The Future of Humanity, Part 1: Cultural Divergence

Will human beings ever colonize other planets and moons? Given our current efforts to establish long term bases on our own moon and on Mars, it seems likely that we will at least try. Initially such a base would probably consist of a small group of scientists and engineers, each of whom may only commit to limited stays. But eventually these outposts may grow into more permanent population centers. Those that find themselves living on these frontiers would need to adapt to obvious logistical challenges. But even aspects of human culture that seem unrelated to these technological requirements may diverge from those on Earth. While these places would likely remain in contact with Earth, such communication might be intermittent and narrow in scope. Wrapped up in their own concerns, the citizens of an extraterrestrial outpost may be fairly isolated from the mother planet’s cultural trends and current events. Moreover the types of people that forego Earth to live elsewhere would probably not be a very representative slice of humanity. The necessary willingness of such people to embrace a radically new lifestyle may also allow them to adopt new customs and social contracts. How different might a moon society be from what we’re used to on Earth?

One way to imagine how different an off-Earth culture may be is to look at the range of Earth-based civilizations that have occurred in different places, and, more importantly, in different times. Doing so we see that pretty much every cultural norm that isn’t bound by the laws of physics and biology, even ones we take for granted, are in fact negotiable. Consider, for instance, how differently the ancient Spartans lived compared to modern Americans, or even compared to other ancient Greeks.

We have a lot of evidence as to how wide-ranging culture has been at different times and places. But even this range may be narrow compared to what we’d find if we knew more about the history of our species. What’s the oldest civilization you can name? The ancient Greeks, Romans, and Persians seem to us, well, ancient. But those civilizations peaked between 2000 and 2500 years ago. By contrast the Sumerian and Egyptian civilizations were flourishing as early as 6000 to 5000 years ago, and they would have seemed as historically distant to Socrates as he does to us. Yet even the Sumerians must be regarded as recent when placed on the complete timeline of human culture.

There is a tendency in popular culture to portray the humans that lived long ago as grunting cavemen. If you go back far enough in time perhaps our ancestors were no more sophisticated than that. But you’d probably have to go pretty darn far back. There’s a lot of good evidence that Homo sapiens became as “smart” as modern humans roughly 70,000 years ago. From this time on we communicated with complex language, we cooked our food, traveled long distances over land and in boats, made art and music, and wore woven clothing. In other words, we had all the basic components of “culture”. We know this despite how little remains of these ancients’ lives. This means there is somewhere between 50,000 and 60,000 years of human history when people lived in fairly complex societies we know little about. These societies spanned two ice ages. Their coastlines are now deep underwater. They lived alongside mastodons, dire wolves, and even other species of humans.

There’s so much we don’t know about the humans that lived more than 10,000 years ago. But one of things we do know is that they must have been very interesting. We are slowly starting to learn more. From time to time a discovery is made that gives us a glimpse at these ancient people. Consider the monumental ruins of Göbekli Tepe, in Turkey, built roughly 11,000 years ago by a society that would have seemed prehistoric and unfamiliar even to the Sumerians. Given the scale of its construction Göbekli Tepe must have been constructed by a numerous and highly organized group of people. And yet it appears the site was not used as a dwelling. Was it gathering place for spiritual ceremonies, as some archeologists speculate? Given the dozens of animal species depicted on the stone pillars, as well as whose remains have been found there, the site has even been light-heartedly referred to as a zoo. Whatever its purpose was, it represents an extraordinary effort directed at a project that went well beyond the basic needs of survival. Or consider the more-than-9,000 year old “Cave of the Hands” paintings, on the other side of the world, in Argentina. Or the 35,000 year old paintings in the Chauvet Cave of southern France, a mind-bending peek at the artistic traditions of a people seven times more ancient than Egypt’s oldest dynasties. Despite the choice of canvas, these images were clearly not made by grunting cavemen, but rather by skilled painters using artistic techniques and technologies that were surely honed over generations.

Left: A lion carved into a pillar 11,000 years ago at the Göbekli Tepe site, in modern Turkey.

Below: 35,000 year old paintings in the Chauvet Cave, in southern France.

Think of all the societies and civilizations that have risen and fell across the globe since the “cognitive revolution” 70,000 years ago, and how little we know about most of them. Think of the fabulous range of beliefs, myths, values, art and music they must have exhibited. Think of the games they might have played! Even their technologies may have been more sophisticated than we might assume based on their age, as innovations that accumulated over the course of years or centuries would likely have been lost with the collapse of those societies.

And yet all of these cultures were bound by the requirements of living on Earth, and even the more technologically advanced ones would have been fairly simple by today’s standards. What will happen to culture when Homo sapiens expand beyond Earth? For our descendants that have settled on Callisto, who may maintain only a passing interest in the mother planet, how quickly and how dramatically will their culture diverge from anything we have seen before?

The radically new culture that could emerge on a colony like Callisto is just one fascinating possibility for humanity that's fun to think about, and what I've written here is only a fraction of what could be said about this topic. But I also want to take a look at other ways the future of our species could potentially be much different than our present. In upcoming posts I will discuss four other possibilities. Stay tuned!