Timeline of the Far Future
Related ideas that seem kind of obvious but haven't seen them mentioned anywhere yet:<p>1. We live in the most interesting 200 year period of Earth so far in its 4.5B year history. The rate of progress has never been so high, one notable example of why this period is special and unprecedented is that it's the first time humans or any species has visited the Moon. It's quite a mind-blowing coincidence.<p>2. Human history will probably look like a sigmoid curve - long period of stagnation followed by rapid progress followed by a long period of stagnation. We were born into a very short period of something like 1000 years with the highest rate of progress. After that, we'll gradually enter an equilibrium in which things won't change much (or a period in which history will just repeat with minor variations). The year 300,000 will look similar to year 301,000 - despite being separated by a millennium - this is unthinkable at this point in time. You can't keep inventing novel technology and art at current pace for a million years. Has there been any debate about how this long period of equilibrium could look like?