It has become a cliche to declare that the future is full of both "great promise and great peril." Nonetheless, this aphorism expresses an important fact about the Janus-faced nature of our increasingly powerful technologies . If humanity realizes the best possible future, we could quite possibly usher in an era of unprecedented human flourishing, happiness, and value . But if the great experiment of civilization fails, our species could meet the same fate as the dinosaurs .

I find it helpful to think about what a child born today could plausibly expect to witness in her or his lifetime. Since the rate of technological change appears to be unfolding according to Ray Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns, this imaginative activity can actually yield some fascinating insights about our evolving human condition, which may soon become a posthuman condition as "person-engineering technologies" turn us into increasingly artificial cyborgs.

Martian Colonies

In a billion years or so, the sun will sterilize the planet as it turns into a red giant, eventually swallowing our planet whole in—according to one study—7.59 billion years. If we want to survive beyond this point, we will need to find a new planetary spaceship to call home. But even more immediately, evolutionary biology tells us that the more geographically spread out a species is, the greater its probability of survival. Elon Musk claims that "there is a strong humanitarian argument for making life multi-planetary…in order to safeguard the existence of humanity in the event that something catastrophic were to happen." Similarly, Stephen Hawking—who recently booked a trip to space on Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic spaceship—believes that humanity has about 100 years to colonize space or face extinction.

There are good reasons to believe that this will happen in the coming decades. Musk has stated that SpaceX will build a city on the fourth rock from the sun "in our lifetimes." And NASA has announced that it "is developing the capabilities needed to send humans to an asteroid by 2025 and Mars in the 2030s." NASA is even planning to "send a robotic mission to capture and redirect an asteroid to orbit the moon. Astronauts aboard the Orion spacecraft will explore the asteroid in the 2020s, returning to Earth with samples."

Unprecedented Agricultural Production

According to a PEW study, the global population will reach approximately 9.3 billion by 2050. To put this in perspective, there were only 6 billion people alive in 2000, and roughly 200 million living when Jesus was (supposedly) born. This explosion has led to numerous Malthusian predictions of a civilizational collapse. Fortunately, the Green Revolution obviated such a disaster in the mid-twentieth century, although it also introduced new and significant environmental externalities that humanity has yet to overcome.

It appears that "in the next 50 years we will need to produce as much food as has been consumed over our entire human history," to quote Megan Clark, who heads Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. She said this "means in the working life of my children, more grain than ever produced since the Egyptians, more fish than eaten to date, more milk than from all the cows that have ever been milked on every frosty morning humankind has ever known." Although technology has enabled the world to effectively double its food output between 1960 and 2000, we face unprecedented challenges such as climate change and the Anthropocene extinction.

Kardashev Transition

Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku has claimed that human civilization could transition to a Type 1 civilization on the Kardashev scale within the next 100 years. A Type 1 civilization can harness virtually all of the energy available to its planet (including all the electromagnetic radiation sent from its sun), perhaps even controlling the weather, earthquakes, and volcanoes. The Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom tacitly equates a Type 1 civilization with the posthuman condition of "technological maturity," which he describes as "the attainment of capabilities affording a level of economic productivity and control over nature close to the maximum that could feasibly be achieved."

"The danger period is now because we still have the savagery."

Right now, human civilization would qualify as a Type 0, although emerging "world-engineering technologies" could change this in the coming decades, as they enable our species to manipulate and rearrange the physical world in increasingly significant ways. But Kaku worries that the transition from a Type 0 to a Type 1 civilization carries immense risks to our survival. As he puts it, " the danger period is now because we still have the savagery. We still have all the passions. We have all the sectarian fundamentalist ideas circulating around. But we also have nuclear weapons. We have chemical, biological weapons capable of wiping out life on Earth." In other words, as I have written, archaic beliefs about how the world ought to be are on a collision course with neoteric technologies that could turn the entire planet into one huge graveyard.

Indefinite Longevity

This is a primary goal of many transhumanists, who see aging as an ongoing horror show that kills some 55.3 million people each year. It is, transhumanists say, "deathist" to argue that halting senescence through technological interventions is wrong: dying from old age should be no more involuntary than dying from childhood leukemia.

The topic of anti-aging technology gained a great deal of attention the past few decades due to the work of Aubrey deGray, who cofounded the Peter Thiel-funded Methuselah Foundation. According to the Harvard geneticist George Church, scientists could effectively reverse aging within—wait for it— the next decade or so. This means actually making older people young again, not just stabilizing the healthy physiological state of people in their mid-20s. As Church puts it, the ultimate goal isn't "about stalling or curing, it's about reversing." One possible way of achieving this end involves the new breakthrough gene-editing technology called CRISPR/Cas9, as Oliver Medvedik discusses in a 2016 TED talk.

Catastrophic Environmental Collapse