r/Futurology

​

BloombergNEF’s New Energy Outlook 2026 says rising electricity demand, energy security concerns and rapid electrification are accelerating the global transition toward renewable energy. The report projects solar could become the world’s largest source of electricity by 2032 as countries invest more heavily in batteries, grids and electrified infastructure.

(sorry about the "for reddit" thing; copied over from a pages doc)

Lets assume that in the future, ET contacts us.

If there is truth to religions of a cosmic sort, Beings and Kingdoms and Realms etc- what else would those things be?

That is the scientific explanation to religion.

I keep seeing people say that ET wouldn’t be religious because they are too smart and rational for it- as if ET wouldn’t have an even greater understanding of the universe, have theories about things humans can’t even think about, have spiritual experiences, have spiritual longings,  and maybe even have “texts” or artifacts from some older, greater, now apparently gone species.

As far as the cosmic beings in human religions, if the stuff is at all real- what else would it be besides ET?

This may be mostly about semantics, but it's about perspective and science too.

At least some of the time, a species said to be extinct was never wiped out and never died out.

At least some of the time the gene pool of a species doesn't stop reproducing. It just slowly changes until the genes reach a critical point and the organism is another species- a lot of the time a species that is said to have gone extinct actually continued on, slowly changing into something else.

Sometimes a whole species- and it's long-term offspring- are destroyed, like in a cataclysmic event, but many of the species we say are extinct kept passing their genes down and down, with slight alterations (up until the present sometimes), and eventually the old genes changed enough that a new species is made from an old one.

I understand evolution is messy and that all sorts of genetic lines move in all sorts of and multiple directions, but that's my point. A species that doesn't exist anymore can also, a lot of the time, be said not to have disappeared, but simply changed into something else.

Humans and whatever comes next will be that way too. We won't go extinct. We'll just change over time until either we all spectate into different things while some pockets or variants stop existing, or both humans as we know them now exist along side other offshoots of ourselves.

I saw an article today saying we could possibly reach singularity within the next 4 years or something. I didn’t really know what this meant so I started looking it up and it kinda seems scary? What do you think would happen if we reached singularity, would it be a good thing or a bad thing?

​

Researchers have developed a new catalytic system capable of converting carbon dioxide into usable fuel at industrially meaningful scales, reportedly producing around 110 pounds of fuel per day during testing. Scientists say technologies like this could eventually help recycle captured CO2 into cleaner fuels for sectors that are difficult to fully electrify, including aviation and shipping.

I've been building a speculative framework for a non-carbon life form and I want people to tear it apart.

The entity I'm calling SBSC — silicon, boron, sulphur, chlorine — uses ammonia the way we use water. The actual living thing is a crystal lattice. When ammonia evaporates it doesn't die, it goes dormant and waits. Like a tardigrade but made of minerals. When ammonia returns, it wakes up.

There's a variant called SBSF where fluorine permanently locks the lattice. It never goes dormant again. It just slows down with temperature. It's effectively immortal.

The uncomfortable part: Enceladus has confirmed hydrothermal vents, silica, ammonia, sodium chloride as a chlorine source, and molecular hydrogen. That's most of what SBSC needs to exist right now. NASA keeps calling it promising for life as we know it. What if we're looking for the wrong life?

The bigger question: if this chemistry is simple enough to have emerged at the birth of the galaxy, what does a 4 billion year old version look like? Our definitions of life were written entirely around carbon and water. Is that a description of life, or just a description of us?

The automation of prospecting and top-of-funnel outreach by BDR and SDR AI tools won’t eliminate the work force but it is going to mean a massive restructuring of the sales team. Watching the ads with Jordan Belfot talking about ""firing"" BDRs to focus on ""closers"", but the broader market is seeing this as the emergence of highly specialized human roles to manage and leverage this AI ""workforce."" My point is, instead of just fewer people, the roles will shift. You’ll get people managing the AI itself, prompts, data, making sure it doesn’t go off the rails or sound like spam. You get more technical sales roles building the system behind the scenes, wiring workflows and CRM so everything actually runs. And then you’ve got closers focusing purely on high-value conversations because the pipeline is already there. So it’s less a thing of humans vs AI and more the fact that the middle layer of reps doing repeatable tasks is going to be the one getting squeezed the hardest. And then …. specialized roles will emerge around it. Stay with the program and you’ll be fine. Or?

I created a poll on my website to see what inventions people expect to exist within their lifetimes. The results were pretty close to what I expected in terms of probability. I'd be interested in what other inventions people can think of that will exist in the near future. Are these percentages about what you'd expect?

Which of these inventions do you expect to exist in your lifetime?

Humanoid robot companions

39%

Brain-computer interfaces that allow direct communication with technology

28%

Reliable weather control (e.g., preventing hurricanes or droughts)

11%

Aging reversal therapy (significantly extending lifespan)

11%

Memory recording and playback (reliving experiences)

6%

Gravity manipulation (e.g., levitation or anti-gravity transport)

6%

Time travel to the past

0%

Teleportation (human transport, Star Trek style)

0%

Fully immersive dream design/control

0%

Nanobot-based disease elimination (continuous internal health monitoring and repair)

0%

A species, such as homo sapiens, will be altered or relegated by things like these data centers.

Humans are not the same thing they were 50 years ago. And soon they won't be what they are now. They won't mean what they mean now, they won't have the same position in the universe they have now, they will be less than their own creation.

THERE IS NO WAY THAT HUMANITY, AS WE KNOW IT, WILL CONTINUE TO EXIST.

Hopefully, humans will be OK in the coming regime.

Be good ya'll..

I think we should use our experiences with advancements of the recent past to be wary of future ones.

Remember when Redbox was $1? Then everyone flocked to Redbox and Blockbusters shut down and a Redbox turned into $10?

Maybe I’m a Luddite, but I was in Vegas and saw these strange robot taxis driving people around. When I asked my taxi driver about them he told me they were free…for now. When everyone abandons the human taxi drivers who knows how much they will charge. Worse, what jobs will the taxi drivers have? One of the best parts of traveling for me is talking to the locals and chatting with the cab drivers. Idk I hate this timeline and it is soul crushing. I’m having a hard time imagining what the future will look like and how to prepare my kids for it.