In the scale of millions of years (it may take many millions!) we can expect diversity and expansion. Perhaps it will occur at other levels beyond space exploration. Some theories (check Stephen Hawking - which book / theory ??) predict that we can create universes inside this universe, for instance with the help of a black hole of the right dimensions. It may happen that more advanced civilizations will take their pick with creating different universes inside this one. Just like some people like to grow flowers, perhaps such civilization would like to play "creator of worlds" just for the fun of it and to learn from its development. In fact, they themselves (along with us and everything else we know of) might be just an experiment of some other civilization, and so on. Of course, this is just mumbo-jumbo, we don't have any idea on how (im)plausible these kinds of speculations really are. But what can we expect in the shorter term of, lets say, a few hundred thousand years? Well, if we pick earth's history where we are now and try to imagine what it would be like a few hundred thousand years from now, several things seem quite straightforward:
First of all the demise of all current dogma and superstition. This may be difficult to imagine today, where religion, science, philosophy and many social sciences are infested with dogmatic beliefs and limited areas and methods of "respectable" research. Today, man opposes himself, one of us says "X" and another says "not X", while in fact none of us can say for sure either way. We find it difficult to live in the angst of simply not knowing who we are, where we are, what will happen next, what we should do. Materialism or physicalism, Christianism, Buddhism, and many other -isms have been created to hide the simple truth: we do not know most of the things we would like to know. We don't even know how consciousness relates to matter, we have no idea if there is life after death, or if good and evil or beauty have an independent reality or are just creations of our minds. While it might seem comfortable to just decide that things are in some way the price to pay is conflict with those that also decided that things are in some other way. Because, in a sufficiently large society, if I choose to say that a necker cube is turned to the right, someone else will come and say it is turned to the left. Perhaps some day we will see that the necker cube represents a real cube made out of plastic, and then we can touch it and be sure. Or perhaps it is nothing than that drawing on the piece of paper, and the question «in which way is the cube turned to?» really doesn't make sense, for it has no third dimension. But for now we can't really answer any of the really important questions: the ones that would tell us what has value, what is worth the fight. So, the more we cling to a partial view of the world, the more we will create divisions and conflicts in society. By choosing one way we will devalue those that have chosen some other way. That does not mean we cannot choose in practice, but, in the long run, we will learn that choosing something in practice (like choosing to be chaste while others choose promiscuity) should be based on a free choice that knows that other ways are also possible and legitimate but nevertheless prefers this path or perspective. There can be no long-term harmony without respecting the truth and recognizing our ignorance. Fanatics are only a first failed attempt to create a wider view.
This leads to the demise of all organized forms of religion. I can't really imagine any form of organized religion that isn't based on lies and simplifications. A religious organization that would say the truth would have to start out by saying: «well, we don't what the meaning of life is, and even if we do, we don't know hot to communicate it or prove it. We can't even say if there is life after death, or what form it does take. We can't tell you if there is a God, or what He wants from you, if anything at all. In short, you can't tell you what you should be doing with your life.» Who would join such a community? If people are taught just to think for themselves you won't get a religion, at most you'll get a bunch of free thinkers, philosophers or something like that. But philosophical fruits are generally high complexity, scope and detail of a vast array of incompatible ideas all uncertain and most of them very beautiful. , I don't think religions can survive more than two hundred thousand years if technological advances are not stopped by some doomsday event. Technological advances will inevitably place in our hands more and more power, making a doomsday device all the more accessible as time goes by (even if it is only through biological weapons). Today religious fanaticism has embraced the US (I imagine the chagrin Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Abraham Lincoln and others if they could see how the country they help to found sank so low regarding the intellectual prowess of its political leadership) and many other smaller countries are still kept deep in the dark, continuing their centennial traditions of keeping social control through stupidity and fear (the most striking case happens in Muslim countries). But religious people are so crazy that they will eventually kill one another (or even mankind as a whole). As time goes by and the power of man grows, religion will be seen by sensible people more and more as a virus that must be contained and finally eradicated, so that true spirituality (honesty, surrender to love, openness to every aspect of the world, free and clear research, etc) may emerge, and that true humility regarding the intellect and awe regarding the world will emerge and allow the diverse cultures and ways of life to live in harmony.
Secondly the interaction with the environment: what we are seeing today are just the first steps of a new regard for our interaction with nature. Instead of simply using what we need and suffer the consequences, we will start studying the consequences both of what we take and return to nature. In order not to have the secondary effects of scarcity, pollution and predators, we will want to create by our own hands the equilibrium that is naturally created by the interplay of different species and the environment in thousands of years. Grasshoppers eat until they deplete their surroundings, and then die of hunger. Other animals grow in such large numbers that predators rapidly appear to take advantage of the large food resource now available and they also increase they numbers until a relative equilibrium is achieved. Man, on the other hand, as created a lot of pollution that endangers his own survival and already greatly diminishes his quality of life and increases diseases. Predators, however, will probably emerge inside the species, through wars motivated by scarcity of resources or different ideologies. At least until now, man is by far his biggest predator.