The average mammalian species lifespan is a million years. But Homo sapiens only evolved about 100 thousand years ago. So we’ve got a long road ahead of us. The chart below explores where we’ve been, and where we might be headed.

Though some futurists say the future is accelerating, there is plenty of evidence that the future might be a lot slower than we think. Just because microchip technology improves rapidly does not mean that other forms of scientific innovation will. Science fiction writers have been predicting that genetically engineered humans are right around the corner for almost a hundred years. But we’re still struggling to understand how our genomes work, not to mention our proteomes, transcriptomes, and microbiomes.

In the early 1990s, computer scientist and scifi author Vernor Vinge suggested that world-changing artificial intelligence would be developed in a decade. Now, over twenty years later, we’re still waiting for our Singularity.