The end of human History

Can you imagine History going forward hundreds and hundreds of years, naturally, as it used to be in the past? Neither I. Maybe it’s because we are really approaching to the End of History

There’s a strong eschatological tradition, inside and outside religions, full of tales that tell how’s going to be the End of the World. Many of them alert humankind (or at least their followers) about a terrible, catastrophic end of the known world; where thunders, floodings, diseases and fire will fall from the sky killing absolutely everything —except their followers— in order to reflourish in a new promise land where peace and abundance will prevail forever.

Of course I am not discovering you anything new by now. It’s absolutely OK that everyone lives with whatsoever his/her beliefs are. I am not going to write about that. It’s not anyone’s business but of the believer himself/herself.

I just want to write a brief summary of a real, possible (and even probable) End of World understood not as the catastrophic implosion of the Earth itself, but the End of Human History as we know it since we are making and recording this thing we call History.

Departing from predictions based on evidences and scientific reasoning. That is, neutral, cold (and cool) stuff.

We’ve been studying in school, college, etc a subject named History; something that started a few thousands years as humans learnt how to write. Before that, we call it pre-history, where we can have some clues of what was going on from analyzed evidences taken from the leftovers of those humans that lived more than, for example, 10,000 years ago.

In order to organize all this knowledge, we just agreed to place some sort of milestones in the timeline that represents History. This timeline just goes forward linearly with the passing years. For instance, from -1,500 B.C. to 2,023 AC (according to christian, most popular calendar). In terms of historic events, not just a simple model of linear ticking time, we can agree that human History is everything but linear.
The pace and size of the events in human chronology seems to go forward in an accelerated rate, may be exponential. Human population, technology development, changes… everything goes faster and faster every time.

In such this scenario, can anyone imagine, project human History into the next two or three hundred coming years? It seems impossible to predict even for the most seasoned scholar.

But if we just make a little effort of connecting the dots, we may find that human History is just beginning to finish. Yes, History could had an arbitrary beginning, but can really have a swift, sharp, well defined End. How come?

My eschatological bet comes from connecting just three points: one theory, one threat and one forecast. Let’s break it down first:

Cosmic Complexity

There is an american astrophysicist, Eric J. Chaisson, that raises a question in his book Cosmic Evolution. In summary, Chaisson explains that, according to (or derived from) the laws of Thermodynamics, there is a magnitude in the history of everything on this universe that tends to always increase —similar to what happens with Entropy— and do it so exponentially. This magnitude is Complexity, something that far from being and abstract concept, it is a real substance that can be measured in units of energy density consumption (or emission) per unit mass.

This way, Chaisson illustrates that in the beginning of cosmic evolution, things that existed then (basically stars) were able to consume (or emit) large amounts of energy, but they were very simple objects, so they need a lot mass and volume in order to do so. As the universe evolves, new things arised that consume or emit more energy per unit mass (energy density) being objects smaller and lightweight in proportion: planets, complex molecules, life and finally the most complex object we know so far: the human brain. Our brain in an organ that makes about only a 3% of total body weight, but consumes 20% of total body energy, so it has very high energy density, as it is very complex.

It turns out that this accelerated run towards a higher and higher complexity has its own limits and tops. Biological evolution is not as quick and cannot update itself exponentially, so the energy density that universe needs everytime to be bigger and bigger cannot be matched with regular, natural evolution of human brain.

How can Complexity thrive then? One possibility could be from decoupling from the human body support and migrate to another structure. This structure cannot be another animal on Earth, as the rest of species, although some show some intelligence, are far less complex than us. So what then? Complexity can jump outside human brain in order to keep growing exponentially. But jump to where?

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

In the latest years Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become probably the fastest technology hype that has spread through human sphere with an incredible speed.

In very few years we have installed in our daily lives a technology that is able to write, paint, read, speak or listen to for us (and like we do). The velocity at which AI evolves and revolutionizes the world it’s so huge that even several important talking heads of this industry and politicians had claimed alarms in order to control or even stop its development. There are many people alerting that AI will soon take over most of jobs developed by human beings, leaving us as just mere consumers that obey what machines tell us to do, and not much else.

But then, what will humans do? No jobs, no money? Will be starve, or we will live confortable for free?

Demographics

Talking about things that grow exponentially, let’s talk about human population. There’s no secret that population has been growing exponentially. By the end of XX century, the Earth had about 4.5 billion human beings. By now there’s about 8.3 billion, and growing fast.

Of course this trend have been used traditionally by malthusian escatology theorists to announce that dramatic overpopulation in the near future, combined with global warming and food scarcity will condemn billions of people to starve to death, regulating human population just like we were a bacteria colony in a petri plate.

But, believe or not, the truth is that almost all demographic studies reveal that human population will reach a peak of population by about 2100. What happens next, anyone knows for sure. Some studies talk about the stabilization of population around 12 or 13 billion from 2150 and so on. Some other studies point that after the peak there will be a shard drop of fertility rates, and that after that, the total human population on the Earth go down quickly, reaching values of centuries ago by 2250 or 2300, or beyond, depending on the model. Humans will kind of self-extinct gradually.

In summary

If Complexity needs to jump outside human body support (it was a nice ride, thank you!) to keep growing exponentially, it could make it by evolving into a huge internet-like entity, something made of pure information and, of course, piloted by an AI that could compute much much more than a human brain with much more energy density, in a world where there will be just a few human beings with few or no direct contact at all (no interest of need), surviving just like another species in a hostile Earth, climatically talking. A few million humans population that won’t be interested (nor allowed, nor capable) to keep generating History events like wars, etc.

An Earth controlled by a extra-trans-human entities with a computing capacity billions of times greater than us.

The end of human History.

The beginning of ……………………….

Just connect the dots ;-)