Hi Pesky Boy,

Perhaps in that 100,000 years, our descendants will work out 'what's the point of it all', all the myriad of ways in which we understand how life is so precious (as you say, even for wild cattle), and we are graced by nature with a short span of it, to put in more than we take out.

I hope I don't stop till I drop :)

Joe

Joe, our species has been here for around 80 to 100 thousand years, and it's taken that long to reach our current primitive stage of intellectual development. People imagine that in 100,000 years time we'll be a terribly intellectually advanced, highly developed species with all the answers. I think the reality will be that there's a VERY good chance that we'll actually go backwards rather than forwards and our intellectual capacities will be relatively unchanged. Intellectually, a modern person is not much different from someone who lived 40,000 years ago. I suspect that someone living in 100,000 years time will be not much different intellectually than someone living today ... that is if our species survives that long.

PB: I suspect that someone living in 100,000 years time will be not much different intellectually than someone living today ...

Except that we'll know "more stuff."

Jayb, you wrote "except that we'll know more stuff". Not necessarily. We "assume" that our knowledge and advancement will continue forever on an upward spiral. That's not guaranteed. There's millions of variables that could happen to our species that could have us living as cave dwellers again when that 100,000 years is up. Evolution and the development of species isn't just about the rise of a species, it's also about the demise of a species.

True, Pesky Boy,

I reckon the world has become too narcissistic and unthinking hedonism seems to be ruling. There is so much BS and spin doctors around and we've lost our grounding.

Enigma - Age Of Loneliness
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APW_QwzGg2o

PB,

One problem about living as cave-dwellers is how incredibly inefficient such a life-style is in terms of food-gathering for a population: if our descendants all did that, there wouldn't be room for more than a million or so of them, perhaps far less, on the entire planet. Severe weather shifts, floods or droughts, would wipe out half of the people in a particular area periodically, and take decades to build up again.

The population of Victoria is now around five million. On the whole, they are all living much more comfortably than Victorians in, say, 1840. Prior to 1837 0r so, the total population of Victoria was barely five thousand, at the best of times.

So, in order to go back to a hunter-gatherer existence, in a dry cave if you were lucky, who decides who will be the 4,995,000 Victorians who have to be sacrificed, and who will be the 'lucky' five thousand ?

Meanwhile, for all the talk of doom and gloom, last year saw a world bumper grain crop. New genetically-modified crops are being designed every year - bananas with added Vitamin A, for example. More food than ever is being produced, and will probably keep being produced. Who knows what might be going on in a hundred years, let alone a hundred thousand ?

So can we get back to the here and now ? The mystery of life is that it is worth it - our task is to solve the mystery :)

Joe