[misja]

I always wonder how our own evolution affects our long term chances of survival as an intelligent species. Homo sapiens only exists 30K years and until recently survival was hard, making it an advantage to be intelligent. But our recent technological and medical advances make survival more and more easy so in terms of evolution, other biological features become more useful, such as for instance the rate of reproduction. So suppose we keep improving our life standard like we have been doing so far, how will humans as a species develop over the next, say, one million years?

I think biology itself provides us with some clues of what is likely to happen. There have been other species in the past that because of climatological or geological changes suddenly had a very easy time surviving. Take the Dodo for instance. What happened to them is that they gradually lost most of the survival features that they didn't need anymore. Perhaps this is the future of any intelligent life form and maybe this is why we don't detect any sign of them in the universe.

[vfc1]

> Homo sapiens only exists 30K year

You meant 300k, right? The problem is, the human species is growing at an exponential rate, so if this continues and it's going to be hard not to, the damage tho the ecosystem can go very fast as there are processes that can also be triggered in an exponential manner.

For example, melting of the ice cap would cause not only ocean rise but a lot more heat staying in the planet as ice reflects a lot of it back into space.

Also, a temperature rise of 5 degrees would kill most phytoplankton, which is the main source of oxygen.

All of this sounds very catastrophic, but it might be somewhere in between a few centuries and a few millennia away, which is nothing on a geological time scale.

The current equilibrium that allows for human life on this planet is much more fragile than we think.