Human Devolution

We have this idea humans will either go extinct, or evolve into something more sentient, like how extraterrestrial humanoids are often depicted in pop culture, with humungous, bulbous heads, enormous eyes, tiny faces, ears, mouths, noses and small, lithe bodies.
But perhaps both of these scenarios will miss the mark, and we’ll survive, but devolve into something more base, more primitive.

After WW3, and the collapse of civilization, some of the elite, despite bearing much of the responsibility for precipitating events, will go into hiding, cowering in underground fortresses they’ve already pre-emptively built in preparation for such a catastrophe.
At some point, after nuclear fallout, they may decide to emerge, or they may remain, if they’re comfortable, growing accustomed to subterranean life.
How may they evolve, and what about the few humans who manage to survive above ground?
Many will have to turn to cannibalism, or hunting and gathering whatever plants and animals remain post-nuclear fallout.
Perhaps a few will manage to eke out a subsistence agricultural existence.

Radiation is interesting, on the one hand it’s very destructive, but on the other, it might speed up mutations and thus, evolution in either direction, towards or away from sentience, a high death rate might also speed things up, and humans now being isolated from one another in small pockets might increase divergence, giving rise to new races and eventually, after thousands or millions of years, new species.

Since sentience will’ve gotten us into such a mess in the first place, and since humans will have to rely more on brute physicality and instincts to survive, we might grow dumber, and more fierce.
Humans may even play an active, conscious role in the reduction and scaling back of their own consciousness, culturally and instinctively, preferring stronger, simpler mates, turning away from science, since it was science that got us into such a mess, and away from religion too, since the messiah, the Maitreya, Jesus, whatever Gods you pray to, never came back as promised.

Perhaps some humanoids will evolve claws, a bit of a snout and sharp teeth, a keener sense of smell and hearing, but reduced vision, but keep many of their human characteristics, like lack of hair/fur, being able to walk upright, and having a little more intelligence and sociability than your average carnivore, living together in large packs, occasionally using simple tools.
They might develop dense bones and massive musculature, more strength, durability, agility and speed, but at the expense of manual dexterity and stamina.
They might also have reduced facial expressions, capacity for language, and smaller brains.
Their women may have larger litters than our women do, and more teats for suckling.

Others may take a more herbivore path, with more complex stomachs, and living together in large herds.They may grow some kind of horns or bony armor plates like many herbivores do.
And others may become more gracile, due to the tough times ahead, where food is scarce.
They may develop large eyes and ears, and have a really anxious, nervous disposition, huddling together in broken down, dilapidated buildings, or in caves, scavenging for food.
Perhaps after millions of years of devolution, some humanoids will even learn to walk or crawl on all fours, developing paws or hoofs, but still look vaguely human.

eventually, after thousands of years, nature might make a full recovery from nuclear winter.
Thousands of species will be extinct, but thousands of new ones will be emerging.

And after thousands or millions of years of human devolution, humans might devolve into dozens or hundreds of new species: humanoids, bipedal creatures with little fur/hair and relatively big brains, but not nearly as big as ours, perhaps as big as apes, or monkeys.
Some of them will be carnivores with sharp claws, teeth and simple stomachs, some herbivores with armor, horns and complex stomachs, and others omnivores.
Some will be many times larger than humans were, others many times smaller.

If a scientist were transported millions of years into the future, he may be tempted to place these humanoids into their own family, perhaps even their own order, apart from primates.
They would forever alter the course of mammalian evolution, or at least for many eons to come.
Where as before, mammals were almost exclusively quadrupedal and fury, thanks to human devolution and divgerence, now many of them are bipedal and relatively furless/hairless, and mammals as a whole will be a little more intelligent than they once were, averagely.

And after millions of more years, perhaps some of them will even become as smart as their ancestors, humans were, now nearly forgotten by time.
And civilization, for good/ill, will rise again, but this time, multiple species will be able to lay claim to it.
Their equivalent of archeologists and paleontologists may discover tiny fragments of a long lost civilization: ours.
Maybe they’ll heed the warning, and not be quite so haughty and hubris as we were, and then the mistakes we made won’t be entirely in vain.

There is another hypothesis you might be interested in mainly that one of the reasons why we haven’t encountered an extraterrestrial civilization in outer space yet is because all advanced societies succumb to the same form of self destruction universally, how’s that for pessimism?

Maybe there really is nobody out there… #-o

That’s a possibility, on the other hand, it’s also a possibility they’re here, and government is covering them up, google the disclosure project.

I’m on the fence with extraterrestrial life, I’m sure it exists somewhere but the skeptic in me needs to see a living or dead body along with a spaceship for me to seriously entertain the notion.

I understand.
I’m not saying it’s a fact we’re being visited, just saying I’m leaning towards us being visited by something sentient, I’m not even sure what it is.
In any case, I don’t think man is going to travel to the stars anytime soon, at this stage in our biological and cultural evolution, if ever, it’s far more likely we’ll blow ourselves to bits, which’s why, among other reasons, I’m anti-globalism, humanism, scientism and transhumanism, and maybe that’s why whatever’s out there hasn’t made (overt) contact with us yet, we’re not ready.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKuL7xSRQxE[/youtube]

How about Musk’s plan of populating Mars? There is a space station , international in scope, maybe, just maybe, it can be pulled off, and give the world a new new frontier.
The question is, will the robotic men arrive in due time?
Unless today’s collusive atmosphere devolve demonstratedly into an uncompromising state of affairs, with it a bridge between a metaphoric heaven or he’ll.
On the positive side, there are still those in the world today, who would see the need to invent a god, even if he didn’t exist.
Could a superintelligent man-god -cyborg with self programming programs, be brought about in a conceivable future?

The prognosis for that could happen in less then a generation, even if some of us won’t be around by then. But those with young families can not flinch at the thought of a world without hoping for a better world, and even ones without should not.

There’s trade-offs to everything, just because something is made of metal and wires, doesn’t mean it’s superior to, or more capable than flesh and blood.
For me, embracing transhumanism is essentially embracing self-extinction, to incrementally replace what you are with what you are not.
At best, it’s a necessary evil, like if you were born without a leg, and you need a prosthetic one, and at worse, plain evil.
It’s also far more likely we’re going to devolve biologically than devolve, as I see it, cybernetically.

Agreed. To me it is also the hubris of the thinky parts of the human mind, assuming they can see all the variable and effects. Pretty like the pharmaceutial model for dealing with human suffering does. Oh, this chemical is lower, so we give them this that adds more of this chemical, as if we were the simplest fucking devices, or a human figure made out of lego blocks. Oh, change that red one for blue one. Duh. Transhumanism is this kind of idiocy on steroids. I look at the less mobile, strangely distorted, less expressive, dollish faces of women who have had plastic surgery and I see a symbol for the no doubt high powered in some ways MONSTROSITIES transhumanists will create.

Transhumanism is already happening. Look at the cellphone zombies.

As far as the evolution of the cybernetic part of it, its a no brainer. Total knowledge doubles at a halving of the time it takes parabolically. I may be off on the numbers.

If, You don’t buy the guy who proclaims the end of history, then its pretty much warranted to say that scientific precedents bear on future development, and its bars to further development.

That the visionaries like Bruno were seen worthy to burn on the stake, whereas the the time gap between that event and the Industrial Revolution with its own set of horrors were a few hundred years. The horrors are too many to mention.

Follows the tremendous explosion of high-tech, maybe a hundred years , and halve that to where we are today. That’s in spite of some awfully horrible tools such as the nuclear and hydrogen bomb.

Incidentally the atom bomb would have been impossible without the notable cooperation by notable Hungarian physicists such as Szilard et al.whereas Teller was the sole developer of both: the H bomb and the so called Sar Wars defense system. So much for venting for Hungarian nationalistic pride-could help it.

The next 20-25 years will bring both the rate of change and the quality of work within range of astronomical limits.

So there are people out there, by now uncaring about a parallel bio-cognitive development, and would answer Your critique by saying that the previous argument bears witness to the fact that sorrily to the detractors, such development is unstoppable because mist of it sequences by input output integration of prmenantly processed schema.

So on that level they would throw up their hands in desperation and declare an impossibility for retraction and a done deal, just like Einstein and Oppenheimer tried to do in regret, when they and many of their fellows wrote a sorry we did it letter to Roosevelt.

On that premise the only other option option left is building safeguards that the angel of life dissent fall like Icarus and dissent morph into an angel of death.

Global peak energy and running out of natural resources will happen first before any serious kind of space travel will take place. Thankfully that will also put a dent in globalist ambitions of A.I. and total automation of society as such a world would be a nightmare. We would do better investing into planetary defense with the last bit of easily accessible natural resources as space travel is never going to materialize but even that has limitations. (We’ll probably waste all of the last global easily accessible energy resources that are peaking fighting each other.)

The future of civilization will not be technological but instead a return to 18th century standard of living amid nuclear fallout of nuclear plants across the planet that eventually will no longer be able to be maintained technologically. The reason we’re on the verge of world war III now is because all the superpowers are fighting over the last bit of easily accessible energy resources in dominating each other to keep modern technological society going, this endeavor will inevitably fail once those resources are depleted globally. All of that assumes we don’t have a global thermonuclear exchange first since if that happens all bets are off. Have fun contemplating all of that as it is a real mind bender. We are all ensnared globally in a fatal, lethal, and dangerous game of high stakes poker, the question becomes who or what will fold first. This will all become very obvious between 2050-2150 assuming the current state of things lasts that long.