Historical Causation And The Deep Future

Unless there is strong evidence to the contrary, it is safe to assume that the chain of causation for historical events is:

Climate change and new technology ==> New economic realities ==> Changing cultural norms ==> Changing politics, changing religious views, new laws, and new wars.

While individuals aren't irrelevant in history and drive the particulars of how it plays out, the Marxist concept of economic determinism is more right than it is wrong. If particular people at particular times in history had acted differently, an Arian Christianity or the cult of Mithras or Rabbinic Judaism or Zoroastrianism might have become dominant in Europe, instead of the version of Christian Orthodoxy orchestrated by Emperor Constantine, of the world we live in. If certain battles and events had come out differently, England might have been French speaking, and Ireland might predominantly speak a Celtic language. The United States might have been a constitutional monarchy under George Washington's dynasty, and the Confederate States of America might still exist today. But the technological, economic, and cultural character of those alternate histories would have been similar no matter how they got there.

Climate and technology drive change in everything else until they stop changing so much and the chain of causation plays out until it reaches a stable equilibrium, where it will then remain more or less indefinitely, until climate and technology chain gain.

Epochal periods in history, from the Out of Africa migration, to the migration of humans beyond India to Southeast Asia, East Asia, and Australia, to the human replacement of Neanderthals in Europe, to the migration of humans to the Americas, to the Neolithic Revolutions across the globe, to Indo-European expansion and the fall of the Harappans and the fall of the Minoans and the fall of an Egyptian dynasty, to the rise and fall of sedentary farming civilizations in the Amazon basin, to Bronze Age collapse and the fall of empires like the Hittite Empire, to the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, to the demise of the Anasazi, to the Black Plague in the Middle Ages, to the Dust Bowl of the Great Depression in the U.S., are all attributable to a great extent to climate events.

Technology fills in the gaps that climate doesn't explain. The domestication of a sufficient package of plants and animals in the Neolithic Revolutions. Stone working and astronomy and calendars for megalithic civilizations. Metallurgy and writing in the Copper and Bronze Ages. Domestication of the horse and the invention of a practical wheel in addition to metallurgy, for Indo-European expansion. Maritime navigation techniques and ship building for the Austronesian expansion, for Phoenician and Punic exploration and trade, for the Viking Expansion, and with European colonial expansion and the Columbian Exchange. Ironworking metallurgy and mathematics for the Iron Age. Road building, plumbing, and aqueduct building for the Roman Empire. Reinvention of art and science and mathematics in the Renaissance. The printing press and practical military use of gunpowder in the Reformation and early modern era. Then windmills and dikes in places like the Netherlands and England. Then coal driven steam engines in the Industrial Revolution. Then electricity, hydroelectric power, trains, steamships, and telecommunications. Then petroleum driven vehicles and antibiotics and vaccines. Then nuclear power and weapons and quantum physics and general relativity. Then computers and space travel and satellites and robots and automation and genetic engineering.

We continue to produce new technologies and have much more to discovery. We've reached a point where our own technologies have brought about rapid climate change.

But our technological development has grown systematic and our scientific understanding grows ever more complete. The remaining frontiers of physics, astronomy, and cosmology probably have few technological applications. Deriving the principles of chemistry from fundamental physics is something that has already been outlined and is close to being possible to do rigorously. We understand chemistry well enough that increasingly it is becoming a matter of artistry and craftsmanship rather than a question of the limits of our scientific understanding of it. Biochemistry is the hardest part of that and we are seeing a torrent of progress there. From biochemistry and parallel study of ecology and meteorology we are coming to master biology and the medical biotechnology that flows from that knowledge.

Maybe we'll have another century or two of significant scientific advancement and technological breakthroughs. Maybe we'll proceed two steps forward and one step back with an apocalypse or two along the way and progress will be delayed for a century or two. But science and technology are ratchets. It doesn't take many seeds for it to revive itself after even a very severe setback.

Call me an optimist, but I see a future where humanity has come to a full scientific understanding of the physical world at all scales, and has developed technologies that more or less fully exploit this scientific understanding, as a more likely one than any other possible future for humanity. 

With the room for technological innovation muted and our home planet's climate susceptible to our precise and intentional manipulation, we will soon after, probably before the year 2500 CE,  settle into a stable equilibrium that will last for thousands of years, not unlike our many tens of thousands of years as hunter-gatherers, the thousands of years of the early Neolithic era, or the millennium long periods of the Copper Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age-Classic era, and the Middle Ages, respectively.

The world of 4500 CE will look more like the world of 2500 CE than the world of 2024 looks like the world of 1824.