User blog comment:Acamaeda/An Upper Limit to Googology/@comment-30279966-20200121183956/@comment-28606698-20200219211200

Throughout its history, mankind has repeatedly passed through the “bottleneck”, when due to natural catastrophes the Earth’s population reduced to several thousand people, and was on the verge of extinction. I say it to show the fragility of humanity existence. But that was in ancient times. Modern technologies seem to make humanity less vulnerable, but, on the other hand, in the modern era, the main threats to the existence of mankind are created by its very rapid development itself. In the twentieth century, people lived under the threat of a nuclear catastrophe; in the twenty-first century, new challenges may arise – biological/genetic weapons, artificial viruses, hazardous nanotechnologies etc. Dinosaurs dominated the Earth for 100 million years, but, in the end, they became extinct. Will humanity have as much time if every century a new threat to its existence arises?

In addition, I do not think that humans are the highest form of evolution. Indeed, at present, no species can compete with humanity, but this does not mean that nothing can be more perfect than human. I believe in the infinity of evolution. I am not talking only about natural biological evolution due to Darwinian selection. In particular, the reasons for the acceleration of evolution may be genetic engineering and human cybernetization, which in total can lead to the emergence of something new that will no longer be human (or we will have to expand the concept of human being very much). Also over time, genuine artificial intelligence may appear, which will cease to be just an algorithm, but will gain the ability to self-development and self-awareness.

Thus, evolution will always continue on the Earth as well as on other inhabited planets, which will lead to the emergence of new intelligent species, similar or unlike humans.

We can consider one of the theories that represents the Universe as the sum of an infinite number of exponentially growing inflationary bubbles with dimensions of the order of 10^(10^10) pc, in some of which the physical vacuum is transformed into ordinary matter. In our bubble, the last star will go out someday and the last proton will decay and further evolution will become impossible, but somewhere far away, in another bubble, maybe with a different set of physical constants, life and evolution will continue.