The Human Journey: A Potential Timetable Extrapolated with Big History Trends
摘要
This chapter reimagines history as a journey of moral, intellectual, and spatial progress towards a future where humanity explores the deep cosmos, attains a complete grasp of natural law, and develops an ideal ethical framework for societal and environmental stewardship. It speculates that, while the Second Law of Thermodynamics necessitates depletion of the universe’s physical potential, this is offset by the growth of informational resources through ephemeralisation—doing more with less. Evolution is modelled as a hyper-exponential growth of combinatorial complexity, punctuated by resets involving creative destruction. Based on these ideas, the chapter estimates that humanity will reach an omniscient, omnipotent state, here called pleroma, in approximately twenty thousand years.