Quote:
Originally Posted by KenGee
Evolution is very unpredictable, at the moment humanity has very little selection pressure on it. So we will see a great deal of genetic variation. If at some point we do see a selection event, say environmental then when will see some rather dramatic change. As others have said though you have to throw our tech into the mix, we will be tempted to have a fiddle ourselves.
100 millions years is a long time though, go back that amount and mammals were just coming to be. Alex is right most species only last around 5 million years, so odds are we will not be here. A more interesting question is how much change will we cope with before we consider ourselves a new species? If you met a Neanderthal on the street you might just think he was a stocky person, if you met Lucy well....
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Oops .... sounds like me.....
One fine SF I read , The Forever War , dealt with this , shorter time frame , only a few hundred thousand years - humanity became sexless and asexual and there were only in general two types , a male and female (and nearlly all humanity were clones of just two perfect humans) , the gene pool still there in "less evolved planetary colonies / civilisations" who still engaged in more primitive behaviours who were tolerated because they were considered quaint and as an insurance policy if the clones developed a genetic problem - they , just choose a replacement perfect human and clone him or her .