This is not about the immediate or even medium-range future; nothing about technical advances in the next century, or political changes, or even ecological disasters. This is about the long-range outlook for the human species. The basic assumption is that we cannot take long-range survival for granted, as we used to blithely assume, although, of course, it remains a possibility, with an uncertain probability. As a grammarian once observed: “Past imperfect, future conditional.”

Four possible futures are outlined below. Some of these are better than others.

1. Extinction without leaving any trace.
2. Evolving to a different species with a higher fitness before the extinction of humans. This seems rather hopeful, as these new creatures would still be our descendants in a way, though we might not recognize them (or they us).
   The possibilities are:
   1. A race with a higher consciousness, a heightened spirituality and moral sense, of which prophets and avatars such as Jesus and Gautama Buddha were forerunners. This was proposed e.g. by Canadian physician Richard M. Bucke (1837-1902) in his book “Cosmic Consciousness”, and is now propagated by the founder of the Canadian Peace Research Institute Norman Alcock in his forthcoming book “Trumpets of Angels”.
   2. A race with greater mental and extrasensory capabilities, as in the science fiction story “Childhood’s End” by Arthur C. Clark. This is not an attractive picture, in fact it is very frightening. These estranged children were at first catatonic while gathering their strength, and then started to move the planets out of their orbits. One might call them “super-tech” with new technologies, mental rather than physical, but sociopaths in the moral sense.
3. The development by humans of “artificial life”, i.e. smart robots, based on silicon rather than carbon, who would take over from humans after their creation. This idea is expanded in the preceding essay “Silicon: the Second Life”. The take-over could be violent and sudden, as in the play by Czech writer Karel Capek called “R.U.R.” (which coined the English word “robot”, meaning “worker” in Czech); but more likely it would be gradual, by competition and natural selection, as probably happened in Homo sapiens taking over from Neanderthals.
4. The last possibility, of course, is survival more or less as we are. Actually, I think that the possibility of 2.(a) would be better.

If we count the subdivisions under choices (2) and (3), there are really six alternative futures.