that somehow affects the babies that are born....  I AM TOTALLY MAKING THIS UP, but it does seem to be a possibility....

Answer 6

It's easily observed and proven that mainly uneducated and less attractive people breed.

Most successful and intelligent people have very very few offspring.

As a result, there will emerge two distinct, but very lopsided groups of people.  Incredibly smart and beautiful people comprising maybe 5% of the population.  And incredibly dull, stupid, ugly, and obese people comprising 95% of the population.

The beautiful geniuses will control everyone else, will be able to think on several orders of magnitude higher levels, and will eventually not even be able to breed with the lower class herd.

Basically two distinct human species.

If you look at some of the people who shop at walmart and compare them to the people who can buy anything they want, they don't even look like the same species as it is.  It's night and day, and will continue to diverge at an increasing pace.

Answer 7

evolution has NO direction! the characteristic's of whatever group has the most reproducing children will dominate in the future. for instance if stupid people have more survivors then people in the future will on average be stupider than now. if people with 6 toes have more then most future people will have 6 toes etc. the one sure thing is since the environment no longer has any bearing on reproductive success & we are now a world wide culture with only 1 out of every 7 people having white skin. skin color will average out to a light brown in time and people world wide will look more like each other than now except in isolated inbred pockets.

Answer 8

Evolution (human wise) still needs a trigger... we won't evolve since we are using technology to "protect" us (entertain also lol) let's say we have an event that would destroy everything (except the human race) we could maybe head into some evolution slate but until then... guess we won't turn all red with bigger palmed feet...

Answer 9

From what I see the smart are rather plain to look at but they do make money and they do choose the beautiful to breed with.

But if you are ugly and stupid thats a double whammy!!

PH nailed it. Politically incorrect but true..

Answer 10

I think we're on the cusp of something big that will occur within the next 100 years.  According to Moore's law, the total sum of human knowledge will be doubling every 72 days by 2025...you will see things in your lifetime that will make our current level of technology seem primitive.  If our technological evolution will be that fast in only 18 years, how can "anyone" predict something 1000 times as distant, especially since the speed of progress is going vertical?

Answer 11

I thinh that within 100,00 years we humans will look like the little green or gray beings that fly around in flying saucers.  Our bodies will be small due to lack of physical activity, our mouths small due to our ability to psychically communicate, and our heads nice and plump due to our expanded brain size.

Answer 12

Your question contains the classical mistake given to evolution that it is progressive... it is NOT progressive. Evolution is based on variance within the population allowing adaptation to fill new environmental niche. Fortunately for humans we are the most generalized mammal on the planet and as of such have found a nearly universal sucess throughout most of the environments that we encounter. That said it is difficult to imagine an environment that would be different enough and that we would habituate for long enough to allow natural selection to act upon the effected population for long enough to create any kind of significant visual change in our species. At the same time we as a species are truly defeating the few acts of natural selection that were acting upon us with advances in medicine. With this in mind the changes that might occur could be much like your thanksgiving Turkey, a creature who has been put under so much unnatural selection that it no longer is capable of mating due to humans artificially breeding them for nothing else but size. If humans were no longer present to do this service for Turkeys, they would go extinct. Through "unnatural selection" humans are doing very similiar things to themselves. Undoubtedly a woman who goes in for infertility medicines has a greater chance of having children who would require the same, children that have severe enough allergies/asthma that may have killed them in the past will now grow to a reproductive age with the assistance of asthma/allergy medicines will also produce offspring who have higher occurances of asthma/allergies. This is a bit of a concern, seeing as at the same time we are making ourselves more susceptible to asthma and allergies we are also taking actions that are converting the environment that we will have to adapt to, to containing more contaminants. If it gets serious enough those who are persevering with the assistance of medicine may be the first to become too sick to be reproductively successful such that the power of natural selection might overbear unnatural medical selection once again in this area? Some areas where medicine is making slow progress, like cancer and Aids, there will be a continued evolutionary process. Already there have been a few case studies that have shown a truckstop in Africa where the prostitutes, despite an alarming exposure rate, are not catching or dying from Aids suggesting that natural selection has already discovered a variant within one ethnic group that appears to have white blood cells which are not as susceptible to the AIDS virus, much like sickle cell trait does the same red blood cells resistance for Malaria. As this gene now becomes more prominent due to the pressure of AIDS we may also see the advance of a new genetic disorder if a person is born with two recessives, much like two recessive copies of sickle cell results in anemia instead of trait. So if people do begin to die from a worse environment that causes worse Asthma/Cancer/AIDS, undoubtedly natural selection will find many variants within our population which now far exceeds 6 billion people and will come up with the needed solutions to combat these problems so that enough people make it to a reproductive age and then go to the doctor to get their fertility drugs. If there is also enough disruption in the sociopolitical structure such that medicine is no longer readilly available, at least to the poor, then natural selection will also reclaim the realm of fertility and those who can't naturally, won't. So that is what our environment has in store for us...

But what about technology, if it is allowed to persist and becomes an enpowered agent towards our development. If on top of the fertility drugs, people take medical-engineering so far that they also have their fetus' genetically altered to bring out the "preferred" characteristics. Well it sounds great on the surface, this is actually a dangerous game of Russian roulette. First of all, if the procedure becomes too widespread we would in essence be eradicating variability within our gene pool. It is this same variance which is the mobilizer of natural selection that gives us our ability to adapt to new environments. Now lets say a bacteria or virus evolves to exploit a now homogenous niche that our scientists have now placed in EVERYONE. Not a single person will have the variance to counteract that virus/bacteria... whoops. Secondly, if genetic altering is only a thing for the rich, then we might find that if two genetically altered children were to fall from the economic status of their parents that either they could not have children at all as they have so many recessives combining inutero that the fetus is continually rejected, or if a new baby is conceived without the same genetic tinkering that the parents underwent, that the resulting child may have severe genetic defects, again by two recessives that matched up in the new baby for the fact that that recessive with a different dominant in both parents had allowed a benificial trait in their parents genetic engineering procedure. Simply put, genetic engineering may create a circumstance where it becomes a neccesary procedure for genetically engineered people to have healthy offspring and the Human race would be up the creek without a paddle if we somehow lost the ability to continue the procedure, once started.

Anyways, don't get your hopes up on some kind of progressive hierarchial structure existing within evolution that will see us become telepathic, telekenetic and whatever else Marvel comics can throw your way. As much as I appreciated comics in my youth, evolution doesn't work that way! In truth, mutation only accounts for a small fraction of evolutionary change and most of these changes are thrown out with the trash of generational decay. (ie causes it's host to die without reproducing or does not result in any significant reproductive advantage)

So what are we evolving into... What environment are we heading towards and how will our biology enpowered by natural selection and our sociopolitical and medical progress, which cheat the processes of natural selection, shape our evolution, our sucess within this new environment? This is the question. The answer is everything above.

Answer 13

splendid .like where are the flying cars ? planse have wheels .now those might be gone by the time your question entales.i'm more with the other theory .catastophic .and the earth will be in control .we survive .in a caveman like era ,but with devastation .

i once read a book.like that with other strange creatures.

and it made me aware ! aside from the creature feature ,could happen.

ah ,the book.turned up missing.and no seen it.i got blamed for making it up. oh well .guess then it never happens?

Answer 14

Is it God's fault that I'm so slow that everything He does manifests to me in an evolutionary form.  So, if He has wiped us out it will probably manifest to me as an evolutionary process and if not then perhaps in 100000 years from now our genes will have been radiated into something that is unrecognizable to us now.

Answer 15

It's possible that another evolutionary jump will be made, similar to our ancestors being able to walk upright or being able to think abstractly. Perhaps a new homo sapien will emerge. Our bodies will wither and our minds will take center stage in our evolution, as we gradually use technology more frequently in our lives.

It's likely that we will have relocated to other planets, and that space travel will be commonplace.

If all else fails, we'll be extinct. Let's just hope man's ingenuity allows us to escape the inevitable apocalypse that we've created, due to man's severe exploitation of resources and lack of consideration towards the planet.

Honesty I haven't any idea what the future will have in store for us.

Answer 16

It is beyond our imagination, but I'll give it a shot.  I think that our craniums will grow in size as intelligence grows.  In order to support our heads our neck muscles will increase to some degree to handle the weight.  

Our skin color will be different.  It will change to be more protectant of the sun as a response to growing cancers.  We will probably be darker.  That is, unless we start to stay indoors more, in which case our skin will lighten.

We already know that our eyes are getting darker.  Brown eye color is winning out.  We won't have an appendix and we won't have as many teeth.  These are things we are already seeing.

As the Earth warms (if it continues to do so for a long period) people will eventually thin out a bit, not needing the fat stores.  It is very possible that our fingers will become slightly more slim as we use them more and more with time (just look at typing).  But we use our individual toes less and they are getting smaller.  I wouldn't be surprised if we have one solid foot that only has the toe bones inside to assist with balance.  We will continue to gravitate toward less body hair with time.

All of these things will become more uniform throughout the races with time.

Technologically, I couldn't even imagine.  I'm sure that there are limitations, and I wouldn't be surprised if people in that time watch our Star Trek shows and compare them to their history books.

Language would be unrecognizable to us, because it also evolves.  It will be more universal than it is currently as the world becomes a smaller place figuratively.

Then again, that is if we are all still on Earth and not somewhere else by that time.  But who knows.