When making projections it is important to set limits and to define what is being sought. Making unfulfillable promises is the occupation of politicians. When they speak of finding a “permanent” fix for a problem they only mean to get elected and to make a statement which can be defended in the next election. The promises are rarely fulfilled and the excuses are always of the form that the other parties involved prevented it, and so it’s their fault so we need to reelect us so the job can get done. Sound familiar?
The goal with this projection is to try to find what will be meaningful to people of the distant future and what they would probably be doing to keep themselves healthy and happy. The easiest approach with unknowable factors, like how long civilization will survive, is to assume that we are presently halfway through the cycle of conception, birth, growth, maturity, decay, death and dissolution. Being half-way means we are usually within the maturity stage, and thus when we look about some things are still growing rapidly and others are abandoned and are decaying. For example, we no longer hunt for wild animals for food, or plant and harvest food by hand, or plow the land with draft animals to create food, or for most people even operate powered farm machinery, and those who do don’t do it to get food for themselves but to get a crop to sell. However, when mineral fuel runs short and becomes expensive there will be a return to draft animals, and more people will keep gardens, and when human population becomes much smaller from the lack of natural mineral resources, wild animals will become more abundant and some humans will, once again, live by hunting for their daily food.
The modern brain-human species began about 100,000 years ago, and agriculture about 10,000 years ago, so the estimate for this study is that we will survive as agriculturists for another 10,000 years and as an oil-based society for another 100 years and as coal-based 200 years. The total human population to have lived during that previous time is estimated to be about 100,000,000,000; thus we could hope for an additional one hundred billion people to live and die during the next ten thousand years. Uh-oh, right away we have a problem because there are presently seven billion people, average age ~35 years old, and to divide 100 billion by 7 billion would give us only 14 life cycles or very roughly 500 years for humanity. The problem is that roughly half the mineral oil has already been consumed in the last one hundred years, and we are using it much faster now than the average for that time period, so obviously the oil we have, which supports modern agriculture, won’t last very long at our current level of population. Young people, if they live into old age, will see the end of cheap oil and the move to alternate ways of doing energy-consumptive things. The new and more energy-efficient ways of making food must be developed, which are not dependent on oil-powered farm equipment and trucks needed to get it to the people. If they can not be developed, then population must dropped back to what-ever level can be sustained.
If we drop into the future about half way to the postulated 10,000 year mark, we would be in a sustainable life situation more reminiscent of Roman times than how we presently live, except for for some high tech qualities. That high tech world would include information transfer far in advance of our present internet. It would include every conceivable form of image or thought that could be transferred electronically. The reason for that aspect of life being very sophisticated is that once it is installed it consumes very little energy. But in this new world some forms of information must be suppressed absolutely from the internet, such as how to make super- weapons, because after a few experiences of their effects humans will be willing to tolerate that legal limitation. It impossible to know what will come of Craig Venter’s and other scientist’s success over such a long time span, but I would expect some surprising things like new chemical formulations and plastics with spectacular qualities. That has already been happening for the last few hundred years but it will become very advanced. Perhaps even physically useful objects could be created by living forms. After all living things have been creating incredible machines for half a billion years, like animal skeletons.
The homes people will be living in at that time will probably be permanent structures made of permanent materials. For example, expanded polyethylene is now being used as a construction material, even for highway subsurface layering, because of its permanence. It is easy to imagine large prefabricated homes being made of such standardized materials and simply assembled and coated with a durable surface both inside and out. These structures might make comfortable homes lasting for thousands of years with very little maintenance. The great advantage of a home with a foot-thick wall of foamed plastic is that it doesn’t require fuel-based heating. The heating and cooling become effectively controlled by the flow of the daily variation of ambient outdoor air temperature and solar input into to on-the-spot thermal storage tanks of water; one tank kept hot and the other cold. With a house built this way, the huge input of one-time-use mineral fuel oil, like we now use, would be eliminated for thousands of years. This home would include such things as triple-pane windows and a heat-exchanging ventilation system, each of which is a one-time expense.
Because many people would be living at or very near the farms they were tending, these houses and farms would each be self-contained and self-sustaining entities. These people’s work would appear to be rather like gardening, and each community would export their local goods through a hyper-efficient transport system moving quite slow by modern standards but placing very little stress on the highways, rails and waterways they used. These infrastructures, at this distant time, would be designed to be permanent with light load usage.
Who knows what the distant future will bring? It’s difficult enough to know tomorrow’s weather but, things have trends and limits and that was what motivated my thinking. I suspect typical daily life 5,000 years in the future will function with very low energy consumption but with fabulous goodies, like a low energy Kindle, at a population nearer the ancient Roman time’s one hundred million than present seven billion.
Human lives five thousand years hence might be very pleasant.
Probaway - Life Hacks 
