Chapter 9 · What comes next
The Future
The story does not stop at the present. The same science that explains the past sets out what the next century, the next millennium and the deep future could hold.
Big History is not only a story about the past. The same evidence and the same methods that reconstruct the last 13.8 billion years also project forward, and the projections are more solid than most people expect for the next few decades and more open than most people expect for the next few centuries.
This chapter is the one with the most uncertainty in it, and it says so. Climate physics, energy systems, artificial intelligence, biotechnology and space are treated the way every other topic on this site is treated: what is established, what is active research, what is an open question, and where scientists disagree.
It ends in the deep future, with the death of the Sun and the fate of the universe, because a story that began with the first tick of the cosmic year deserves to be followed to its last.
Lessons
- 9.1 The next century: climateDraft
The range of plausible futures narrowed at both ends, and almost nobody noticed.
- 9.2 Energy after fossil fuelsDraft
The transition is probably cheaper than not doing it, and that is the least interesting thing about it.
- 9.3 Machines that learnDraft
Chapter 6 said collective learning made us. This lesson asks, carefully, whether this counts.
- 9.4 Editing lifeDraft
The first CRISPR cure works. It treats a disease concentrated in the places least able to pay for it.
- 9.5 Leaving EarthDraft
Space is one of the most valuable things we do, and almost all of its value points back at Earth.
- 9.6 The deep futureDraft
Earth has about a billion years of biosphere left, not five, and that is only the first paragraph.