Will humanity extend into the far future? It's likely many of us think it should. The problem is that each of us, individually and collectively, act otherwise—we are destroying the environment and climate at every turn. Now a group of scientists is arguing that civilization needs to specifically and systematically study how our species can ensure its survival, even for millions of years, via a new interdisciplinary field they call "Future Dynamics." Their study is published in Habitable Planet.
"'Future Dynamics," they write, "would integrate geodynamics, climate science, ecology, economics, and social modeling to simulate possible futures over tens of thousands to millions of years. Rather than predicting exact outcomes, it would identify safe trajectories and tipping points to avoid."
Why? Because our intelligent, technological species may well be the only one in the galaxy.
Humans—Homo sapiens—have existed for at least 300,000 years. In the natural world, viz. pre-modernity, species existed an average of 1–11 million years (1–5 million years for mammals) before being driven to extinction by environmental and climate change, catastrophic events or biological competition.
But since the industrial revolution, everything has changed. Our own species seems to be doing well—our numbers and our average lifespans have never been higher—but these advances have come at a cost of intense resource extraction, air and water pollution, the degradation of nonhuman species, warfare on unprecedented scales, chronic diseases and more.
Immediately staring us in the face are the possibilities of nuclear war, climate change—where Earth is on track to warm by half an Ice Age (3°C out of 6°C) in just 250 years instead of 12,000 years, an average warming rate today about 25 times higher—natural or engineered pandemics, cyberattacks, robotics, artificial intelligence and more. Long-term, even plate tectonics could matter.
While these threats have seen a great deal of research and thought, "a guiding holistic paradigm for civilization's long-term survival is missing," write Taras V. Gerya of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and colleagues from Texas and Slovenia, "and the research of the Earth-Life-Human system future focuses on relatively short-term timescales (decades, centuries)."
Why intelligent life may be rare
Decades of searching have found nary a scintilla of evidence for extraterrestrial beings. Research finds many of the necessary and specific properties for complex life—orbitally, planetarily, geologically, atmospherically, geographically and more—are rare. These rare combinations are a result of long-term planetary evolution and are likely to "make up less than 0.003–0.2% of all habitable worlds."
"Our species is precious," the researchers write, and "we have a duty to ensure the long-term survival of our civilization, for the sake of the galaxy as well as our descendants."
Building a science of the far future
How then, when future human evolution is more likely to be engineered than natural, should we plan for a million years or survival or more? Even the Clock of the Long Now, intended to make us "good ancestors," only looks ahead 10,000 years, about twice the interval of recorded history.
To formulate a paradigm to take long-term survivability seriously, the group advocates four core areas of knowledge to guide research science: education, policy and public discussions that emphasize clarity, scientific grounding and urgency.
The new multidisciplinary field of biogeodynamics "points the way" towards their vision, they write. The field investigates the long-term interactions of Earth's interior with the evolution of its surface, landscape, ocean, atmosphere, climate, biosphere, exosphere (the sun, asteroids, cosmic radiation) and human civilization.
Inherited behavior patterns—instincts like a rattlesnake rattling its tail, and, for humans, specific personality traits like tribalism, reactive violence, short-term thinking and blindness to exponential trends "have high potential to induce civilization destruction.
IBPs have been evolutionarily tuned to optimize the survival and reproduction of organisms in their natural environments and may be incompatible with a civilized community." (These behaviors, if true of all intelligent life, might also explain the Fermi paradox—intelligent species may eventually and inevitably destroy themselves; an idea called the "Great Filter.") If it is to be successful, the new field of Future Dynamics must grapple with and subdue IBPs and their consequences.
Policies for a truly long future
The researchers write that humanity, and especially the scientific community, needs to encourage policies "that favor long-term stability over short-term gains."
They state that this can be done by focusing on such topics as global catastrophic risk reduction, sustainability trajectory design and future-oriented institutions. The second would mean moving "beyond the idea of a sustainable steady state and aim for a sustainable time-dependent trajectory—a scientifically navigated path of continuous adaptation and resilience."
The third topic would include continuing "to gradually embed long-term metrics, such as...existing policies already in place for the long-term safety of radioactive waste disposal sites." Such a challenge even includes developing a language to inform inhabitants of the deep future when they may well be entirely unaware of the languages we use today.
Planning for a long-term future via Future Dynamics is not a utopian project, they say, but one of necessity that may take several generations. If we have such time. For example, the Mayan civilization that existed in Central America from about 2,000 B.C. to 1697 A.D. collapsed in about 50 years due to a wicked combination of negative individual factors.
They conclude, "The long-term survival of human civilization is the bedrock upon which all other aspirations rest—and it is a mission worthy of our greatest efforts."
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Taras V. Gerya, The Long-Term Survival of Human Civilization: A Science-Based Paradigm, Habitable Planet (2025). DOI: 10.63335/j.hp.2025.0022
Citation: A new scientific discipline to ensure humanity's deep future (2026, February 27) retrieved 1 March 2026 from https://phys.org/news/2026-02-scientific-discipline-humanity-deep-future.html
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