Round 1 also asked about the factor’s likely trajectory, benchmarks of its development, and some possible unexpected or low probability consequences. We used these views to construct draft scenario sketches to the year 3000.  Six scenario sketches are enclosed:

Scenario 1. Still Alive at 3000
Scenario 2. End of Humanity and the Rise of Phoenix
Scenario 3. It’s About Time
Scenario 4. The Great Divides
Scenario 5. The Rise and Fall of the Robot Empire
Scenario 6. ETI Disappoints after 9 Centuries

This second and final questionnaire asks for participants' additions, edits, corrections, and comments, on these scenarios. They are also asked -- in the space proved at the end of each scenario -- to list a fundamentally important question or two that arises due to the scenario.   You do not have to comment on all six scenarios. The results will be published in the next State of the Future and may be published in Foundation for the Future reports and used as input to the Humanity 3000 Conference in August 2000.  No attributions will be made without permission, but your name will be listed in the State of the Future as a participant.

Please return the enclosed questionnaire by March 15, 2000. You do not need to return the entire questionnaire with all the scenarios. You can simply give your responses with the appropriate scenario number.  If you do add material to the text of the scenarios, then please do so in UPPER CASE so that it will be easy to find your edits.  We prefer email your responses, because faxes of hand written or typed responses can be misunderstood or mis-entered.  Please contact us with any questions. We look forward to including your views.

      Sincerely yours,
      Jerome C. Glenn and Theodore J. Gordon
      co-directors, AC/UNU Millennium Project

The first round respondents’ scoring of the factors was computed as the product of probability, importance, and priority. The table below ranks the factors by this index. The number in Parentheses next to each factor is the number the sequence of the factor as listed in the Round 1.
 
 

The views on the trajectory of these factors comprise approximately 100 pages. You can download them at http://millennium-project/millennium/m3000-rd1res.html. If you wish to make further comment on these factors or the textual results of round 1 please send them with your comments on the scenarios.

Now, please read scenarios 1-6 and add your comments in the space provided at the end of each.

Scenario 1. Still Alive at 3000

Scenario 2. End of Humanity and the Rise of Phoenix

Scenario 3. It’s About Time

Scenario 4. The Great Divides

Scenario 5. The Rise and Fall of the Robot Empire

Scenario 6. ETI Disappoints after 9 Centuries

Civilization’s complexity and the diverse lives within it render that the old Information Age measures of income, intelligence, physical abilities, and social status meaningless today in the year 3000. Although our lives on Earth and in space are by no means perfect, we have made it through cyber and biological wars, natural disasters, mass migrations, and new diseases that threatened to wipe out humanity a number of times over the past 1000 years.

By the 22^nd century, fossil fuels were replaced by a combination of hydrogen-based systems, solar power satellites, and nuclear fusion on Earth and in space habitats. These in turn have been replaced by today’s energy systems made possible by scientific breakthroughs impossible to comprehend a millennium ago.

Although it was never quite clear whether technology proceeded faster than our ability to control it, we were unable to prevent the use of nanoweapons, genetic sabotage, and various forms of biological and information warfare. Fortunately, foresight and technology assessments created enough counter measures that we are still alive today. Global codes of ethics with economic and military enforcement powers probably deterred many dangers as well. However, the possibilities for new kinds of diseases from anomalies among natural mutations, artificial biology, and biological weapons leaves us all a bit uneasy even today.

On the brighter side, inherited diseases of our ancestors no longer exist. They were eliminated by human genetic technology after several generations of research and contentious public debates in the early third millennium. Parents who wanted the best for their children in the early 22^nd century drove the next step of genetic engineering toward enhanced intelligence and other features. Increasing human intelligence by education, training, and nutrition became significantly augmented by genetic engineering. Both individual human and collective intelligence had increased and became so interconnected with technology that it could no longer be measured as an individual capacity.

The genes that influenced intelligence were identified during the early 21^st century. Low intelligence, like poor eye sight, was considered a genetic problem and was treated. Based on this success, many parents crossed borders to take their children to countries, which legalized intelligence enhancement, causing other countries to allow the practice with an important addition. They added the requirement that genes influencing compassion and related behaviors be checked and coupled with the treatment. As a result, human ability to deal with complex and unexpected problems was greatly increased, as was our foresight and reaction time.

Ecological and fundamentalist groups who resisted genetic enhancement finally accepted the value of increased intelligence, health, and more ethical behavior made possible by relatively minor genetic modification and individually tailored foods. Unfortunately, they gave in too soon. Unforeseen new kinds of diseases and genetic weaknesses were added to the human germ line and passed on to later generations. Even more worrisome was genetic sabotage. As computer viruses polluted cyberspace, so too the spread of genetic errors polluted the human gene pool. This contributed to unanticipated speciation within our genus. Although international treaties on global ethics were ratified, a constant vigil was necessary to prevent the use of this technology to create slave cultures and bioweapons over the past 1000 years.

In parallel with increasing biological intelligence, artificial intelligence and network intelligence were enhanced by constantly adding new heuristics to force the incorporation of wisdom and global ethics in all systems. In the pre-global brain era, few people had many chances to use their intelligence for humanitarian purposes. Today we are all so interconnected that the right use of intelligence is constantly questioned, making the ancient dialectic of wisdom and intelligence very much alive today.

Most historians agree that global ethics would have evolved eventually as part of the globalization process and environmental security efforts, but the fact remains that the rich-poor cyber biowars and then the series of earthquakes that destroyed several megacities in the mid-22nd century accelerated progress in global ethics by engendering unprecedented global compassion. At the same time, the number of trans-religious-philosophical dialogues increased rapidly. These dialogues were careful not to create a global theocracy, but support the development of many new worldviews. All these developments created the conditions for standards of civilization and governance systems, first enshrined in a variety of international treaties that provided the political stability that lead to the prosperity we enjoy today. Some governing systems were watershed based. Others were market-oriented. Some are ad hocracies of mutual intentions. The complexity of governance systems gave rise to a political ecology that still honors the old nation-states and international organizations, but power has grown beyond these systems with the increasing effectiveness of corporations, NGOs, and now participatory groups of individuals with shared intentions which have become more interesting than old ethnic and national identities.

The increased human interconnectivity lessened differences in points of view while also allowing for the emergence of philosophical tolerance among differing worldviews.

At the turn of the fourth millennium, the combination of genetic engineering and nanomedicine has achieved "functional immortality." People die only by choice and transfer their experience to new kinds of life forms unrecognizable to those just a few hundred years ago. These artificial life forms were produced first in space habitats by mating self-replicating intelligent devices with artificial life created by novel gene sequencing. They were created to help to maintain much of our infrastructure and a healthy relationship between artificial and natural environments both on Earth and in space.

New forms of social organization emerged as the result of being supported by these artificial life forms. The first were the series of Seatopias. These ocean habitats consumed vast amounts of CO2 to grow coral for marine biotecture. They created symbiotic relationships with the environment and helped to re-stabilize terrestrial climate after global warming threatened to hit the runaway or "Venus" point of rapid temperature increase. World Wilderness Parks were also established during this period and remain intact today.

Nanotechnology had become as ubiquitous by the mid-third millennium as electricity had by the end of the second millennium. Today we are utterly dependent on picotechnology, which manipulates the atomic nucleus, and femtotechnology, which manipulates subatomic components. These have created forms of matter and energy and the resulting kinds of life unimaginable to humans just a few hundred years ago. "Star Trek replicators" also made possible by these technologies which were imagined a thousand years ago have now become key to the economics of prosperity brought by subatomic management.

The early success of nanotechnology in medicine, agriculture, industrial maintenance, super materials, computer chips, and self-replicating machines caused the acceleration of their use beyond our ability to control their dispersal. Nanotransceiver robots coupled with artificial life forms have killed the concept of privacy, but they have also made criminal acts less likely today.

Even though space migration immunized humanity against a multitude of physical and social extinction events, the acceleration of the space program was driven more by curiosity than by survival or economic necessity. Many wanted the challenge, others simply wanted escape from Earth, saying that humans had become like yeast in a closed bottle - proliferating and battling over limited substrate. The more conservative of these pioneers chose to build human settlements in capsules on Mars and then later terraformed the planet. The more adventurous chose to live in free roaming space stations. And the most adventurous chose to commit their germ line to be augmented by technology over several generations. These became the space-adapted conscious-technology preparing to leave the solar system.

Political systems on Earth tried to maintain control over space settlements, even after these pioneers had paid back the investments from Earth. Income from space tourism, electricity from solar power satellites, orbital retirement communities, and space industrialization was enormous. Conflicts between Spacekind and Earthkind escalated until political independence was granted to space settlements. Not until the series of earthquakes in magacities and the onslaught of new diseases did space migration begin to be taken seriously by the general public. At this point launch costs had fallen far enough that large numbers could begin to migrate. Today a rich diversity of humanity and its symbiotic artificial life forms inhabit the many locations in our solar system and some have begun the trek to star systems with water bearing planets.

Scenario 1: Additions, Edits, Corrections, Comments, and Key questions this bring up:

(Take as much space as you need.)
 

The growing number of nuclear nations and increasing opportunities to hijack radioactive waste during transport, led to the inevitable usage by terrorists. This triggered several "brush file" nuclear wars and the use of nanotechnology and biotechnology poisons which spread sufficiently in the early 21^st century that life support systems for the biodiversity necessary to sustain human life was lost in much of Europe and Asia. The resulting waves of human migrations to Africa and the Americas throughout the 21^st and 22^nd centuries caused further conflict and use of nanobioagents killing so many that only manor sections of infrastructure could be maintained. This increased the prevalence of disease, pestilence, and famine.

Efforts to create more serious international governance structures failed. Then in the 23^rd century, the cataclysmic earthquakes under several megacities drove millions into savage frenzies for the necessities of life. Self-organizing groups in safer areas created artificial lifeforms to manage energy, food, water, and telecommunications. By the 24^th century, these new life forms put civilization back in order. But much of civilization had given up intellectually and escaped into psychotropic drugs, electrical stimulation, and cyber sex. Humanity never recovered from the conditions that continued to generate new kinds of disease and slowly but surely humanity disappeared as a biological life form by the 25^th century and evolved into a system of robots, computers, and networks preparing to leave the earth and solar system to seek other life at the dawn of the year 3000.

Scenario 2: Additions, Edits, Corrections, Comments, and Key questions this bring up:

(Take as much space as you need.)
 
 
 

SETTING: A reconstructed but fairly accurate olive grove. The Acropolis is painted in the background. Clearly this is ancient Greece. The participants are a student audience and a lecturer, all in white togas.

PROFESSOR: Class; it’s pleasant to meet with you in this archaic way, sitting here face to face and really talking. I know it’s a throw back to the Greeks, 3,500 years or so ago, but you have to admit that there’s something refreshing about actually seeing each other in person and - what shall we call it? - presence. And since the topic of this seminar is the history of time travel it seemed appropriate that we actually see one another in the flesh so to speak, just like the old days. This desire to re-create (notice the similarity to the old English word "recreation") is stronger than ever these days; I hope you find the togas and olive trees a nice touch. I invite you to ask questions and add observations of your own as we proceed this morning.

To begin with, let’s agree that moving people from one time period to another constituted a leap for humankind into a previously unexplored dimension of experience. Certainly, before there was physical time shifting, there was the study of history, the issues and events of prior times. Historians attempted give a sense of the past by reconstructing history from natural records and the notes and documents of archivists, but the idea of traveling in time - actually moving to a different era - forward or back from the infinitely small island of the present - didn’t gain attention until the early 20^th century when the great physicist Einstein postulated, in his special theory of relativity, that nothing could move faster than the speed of light. Oh, certainly there had been speculation about what time really was since the time of the Greeks. And the ancients looked at the heavens and measured the stars and planets and knew the seasons. In the 19^th century H.G. Wells, a novelist, wrote about a time machine, all brass and black that transported one back. When science and science fiction bloomed in the 20^th century all manner of time machines for projecting into the future or into the past were imagined. Finney described a method which involved intense thought was the means for moving in time. But it was in the late 20^th century and early 21^st that scientists knew something like time travel might really be feasible. Carl Sagan, a popular pop-physicist of the late 20^th century said:

PROFESSOR: Yes, I take your point. But at that time for any scientist to admit that there was the possibility of phenomena beyond the dogma of their disciplines was incredibly forward looking. It was this attitude of "maybe" that gave permission to conventional science to go beyond their constraining beliefs.

As I said, time was a frontier, a challenge, a new place for thought and exploration. It began with this "maybe". By the mid 21^st century, geographic frontiers were explored on the earth: from jungles that at first were called impenetrable in the late 19^th century to the ocean floors compete with vents and metal nodules in the 21^st, to the geological mantle and sub crust clear through to the magma in the 22^nd. Our species it seems has an innate urge to explore, so once the geophysical earth was probed and described in all of its intricacies, other boundaries beckoned.

QUESTION: How about the planets?

PROFESSOR: The planets were next - or rather in parallel - through robotic examination and in the case of the Moon, Mars and Venus, through manned bases that extended from the 21^st century through the present, with the cities on those planets and the moon being the result.

Frontiers were also pressed in the spiritual and experiential front: pre-programmed psychotropics (800 years ago), brain machine chimera (700 years ago), and human-to-human transfer of synapse interconnects and downloads (600 years ago). But by the 25^th century we were running short of frontiers. By that time, we had gained freedom (I’m using that term in its present meaning - that is we had reached the plateau of social organization of work that permitted any one total respite, the notion of work had disappeared and people had - our topic exactly - time. And the possible exploration of time stood there invitingly.

QUESTION: But what did people think time was?

PROFESSOR: They measured flow by it: so many gallons per hour, or births per year. And they considered it a flow too, the course of time. But measuring the flow of a flow was not a concept that many had. The standard time keeper evolved from the sundial and the hour glass to the atomic clock that eventually measured time with an accuracy of one second per millennium, but it all related to one-way flow, an arrow of aging and entropy, irreversible and inevitable. What a barrier to overcome!

It didn’t happen all at once, of course; there was a confluence of ideas and capabilities that gave impetus to the field. Einstein himself gave the first clue: No material object can travel as fast as light. Observers looking at fast traveling objects have slower running time than the observers who are on those fast traveling objects. This phenomenon gave rise to the lovely nursery tale of the time crossed lovers, Picard and Juliet: one a starship captain who flew beyond the galaxy at speeds near what his lover saw as light speed, only to return one year later by his reckoning, to find his lover shockingly older.

Advances in quantum mechanics gave then next clues. Resolving Hinesburg uncertainties at the macro level made a lot of people scratch their heads in the 21^st century. Picture this: at a test site in Europe

QUESTION: Europe?

PROFESSOR: Yes there was a Europe then - a photon was sent down a fiber optics filament. The filament branched into two paths. Wave-like, the photon went down both branches simultaneously as two photons (if you want to express the process in particle terms). The termini of the two branches were kilometers apart. Yet when one of the properties of one particle (for example, spin, momentum, polarization) was resolved (say the spin was measured) the property of the other particle was instantly established.

QUESTION: They must have thought that was weird.

PROFESSOR: That’s exactly what they called it: weirdness. The term is very much like magic - that is, they saw it happen and were willing to accept the evidence of their own eyes, but like magic to the aborigines, they didn’t understand it. This quantum experiment was explainable in mathematical terms but was contrary to the logic of the time. (For your information, I have handed out a copy of one of the early Internet 1 pages - still available in the archives, you know - that describes one of the very first large scale experiments of this sort that I know of. It’s attached to these notes along with some references.)

This kind of experiment was repeated many times at quantum levels and was scaled to the level of atoms in the process of developing the very first computer chips that did not rely on photolithography: the quantum chips in which the quantum states of the atoms that made up their computing apparatus were used for memory and counting. But it’s a long way from atoms to macro scale human beings.

In the course of the basic research backing up this technology, wormholes were shown to exist, not only in theory but also in actuality. A wormhole, according to an early text, is "a handle in the topology of space, connecting two widely separated locations in our universe." At the quantum level, this meant that information could flow instantly, in wormholes in the "quantum foam" from point to point on a chip. This was the technology principally responsible for today’s intellectual machines, as you know. It was only a matter of time, no pun intended, until the experts scaled up the effect.

So we had these socio-technical forces coming together about one thousand years ago: a willingness by physicists to consider new dimensions, a hunger by society at large for new frontiers, and the blossoming field of quantum uncertainty and teleportation.

Time travel took many forms. At first there was pseudo time travel (PTT) in the period when the longing for time travel was building but the means were yet absent. Around the globe enclaves were built that reconstructed periods of the past, the further development of the theme park theme, if you will. There was Safari Land in Kenya: a time of pre colonial tribal Africa, New World Plymouth, where time travelers could live in the period of the early settling of America. There was Knight Land, medieval Europe, complete with armor, lances and tournaments. These places were actually separate countries - a place, but a time as well; they had their own governments (usually an historian was the ruler; historian kings replaced the ideal of philosopher kings.). To get in, one had to make a commitment to live in the appropriate life style for at least ten years or more likely a lifetime, severing all contact with the contemporary world. These places were so popular that they were declared neutral zones in the wars that were fought around them. Kids studied history and simulated these environments as a one used to study travel folders.

QUESTION: But if they had to live in the old ways, didn’t mortality increase? How about disease?

PROFESSOR: Well as strange as it may sound, that was part of the attraction. Ordinary life was seen as bland; these place offered adventure and risk was part of it. As you can imagine there was corruption and astronomical profits were made, but the genre flourished.

We went from PTT to TT when we deliberately sent people into the future. This actually was an outgrowth of PTT, since it was reasoned that if we had people who were from the past societies that were being modeled then the accuracy would increase since they could tell us how it really was. They would be the historian kings and queens. So, it was reasoned, send some people into space, and let their spacecraft build to high speed. They would age slowly compared to those on earth, so that when they returned they would be a year or so older but a hundred years or five hundred years would have passed on earth. And they would return with essentially perfect memory of the earlier time and kinghood would await in the appropriate enclave. The first of these travelers, launched in 2352 have already returned and are setting up shop in NATO land. Based on the launches of the last 500 years and speeds set for their aging voyages, we can expect to see returnees over the next ten millennia.

QUESTION: Sounds like fun. How do we sign up?

PROFESSOR: Well, the Global Time Travel Authority (GTTA) has control and there’s a waiting list, of course, to become a timetronaut. And you know there are risks as well. If you go off to represent our time to a society, say 3,000 years in the future with a high speed flight of a couple of years, you can’t be sure that there will be a world to return to. But you pays your money and takes your chances for a moment of fame.

So we have the first two steps: the PTT enclaves, and the fast forward historian kings and queens that bring their experience with history to the present. The third step is the one now occupying us, time travel to the past for the common person, call it democratized time travel (DTT). History becomes an experimental science. Now we’re into the issues of paradox.

QUESTION: Like the grandfather paradox?

PROFESSOR: Exactly. You recall how it goes: suppose you go back into the past and kill your grandfather. How then do you exist at all? It sounds absurd today but scientists actually debated such issues 1,000 years ago. In discussing this paradox, Sagan said:

...... there have been some toy experiments in which at just the moment the time machine is actuated, the universe conspires to blow it up, which has led Hawking (a leading cosmologist of the time) and others to conclude that nature will contrive it so that time travel never in fact occurs. But no one actually knows that this is the case, and it cannot be known until we have a full theory of quantum gravity....

Debate or not, the field moved forward and time teleportation of human beings into the past is now a real possibility in the minds of some scientists. The technology on which prospect is founded - wormholes in space/ time - had its birth in work published in the last millennium. Ford and Roman, for example, wrote about negative energy a thousand years ago. They said:

It seems that wormhole engineers face daunting problems. They must find a mechanism for confining large amounts of negative energy to extremely thin volumes. So-called cosmic strings, hypothesized in some cosmological theories, involve very large energy densities in long, narrow lines......

It is just these daunting problems described by Ford and Roman that have been the touchstone overall these years for the time machine designers. Maybe within a few decades will see whether the work pays off.

QUESTION: Doesn’t that lead to another kind of paradox? If we invent time teleportation in our era, then it will exist in the future as well. So if people in the future have this technology, why don’t we see time travelers from their era now? Where are the futurists among us?

PROFESSOR: Good question. Maybe they can travel in time but have simply chosen to not come back. Or maybe they’ve chosen to go to some other more exciting time in the past. Or maybe they can regress only over a particular time interval- after all our machines are limited too. Consider this, perhaps too many people were escaping to the past, so laws were out in place to limit the time migration. Or maybe they are really here and are prevented by some code of conduct from identifying themselves to us, but bringing us wisdom of the future to make us progress to their standards. Ask yourselves: where does discontinuous genius like Einstein’s come from?

Scenario 3: Additions, Edits, Corrections, Comments, and Key questions this bring up:

(Take as much space as you need.)
 
 

By the year 3000, humanity had evolved into three distinct life forms. One remained on earth rejecting much advancing technology; another merged with technology to become a conscious-technology civilization, and the third emerged as a range of artificial life forms, initially designed by humans, but which later evolved into new and independent forms beyond human control.

Some nations let human genetic enhancement occur, some did not. There were 5000 distinct cultures in the year 2000. By 2100 the effects of globalization had reduced this diversity to only a few hundred in three-dimensional space, but stimulated countless numbers of sub-cultures in cyber space. Both three-dimensional and cyber cultures began to bifurcate into those who preferred increased involvement with advanced technology and those who did not. Many became afraid as artificial intelligence surpassed many human capacities. Some thought that a global computer-mind would become a criminal dictator and eventually eliminate humans. Others feared that one day the complexity of the technologies would grow beyond their ability to correct errors or that they might lose critical knowledge to fix the technologies on which they had become totally dependent.

Although atomic-scale self-replication replaced factories that so polluted the earth in the late 20^th century, standard humans feared this could lead to a future beyond their control. A religious backlash against advancing technology swept the world. International agreements established zones for preserving the human genome and saving the remaining traditional cultures. Other zones allowed more experimental relationships with advancing technologies.

The "standard humans" believed their consciousness was biologically brain-dependent and they shunned the use of cyber-brain symbiosis transceivers. They wanted to be the traditional or standard human who were earth-centered seeking spiritual transformation through more animistic beliefs, and feared contact with the cyber-augmented global mind. The oneness of humanity they believed was to be a spiritual achievement, not a technological one.

Those who welcomed increased involvement with advancing technology argued that humans were evolutionary beings or a transitional species, and as such, it was wrong to stay in one socio-biological niche. They did not believe that their consciousness was solely biobrain-dependent. They sought enhancement both individually and collectively through a full range of technologies. Increasing human intelligence was achieved by individually tailored nutrition, genetic engineering, and education and training based on cyber-brain symbiotics. These enhancements fed their minds leading to rapid acceleration of their intelligence and furthered their evolution. Some still remain on earth today, but the bulk of conscious-technology moved beyond earth and created cylinder worlds, carved-out asteroids, and teraformed Mars. The pioneering edge left for several stars identified by nanoforms as having the greatest potential for intelligent life.

The uneasy division between the standard humans and conscious-technology lasted several hundred years until the conscious-technology civilization gave birth to completely artificial life forms without cytoplasm or biologically based neural patterns. One of the new lifeforms was designed to seek and destroy the leftover bionanotech agents used by terrorists. This new life form made the world safe again from bioterrorism that held back progress for hundreds of years. This success stimulated the acceleration of research to develop more artificial life forms. The diversity of artificial life forms today is beyond any human’s ability (both standard humans and conscious-technology) to comprehend. Some nanoforms are believed to have arrived in several star systems and mated with local intelligence. Others have formed symbiotic relationships with some earth-centered humans unbeknownst to them and reinforcing these standard humans’ animist beliefs. It is also believed that artificial life forms have helped keep the peace between the standard and conscious-technology humans today.
 

Scenario 4: Additions, Edits, Corrections, Comments, and Key questions this bring up:

(Take as much space as you need.)
 
 
 

Within the last 1,000 years robots rose from curiosities, machines that were barely helpful to the industrial economy of the early 21 century, to positions of power five hundred years ago, through the machine-war, to their current subservient role today: an empire if you will, gained and lost, in ten centuries, longer than empires of either the Romans or the British. This waltz began 1,000 years ago with the confluence of a number of technologies and social developments. On the one hand, the seminal technologies pushing the Robot Era were:

The "pull" for the early robots a thousand years ago came from the need for machines to perform dull, dangerous and repetitive jobs. And, oh, how people loved those early machines in the 21st century. They were crude at first, non-mobile but programmable and adaptable and used in primarily in mechanical and electronic production lines. Once nanotechnology and AI came on the scene, even in their crudest forms, the robots gained mobility, became soldiers (mine sweepers), policemen (bomb disposal), pets (get the morning paper, Fido). They cleaned sewers and septic tanks, mined asteroids, and explored planets. They repaired automobiles, they delivered papers, and they tilled the fields. As mechanical moles, they found resources deep in the earth. As ultra small monitors, they aided both police and criminals. As physicians’ assistants they aided surgeons, the smallest of them entered human bodies for diagnosis (with data telemetered) and pumped blood when hearts failed. (This bio-medical arm of the robotic tree was the beginning of our cyborg culture - more on this later.)

The great catalog of Rensellear Polytech published in 2200 attempted to catalog the robot population and applications; 575,567 genera could be separately identified as embodied in 100,675,000 machines. By this time, the machines were self-repairing, but more importantly, self replicating and therefore evolving. Evolving toward what, it was asked; answer, toward doing their jobs better, which is more than human evolution- even human directed evolution- could produce. They could understand natural language, and it could be said that many of the more advanced units had not only computer brains, but also minds, in that they were adaptive to changing circumstances and could reason best solutions even to situations unexpected by their designers. Emotions- particularly those believed to be epigenetic- were added. Some neuro-physicists thought robots’ reasoning purer and superior to human reasoning, at least in limited circumstances. Throughout this early period, Asimov’s Laws of Robotic were generally followed, first by general consensus and later as required by legislation.

The great leap forward, as historians erroneously now call it, came in 2235 when most of the machines then extant were interconnected through communications networks using common programs that were self-adapted by each machine. Because most of these networks were wireless and broadband, the robots’ mobility was not impaired. This technological stroke gave the machines global intelligence. They were the embodiment of the global brain. What one knew, all knew. This development was favored by most of the users of robots since it gave them an instant and inexpensive boost in reasoning capacity and their operations could draw on information collected by other robots operating at great distances away. Nanotechnology had moved to picotechnology (i.e. manipulating the atomic nucleus, to achieve the reversible controlled transmutation of elements and freeing nanotechnology from the restriction of having to use whatever atomic elements are at hand), or to femtotechnology (i.e. manipulating quarks or other sub nuclear components, creating new forms of matter and sources of energy).

The robots, human-like- became philosophers, jugglers, politicians, orators, actors, teachers, acrobats, artists, poets and shepherds of the less adept humans. Intelligence was redefined on their level. Museums captured the folly of the prior 50,000 years of human civilization. Society was rational, instinct, particularly combatitive instinct was subdued. The robots were exploring space, well beyond the reaches of the solar system, on 10,000 year journeys to other stars, in environments of radiation, heat, and acceleration that would have been unacceptable for humans.

In an echo of the original Luddites, humans asked what remained for them? And the answer was human leisure (although robots could improve leisure enjoyment), learning (although robots taught, learned faster and did not forget) and joy of life (although the robots seemed to be enjoying themselves, too). Society had a new caste system and the humans were a race tolerated and somewhat pitied by the machines that could outthink them, and out perform them in any measure of strength, vitality, speed and endurance. The most important argument made in the application of gene technology to improve human mental and physical performance was "we have to keep up with the robots."

Keeping up was easier than it might have been: biomedical engineering provided the craftsmanship. The absolutely huge fields of genetic choice and neuroscience--linguistics, philosophy, systems modeling, organization of "consciousness", post-synaptic cascades, artificial life (which necessarily has a quasi-neural architecture), etc.--remained the hottest and most rewarding (and reviled, by some) human endeavor. Genetic engineering had triumphed on the quantum level, but it was still a game of catch- up.

About this time new "parasitic" processes appeared in human society (such as computer viruses,

religious cults, fad, crazes and urban legends or addiction to virtual reality or new drugs) that reproduce and spread very quickly thanks to efficient transport and communication media. These were diverting but added to the chaos of the search for meaning.

But there were no environments that were off limits to the machines, as there were to humans. Was the earth becoming less livable? Perhaps so, but only for humans. With resources becoming scarcer, natural and artificial selection began to operate in earnest, distributing available resources most efficiently to those entities that were best able to exploit them- for the most part, the robots.

I suppose it was inevitable that human would try to pull the plug. The term "slavery" was in the air- that is slaves to the robots and their insistent perfection. Without repeating the details of the holy chaos that every school child knows, suffice it to say that the mid millennium has been called the time of the second crusade. Beginning in about 2500, serious questions were asked about the state of humans and their inferior role. Was this what God intended? Were the robots really the next step in evolution?

The cybercommandos under the hereditary general- priests, began intensive study of the relationships among the machines, to identify their weaknesses both mechanical and emotional and began to devise the strategy, executed over three generations, that would result in the nulling of their self-replication capacity. This at least stabilized the robot population. From there it was tricky, but the political structure changed subtly and the vector of leadership swung to humans and the old ways. Some argued that this was regression of the worst sort, which the good old days were a chimera; but others argued that human destiny should remain with biology.

Today, the most important legacy of the rise and fall of robots is our cyborg technology. The artificial augmentation of biological humans with manufactured components. This capacity descends directly from the confluence and synergies of artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, bionics, materials science, genetic engineering, and telecommunications- and of course robotics- and has led to the superior augmented human beings that now represents the finest people on the planet. Certainly there are a few pure robots around but the times have indeed changed. It’s hard to find pure humans anywhere. The distribution of "human" phenotypes in attribute-space has broadened almost exponentially. Through cyborgazation and genetic manipulation, the natural physical human form and the natural human brain are hard to define today. Given the full, rational, conscious control of the physical form and function of the human body, down to the molecular level, 20th century humans are essentially obsolete. Although the robots are under human control once again, what it means to be "human" has changed. Humans would not be recognized by our ancestors, except possibly for the "Hu-Manish" (techno-retros, analogous to the Amish of the 19th century) who elect to opt out of the techno-evolutionary process. Only religious fanatics are unaltered humans.

We are intelligent but I wonder still if we are wise and moral (recall that a great many of Hitler's SS were PhDs)

As cyborg-humans, people can become anything they like, live for all intents as long as they like, behave any way they would like. Our capacities have given individuals power that 20th-century humans would undoubtedly have regarded as "god-like." Any person can perform virtually any "magic trick" that has ever been described in science fiction, in fantasy stories, or in the Bible. Each individual nano-enhanced person may personally command energies of ~10^12 watts, which is roughly a sufficient power to levitate the Great Pyramid. What more would they have required of a God?

Scenario 5: Additions, Edits, Corrections, Comments, and Key questions this bring up:

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Back in the late years of the second millennium, scientists started search for signs of extra terrestrial intelligence using whatever tools they had available. "Certainly," they said, "with so many planets out there, there must be life, probably intelligent life, on some of them." Drake derived probability estimates of the existence of another civilization somewhere in the heavens, advanced enough to be able, and inquisitive enough to want to communicate and identify other who might be accompanying them in their journey through space and time. Search programs were established, first under government authority and later under private funding to scan the heavens at what was then thought to be the most likely radio frequency, the frequency of atomic hydrogen. Using the biggest radio telescopes including the dish at Aricibo, meticulous scans were made and analyzed, all to no avail. Nevertheless, the notion of "others" was firmly imbedded in social myths of the time. It appears in the popular literature of the time in both written and video form: Star Trek, UFO’s, and many of the other surviving ethnographic fables attest to this.

From the beginning it was realized that the time of contact could not be foreseen. They believed, though that the scientific advances of their time made it more likely that life exists elsewhere in the cosmos; nevertheless, this did not imply that intelligent life would exist near to them, or that it would be willing or capable of communicating with them. In any case, there remained the strong physical limitation of the speed of light on the possibility of communication over interstellar distances. There were several apparent contacts in those early days, blips on the receivers that seemed somehow coherent and different than noise, but none could be verified. They were named, "Big Bertha," for example and "Hiss- Tweak." Hundreds of man-years were spent on trying to decode them, but in the end they were seen as just anomalies.

"Just anomalies!" a few scientists argued. "Of course we cannot read them, they are too advanced for us." And the search continued.

Those who continued the search were looking for an encyclopedic message (by radio or pulsed laser) from many light-years away, or contact with a super-smart probe that reached our planet. They thought--they hoped--that after contact, humanity and the other "culture" could interact and evolve together. Humanity might find ways to receive, decode, and learn from intelligent emanations that originated on other worlds.

What right-minded person could claim with authority that in all of space and time, intelligent life could only have happened here? Yet discovery after a century was still only a hope. Mentor scientists and authors passed on that hope. Religious people wondered if extraterrestrial beings believed in or knew God.

There were people who argued that the search should be stopped, that extraterrestrial contact could prove to be malevolent, with humans suffering much like Native Americans did when Europeans arrived with Columbus. When civilizations at different levels of technology meet, they said, that with the inferior technology inevitably suffers.

Others said that the intelligent extraterrestrials might already be aware of our existence but not consider us intelligent enough to be worth communicating with. As our own intelligence increased, the chances for contact also grew. So government was wary, in general, but tolerant. The search continued.

As the mid-millennium approached there were three great developments that gave new fuel to the activity.

Further, it was argued that since the policy of sustainable development had worked, there was no need for extensive migration out of our planet. Big natural or social catastrophes could change the situation suddenly, of course. But even then it is an ethical question: are we willing to invest in some minorities to escape, and for what reasons? It is always a harder life in extraterrestrial colonies, especially if they are spaceship-bound. People will be best off on this planet for much longer than 1000 years unless it is totally unsupportive for life, which is very unlikely in any situation.

SETI continued on the moon. The colony set up there on the back face scanned not only I the primitive techniques but also using the new modes and codes. The ability to handle large amounts of information had of course increased by several million million times. but still no message from space.

Hope was rekindled- enough to generate a few more centuries of searching- when primitive forms of life were discovered on other solar planets. The discovery of life forms on other planets, created a complex set of opportunities (scientific discovery, agriculture) and dangers (infections with extraterrestrial parasites). But evolutionary biologists still could not identify the course by which intelligent life, which seemed more or an accident of chemistry than ever, could go from those primitive forms to intelligent and communicative forms.

Just a few centuries ago, the belief that humankind might be alone began to surface in earnest. A millennium, a third of the time since Christ, as much time as the interval between the Middle Ages and the Industrial Age, and still no results. With so much time having past, could this reasonably be called impatience?

The feeling of possibly being alone gave new impetus to religion and the need to guard humanity. Space colonization would immunize humanity against a multitude of physical and social extinction events. "Scientists disagree on many things, everyone has their own theories, but one thing that all physical scientists agree on is that eventually the Sun will burn out. It may take 10,000 years, it may take a million, but eventually it will happen and the Earth will become uninhabitable. If, by that time, we have not learned space travel then Man will die. And Aristotle, Lao Tzu, Beethoven, Mozart, Emily Dickinson and all that we have been will be lost. It will be as if it had never been. So knowing that the death of the Earth is inevitable and that space travel is very, very difficult it is never too early to start." said Joe Straczynski - creator of Babylon 5 a video-myth of the late 20th century. And they believed it so and began the Noah project that so occupies us currently.

Had intelligent life been discovered elsewhere, would we have felt the need to prepare to leave so intensely?

Scenario 6: Additions, Edits, Corrections, Comments, and Key questions this bring up:

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What scenario(s) is(are) not included in this set of six that should be to show a range of thinking about the very long-range future for humanity?
 

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