Future of mankind

What do you think will happen? I think space settlement seems pretty interesting, though I can't really decide on its likelihood. Space settlement, it seems to me, would also cause humanity to branch off into separate species, since the requirements for life in space are different than on Earth.

With growing population and technology, the future's pretty much open for anything, assuming we don't blow ourselves up too soon.

http://future.wikia.org/ is a nice site on this.

There's a scale: the Kardashev scale, that defines the technological level of a civilization as the amount of energy they are able to harness, roughly exponentially as:
a Class I Kardashev Civilization would be able to harness all the energy available on a single planet.
a Class II Kardashev Civilization would be able to harness all the energy available within a single star system
a Class III Kardashev Civilization would be able to harness all the energy available within a single galaxy.
Carl sagan placed the human race at around 0.7 on the Kardashev scale.

Theories exist that if aliens existed already in the galaxy then we'd see their structures spanning star systems, like a kind of interstellar spider web. We can therefore say either the development of hypothetical alien civilizations elsewhere in the galaxy is roughly concurrent or behind us, no aliens exist, or interstellar construction work is simply impossible. I'd tend towards believing the latter, but we may prove this wrong.