Ask A Genius 482 – Heating Up: Climate Change, Mathematicizing Consciousness, and Denzel Washington in Black Trenchcoat
December 23, 2018
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What are some other possible futures?
Rick Rosner: Oh! The deal is that there are a bunch of different possible futures but most reasonable possible futures now encompass us riding this accelerating wave of increasing technological expertise with a few possible futures having the world entirely falling apart.
You can still go to the movies. There are three zillion dystopian books that have climate change in destroying the world. But if you look at possible futures, the more probable futures rendering climate change destroying the world of the future is almost super unlikely.
Instead, climate change futures, which are all reasonable futures, will be reasonable to an extent but will simply fuck a lot of things up. Then there will be technological solutions coming along to soften blows.
We’ll eventually engineer ourselves around most of the worst effects of climate change. We have some tough decades for the next 40 to 60 to 100 years from now, but technology eventually gets a handle on it.
Even if it is slightly the default technology of now, we may solve the problem of consciousness. Which means that more and more humans will live in the future equivalent to cyberspace, they do not live fully fleshy existences of the human population.
Eventually, the population starts dropping around a hundred years from now. By 200 years from now, the human population is maybe five or six billion down from a peak of 15 billion and the 5 billion humans will have a much smaller aggregate footprint because there are fewer of us.
Also, technology’s carbon footprint minimizing aspects will exist more than ever before. So, climate change will be solved after reaching a certain amount of havoc along the coastal areas of the world.
Also, the non-coastal areas of that stuff get to solve, like the gun problem in America. Even if we never get a handle on guns, and guns continue to proliferate, eventually, people become bulletproof because consciousness becomes storable and downloadable.
So even if you are shot by some maniac in the year 2147, you are able to be reconstituted because you’ve been frequently downloading your consciousness. You are able to be reconstructed. Having only lost a few minutes up to between the last time, you were downloaded and when the active shooter obliterated the consciousness.
There will be one in the future. There will be other means of liberation. There may be cyber wars that result in the obliteration of the backups of hundreds of millions of people. But that is almost a level beyond regular humans’ problem.
Where the technology exists, everybody can be practically immortal and indestructible, except for these political wars. You get to live forever, except there is a small chance that you get a race to the cyber war.
But everything points to our current problem and our current questions, scientific questions, besides the biggest being answered solved: consciousness. The super powerful technology is our future, without us necessarily facing the dystopian apocalyptic future or if it is Denzel Washington walking around in a long black leather trench coat.
[End of recorded material]
Authors[1]
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing
Footnotes
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