The world in 2100

[Hrothbern]

I think by 2100, we will have solved the man-machine interface problem and basically we will be a jacked-in society of people living virtual lives over the internet or whatever comes afterward.

Similar theme in of one of the Flash Gordon comics.
We ended up in hospital like housing lying on beds with lots of tubes.


In the SF movie Zardoz (1974) with a young Sean Connery as Zed the barbarian... Zed rescues humanity from themselves, they were the Eternals, by disconnecting them from Zardoz granting them death.

It ends with Zed in a cave in the wilderness in effect resetting time with 20,000 years for a second chance of us.
The end scene the most impressive part of the whole as such C movie.

Zardoz ends in a wordless sequence of images accompanied by the sombre second movement (allegretto) of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, snatches of which are heard throughout the film. Consuella, having fallen in love with Zed, gives birth to a baby boy within the remains of the giant stone head. In matching green suits, they sit with the boy standing between them, who matures as they age in a series of dissolves. The youth leaves his parents, who take hands and grow very old, eventually decomposing into skeletons and finally vanishing. Nothing remains in the space but painted handprints on the wall and Zed's Webley-Fosbery revolver.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zardoz

 

[Narz]

^There was a Sliders episode about that, back in the '90s. It was thoroughly depressing, and I don't recall how the episode addressed the matter of how these virtual reality-addicted people did things like eating and other basic needs.

Heh I remember that show. It was quite watchable, the "Lipschitz Live!" episode stood out to me, it reminded me of the (later) movie Idiocracy.

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

Here is an idea how CO2 emission per capita have changed between 1960-2014: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC

As can be seen it peeked in 1979, then it declined and only started to increase again around year 2000. If you look at specific countries, you can see that for wealthy countries CO2 emission per capita is going down while for developing countries like China it is going up: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?locations=US-CN-EU

 

[Hygro]

Everything will be alive. Old LEGO? Walking the earth.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Some of my predictions:

• Climate Change
  
  • Extreme temperatures and weather will be the new norm in many places.
  • Places that are now the hottest places people live will be virtually uninhabitable on a large scale without artificial cooling (Arabian Peninsula, parts of the American Southwest, etc).
  • Droughts will become more common, more severe, and last longer. Places like Las Vegas will probably just become too difficult to get water to, so will have to be abandoned. Other places will have been battered by extreme weather so often that most people will find it more cost-effective and easier to simply move, leading to urban abandonment in certain cities. Forest fires will be fiercer, longer, and more deadly. Some forests will never recover as the fires will be too severe.
  • The suffering of the poor in poor, disaster-prone areas will only deepen and become more horrifying. Imagine if Haiti were hit by one or more Hurricane Matthews a year. "Humanitarian crisis" will become "life as normal".
  • New farmland will open up in the formerly tundra regions of Canada and Russia, which will prevent a worldwide food catastrophe as previous bread-baskets lose access to aquifers and fall prey to desertification (hello American midwest). I wouldn't be surprised if there is a fairly large population migration to these new "temperate" zones.
  • Sea level rise means quite a few Island nations will simply cease to exist, with their populations being absorbed into the nearest neighbor willing to take them.
• Population
  • The previous as well as ever-present human conflict will create a lot of refugees, which will lead to greater conflict and suffering (as we've seen in current refugee crises) as nations will not be willing to take very many in. Something which may balance this is developed countries with low birth rates may open their doors wider for refugees in an attempt to shore up the economy for rapidly aging populations. Overall population will grow, but the majority of the growth will be in underdeveloped countries (as is the case now), which will increase migration and conflict opportunities.
• Power
  • Power will be produced by almost exclusively renewable sources, and our use of fossil fuels will be long in the past. Fusion may even be figured out by that point. This may help balance some of the previous doom and gloom, making places habitable with cheap solar/wind power via indoor climate control, indoor agriculture, and desalination plants.
• Space Exploration
  • We will have permanent bases on the Moon, and exploratory missions to Mars will have occurred, mostly driven by the super-rich (anything beyond that will simply require too much of a technological leap than is feasible to make realistic, even if we push the timeline out be several hundred more years)
  • Resource extraction from sources in space will have started, and attempts to process resources "on-site" or at least without required a trip back to Earth will start to build the infrastructure for completely space-based industries and settlements, whether those are lunar settlements or larger space stations. These bases will be nothing more than outposts though in terms of their total population.
  • Space Tourism will be a thing, with Space Hotels, etc.
• Personal Freedom
  • Personal freedoms and liberties will be curtailed more and more as long-term societal and population shifts due to climate change will be, in the end, supported/organized/controlled by governments as the only organizations with the structure and scope able to address the logistical problems. Since they will be in control, freedoms and liberties will be curtailed to keep order during the transition and will not be restored (because they never are).
• Religion
  • I think Religion will become more important, rather than less, as people tend to search for hope as life gets harder
• Internet/Technology in general
  • I think the Internet and Technology in General has the opportunity to prevent or subvert many of my predictions, as it changes many considerations (can counteract repressive regimes, make education freely available, broaden access to healthcare, or even just allow society to continue to function on a broad and extensive level as it does now even in the face of drastic climate or societal change).

In other words, mostly as Ben Bova predicts in his Grand Tour series. There's a very minor character who is chosen as an "Everywoman" type of character as he describes her situation. She and her family became climate refugees when their home experienced a catastrophic flood and never recovered. They ended up as migrant workers for rich corporate farmers, and her one possession was a computer she held on to so she could get an education. She used that education to get hired as a laborer on the new Moon colony. The last we see of this character is that years later (in-universe) she's moved on from the Moon to the mining colony on Ceres, in the asteroid belt.

Heh I remember that show. It was quite watchable, the "Lipschitz Live!" episode stood out to me, it reminded me of the (later) movie Idiocracy.

They did some good stuff in the first seasons, up until the idiotic Kro-magg arc started and John Rhys-Davies left the show.

One of their more memorable episodes is the one they borrowed from the "Lottery" story: Overpopulated world, so a lottery is instituted in which the "winner" is euthanized.

 

[Morty]

by 2100, the Earth is going to be a climate destroyed dystopian hell-hole. (Assuming that we don't blow ourselves to smithereens first.)

Feeling positive today!??

 

[Commodore]

I think society will collapse

We can only hope.

 

[civvver]

More automation. Self driven cars will be a thing of the past. Owning individual vehicles will be something only for the wealthy as a luxury.

Automation will eliminate a lot of menial jobs. Like AI will take your order at McDonald's and the food is served by robots (heck they already have touchscreens at all the micky D's now anyway so you don't have to interact with anyone). I think we will probably get to the point where even education is done by AI, since all it has to do is present lectures and then answer questions. You could probably make an AI to do that now I think for a specific class. Like everything's going to be done by computers and robots. You'll visit an AI doctor. I'm not sure what this will do to society. There's basically three possible routes I see:
-The automation should greatly increase production and goods availability and quality of life so people should in theory not have to work as much, but that only works if society shifts into some sort of universal income or welfare state or whatever. Which is fine if the goods are equally distributed and being on welfare is not living in squalor like it typically is today.
-The opposite of that happens, where jobs get eliminated but instead of an equitable distribution of the added production it's hoarded by the wealthy who own the capital and tech so everyone is on welfare but has a substandard of living.
-The automation opens up new jobs. This is typically what's happened throughout history but I'm skeptical this time as AI was never involved. Like computers came along and eliminated secretaries who used to dictate and eliminated mathematicians who were human calculators, but those secretaries are freed up to move to another office job and the mathematicians moved into programming computers, etc. If AI can support itself at some point I'm not sure what humans have left to do.

I think our diets will shift dramatically towards engineered food. At some point they'll come up with plant products that taste just like (or close enough) real beef and pork and chicken and it'll be way cheaper.

Less wars and conflicts. As we move even more towards one giant globalized economy it becomes too costly to wage war. Basically everyone buys stuff from everyone and waging war eliminates your suppliers, your customers or both. Look at the wars we've had in the last 50 years and they've all been basically for resources in developing areas, or wars between ethnic groups like in Africa and genocides in Cambodia. The west didn't give a crap because they didn't buy or sell anything useful to us, but someday they will. Eventually when all the resources are claimed and the areas developed, you won't want to rock the boat.

Zero privacy with anything. We are close to that now but I think the US government will eventually be like China where they just monitor everything under the guise of safety.

I'm not sure about bio diversity and climate change right now. Cus I think we're going to see some break through tech to fix that soon enough.

Marriage and traditional families will decline dramatically. I think that as people move more online and into communal housing most likely there will be less desire for offspring, and I think eventually we'll have AI sex workers just like everything else so a lot of the early hooking up kind of stuff young people do won't happen and they'll be less likely to desire romance later. Cus let's face it, even though romance and marriage and other real relationships are about a ton more than just sex, it's the hormones and sex that drives young people to seek out partners initially. If you have an outlet for that and a lot of virtual friends from all over the world, you will probably desire relationships as we see them now less.

 

[Narz]

I'm not sure about bio diversity and climate change right now. Cus I think we're going to see some break through tech to fix that soon enough.

I see no evidence whatsoever suggesting that

If it happens it will be figured out by a higher order intelligence than human beings

 

[civvver]

Eh it's more like it no being profitable enough so no one implements it, or even more so, old energy sector and emerging markets generates so much profit no one will shut it down.

We have the tech to pretty much go all green with our electric grid in the US but no one will do it cus of cost and same with electric cars and the autos and big oil making too much money the way things are and not wanting to give that up. There's been a lot of talk about tech that captures co2 directly from the atmosphere and can turn it into fuel for energy or bury it deep in the ground as plain old carbon.

 

[Narz]

Even electric cars require non-renewable resources. There's no free lunch and also no guarantees the transition will happen smoothly and automatically when we realize at the last minute that raping our mother earth is unsustainable.

This kind of blase trust in the markets and "science" to be able to handle any problem doesn't inspire confidence in me. The fact that it does in 90+% of others makes me even less confident in it.

Other species who destroy their environments the way we have always have massive dieback, often extinction. We're very special creatures but there's no guarantees for us.

 

[Ferocitus]

Here's a warm-up exercise you can try courtesy of the BBC today.

What do you know about predicting the future?
Between 1965 and 2003, the BBC’s flagship science programme Tomorrow's World looked at how technology might change the way we live in the future.

Now that the future has arrived, here's a quiz that looks back at a world where mobile phones were mind-blowing and home computers were like something from science fiction.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/quiz_tomorrows_world_today/zfk8d6f

I got 3/7 even though I'm old enough to have seen all of the innovations come to fruition (or not!)

 

[Valka D'Ur]

You'll visit an AI doctor.

Butlerian Jihad, here we come.

 

[caketastydelish]

Colonies on other planets would be wonderful and really important to me. I hope I can live to see it but I highly doubt it, unless they find a way to freeze aging. As a side note, that’s something else I would like. To prevent overpopulation, anyone that would be cured of it would have to be permanently sterilized. I am ok with this, and would pay any amount of money I have (and would sell whatever I need to) in order to make it happen. I am completely serious.

 

[Kaitzilla]

The oil ran out and everything is Mad Max style in 2100.

 

[Birdjaguar]

The world leaders in 2100 will have been born in about 2050 and they will make their decisions based on a completely different set of circumstances than we know.

 

[Lemon Merchant]

Feeling positive today!??

Do I sound that bitter?

 

[Gori the Grey]

The internet will archive it and perhaps in 80 years a researcher will discover it and laugh at our thinking.

We'll all be here to laugh at our thinking.

 

[Morty]

Do I sound that bitter?

Just this once!

 

[Hrothbern]

Just imagine... a world where you do not need to be afraid anymore of your kids being severely allergic for stings of bees...
no bees anymore.
replaced by little drones...