10 of the Weirdest Futurist Scenarios for the Evolution of Humanity

How weird could our progeny become? Here are 10 of the absolute strangest visions of our post-human future.

When science fiction writers and futurists imagine humans of the far future, they never think our descendants are going to look exactly the same as we do now. After all, we’ll have access to powerful tools to turn us into cyborgs and hack our DNA, so there’s no limit to how we could reinvent ourselves.
But just how weird could our progeny become? Here are 10 of the absolute strangest visions of our post-human future.

1. Voluntary Devolution
What better way to start a top 10 list of the weirdest visions for humanity than by considering the possibility that we take a massive step backwards rather than forward? Voluntary devolution is the idea that we should re-engineer the human species to the point where we’re no longer advanced enough to be considered human. The basic premise here is that humans basically suck, and we should take it upon ourselves to regress, from an evolutionary standpoint, to a state of harmlessness. By becoming pre-civilizational, we would stop being a threat to ourselves, the animal kingdom, and the planet itself. This perspective could be interpreted as a kind of oxymoronic uber-Luddism, where progress is measured not by the increase and refinement of human capacities, but instead by its regression. The ultimate goal would be the end of civilization and our return to the jungle.

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Illustration drawn by Dougal Dixon and taken from a 1980s issue of Omni Magazine about what humans might look like in 50 million years.