Three words: Ow! My balls!
Idiocracy was rather scary, as framed as a horror film.
Seriously, may grandfather was born in Scotland, in 1912.
if you look at what he saw become commonplace, it’s easy to lose track of our progress.
I set him up with an Internet computer. He got dialing in, he got bookmarks…he could NOT grasp email, just couldn’t wrap his bain around it. I wonder if me, in my higher than average, tech-based lifestyle, will ever be in a similar place?
The thing about Idiocracy is that a society with that low of a collective intelligence couldn’t exist without outside support. Someone has to keep services supplied, food and water distributed. Even with all the garbage piled up there still has to be waste management to prevent massive epidemics. A subculture of robots? Benevolent aliens? Malevolent aliens softening us up for a takeover? Sadistic aliens just amusing themselves having learned all they can from anal probing generations ago?
I’m thinking that todays IQ of 130 will be the 100 of 2364. People will be getting smarter as learning techniques evolve and improve. Choosing partners for genetic compatibility will be the new arranged marriage. We will probably have artificial wombs, but sex will still be in fashion. Vat grown replacement organs as well.
Large portions of the population will be connected full time to virtual worlds, possibly including variants of Second Life or The Sims, RPGs, pornography, or other things that we haven’t even imagined yet. Their bodies will still exist in the physical world but they’ll have no real life; they may not even be aware that the original reality exists.
The entire world will be controlled by a small number of enormous corporations. I’m guessing ten or fewer companies total. Governments will either cease to exist or will be totally under the control of the corporations. Any attempt to introduce competition or question corporate rule will be squashed by force.
Society will have degenerated further towards mindless hedonism.
A few small enclaves of free people will still exist outside of corporate rule. most of them will be religious in nature.
Pristine areas of the environment will all be destroyed. Global warming will have drowned the coastlines. That along with other environmental disasters will render large portions of the planet uninhabitable.
“Where are the flying cars? I was promised flying cars!!”
Everyone will have a daily burn-rate. If their burn rate exceeds their earn-rate, then they will be ‘taken out of circulation’.
That’s the closest thing to money we’ll have.
Yes, I think you and I would be able to deal with future high tech better than your grandfather. You and I have been reading/watching science fiction all our lives.
Isaac Newton was smarter than me.*.But we have an advantage over him, because we have technology. He figured out how the universe runs…but Newton could never have imagined flush toilets in every house.
Nowadays, because we know a lot more science, we can imagine the future with less disorientation than your grandfather. We know more, and we know how to look for what we don’t yet know. Time travel, other universes in other dimensions, anti-matter, dark matter, quantum physics, telepathy.
Whatever happens by 2364, I may be amazed, but I would be able to wrap my brain around it.
I dunno…Maybe we will use quantum particles to communicate by sending info directly into your brain. Nobody will have any private thoughts, since everything we think will be sent instantaneously to a central quantum computer-brain, which will instantaneously notify the person we were thinking about.
I may prefer not to use it, but I would be able to grasp the concept.
(* Heck, he was even smarter than Uncle Cecil)
Based on the religious beliefs in which I was raised, there will be a federation of united planets, with multiple humanoid participants, many of whom are hot alien babes.
Genetic Engineering will guarantee a Post-Human society.
Beyond that, I got nothin’.
That’s incorrect. Historically mass murder has occurred for other reasons, such as hatred ( I notice you assume that the Nazis didn’t believe their own rhetoric ), to make a political point, or simply for entertainment. And at any rate, the general public would be an “obstacle” at that point, a potential source of an overthrow. It’s just a larger scale version of Stalin’s “People are the problem. No people, no problem” philosophy.
First, the fact that they are unnecessary isn’t the motivation, but the reason why the killers could get away with it. Second, it wouldn’t take any effort beyond telling their robot army or robot biowarfare unit to do so. And third, why would they care about “bad PR” when the people among whom it would be bad PR would all be dead ? And fourth, their gain would be safety from overthrow, and the death of billions of people they despise.
Let’s look at a slightly modified model.
Assuming you donned suitable period clothes, what do you think the people, women and children would be like, and how long do you think you’d last if you landed somewhere in London town on a bright summer day in 1652?
…by 2364, the average IQ will be 55, and society will be run by a small group of super-intelligent people.
scoff That’s EXACTLY what they said in 1508.
A classic example of American class bigotry, based on the conviction that the poor are by definition stupid. Because it’s the poor that have more kids, not stupid people. And the solution in the story was the genocide of most of humanity.
Several folks seem pretty doomful about the Earth. That’s not realistic.
Global warming will not have “drowned the coastlines.”. Even if sea levels rise 400 feet (wildly exeeding even the wildest doomsayer predictions), there will still be coastlines. They’ll still have eiher cliffs or bays or beaches. They just won’t be in teh same places they are today. A lot of human construction will be destroyed. The shore is eternal. And the new shore will be just as habitable, and as buildable on, as the current shore is.
Nuclear war: Nagasaki & Hiroshiima are thriving cities today, and were back in the early 1950s, just a few years after the nuclear attacks. If, say, Pakistan and India, were to launch their entire missile inventory at each other tomorrow, a lot of people would die.
A dozen (?) cities in each country would be largely toast. Although major Indian cities are so large in area that much of the outskirts on the upwind side would survive. The dislocation & refugee problems would be immense. A lot more people would die.
Downwind for a thousand miles cancer rates would increase 10-15%. Worldwide they’d increase a detectable amount.
And 10 years later there’d be teeming cities on the same sites, just as occurred with Hiroshima.
Nature could scrape us off this rock tomorrow with a big meteor, or maybe with a year long Yellowstone eruption. Man’s best (worst?) efforts can only produce changes which confound our own efforts. We can wreck cities & farms. We can wreck each other. We can change Nature. We can’t wreck it.
Note I’m not advocating some Republican “the market is all, the earth is worth what we paid for it” mentality. IMO we ought to be a lot smarter & more conscientious than we are about stweardship of the planet. But the idea we’re doomed is silly. We can/will poop in our nest, and then we’ll have poop on us. And we’ll muddle through the consequences. And Nature will press on regardless.
<It’s only a model!>
I think the people would be like people everywhere–focused on their lives and their significant others, curious about but a bit wary of strangers. I expect it wouldn’t take more than about 10 minutes for me to violate some social expectation–where I walked, how much eye contact I made, how I responded to a beggar.
I’d last until the first meal. I don’t think my modern hygenically weakened intenstinal flora could handle the relaxed standards of 1652.
Go back and read some sf from back in the 40s and 50s that describes what life will be wayyyyyy in the future in the 1990s or (gasp) 2000. Hell, read 1984, written 50 years prior.
That’s about how accurate any predictions made today will be. I would love to believe that the Star Trek universe will come to be; I have no illusions that it will.
That depends on whether or not (like batman) we were prepared. Our modern Purell based sterile society might not last the first wayward sneeze.
A person may survive a short period of time in any timeframe, as long as they don’t open their mouth. I might not pass as a native in certain parts of town in my current timeframe.
But I make a hilarious whiteboy. Werd.
We’ve already severely damaged nature; we are at the tail end of a mass extinction, one instigated by us. Animal life used to be much more abundant than it is now.
And we are speaking of the future, and if we keep progressing, we will certainly have the technology to destroy the biosphere, not just damage it. For example, a man made asteroid impact, either a screw up or as someone’s doomsday weapon. Any form of replicator could eat most or all of the biosphere. It’s been pointed out that a Von Neumann machine built solar power/microwave power transmission facility could be built covering Mercury ( using Von Neumann machines, machines that replicate, means the scale doesn’t matter ); if directed at Earth that much energy could burn it clean. And so on.
My WAG prediction:
We will be in a Solar System-wide Civilization living in human made Habitats. Because humans will live impossibly long by our standards, I believe that the human population will be impossibly huge and most of it will not be on Earth.
I believe it will have lead to a drive for resources and for exploration. I believe that our habitats will be far safer and more comforatble to live in than Earth itself (e.g. perfect gravity, temperature, & beauty, no bad indigenous bugs or terrorists, or pollution)… and possibly with people who think alot like you/share your values to a huge degree :
“I wish I lived in Small Town America 1956, with all the luxuries of 2364 and what an average Red State Republican 2008 sees as appropriate social values to raise my kid” — and 95% of the 100,000 people with you in the habitat feel the same way.
“I wish I lived in an Artists Colony like Taos, New Mexico, without crime or weather, OR New York City with varied theater and dining experiences until dawn with virtually no crime, OR on a green biosphere where 5,000 humans live in a Manhattan sized rainforest in perfect eco-balance – whatever you want you could (theoretically) build a habitat to suit it. That is the future of Space and humanity (I think) – obviously the larger and more elaborate and specialized the farther in the future it will be (but I think it is coming).
I expect that it will be a society that couldn’t survive as it will be without the resources it harvests from the solar system and probably it will be early days of building similar floating habitats around stars that are more and more distant (as the nearer ones will have already been colonized.)