I came across this question on 'Quora' recently.

It sparked some thoughts and I read a dozen replies, most of them citing our slow evolutionary change in looks and declaring that we'd look almost the same as we are now.

I knew this was a ridiculous answer and can say with certainty that it's wrong.

First of all, there won't be any exemplar of Homo sapiens a thousand years from now, standing in front of some full-length mirror and fastidiously adjusting his garb while comparing himself to an image of some clean-shaven Wall Street broker from our era. That scenario might be a good idea for the next DiCaprio movie.

Most people conceive of the future with the imaginations of five-year-olds, and such a narrow, homomorphic bent that we eagerly consume series like 'Star Trek' and 'Star Wars' filled with space explorers two hundred years from now with just our looks and emotions and issues, in a fancy ship and a few new gizmos to play with, meeting strange aliens.

The costume department got off easy.

"Not so", says the Grinch, the popper of bubbles, the debunker of Santa Claus. "Your future will not savor of eggnog."

Everyone with an eye open can see the spiralling changes that our sciences and technologies have created, in our world and in ourselves. The span of so-called 'progress' we managed in the last hundred years, we'll double in another twenty. After that the same degree of radical redesign will occur in two more years, then two months. This rate of change is exponential, always has been. It's a simple mathematical formula. What amazes me, to powers of a thousand, is that most people don't get it.

I've always admired the complexities of chess, the plenitude of possibilities on such a small board with sixteen opposing pieces and the fact that a few gifted individuals can master the game and achieve the title of 'World Champion'.

I doubt anyone will deny that our world is infinitely larger, more complex (more moving parts, more possibilities) than a chessboard.

By simple extension, any rational being must admit that our future on this planet, our fate, our possible trials and transformations are an unfathomable equation, far above our intellects to even glean.

I started university as a math major. Integral calculus I could tolerate. But when I was given a peek at differential calculus, I promptly quit. It was as if someone had just asked me to swim the Atlantic Ocean. I switched to English lit.  Reading Chaucer and Milton was a much more pleasant chore.

Now I write fiction novels, a genre where new ideas can never run out.

This was my reply to the question. I'm sure, tomorrow, I might have a completely different one.

"What will we look like in a thousand years?"   

We will look like prehistoric Homo sapiens.

We'll be long gone but our legacy on this planet will remain, deserted buildings, the ruins of vast metropolitan skylines, spiderwebs of freeway systems, huge dams, iron and cement, which lasts longer than a thousand years. The planet has been ravaged and will slowly recuperating, as it always does. What once were humans can’t be called that anymore. They have no bodies, no mass. They transcend time and space and control the ether of the universe. But they have no purpose, so they can’t act or effect change. Every act requires purpose. So they simply observe everything, everywhere, all in the same instant, a trillion ecosystems evolving. They hope to discover a purpose, curiosity being the last cerebral infirmity they did not shed when they had to abandon their physical bodies, all constrictions and needs on a planet destroyed and unable to sustain physical life.
Now they float through space and time, bend light, nanosecond collectors of terabyte data, less than dust, as there is no meaning or purpose to any of it, evolutions of species that come and go, and their own invisible and impotent status reflects their insignificance, less than zero.
One trace of an emotion survives in one of them, against all logic and hyper-collective intelligence, a longing for the past. So it infects the hive, creates a pristine planet circling a young sun, just like God, and we are once again embodied as we were thirty-thousand years ago, a band of Cro-Magnons traipsing across green hills in the garden of Eden, the eternal recurrence, alive again.