What if?: Technology and the future.

            Something that was brought up for a brief moment in today's class got me wondering... what if, in billions of years, when the sun is still going strong, whoever inhabits the planets consider us, humans, to be minor organisms from the past? I've spent quite some time thinking about this topic since we spoke about it in class today because I really think it is interesting. We consider the small organisms that first inhabited earth to be minor in the grand scheme of evolution. Compared to human beings, those organisms were nothing. In billions of years people could be calling us those organisms. It baffles me to think of what the world could be like billions of years from now. With all of the technological advances that are being made every day, it seems to me that we are exponentially growing in our technological use and our ability to understand what is around us. 

            The possibility of humans being more machine than human in the future also came up in class today. The thought of that ever happening to the human race scares me. Not just because of the movie Terminator, but for many other reasons. If humans become less human and more machine will we still be able to feel? Will we still be able to experience the emotions of love, hate, fear, happiness? A life without emotions, both good and bad, is a sad one at best. If we keep going at the rate we are going now with technological advancements then, sadly, i can say that I would not be surprised if this actually did happen sometime in the future. If this were to actually happen we would probably gain years on our average life span and a few more physical abilities that we could not have possibly had being fully human. But at the same time we would have the possibility of losing all of the things that make humans such amazing creatures. 

            I don't know about you, but I know that I would not be willing to risk the amazing things about being a human being just in order to live longer or be able to lift heavier objects or jump really high. I wish that things on Earth could just stay the way they are now, but this is a very naive thought. Our world is changing right before our eyes and there is nothing we can do about it. We are just along for the ride. I could probably go on about this topic for hours, but I will end this blog entry now. Maybe I'll continue this post on another entry in the future. I guess we will see!