Are we mutants?

[Satyros]

Have we become more or less mutants by the things we consume, the polluted environment we are living in, our general way of life?

Will we mutate more in the future trying to fit in, to survive?

[Tbilisi]

I beleve that humaity will not last for too many years more... we will probobly get extinct, just look at all those factories and stuff in the former USSR and other former Bolshevik contries, and in the USA, and all over the place... no, we will die soon.

[AWAR]

We always mutate, evolve into new, more adapted forms. I doubt that humanity will become extinct, it's more likely we'll gradually evolve into amoebas

[Artemidoros]

AWAR said:

We always mutate, evolve into new, more adapted forms. I doubt that humanity will become extinct, it's more likely we'll gradually evolve into amoebas

I think that is devolution rather than evolution. Vive la devolution. ;D

[Satyros]

Artemidoros said:

I think that is devolution rather than evolution. Vive la devolution. ;D

Extreme stupidity is a strong sign of devolutionary mutation of the mind.

It is a very common sign that our societies are culturally mutating straight into involution, into cultural degeneracy.

[geirr]

I don't think that pollution and the crap we eat will make us mutate into some different form. Humans in the long term will evolve (over thousands of years) to a better human then eventually in billions of years the sun will die out, hopefully by that time our decendents will be living on another planet or maybe we will work out a way to power the sun with methane(the gas of the future). In the short term the optimist in me says that we will see the error in our ways and fix the environment and our general way of life. You also have to consider that technology will be so advanced that many things that are totally impossible today will be very possible in the future.

[Graeme]

Yes human are mutants. Humans have been living in undesirable conditions for many thousands of years until modern times and since then we have done our upmost to reproduce those undesirable conditions by the effects of our modern lifestyles.

Humans are still much as they were thousands of years back: belligerent, ignorant, hard to change, unwilling to face their limitations etc. Maybe some more mutations are needed in order to stave off extinction, terrible wars and unleaching ever more plagues on ourselves.

[SKADI JU87]

The final outcome?........The human race is going to be all one colour, with slightly slanted eyes (but larger).... Longer fingers, fatter/shorter bodies. ...I believe this is the eventual future for humanity.

[murphee]

I believe the final outcome will be dire (whether we blow up the world, or slowly poison it to death). Best case scenario is that we survive until or after the sun consumes itself. I fear that we will breed ourselves into oblivion, fouling the nest so severely that quality of life for most people will be so degraded that life won't be worth living. War, starvation and pestilence, those ancient forces, will cull the numbers if we're too stupid to self-regulate peacefully.
I think the human race of the future will look much as it does today--there will be Nordics, Negroids, Mongoloids, Meds etc. but also a large population of mixed people who have brown skin, hair and eyes.

[berschneider]

murphee said:

I believe the final outcome will be dire (whether we blow up the world, or slowly poison it to death). Best case scenario is that we survive until or after the sun consumes itself. I fear that we will breed ourselves into oblivion, fouling the nest so severely that quality of life for most people will be so degraded that life won't be worth living. War, starvation and pestilence, those ancient forces, will cull the numbers if we're too stupid to self-regulate peacefully.
I think the human race of the future will look much as it does today--there will be Nordics, Negroids, Mongoloids, Meds etc. but also a large population of mixed people who have brown skin, hair and eyes.

Murphee, I agree with you 100%. I think that although breeding ourselves to death is a possible scenario; it is also possible that population growth will stabilize at some point (as it has in Europe) and even decrease. Major calamities are still plausible but they are more likely than not to be results of governments' idiocy or criminality rather than just acts of nature. I also think that religious fundamentalism - be it current rabid Christian fundamentalism in the United States -- or Muslim fundamentalism in Islamic countries - coupled with today's capabilities for destruction is of serious concern to all people in all countries. But how can we control religious fanatics, especially foreign ones? - Frankly I have no idea.

[murphee]

I agree that religious fanaticism, exponential population growth, conflict over land, oil and especially water all pose the greatest threat to future survival.