Perhaps I’m a pessimist but based on information in “The Coming Age of Wonders,” Rudy Rucker’s 1997 Washington Post review of a Freeman Dyson book, I’m predicting a war in the year 3000 between the people of Saturn and those of Jupiter. An excerpt from Rucker’s piece:

“Going further into the future, Dyson says that sometime around the year 3000, our descendants will have dispersed over the whole solar system. Due to the vast size of this space, our population could become many millions of times as large. ‘No central authority will be able to regulate their activities or even be aware of their existence. The process of speciation, the division of our species into many varieties with genetic endowment drifting gradually further apart, will then be under way.’ Thanks to genetic engineering, human speciation will happen at an explosive pace and ‘our one species will become many.’

As well as there being many more people, the quality of human experience may change. ‘Some of our descendants will be eager to explore the delights of collective memory and collective consciousness, made possible by . . . radiotelepathy. The experience . . . will enormously enlarge art, science, religion and history. . . . Those who have experienced the merging of memory and consciousness into a larger mind may find it difficult to communicate with those who still rely on spoken or written words. Those who have been part of an immortal group-mind may find it difficult to communicate with ordinary mortals.'”