Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit Subscriptions.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

You can register for a free account to have four complimentary articles per month. We will occasionally email you a newsletter, from which you can unsubscribe at any time. We do not sell personal data or otherwise disclose personal information to other organisations.

Life & Death

Immortality & A Galactic Future

Andy Yee looks forward to humanity’s technological ascension.

Ideas about the long-term trajectories of human civilization have typically put humanity’s future under a few scenarios. The philosopher Nick Bostrom outlines the four families of future scenarios as: extinction, recurrent collapse, plateau, and posthumanity. A more recent study by a cross-disciplinary group of researchers instead formalizes the broad classes of trajectories as status quo, catastrophe, technological transformation, and astronomical transformation (‘Long-Term Trajectories of Human Civilization’, 2019). And in his book Future Stories (2022), David Christian labels the four global scenarios of our imagined futures as collapse, downsizing, sustainability, and growth.

There are some conclusions we can draw from these studies.

…