by Matthew Cobb
On Tw*tter the @realscientists account just posted an interesting challenge.
So here's something I've been pondering a lot lately: what will the world look like in 2100? What do you think?
— RealScientists | #BlackInMarineScience | Symone (@realscientists) July 27, 2015
I came back with what I think is probably going to be the correct answer:
@realscientists More water, less ice, fewer and less happy humans, fewer megafauna (if any), no wild apes.
— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb) July 27, 2015
While Laura Schmitt responded in similar vein:
@realscientists I'm bummed about it actually. Not necessarily more overpopulation. Impacts of climate change. Technology benefits some.
— Laura Schmitt (@laura193laura) July 27, 2015
But Corey Bradshaw (@conservbytes) who is currently curating the @realscientists account (it’s what’s called a ‘rocur’ account – that’s ‘rotationally curated’ – a different scientist runs it each week) responded with a rather more interesting challenge:
@matthewcobb @laura193laura Can you picture a better scenario too? One where we choose a smarter path. Or is that unrealistic?
— RealScientists | #BlackInMarineScience | Symone (@realscientists) July 27, 2015
I gave a facetious reply:
@realscientists @laura193laura Hoverboards, jetpacks, moonbase, Mars colony, 2001-style Hilton satellite. #retrofuture Interesting challenge
— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb) July 27, 2015
And then a more serious one:
@realscientists @laura193laura Huge reduction in meat-eating and dairy industry, ecologically planned industrial development, no capitalism.
— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb) July 27, 2015
So, the challenge to readers is this: what do you think a GOOD 2100 would look like? Apart from stopping getting more CO2 into the atmosphere, how can we get to a good place in the 21st century, and what would that look like? Shoot my ideas down if you want, but I’m more interested in what you think the world should look like in 85 years when we’re all dead and gone, and how we can get there.
Check out both @laura193laura and @realscientists for further thoughts, then post your answers below.
In 2100, technology requires transparency in societies so governments are more accountable for their actions. As a result, the world’s people are more knowledgeable about their environments, food, and daily activities. In other words, fewer people live in a bubble of ignorance. As a result, both individuals and governments make better decisions on individual, family, local, regional and global levels.
All roofs have solar panels. All schools teach high quality science classes. University educations are nearly free. Religious institutions don’t get tax breaks except for truly charitable activities presented in a secular format.
And I’m still alive to see it!
Alive in a robot body that can shoot lasers!!
I’m sure that you actually mean something sensible, but, that would include the pole-facing side of roofs more pitched than {latitude} to the vertical. At 57 north, my ~40 degree pitch roof literally does not see the sun from about August to May.
Saying nothing.
I guess I made the assumption that the reader would reasonably think that roofs where sunlight doesn’t fall would not have them installed.
I seem to have been mistaken. Some people apparently think someone might advocate for installing them inappropriately. In deep forests and on storage sheds within rock shelters, for example.
And, while we’re at it… “saying nothing”? What does that mean?
People DO have a knee-jerk reaction that “this technology” (in this case, solar panels) is bright shiny and new and so must be appropriate. On this website, I’ve had people advising me of the wonders of installing solar panels and needing the facts of latitude and illumination pointed out to them. Different places are appropriate for different solutions.
Better quality science education – yes, good idea. But it needs to be applied to be of any use.
Regarding appropriate places for solar panels, does anyone here admit they’ve been watching Zoo? In the last episode, somebody’s idea of plausible technology is an Antarctic research station running on a few square metres of solar cells and apparently without any battery storage at all; all the lights go out as soon as the flock of mad bats cover the panels (after flying all the way from South America, or possibly Japan).
(Just think of the amazing technology and expertise and enormous amounts of actual fossil fuel that goes into making a TV series… and they go ahead and make stupid shit like that.)
Probably the result of a modern upper-level creative writing programme.
Probably the result of a modern upper-level creative writing programme.
They’re working on “solar paint”, too!
There’re all sorts of really nifty technologies being worked on. But the most important of all…is that you can, today, go to your local home improvement megastore and buy panels that make all kinds of financial sense. And utility-scale solar is cheaper than nuclear and about on a par with natural gas — the latter especially with Tesla’s just-announced pricing for utility-scale load-shifting batteries.
In other words, new technologies will always be welcome…but we don’t need anything new; we’ve already got all we need.
b&
The world is likely to be richer and happier by 2100, unless there is some really horrible downturn. Trends have been very positive in the less developed world.
What I’d really like to see: economically competitive and healthy synthetic food. Let’s move on beyond agriculture so we can give that land and water back to nature.
Like Paul, I think the world is very likely to be doing much better (thanks largely to Capitalism).
For one, extreme poverty might well be long gone(see Bill Gates’ 2015 annual letter).
Have those who disagree taken a look at the enormous progress made in the past decades? If they have, they need a good answer to the question Thomas Babington Macaulay posed in 1830: “On what principle is it that, when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us.”
Well, political institutions and ecologies change relatively slowly, while technology and economic availability of technological goods is changing relatively rapidly, so here goes my ‘utopian’ prediction:
1. 90% of the world’s population has practical (not just theoretical) access to free effective birth control. Which means that the population around the world is stable at just a smidge above the replacement rate, and women are no longer a minority in terms of educational and work achievements.
2. 90% of the world’s population has a lifestyle equivalent to first world populations today. A small fraction is still essentially dwelling in the iron-age, while while 4-5% enjoy luxury we can’t really dream of (no really, we can’t even imagine what sorts of things they have available to them). This includes universal health care for 90% of the world’s population.
3. Most people have instantaneous handheld access to any knowledge or recording made before 2070. Near-AIs allow for search-on-vague-command of this material.
4. Unlike many utopian predictions, I don’t think robots and AI will replace all blue collar work and work involving a combination of intellectual and manual labor (like nursing). “Hardware” problems are of a different sort than “software” ones and don’t seem as amenable to rapid solution. But I bet near-AIs will replace a lot of assistance- and support-based white-collar jobs, such as legal research associates. A “good” future allows that this replacement frees up the individuals affected to become experts in their chosen fields (i.e., all those who might have gotten a legal assistant job now become lawyers).
5. Most current major human and domesticated animal diseases are extinct. Including (cross fingers) cancer.
One more add: in 2100 we still don’t live much more past 100, but mental degeneration problems such as alzheimers are far more rare, and physical degeneration is much lessened. IOW average high quality lifespan will continue to increase. As will average age of death, even if maximum lifespan itself doesn’t change much.
Quibble: Cancer can be managed and treated, but I don’t think it can be driven to extinction the way polio and smallpox can. Cancer is generally not caused by a specific organism; it’s just what happens when the machinery of cellular replication malfunctions. Eliminating all the various causes of such malfunctions seems a much tougher challenge than wiping out a species of pathogen.
My contrarian self thinks in 85 years there will be fewer hungry people, fewer people deprived of basic medical care, fewer beheadings by religious lunatics, fewer black people rotting in prison for smoking pot, and so forth.
Despite the hysterical ranting bedwetting TV news anchors, the trend over the centuries has been away from violence and war as a cause of death. Despite the best efforts of the NSA and such, fewer people are in prison for expressing political opinions.
Despite ISIS, the intellectual trend is away from fundamentalism. I think, in fact, that this trend is a contributing cause of ISIS. A death rattle.
Does that make me a Pollyanna?
“Does that make me a Pollyanna?”
No, I don’t think so at all. There is a generally upward trend in quality of life throughout history and I heard a quote once that, and I’m paraphrasing here, the poorest child born in 2000 has the same life expectancy as the richest child in the world born in 1900. Consider history from the enlightenment forward and there is a remarkably upward trend in quality of life for humanity. It’s pretty arrogant to think that we’ve gotten so good at f–kin’ ourselves up that we’re going to reverse that trend in 85 short years.
There aren’t very many Black people rotting in prison for smoking pot:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/01/05/marijuana-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/
Matthew,
I tend to agree with yourself original and Laura’s original pessimistic predictions.
On the positive side I feel that there will be a significant advancements in health, which is something that should be very familiar to you. I am currently reading chapter 13 of your book “Life’s Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code” , which is a wonderfully written and researched book.
I agree that there will be significant advancements in health but I see those advancements benefiting only the wealthy/wealthy nations unless something changes in the developing world and the developed world (in some cases).
Thanks, Bob! Glad you’re enjoying it. Don’t forget to leave a review on the online book/bookseller site of your choice! MC
Switching to renewables, a basic income with education and health care for all would do it.
The only thing standing in the way is the paradigm that all worthwhile activities must enrich a few.
Realistic scenario:
More water, less ice, far more people in Africa and on Earth as well (though fewer in Japan), surveyed happiness staying the same or rising a little, higher world average GDP per capita (approximately three times that today), mainly driven by non-African states. Fewer dictatorships, more democracies (esp. in Asia and Africa). Better computers and robots. Fewer megafauna and wild apes. Final triumph of capitalism in Cuba and North Korea. Higher life expectancy, fewer diseases, better health outcomes.
I don’t think any significant worldwide action is going to be done to influence climate change.
Strange Matthew put “no capitalism”. Yesterday’s socialism was certainly highly environmentally unfriendly, and I don’t see why any future version would be less so.
Capitalist/socialism (and democracy/dictatorship) have, in various forms, been with us for thousands of years. So I am skeptical any form of government or economic system will disappear. I think the things that will change in the next 85 years will be the things that have changed in the last 85 years – medicine, technology, how our ‘day jobs’ are done and our daily hours are spent, possibly modes of transportation, etc.
Dictatorship has been with us for thousands of years, democracy, capitalism, and socialism are fairly recent innovations of the past two to four hundred years. I doubt modes of transportation will change much, but medicine, technology, day jobs, lighting, energy production, etc., certainly will.
Would certainly agree with the – how we do our day jobs. Have seen that change as everyone has over the past 35 years or so. Big changes in how you do your job and even what you do. You better be ready for change on the job from the first day you start. One of the areas I studied in school did not exist 10 years later.
We somehow functioned without email or desk top computers for several years – just imagine.
perhaps the world will move more towards the the Scandinavian model. I mean, while we’re playing make-believe…
I’ll wait for any evidence for that to appear in Chile and developed Asia. So far, I don’t see it. Japan, for example, is low-tax, low-welfare-state.
That would be nice. Especially if Scandinavia stopped moving away from the Scandinavian model, which is currently the case. I suspect we will have a mixed political/economic system. I just hope it is not so steeply slanted towards one side as it is now.
Science and technology may find solutions to world problems, but until humans are socially ready to accept science and live in a more peaceful existence those solutions may not be able to reach their full potential. I think it will take some time beyond 2100 before our social consciousness has caught up to our technological progress. If we can just survive until then the world will be a better place.
Yeah, I personally believe that it isn’t tech that will pull our asses out of the fire. Yes, we need technological solutions but we also need the will and the way to use them.
I think I’m too cynical to actually believe it will be better. I see fresh water crisis, energy crisis, pollution crisis, population crisis and the deep and inherent conflicts the combination of these crises will cause.
Within my lifetime (I’m 46) I think I’ll be able to discern whether or not these dire predictions will take hold.
What would give me hope is:
Political will across the world to stop ACC. This would entail getting off of fossil fuel burning completely and replacing with renewables, especially solar. And replacing combustible engines with electric.
A reduction in religiosity across the globe and an enlightened, reason-based world view-especially in the Middle East.
Robust technology to recycle water/waste/energy.
Greater resistance to materialism and rampant consumerism.
In the US, the Green party (or similar) overtakes the status quo of the R and D parties.
Massive increases in R&D spending for ALL sciences.
Replacing combustion engines with electric doesn’t seem like a requirement. There may well be circumstances in which combustion engines, burning synthetic fuels manufactured from renewable energy sources at no net increase in atmospheric carbon, continue to be the most cost-effective solution.
I agree that wouldn’t be a requirement if we developed some other form of synthetic fuel. Since electric cars are a reality, and synthetic fuel cars aren’t (that I know of) I went with what is feasible currently.
Synthetic fuels are a reality, and have been for nearly a century at least. Fischer-Tropsch synthesis of hydrocarbons goes back to the 1920s, for example, and there numerous other routes.
The problem with synfuels has been they aren’t competitive with fossil fuels, but that doesn’t mean that in a world that will have moved beyond fossil fuels they would still be uncompetitive everywhere. Aircraft, for example, are a tough sell for electric propulsion.
Most of the stuff I’ve seen suggest that, when oil gets to the ~$200 / barrel level, solar-powered synthetic fuels are competitive. The problem is that it’s not clear that industry can function at those price levels; there might be a theoretical profit to be made from synthetic fuels at those prices, but nobody who can afford to buy the fuels nor pay for the capital equipment to make them.
But we’re unquestionably running out of hydrocarbon energy sources that can be dug out of the ground; there’s only so much of them in the ground in the first place, we’re increasing extraction at an exponential rate, and we’re already about halfway through — which means they’ll be gone in much less time in the future than we’ve been extracting them.
If we’re to have any hope…it’s that the cost for solar and batteries is practically in free-fall. If the price curves overlap at significantly less than $200 / barrel, we may well be able to transition away from fossil fuels. Plus, demand for fossil fuels should drop as more and more people just use electricity directly. Though coal is still the cheapest player at the utility scale, solar is already cheaper for utilities than nuclear and cost-competitive with natural gas — and still dropping.
I wouldn’t advise betting the farm on it…but, if we do manage to dodge the bullet, that’ll be the way we do it.
But we still gotta cut the birth rate to significantly below replacement levels at the same time.
You want a magical faery-tale SF recipe for humanity’s survival? A plague virus that’s no deadlier than the flu (ideally not deadly at all) but that renders sterile 80%+ of those who contract it.
b&
Sorry, what is ACC?
ACC is the acronym for anthropogenic climate change. I get lazy typing that out. 🙂
Good and bad are relative terms that need to be defined. But if you are asking what I think the world looks like in 85 years, that’s easy.
Are you familiar with the movie “Blade Runner”? From my point of view (as a sociologist), I think that movie most accurately reflects what we can expect in 2100.
I also think it’s the best science fiction film ever made.
I would put my money on “Idiocrasy”. 😬
I just saw Blade Runner about three months ago (no idea why I waited so long) and there were a few things that rang true, certainly, but what really made me laugh was the amount of smoking in them movie and of course, no smartphones. It was hilarious proof of how bad we are at predicting the future.
Perhaps we aren’t so good predicting technology (though HG Wells really impressed me and made me wonder if he really did have a time machine) but it scares me how accurate some of Philip K Dick’s paranoid, drug augmented predictions have been
if we’re dreaming, then I’d hope for
1.religious population to be dwindling into the single digits.
2.birth control free and accessible for all and leading to a declining and environmentally friendly human population.
3.an increase in “racial” mixing leading to us getting the hell over ourselves and obsessing about skin color because we’re all increasingly looking quite similar.
4.nobody talks about 1st woman this, 1st racial minority that, because finally we’ve realized it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference what kind of junk you’ve got or what color it is.
5. international borders don’t matter any more than city, county, or state borders because we’re finally free to safely move about in the world w/o being bothered by where you happened to be born.
but mostly, it’ll be more of the same, wars, environmental destruction, extinctions, climate instability, religious extremism, racism, sexism, overpopulation, and all the brilliant stupidity we continuously perpetrate today.
Re 3.
? Manfred Mann song:
What we need is a great big melting pot
Something something world and all it’s got
And something stir it for a hundred years or more
And turn out coffee-coloured people by the score.
Etc
might mean the extinction of gingers like myself but then climate change might take care of that anyway, unless we all migrate to the poles to escape the sun, or perhaps live underground!
of course, i’m really not expecting humans to mix to the point of being “coffee-coloured”, and then be nice to each other. taking into account the levels of racism within the African American community (high yellow vs. blue-black, etc.) I’m sure we’d find some sort of shade-hatred, so that anyone who doesn’t match a particular coffee tint (too much cream or not enough) would be treated as second class scum.
Yeah, we humans are bound to find something to pick on. It would be nice though if colour didn’t make a difference to how human beings treat one another.
Education is free – all of it including post secondary.
Internet Access is considered a needed resources like electricity is today so governments provide it cheaply.
Most people have abandoned superstitions, especially religions
A strong social network exists for all people so poverty and exploitation of the poor is rare and unusual.
Nuclear arms have been destroyed – no one has the power to annihilate the earth.
We didn’t make the mistake of going forward with full on AI without thinking about the consequences and addressing them.
Quantum Computing is a thing so research can be completed lightning fast and security is no longer as much an issue in the online world.
Renewable energy is the primary way to get energy and although cars are emissions free, more resources are put into public transportation (which is safe, cheap & clean) so that green areas are preserved instead of being ploughed under by concrete and asphalt.
Oh and most diseases are eliminated and the real tricky ones like cancer are solved using retro-viruses or other fairly benign treatments.
I’m kind of leaning towards Logical Positivism on this question. I’d like to believe we will use science, engineering, technology, etc., to overcome the challenges we face with overpopulation, dwindling resources, global climate change, pollution, religious fundamentalism, income inequality, etc. We can’t pray away these issues so at some point we will be forced to turn to the use of empirical knowledge or face extinction. My best case scenario will be a Star Trek type of future where after we experience some really bad sh!t, (WWIII in the Trek universe), humans will realize the need to adapt or perish. The discovery of intelligent life in the universe (First Contact in the Trek universe) opens our minds to the possibilities of uniting as a species and moving into the exploration of space. Otherwise we are just going to tread water until forced to do otherwise. Live Long and Prosper Y’all!!!
I have a difficult time imagining any truly good futures — that is one in which reason and compassion have clearly triumphed over religious insanity and excessive capitalist greed and in which environmental problems caused by human overpopulation, pollution, destruction of wilderness, climate change, the 6th great extinction, etc., are actually being resolved in a positive manner rather than accelerating in severity. I think it would take a massive global catastrophe to cause the masses of mankind to wake up from the collective fantasy that we don’t have massive problems caused by our own destructive appetites and that can’t possibly be solved by forcing people to live by religious texts that are really recipes for ignoring reality.
There’ll be a lot more people because improved health care in today’s poor countries will continue to increase life spans and survival rates.
There will be a rise in sea levels that will leave many of the world’s coastal cities with New Orleans-style problems.
Some of the extra water will be channelled in a way that makes areas fertile again like sub-Saharan Africa and the US dust bowl. We’ll be able to increase farm land to feed the larger population. In the biggest cities, there will be vertical farms, many of which will be hydroponic.
There will be a base on the moon, and plans will be well underway for one on Mars. We will have discovered life on other planets.
Most people have access to clean water, free education, free health care, and adequate housing. I’d like to add a fair justice system and democracy, but I think that’s a pipe dream for a time as soon as 2100.
There will be less inequality, more democracy, more peace, less religion, more and better health care and education, and a fairer society. The world in general will be a better place, but there’ll still be a way to go.
I don’t think we will have less meat and dairy – our brains need the protein. However, we’ll develop grasses and breeds of animals that produce significantly less methane.
3D printing will enable at home or local production of a huge range of goods, including food, thus reducing the need for transport. Putting waste products into the “tank” of your 3D printer will increase recycling and reduce land fill waste. You’ll be able to get your lawns mown for free – you can pay in grass clippings!
This has gotten too long so I’ll stop but I haven’t finished – I’ve been thinking about this recently because I was going to write about it on my website. Not much point now.
I find some of the comments very optimistic on our future and only wish I had that outlook or faith in the future. Sorry for using the word faith but there was not much evidence for many of those rosy predictions.
If science and technology would happen to come up with solutions to our climate and soon to follow water problems it might create the space to get into our many other difficulties like a dysfunctional U.S. government that cannot even handle the simple problems that come up.
The latest report out by some of our best scientist says a 10 foot rise in the ocean is likely in the next 50 years. This is not reversible after a short period and it only gets worse after that. Some of you may be around just long enough to see most of this happen and you can say if the science is all wet.
Matthew did say positive predictions. Though as you say, there are plenty of reasons to expect negative results in some areas. The US political system is already largely dysfunctional at a national level as you allude to, and I suspect we’d be lucky to see any change there even if it collapsed completely.
The collapse of America is indeed scary and with the split in politics and even culture it seems more and more likely.
I’ll try to be more optimistic. Something like this — even though the national political system is collapsing, governments at the local level will take over and save the day…
Soon after that, superman will arrive and remove all excess CO2 around the world.
Please don’t ask me to pray.
Predicting the future of technological (in particular) advances was a big thing in the 1950s (and, of course, all the time). So check some Popular Science magazines or any of their ilk from that era, and see what sort of things were being predicted. Flying cars were big and “futuristic” architecture was big as well. How about colonizing the moon? I have a pamphlet from the 1939 World’s Fair which is all about the future. According to these sources we are not yet in the future. Not even close. We can’t keep our highways paved or bridges safe. What kind of future are the Republicans promoting? How has the future been doing since WW II?
I love looking at those old “futures” that failed to materialize. the annoying bit is when those magazines claim they predicted correctly things such as the cell phone because they had a drawing of a person talking on a phone that was attached to a tv screen. Nice try, but nope.
Personally, I’m still waiting for my car that folds up into a briefcase a la The Jetsons. just think of all the space we could save on parking lots!
About 25 years ago I saw one of those advertised! It had a range of about 50 km and didn’t go above 20 km/h, though. Don’t know what happened to it or whether (as is might be the case) whether it was actually legit – but it was on a “new technologies” show that had a few things I’d seen in Omni and what not, so …
One of the most interesting talks at the recent TAM came from 3 Swedish researchers from this organization. The predictions for the future are cautiously optimistic.
Some of the pessimism is coming from an ignorance of current facts. We’re often better off than we think we are. They tested the audience with some of the questions from a survey they gave to a lot of different countries. The US did better than others — and in some cases better than the skeptics. Scroll down here for some of the questions.
There’s a report just been released about how we’re doing on reducing poverty in the world, and we’re actually doing pretty well. The numbers living on less than US$1 a day has reduced to about 14%, and maternal and neo-natal survival rates have increased markedly. The stats on all the basics are improving a lot.
As I posted in the wrong thread.
I think that universal education, of women in particular, is already seen as a public good globally and will trigger a golden age. A more educated populace will have fewer children, reducing humanity’s footprint, and spawn a never-ending technological golden age through recursive self-improvement, provided we solve the skynet problem first.
Of course we’ll probably hit 500 ppm carbon first, but alien archaeologist will find the remains of a civilization that was poised for first contact.
We will have hit AT LEAST the 11bn population mark. There will have been advances in all kinds of positive measures, like life expectancy, education levels of women in developing countries, overall fertility levels… but it will be too late: our horrific population momentum is unstoppable, and will undo any gains over the longer haul (to 2200). The biggest story of the 21st century will have been water shortages and the civil unrest and outright warring that it led to (intensifying earliest in the middle east). The megafauna planetwide will be virtually nonexistent by then. (it has been reduced 50% since I was a kid). The saving grace will be that the young living in 2100 will never have known how beautiful it all once was, or how easy it used to be to make a living. …or how easy it was to get around. Human life will be cheaper, a lot cheaper, and that will not bode well for human (or animal) rights, in general.
Forgot to add: HOW we could get to a rosy 2100 would involve tradeoffs of our civil liberties & current living standards we are collectively unwilling to take. (which is why I forgot to mention it in the first place) With unrealistic, draconian measures reducing our fertility to sub-replacement levels TOMORROW (a one-child norm, termination of unwanted pregnancies, and drastic cuts in immigration levels to the most resource-hungry nations from the most baby-happy ones), we could be at 7bn with declining pop levels by 2100. Then, we’d have a chance to be able to replenish water and mete out non-renewable energy sources (if we were investing heavily in converting to renewables at the same time). And we’d get to reduced populations without massive human die-offs (the megafauna would still be gone, sorry).
My crystal ball sees some pretty bad die-offs due to lack of overall vision on the issue, and this leads to younger, poorly-educated and hence more fertile, people. A paradox is that massive die-offs lead directly to populations exploding.
On a brighter note, at least we will all have each other.
Our only hope of a long-term sustainable future is with an human population an order of magnitude less than what we have today. A mere several decades is borderline for how dramatic the effects of gross overpopulation will be…we could conceivably see a collapse of the civilization due to pollution and resource exhaustion if population growth continues to run rampant; my hope would be for birth control to become ubiquitous to the point that, by the end of the century the population has clearly peaked and been in steady decline for a couple generations. Probably take a couple centuries after that to stabilize at a sustainable level.
…and, if we don’t, the Four Horsemen will be all too happy to do it for us….
b&
Trying to keep it to a hypothetically-attainable best case pipe dream in my crystal ball here. Some of this was mentioned already; seems there’s some like-minded people visiting this web site!
We’ve stopped burning fossil fuels for electricity or to make our cars go. Cars are electric and drive themselves, and as a result road fatalities are all but eliminated. Public transportation is fast, broad, and affordable. Technology advances help us feed and power the planet, at an advanced quality of life, without destroying the environment around us.
Alzheimer’s and related issues with senility have been solved, and cancer is no longer a life threatening condition when caught relatively early. Preventative healthcare is universally available, and medical research gets enough tax funding to keep profit motives from jacking up medical costs. AIDS is no more.
The open Internet lets ordinary citizens track their governments as eagerly as our governments have been trying to track us.
Education is freely available and based on sound science, so no fresh 21-year-old enters the workforce already buried in debt. We move past the debate on whether it’s okay to tax wealthy people a higher marginal tax rate, and use that money to balance the budget and actually pay for things.
Religiosity is down everywhere, and even the most religious communities realize that “secularism” is not a boogieman but rather a system of government that protects them from persecution by those who have different religious views. Wingnuts who insist that making them behave as equals is “persecution” surely still exist, but are mostly laughed out of the room.
Population is brought under voluntary control with great family planning, birth control, and safe early-term abortions available everywhere. The world’s major religions realize they should stop forcing sexually-active people to have babies.
All this religiously-fueled hatred and violence over Israel and Palestine is (peacefully) over. Secular and democratic governments protect individual liberty throughout the Middle East, and people look back on group like ISIS and the Taliban with the same sort of curious historical astonishment that kids show today when they learn about Nazism.
Freedom of speech is declared a universal human right by the UN. Blasphemy laws fall worldwide and far more places choose to protect those who criticize governments, religions, powerful individuals, or the status quo.
The last American racist dies from old age and nobody is there to replace him. Maybe CNN will announce his passing.
Women drive, unescorted and heads uncovered if they wish it, in Saudi Arabia.
Human bootprints have been planted on Mars. Space travel and orbital stations are open to citizen groups. Science gets the funding it needs. Earth-like planets around other stars have been directly photographed.
The abiogenesis puzzle has been solved. So has dark matter and the unification of quantum-scale and macro-scale physics.
I’m still alive to see it, and still have all my parts and mental faculties. (No robot bodies, thankyouverymuch.) Ok, this last one might be pushing it. I’d be 120.
I have been in Secondary Education for 19 years. Currently the “Mellenials” are in the field. They are brilliant, less religious and more responsible than previous generations. My Middle School students are more tolerant than any group I have worked with. They will change the world. We have openly gay, transgender, and bi-sexual students who are respected and accepted. This generation has more access to knowledge than any other. This promotes a spirit of collaboration across the globe. We have left them some tremendous challenges. By 2100 I would love to see more equality, less poverty, and a continuing trend toward less violence in the world. The children of today have the tools and the will to make it so.
Oops “Millennials”
People will have pretty much lost interest in Rollerball, and just about everyone will find that you can forget that soylent green is you-know-what if you smother it in enough salsa.
There will be 3 unusually cool old people
Jack Wilson aged 90, Lyla Wilson aged 88 and Alex Wilson aged 86
…and sex robots. Don’t forget the sex robots
…oh and the American Psychiatric Association will finally recognize that having ones comments on blog posts consistently ignored is a legitimate excuse for mass murder
I have contacted the APA’s Joint Reference Committee, and asked them to review their Bylaws to ensure that such an outcome could never be realized by their Board of Trustees. I was assured that there could never be a policy put into place condoning mass murder, as that would put the entire Association at a significant liability with respect to national and international laws, especially all the new ones associated with acts of domestic terrorism.
He did mention a proposed exemption clause though, contingent on the outcome of a vote of the United Nations Human Rights Council in their next meeting concerning freedom of belief and religion… it seems that some on the Council have raised concerns that absolute prohibitions on mass murder come into direct conflict with certain Member states’ judicial imperatives. You aren’t religious, are you?
I wouldn’t be surprised if we had most of this. The good and the bad can easily happen together.
I think there’s a reasonable chance that a major epidemic will have wiped out 10-50% of the world population. We’ve built up a massive monoculture of humans just waiting for the right virus to say, “For ME? You shouldn’t have!”
If not, and the population reaches 11-12 billion, the reduction in meat and dairy intake will happen for cost reasons rather than moral ones, but it will happen. In fact all food will be much more expensive than it is now, which will help with the obesity issue. People won’t be able to afford to be fat.
I think religion will be like smoking is today, generally the preserve of the poor and uneducated, and treated as an affliction to be ameliorated.
The Arctic will be ice-free in summer, polar bears will be rare. Florida will have shrunk a lot.
The working week will be down to four days for most people. We already don’t need to work as hard as we do, and the leisure industry will demand that people have more time to use their services.
The only remaining wildlife will be in deserts and on mountains that we have been unable to farm.
Technology will be AMAZING!
If food becomes significantly more expensive, there will be global starvation and food riots and general unrest. You and I won’t notice much if we go from spending $100 / week on food to $120 / week. But there’re a billion people who’ll suffer malnutrition and starve if their food budgets go from $1 / day to $1.20 / day.
On the contrary; obesity rates will soar. People who today can afford to eat healthy food won’t be able to afford much more than sugary junk food. Sugar is cheap.
That’s the ideal outcome. Much more realistic is 80% – 90% unemployment and 60-80-hour work weeks for those who still have jobs. More realistic than that is mass unrest as more and more jobs get automated out of existence with the profits from such “cost-saving measures” continuing to accrue to the Romneyesque “job creators.” There’s a tipping point approaching, and it won’t be pretty when we reach it. Especially worrisome is that driving jobs are about to become roboticized, and that’s pretty much the largest remaining job market, skilled or otherwise. Fast food, too. Amazon has already pretty much completely automated retail sales, after all.
b&
With regard to food prices, the global unrest and starvation would certainly happen, but I’m not talking about food prices going up 20% as you suggest. I’m talking about them going up 300-500% which will make everything much much worse, except possibly for farmers, but probably the food conglomerates will make sure they don’t benefit much if at all. Even crappy food will expensive.
The situation regarding work may well be as you suggest in the USA, but I think in most of the West my suggestion is more likely to happen. Americans are much easier to turn against the poor than the rest of us for some reason, possibly having something to do with race issues.
Australians for example, are basically socialist minded (regardless that we were insane enough to vote for the likes of Tony Abbott), and won’t tolerate the sort of anti-working class bullshit that goes down so well in the US. Of course here as much as anywhere the media are owned by the plutocracy, who are prepared to say whatever it takes to get their message of their right to outrageous wealth and low taxes across. That’s how we got Tony is the first place, so I may be being overly optimistic. I’m hoping that the internet will make the dissemination of ruling class dogma less effective, in the same way that it’s killing religion.
I think you’re right about a tipping point in the US, I feel that Americans are realising that they’ve been sold a crock of shit and some serious redistribution of wealth is needed. A ruling class which refuses to pay taxes is a long standing cause of national decline and revolution. Good luck with it.
That would probably kill at least a billion people, and result in global revolution long before prices actually reached that level.
Unfortunately, we’ve got some structural problems that, historically, have only been remedied elsewhere by revolutions or conquest from without. But the States has this nuclear arsenal, and an equally-impressive conventional force…no clue how it’s all going to play out, but I don’t think anybody’s going to be happy.
b&
Americans do have a form of democracy, even if hijacked by the ruling class, so I think it’s possible that an actual revolution may not be necessary. If the capitalists can be forced to realise that they need to pay a reasonable amount of taxes then things are salvageable. The only thing that the ruling classes are afraid of is collective action. Individually we are powerless, but collectively we’re terrifying. From riots to unions, the rulers are always frightened of collective action by the people. That’s how England got democracy in the 18th and 19th centuries. If the American people can unite for a fairer future maybe there won’t need to be too much upheaval. But it is going to be hard. I hope, for the sake of the whole world, you succeed.
Alas, the States can no more reasonably be considered a democracy.
Ever since the Supreme Court ruled that campaign “contributions” are a form of free speech and therefore beyond Congress’s right to regulate, practically without exception all political offices are now awarded to the candidate who garners the largest collection of bribes. It was bad before, but there’s not even any pretense remaining.
And the NSA has the power to spy on anybody and everybody, even Congress and the Courts and the President — and they also have the power to plant incriminating evidence on anybody and everybody. Their only oversight comes in the form of a court so secret that all we know about it is that it has yet to rule against the NSA.
…and that’s long before we get into the whole question of Obama’s death warrants (carried out typically by flying robots) or the fact that Congress doesn’t even pretend to complain any more that the President just goes to war wherever and whenever he feels like it whether anybody wants him to or not.
Or, on a more local scale, the way that the first thing any new candidate ever does is gerrymander the district boundaries to ensure a lifetime appointment, with practically all changes being the result of “trickle up”…a top-level politician retires; the vacancy is filled by a chosen well-established politician in the next lower tier; and that politician’s vacancy is similarly filled by somebody lower down still.
Day to day it’s still pretty nice here. But the Republic is most definitely pinin’ for the Vroom-Vroom Choir Eternal of the Ten Thousand Volt Fjords. I must admit, though, the circuses are quite entertaining and the bread is first rate.
b&
Perhaps there’s some very slim hope that one day our bribe campaigns can be circumvented by something akin to a salary cap in sports. For example, we could legislate some kind of public campaign financing law that says X% of campaigns shall be publicly funded, obviously leaving 100-X% as the maximum aggregate contributions a candidate can collect.
The NSA is another story, but I can see a scenario where the negative results for capitalism may finally give us the resolve to reel them in. It’s a depressing thought, but the Supreme Court already formally established that money talks.
The problem is these things act like a ratchet. Once elections are sold to the highest bidder, you need more money than a majority of the other candidates for the entire Congress can raise to be able to buy an entirely new Congress who can’t be bought — an obvious contradiction.
Same thing for the NSA. Any threats to the NSA will have to survive having the local police discover kiddie porn on their computers after being anonymously tipped off by the NSA.
b&
In high school, during the height of the fear of nuclear war era, I drew a cartoon of the world with a tombstone on it with the inscription “Humans: the first animal species to develop the ability to extinct itself, promptly did”. Almost 60 years later, I’m marginally more optimistic, but not as optimistic as most of the writers here.
And for my grandchildren’s sakes, I hope the other writers are right!
The fact that you have grandchildren suggests that you managed to muster some degree of optimism even back then.
I suspect most of us aren’t optomistic but we were supposed to write an optomistic future.
I think we will pollute ourselves off the planet, personally.
The likely hood of a nuclear explosion is much greater today than it was back in those duck and cover days. No reasonable or sane country would consider it but now we have many crazy and desperate groups that just might if they could get their hands on it.
The idea of world peace was always a good statement to put out year after year but that possibility today seems almost impossible.
But by the same token, it seems much less likely now that the detonation of a single nuke by a rogue state or terrorist group would trigger a global nuclear conflagration.
I wouldn’t be too sure. The most likely target of a rogue nuclear strike would be Israel, and they’d be likely to respond with a MAD destruction of all their Arab and Persian enemies. That sort of thing can catch like wildfire, especially considering Pakistan, and therefore India, therefore China, therefore the US and Russia….
b&
A rogue state sneaking a nuke into Israel would be catastrophic, and Israel’s response would be heavy, but Israel is not run by insane people and would not be responding alone.
Surly their and USA’s intelligence agencies would quickly pin the attack on some group, and then that group and any country harboring them would be assaulted with hell on earth. Israel’s own neighbors, especially Jordan and Egypt, would undoubtedly denounce the nuking and take Israel’s side — not the least because any nuclear detonation would drop radiation onto their countries (and kill many Palistinians as well).
That’s exactly the problem.
“That group and any country harboring them,” realistically, would be DAESH in Iraq; al Qaeda in Afghanistan; or Iran. And “hell on earth” being unleashed in any of those locations would result in unrestrained conventional retaliation on Israel, and the whole thing quickly escalates into regional horror, which in turn escalates into global horror.
It’s hard to imagine such a scenario in which Pakistan doesn’t wind up using its own nukes, or a scenario in which India doesn’t respond with nukes of its own after Pakistan uses them aggressively. And for China to sit idly by as the two of them are lobbing nukes at each other…is not something I’d want to bet on.
MAD only works up to the point that the first shot is fired. After that, mutual destruction is assured.
b&
We’ve been down that road many times, and it hasn’t resulted in nuclear armageddon yet. Costly and destructive military quagmires, yes. Power vacuums later filled by groups like ISIS, yes. Armageddon, no. I don’t see how you can get from some terror group aligned with a rogue state attacking Israel to everyone with nukes blasting everyone else with nukes just because nukes.
The reason so many hardline Muslim groups are opposed to Israel’s existence is because they believe that land to be holy to Islam. Vaporizing Jerusalem to assault Israel’s government would surely unite the entire Jewish, Christian, and Muslim worlds against them.*
*except the true crazies, who will think it’s a big Zionist conspiracy.
Simple, if we’re assuming that the terror group aligned with a rogue state attacks Israel with a nuclear weapon. Not just a dirty bomb, but something Hiroshima-scale.
Remember, Israel is a tiny country. Any actual nuclear weapon detonated in a metropolitan area will kill a large fraction of the country’s total population and contaminate basically all the land, rendering much if not most of it unlivable. A single bomb would be roughly the equivalent to Israel of what America would probably experience if China threw all they had at us.
You can rest assured that Israel’s response would be every bit as devastating as ours would. And, quite possibly, Israel wouldn’t care all that much about who they directed their retaliation towards; I wouldn’t at all be surprised if they’ve made it plain through non-public channels that, if they get nuked, they’re taking out the entire rest of the Middle East with them. That is after all, how MAD works….
b&
And things are unstable. Putin is rearming and when there is a new Russian leader, it is likely, given the environment he has created, that he will be more right wing and more nationistic. That means trouble for NATO and the West.
People ARE organizing themselves, making small but numerous gains, mitigating the outrageous, battling the preposterous and listening to the sane amongst us. Why the glum? It isn’t predetermined either way, the boat is still afloat folks and I’m more the pessimist by default.
In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond gives rather large hints on how to do exactly that… collapse, and why.
The Easter Islander’s managed to show what a religion unabated can do (and the odd rat) The Mayan civilization tells the tale of the top down rule and blindness to your own self importance.
The Pitcairn Islander’s and Tasmania showed how isolation is a death kneel for a society.
So we have an open book on how we decide on how to do away with ourselves, can we all be that blind? To stay positive don’t answer that.
Deforestation, biodiversity are a particular concern of mine and most of it stems from over population, we need to fix this. But
something tells me that this is not for the current batch of homo though, there are to many who actually give a damn.
One thing about technology. It is when we have quantum computers operating at the average temperature range of the common lounge room are things going to go rather insane. Science, medicine and pretty well everything that we build, manufacture or make will start into overdrive. They will be doing things I can’t even think of.
3D printers was one thing I did not think would happen until a neighbour built one from scratch (RepRap, in conjunction with Bath University)in his laundry, he said it was for the masses and everyone should have one.
He certainly gave a damn.
I’d like to think there will be a successful therapeutic for insecurity and shame.
The best hope for a better future (IMHO) is for what happened in Eastern Europe after 1989 to happen everywhere. We need a “Berlin Wall Comes Down” moment for the third world.
With a bit of luck we have become a type I civilization on the Kardashev scale and start exploiting our solar system. Need fusion power or very large space-based solar power satellites for that to happen.
Yep. Reliable fusion would pretty much scrap whatever rosy scenarios I concocted above. All bets would be off & anything could happen. That could buy us a billion years (until the sun became too crispy). The megafauna would still have been almost completely wiped out in the 21st century, but our nascent spacefaring civilization could probably learn to direct the coevolution of future large species over subsequent millions of years…
Optimistic (and IMO necessary) prediction: transitioning to steady-state economy.
The processing power of computers will quite likely have surpassed that of a human brain, which means even high tech jobs may be in danger of being automated.
The best case scenario is that we use the newly found free time to make the world sustainable for humans indefinitely into the future. The worst case scenario is that we have a handful of trillionaires holding all the resources while the vast majority of people wallow in poverty.
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