Possible Futures

Simple branching timeline. Out of many possible futures, we select one, according to particular choices or decisions made. In a linear timeline there is only one past and future history. In a branching many worlds style multiverse, all possible timelines all possible timelines already exist. Diagram copied from Frihost Forum - Life (original source & license unknown)

The future is unpredictable and remains to be determined, which means there are an infinite number of possible futures. But for the sake of convenience, four stylised possible near-term futures (at a historical scale, not quaternary or geological time) have been selected here and are briefly considered. Each of these however will have implications for the longer term (future deep time). These are: postapocalypse (out with a bang, equivalent or even worse than the P-T mass extinction), long decline (out with a wimper), ecotopia (the best of all possible worlds from our present knowledge), and singularity (the evolution of radical new "kingdom", totally transcending humanity and current life on Earth). MAK111011

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