Someone imagines how humanity is spread over several galaxies and fights with other civilizations. Others imagine how people on earth communicate using holograms and eat artificial meat made from atoms. If you ask them when such times will come, then some will answer that in a couple of hundred years, others say thousands of years, if not tens of thousands.
There is such a science - futurology, it deals with the analysis of technological growth and forecasts of the future. Futurologists once predicted the global spread of the Internet. They also predicted the appearance of a google translator. To many, this seemed as absurd as the idea of human immortality in 2045 will now seem to everyone. However, there are reasons to believe so. This is already leaving the realm of fantasy.
Imagine that you decide to walk along the streets of the 18th century, a time when the streets are lit with kerosene lamps, and for any communication at long distances you need to write letters by hand, and then wait a month for an answer. You walk, and a flat cake from a horse, on which a man is passing by, flops onto your leg. You decide to surprise him and return with him to Wooden Fifteen.
You drive him down the street, show him shops that are bursting with all sorts of goods, show him Skype, memasics, talk about space achievements, briefly explain the general Theory of Relativity. Let's think of a 10-point scale of surprise for a second and put it 10 out of 10.
Now, let's say you gave him your time machine, and he decided to surprise his great-great-great-grandfather and goes to 1550 to send him to 1700. He will be surprised by the achievements in physics, mathematics, medicine and many other branches of science. He will be surprised by the laws of Newton and Galileo, but in ordinary life much less things will change than changed from the 18th century to 2015.
The degree of surprise takes a solid six out of ten. To get a dozen, he is forced to travel to the 12th century. Thinking which year you need to go to get the top ten for you?
More discoveries are made in each current unit of time than in the previous one. This is a proven fact. This is the exponential growth of technology.
The graph of technological growth versus time looks like a branch of a parabola. True, it is defective: it is an s-shaped curve, gradually turning up. That is, each explosion of technology is followed by a quiet period, followed by a new explosion, and so on.
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The latest explosion was the emergence of the Internet, personal computers and their spread to every home. Now we are seeing a slowdown, but a new technological breakthrough will happen very soon.
We have already started 3D printing organs. Scientists are able to print a piece of trachea suitable for transplant. An artificial blood transfusion project is under development in England, which will be launched in 2017. Corporations are showing the world more and more AI innovations every day. If you subscribe to any scientific publics, you will notice that new shocks for a person are very, very close.
New technologies will be cheaper and cheaper every year, to see it now, just remember how much the first 1 gigabyte flash drive cost.
so that's about immortality. Scientists expect a breakthrough in artificial intelligence and nanotechnology. Robots are decreasing in size every year, computer transistors are becoming more compact and more compact (Moore's Law), people can already create robots the size of a blood cell, and if in the future we replace blood with nanoblood, which futurologists predict by the 2040s, then we will be able to eliminate all infectious diseases, clear cholesterol, improve all our indicators and extend life until you have a knife stuck in your throat, if by that time there will be such objects as a knife.
With the development of artificial intelligence, we will approach the merging of man with a machine, our mind will surpass today's mind billions of times, we can understand ourselves from the future less than ants or Colorado bugs can understand us. That is, our future is in no way like Star Trek, Star Wars or Futurama. The point in development beyond which it is no longer possible to predict further is called a technological singularity. Progress will go so fast that we cannot understand it. With my current intelligence.
The mind will be completely merged with technology, a person will be able to create a virtual reality in his head without additional equipment, which will be many times better than ours, even you, anon, will be able to visit your favorite 2D world.
With the help of new opportunities, you will be able to create new worlds in your mind, travel through them and, occasionally, for the sake of interest, look out. By the year 99, our civilization will spread to the entire universe, we will be able to realize all 10 dimensions, and perhaps you will be one of these people (?).