Last Stop on the Cosmic Journey: An Estimated Time of Arrival

Abstract

History is here imagined as a moral, intellectual, and physical journey whose destination involves: penetration to the furthest reaches of the cosmos, complete understanding of the laws of nature, and a perfect system of ethics with respect to the management of society and nature. It is suggested that the exhaustion of material potential implied by the Second Law of Thermodynamics is counterbalanced by the augmentation of informational potential in a process of ephemeralisation or doing more with less. Evolution is modelled as a process of hyper-exponentially increasing combinatorial complexity interrupted by occasional restarts or episodes of creative destruction. Drawing on these speculations, a calculation is developed leading to the necessarily rough and impressionistic conclusion that humanity will reach its above-defined destination some twenty millennia from now.