This essay started when I began wondering: Today, we look back on people just 100 years ago, and we are surprised by their beliefs, lifestyle, and assumptions. In the year 2100, people will look back as us with a similar attitude - what specifically will they be surprised about? Obviously, there's no way to answer this question, I have the same "2000 blinders" that everyone else does. But what the heck - it's fun to wonder what the future holds. The following is a compilation of my current opinions, WAGs, and fliers. We first need to forecast what the world will be like in 2100, and how we got there from here. Then, we can draw some reasonable inferences about what the future will think about the present. I would love to be wrong about some of the following: Population: In the last couple of decades of this century, we have just started feeling the first pangs of overpopulation. In the next century it will hit big time, with the attendent resource conflicts and plagues that are observed in any biological overpopulation scenario. The world population - 6 billion as I type this - cannot double twice more, and if it doubles even once more, we're in some deep kimchi. A major war or two are a near-certainty as well, probably biological or nuclear in nature. The gap between the haves and the have-nots will continue to grow from a global perspective. On the semi-plus side, population growth has all but stopped in the First World Technology: The internet will be ubiquitous. Real-time remote video and audio contact will be commonplace worldwide, especially in current First World countries. Small groups of people will be living on Mars, on the Moon, and on floating island-cities in the ocean. We will have sent manned missions to Mercury, Callisto, Ganymede, Europa, and Titan. We'll have a hotel in low-Earth orbit, and another on the Moon. We will probably have fission, and maybe even fusion, technology for power generation. Transportation will have completed its move away from oil fuels. Portable speech translators capable of listening/speaking from language X to language Y will aid increased travel greatly - especially for us (largely) monolingual Americans! Electronic paper will finally be a reality. Biotechnology will define the 21st century in much the same way that industrial and fossil-fuel technology have defined the 20th and 19th. I expect that we will find a way to turn off people's aggression via some type of biotechnology, and we'll use this on violent criminals - and possibly on everyone, or maybe just all males. We'll be able to control various attrubutes via human gene technology - this, of course, will spawn huge ethical debates. It will also spawn tremendous good: say goodbye to Down's Syndrome and a host of other birth defects that will be able to be fixed shortly after fertilization. Environment: A strong argument can be made that First World countries are currently exporting their pollution to the Third World. I expect this to continue, even accelerate, until about 2050-2070, at which time global pollution and resource constraints will hit with a huge double-whammy that will rock the coming century. I would anticipate many more "problems" such as Union Carbide had in Bhopol, India and Chevron had in Nigeria. But I would not expect that global reaction would be as passive as it was in both cases! Technology will come more slowly to the current Third World - after all, they have no one else's backs to climb on. Energy: A topic that overlaps considerably with Environment. Oil drives the bulk of current energy production, and various estimates say it will effectively run out sometime in the middle of the 21st century. Fortunately, that's right about when the next big move in energy technology should take place: Fission. Fission - or perhaps even fusion - should be realized sometime in the next 100 years, as the current barriers to its realization "only" require evolutionary, not revolutionary, technological improvements. Transportation: There will be two fundamental changes here. First, a hundred years from now, the majority of transportation energy will not come from fossil fuels, wheras today virtually all of it does. Second, a new form of rocket-powered long distance travel will reduce global travel times by a factor of at least four, and probably more like 10. (right now, flying from New York to New Delhi takes 17 hours) Religion: Religion in general is growing slightly more tolerant over the.... millenia, and I would expect this trend to slowly continue. However, there have always been radical elements of the major faiths, and these radical elements do not show any tendency to become more peaceful or tolerant. Furthermore, their access to destructive technology is increasing. Accordingly, I would anticipate several terrorist incidents (which are seldom separate from religion), possibly large-scale in nature. And, if the incidents themselves aren't large-scale, the reprisals will be. The remainders - the majority - of the various faiths will become increasingly accepting and tolerant. Global: Right now, the Middle East sits on top of the most important natural resources in the world. In 2100 they won't - a century of drastic change awaits them, which will not help their drive toward stability. India, and to a lesser extent, Africa and South America, will bear the brunt of overpopulation. Society: The 20th century in America showed many types of people achieving equality under the law: various races, sexes, etc. This is not to say that there is no sexism or racism in our society today, but they have mostly been eradicated from the law. In the 21st century, in America, I would expect that the same ascension to equal legal standing will be achieved by nontraditional unions of people: same-sex marriages, etc. I believe homosexuality will lose much (but not all) of the stigma it has today. (But what will happen when we find we can "cure" homosexuality in utero? Should we?) ----------------- So, given the above picture of a world that will exist in 2100, how would they look back at the society of the year 2000? Of course, there's no way to know for sure, but here's my guesses: I think they will be very surprised at our current environmental impact, and our complete lack of awareness of it. I don't expect energy consumption to drop - quite to the contrary, I suspect it will keep on the same exponential curve it has been on for the last few centuries. But the technology used to create the energy will be far cleaner. Fission and fusion are my current best guesses. Expected quote: "The average American family in the 1990s used only a tenth as much energy as the average family does in the 2090s, but the 1990s family generated roughly 10x the pollutants.". It is likely that many people will not have the inherent right to procreate. People will be apalled at family size in first-world countries that can pass without comment today. We'll find a cheap safe human contraceptive (or maybe we'll just sterilize at birth), and it will be seen as inhumane to withhold these technologies from third-world countries struggling with overpopulation. Our time will be seen in many ways as an ignorant one, as a society that came into some technical power before it came into the awareness to harness that technology responsibly. Of course, with the expected conflicts and world wars of the 21st century, the future won't really be able to throw many stones at the present. |