I have deliberately chosen GD for this post for a simple reason. I want people to answer as factually as possible, taking their best educated guess at the question. My question is simply this: What will life be like on earth in 2364?
I was inspired to chose this year by an episode of Star Trek: the Next Generation called “The Neutral Zone”. It is unique, because it features a scenario where people from the past, like us, are taken to the future to witness how things have changed. I take the writers’ optimisitic view that earth’s future will be almost utopian, with hunger and poverty being eliminated, and money and wealth acquisition being obsolete. But my question doesn’t just pertain to the show (or else I would have put it in Cafe).
If you need me to add more of what I am looking for when I ask this question, I am specifically looking at earth’s problems now and whether they will be resolved by then. But please offer anything you think is helpful to my question even other than just this.
We can’t even accurately predict what life will be like in 40 or 50 years (look at how futurists back in the 50’s predicted what life would be like in 2000), let alone over 350. Might as well type up random descriptions, tape them to a wall and throw a dart at them blindfolded for all the accuracy you can expect.
I take the Calvin and Hobbes view: it will be pretty much like it is today, just with faster cars and smellier air. Or maybe faster cars and fresher air. I think that’s a problem we might just be able to address by then. Maybe.
Other than that, aside from a significantly different geopolitical makeup, I really don’t see any reason to think the basic challenges of humanity will change that much. Our problems will still be unsolved, or else solved and replaced with different similar problems. Maybe we’ll have a colony on Mars. Computers will be ubiquitous and transparent, but just as annoying when they fail, which will be often. Thanks to revolutions in neural and sensory broadcast technology, reality TV shows will be six thousand times as fake, but inherent limitations in natural law will prevent them from being more than one and a half times as irritating as Survivor. Cellular phones will be rectally installed by robots at birth.
Either that or religious wars will plunge us into another Dark Age. It could go either way.
To get a handle on your question, I looked at a model. What would someone from 1652 (356 years in the past) think if they saw 2008? I think they’d mostly be confused. Life would seem chaotic and fast paced. People would seem rude, society unstructured, and women and children totally out-of-control. Would they notice that disease had been conquered? that travel and communication ‘problems’ were solved? that racism and sexism had radically decreased and personal freedoms and social equality among classes were changed for the better? I guess they might.
So, taking that model and looking forward. I think a time-traveler would be in a state of shock. Whatever social ills were “fixed,” he might think the cure worse than the disease. I believe that the people living in 2364 would think they were better off than those who lived in the past. I suppose they might have some nostalgia, but it would be tempered (as ours is) by thoughts such as “ewww, just think they never bathed.”
I think it’ll be unimaginable. I think surveillance poses a threat. If something like The State from Larry Niven’s Integral Trees series get established it’ll be like the dark ages but with modern stuff. Anything not approved by a central authority ( the church in the dark ages, The State in a hypothetical future) will be shunned, unspoken about and done with great personal risk.
It really worries me because through out human history free societies have been the exception and not the norm. Something like the North Korean government ever gets a global foothold on the planet, combined with ever present surveillance down to the personal level and we’re fucked.
Free societies tend to decay from the inside too till a central authority sweeps in takes control. This can be from within or conquering invaders. It’s because freedom is full of energy and change, but dictatorships and similar aren’t. Things tend to shift to the lower energy level.
Not only that but our ever growing mastery of physics will mean we’ll get ever more powerful tech. Which may or may not fall into the wrong hands. Will the earth survive? I hope so.
We’ll survive if we develop space travel and eventually star travel. Spread out to a few star systems and it’d take a galactic disaster to kill us. Plus with the abundant energy and resources of space we could take alot of pressure off the earth. We have a giant fusion reactor in the center of the solar system and a belt of more mineral wealth then can be imagined. There’s nothing to kill in the asteroid belt so we could pollute till our heart is content.
Not only that but space would give an out to escape the grasp of The State should it happen. Freedom would be alot less vulnerable.
So to answer the question. BY my reasoning it’ll be full things we can’t guess. Who saw the internet coming? And it’ll be bright and hopeful if we learn to leave this rock, or gloomy crowded, and totalitarian or nonexistent for us if we don’t.
1 : Earth is dead, or at least bereft of anything smarter than an animal; we screwed up big time and destroyed everything.
2 : A new Dark Age. Probably imposed by religion.
3 : Worldwide tyranny imposed with technology somewhat better than we have ( mind control and mind reading, genetic engineering for docility, etc ). Probably stable, stagnant, and permanent.
4 : Decadent robo-feudalism; with a few wealthy sorts supplied with their needs by machines, who had the rest of humanity killed when they were no longer necessary for labor. Perhaps a small number of slaves kept for the purposes of ego and sadism.
5 : Humanity is gone, replaced by either our greatly altered descendants or our creations.
Probably one of the least likely futures is the popular “modern world with a few new toys” you often see.
It ain’t that unique. 20th-century people get glimpses of the future in TOS-Tomorrow is Yesterday and TOS-Assignment Earth. In Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Dr. Gillian Taylor gets transplanted from 1986 to the 23rd century, seems to blend in just fine. The TNG two-parter Time’s Arrow has Mark Twain touring the Enterprise-D. The Voyager episode The 37s features Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan…
Personally, I think science-fiction has “immunized” a great many westerners to possible future shock. A person raised on Star Trek or Star Wars would find the tech nifty-cool, but not be shocked into catatonia by it. As for social changes, there are some people still struggling to come to terms with the 1980s. The reaction will depend far more on the individual than on whatever the future society comes up with.
I think the analogy with a time traveler from the year 1652 is apt. First impression of that guy is Mon Dieu!, look at all the people! How do you squeeze them all in!? How do you feed them!? Haven’t you ever heard of famine? For that matter, haven’t you ever heard of disease? You live how long?
A few things wouldn’t bother him much. A few of you, but not too many have got that funny jewelry you wear on your eyes. How do you see through that stuff? Oh, okay, it’s made of glass, sort of. Well, no accounting for fashion tastes. Barbarians.
A few things would bother him very much, after he’d thought about it for more than a few moments. Democracy?! Decisions made by the common people? Are you all mad? America, that wasteland of savages, holds the (currently) mightiest power on earth?
So, we extrapolate that kind of change forward by another equal time period and get… who the heck knows.
I’ve always been a fairly optimistic person regarding the future. But more and more I’ve been thinking that some sort of nuclear apocalypse is almost inevitable. Too many countries/terrorist groups will be getting their hands on nuclear weapons, and I can’t see them having the power and not using it. And of course other countries/terrorist groups will retaliate.
So in 2364 … I think there may still be a few large population centers on the planet, probably run by fundamentalists/totalitarians, with most of the planet uninhabitable. Hopefully, there will be one extremely-defended free society somewhere.
The only historical precedents for mass murder are when some government decided that a particular group was an obstacle (e.g. Stalin’s government vis-a-vis the Kulaks) or a useful scapegoat (e.g. Hitler’s government vis-a-vis the Jews, gays, etc). The notion of people being killed simply because they are “unnecessary” is absurd, since it is an expenditure of considerable effort and acquisition of bad PR for no gain.
It won’t be at all like anything that’s been mentioned here. How do I know? Because it’s unpredictable, and these are all predictions.
It used to take millennia for mankind’s total scientific knowledge to double. That was slowly whittled down to every 200 years, every 100 years, every 50 years, until now … what? I think every six months is the last I heard, and that was a long time ago. Just the fact that I’m sitting here in Bangkok typing this on a computer with BBC blaring live news at me on the TV would have been unimaginable to me in the 1960s or 1970s.
My grandfather was born in 1876. That’s right, 1876. (He had my father rather late in life.) 100 years ago, he was 32. I never met him, but I often wonder what he experienced and how he would have thought of my present day. There is no way he could have guessed any of this, and that was only 100 years ago. It was about that time – maybe a little earlier in the decade – that he followed his brother out to California from New York and settled in a tiny community called Hollywood. He would not even have been able to imagine the changes in that little town in a couple of decades, let alone what the entire world would be like 100 years later. 2364? I bet 2064 would blow me away.
I do think that there will have been a significant nuclear exchange, and it will not have had a significant long-term effect on the Earth’s population.
Somewhere along the line a disease will probably wipe out over half of the planet, most likely something like the flu - probably a good thing for the environment, but not particularly pleasant for those living through it.
Environmental changes will cause people to move to new locations - buy land in Minot, North Dakota - it will become a major metropolitan cultural mecca.
Kids studying ancient history will think Paris Hilton was considered a goddess and adults will be wondering why they still haven’t seen those flying cars that were predicted back in 2301.
A new dark age, brought about by global recession, badly mismanaged by top-heavy, micromanaging authoritarian governments, with a few environmental catastrophes, fuel crises and pandemics thrown in.
Oh and war. That never seems to go out of fashion.
