The Deep Future

The Deep Future

Point Of Divergence is an amateur press magazine and also a forum for discussing AH and AH-related ideas. Here is my comment section.

This is a slightly modified version of something I wrote in the summer of 1978 when I was amazingly young and the year 2000 seemed a long way off. I set it aside and it sat forgotten in a notebook until a recent cleaning spree almost sent it to the trash. I got started reading it though, and decided to share it.

I took a walk this morning and for some reason as I walked I started thinking about the future. Not the future in terms of tomorrow a year from now or even fifty years from now but the future say a thousand or ten thousand or a million or ten million years from now.

Suppose a man from 1978 suddenly found himself ten million years into the future. What would he find? I doubt that he'd be able to recognize even the landscape. Would Rock River exist, or Kent Creek? The Great Lakes? Probably not, at least not in their present form. More importantly—what type of inhabitants would he find in that world? A super civilization? A world without human life? Both?

I've got two conflicting opinions on what he'd find. Opinion number 1 is the typical science fiction future world that Heinlein or Anderson have built up—mankind expanding to the stars, a technology-based civilization, maybe with contact with extra-terrestrials, maybe without. Mankind itself alters only slightly in physical and behavior patterns.

I have problems with that future though. We don't really have any way of extrapolating technological growth for more than a few hundred years. Think about it. We've expanded knowledge and technology so much and at such a geometrically increasing rate. In ten million years what would we or rather out descendants know? What wouldn't they know? Lots of short story possibilities there—the last researcher finds the last fact left to be found out.

Can you imagine how specialized the scientists would have to be if knowledge kept increasing at the current rate?

What if we contacted a civilization more advanced than our own somewhere along the way? Most people think about invasions and wars when they think about that possibility, but there are other possibilities. What would happen given peaceful contact and interchange of ideas and technologies? First, what would happen to the specialists—engineers, physicists, linguists, accountants, doctors, teachers if the contacting civilization had technologies in those fields that made ours obsolete.

What effect would there be on music, literature, philosophy, theatre, art, political science, religion? There ought to be quite a few potential stories in those areas.

Also I think the invasion idea could be handled better. Invasion wouldn't have to be military. It could be ideological or economic. Maybe you could make some kind of a parallel with what happened to the American Indian. Sell him a gun and eventually he forgets how to use a bow and arrow—and then you have him at your mercy. If you read about the Indian wars and you look for it you'll usually find some reference to the Indians running out of gunpowder right before the cavalry rides up.

The point is: if a society can't manufacture something that it is dependent on, it becomes subject to whatever the people or society that supply that something want to make it subject to. The Indians never whole-heartedly wanted to exterminate white settlers completely because if they did the Indians would lose the trade in gunpowder, whiskey, cloth, that had become important to their survival. Economic invasion could also be through superior techniques or capital that drive native businesses out of business. I can think of quite a few stories to write from that angle.

I think I got a little off the subject, but the point of all this is that while I can theorize about the future, all of the concrete possibilities I talked about are things that would happen in the next few hundred or a thousand years. The technology of a society ten million years from now would be so alien if the current knowledge and technology explosion continues that I can't imagine it. There isn't enough data to extrapolate that far ahead.

If a human technological society exists ten million years from now and if it continues to expand in knowledge and technology, it would be so alien I can't even imagine what it would be like. However, I've got another opinion of what kind of a world my hypothetical man that goes forward ten million years would find.

I would say that he would step out into a world where there is not just one intelligent species. In other words there might be several different species of men and possibly other intelligent animals. That opinion assumes that our current surge of technology will burn itself out and collapse. Mankind will go back to the hunter-gatherer or primitive agriculture stages. With the easily available coal, gas, oil and ore supplies used up there will never be another industrial revolution. Man will become dependent on nature again and nature will shape him into different species for the different parts of the world—men for the jungle, men for the desert, men for the mountains, all going their separate ways in response to their environment and eventually over millions of year, becoming separate species.

This opinion also assumes that animals other than man will develop the things that now separate humans form animals—tool use, speech and greater intelligence to name a few.

Let's face it. There is no real barrier to animals gaining greater intelligence, and as far as speech and tool use goes chimps and gorillas already have shown some capacity for both. I read an article recently that talked about tool use by birds. It said that at least 16 kinds of birds have been observed using simple tools. Some of the examples it gave were of eagles dropping rocks on ostrich eggs and caged birds raking in food with a roll of newspaper. Those aren't exactly the height of technology but compared with what we had a million years ago its not bad. Ten million years from now we may have monkeys, birds, wolves, cats, elephants, mongooses (mongeese?) all what we would consider intelligent. What would a world with multiple intelligences be like?

Slightly revised version Posted on Feb 4, 2012.

More Stuff For POD Members Only

What you see here is a truncated on-line version of a larger zine that I contribute to POD, the alternate history APA. POD members get to look forward to more fun stuff.