Popular Science writes: “The big question now is, can we survive long enough to become the next humans?” This article was an excerpt with permission from Last Ape Standing: The Seven-Million-Year Story of How and Why We Survived written by Chip Walter. He writes:
“Given evolution’s trajectory, short of another asteroid collision or global cataclysm, we will almost certainly become augmented versions of our current selves. That has been the trend for seven million years. Apes increasingly endowed with more intelligence, and more tools, becoming simultaneously wiser and more lethal. The question now is, can we survive… ourselves? Can we even manage to become the next human?”
Well, it makes for gentle science fiction to drop the occurence of a global cataclysm. To be sure, climate change is cataclysmic, it just will occur on more than human span of time. And, it certainly is easier to write about it in the future than to explore the recent past when we humans wrote off the possibility of saving life on the planet as we know it.
