have evolved to a point where they can impact
their own evolutionary process,
and describes what life in the future will be like.
We are living in a time in which time itself feels as though it’s speeding up.
It’s also a time in which you might be able to dramatically increase the length of your life beyond what was previously thought possible.
I met recently with Dan Finfer of Post Human Era to discuss the technological side of longevity.
what will life be like in the future?
Designing the Human Life for Perfect Health
“At the dawn of life on this planet, evolutionary changes happened slowly. We’re talkin’ billions of years,” says Finfer.
the journey of your life
could change dramatically
Finfer explained to me that one microbe took billions of years to evolve the DNA necessary to replicate itself from simple amino acids. But that first copying mechanism, DNA, allowed information to be transmitted that much faster.
Speaking personally, I’m hopeful that our future includes an increased reverence for our physical environment and that as a world we’re able to find solutions to protect and nurture the natural beauty of earth.
I’d also like us to find a way to solve many of the factors and symptoms of aging (many of which I believe to be unnecessary and curable).
The Acceleration of Time Itself
“Then, evolution only took millions of years to create multi-cellular creatures. Good information was kept, and bad information was discarded,” explains Finfer. “The wheel of time continued until evolution presented the planet Earth with a new species, human beings.”
According to Finfer, this is really where the evolutionary process of life really began to accelerate.
Instead of millions of years to the next paradigm shift, it was only 50,000 years until Man began to talk. And then, only 10,000 to develop agriculture, written language, society, and government. Another 5,000 elapsed, and we had constructed Pyramids, developed theological and monetary systems, and had begun colonizing the planet. This led to the development of Science a few thousand years later.
Science, after a few mere centuries, thus gave us the Industrial Revolution,” Finfer states, “which after only 50 years gave us the Computer Revolution. Notice the trend? Evolution is a feedback loop. The meaning of life is to speed up.”
“…the trend of progress we’ve been seeing is actually: exponential growth itself!”
~ Dan Finfer
What You Can Expect Life to Be Like in the Future
My conversation with Finfer becomes even more lively and startling. You can hear it in the short podcast below, by clicking on the play arrow. It’s quite scintillating! We explore the current model of human progress (and how that’s about to change radically) and how people still aren’t grasping the exponential trends inherent in computer power.
We also talk about how to increase daily quality of life and how to extend the human lifespan, and how what we think of as holistic health is going to change significantly! From there, things get outrageously nerdy, as we chat about:
- science fiction
- the Matrix
- television
- iPhones
- YouTube
- other futurists
- the singularity
- through the Worm Hole
- nano-technology
- …and the shadow side of tech
What Will My Life Be Like 20 Years from Now, and Beyond?
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Interesting topic, Dane. As a physical species, we have reached evolutionary stasis due to the fact that our sheer numbers (7 billion and counting) have rendered genetic mutations far less impactful. Of course, medicine has removed us even further from the arena of natural selection.
Nevertheless, culture is evolving at an astounding rate. Now electronic databases have replaced the human mind as the main storage-hardware for our cultural database.
I watched a documentary on Alan Moore (Watchmen) a few months back, and he mentioned this idea of the doubling of the availability of human information. I wish I recalled the exact figures, but the idea was that while information used to double over spans like centuries and decades, it is currently doubling in monthly intervals. He contends that, at this rate, it will be doubling at fractions of a second in a matter of years. This, of course, makes the cultural landscape far less predictable than its been over the several thousand years.
when I was kid watching Classic Trek, I didn’t realize that by age 46, our own technology would have surpassed some of the “far out” tech in Star Trek (my iPhone is more powerful than the Trek communications device, etc)!
Not 100% sure that I am on board with all of Kurzweil’s futurism, but I am a fan of his keyboards for sure.