I’m disappointed I don’t have a flying car, holodecks, or 3D interactive porn. If I say “Tea. Earl Gray. Hot.” my wife says “Sounds good. Get me one, too.” I’ve never been to the moon. I’ve never teleported. I’m still a slave to my material desires. So, given another thousand years, do you think those pencil-heads at MIT can figure out a way to teleport my molecules to the moon (and back)?
I envision a word where we all live free of material needs, and the porn flows like water. Either that or the earth becomes a barren, nuke-charred rock devoid of atmosphere and night-life. Tell me about your vision of the future.
Think really hard about what it was like in 1007. Pretend you’re actually there and of that time. Then imagine someone asks you what life will be like in the year 2000. I doubt anyone could have even come close. It’s probably like that for now/3000.
I’d probably agree with this. However I will note that Benjamin Franklin made some pretty accurate predictions about the future.
He predicted the rise of mass air travel, and accurately predicted what the U.S. population would be 100 years later (his predictions were only off 1/10th of a percent) which is pretty significant considering just how small the U.S. population was in the 1780s and how large it was in the 1880s.
A hundred years is impressive, but 1000 is nigh on impossible. In fact, a person could probably just automatically discount anything he could think of.
Times ten. If you predicted in 1007 what it would be like in 1507, you probably wouldn’t have been too, too far off. You probably wouldn’t even have been that far off predicting what it would be like in 1707 or maybe even 1807. But 1907? Hardly. 2007? Forget it. The acceleration is now ferocious. No one can have the slightest notion what’ll be happening in 2207, let alone 3007.
Of course, it’s very subjective. I say that someone in 1007 would probably have predicted 1507 with a fair amount of accuracy. But maybe that’s just me looking back and saying both times seem relatively similar, with a slow rate of development. Perhaps something such as Renaissance one point perspective would absolutely have floored someone from 1007. To see his world realistically captured in a drawing might have been astonishing and terrifying.
What will life be like in 3007? Hello, take a look around you! It IS the year 3007!
The human race has been enslaved, and the sheepish population is pacified because they have been placed in a simulator that makes them think that the year is still 2007. We (the “leaders”) are able to mine their brainwaves through the use of zlorblaxes, powerful mind-control devices that resemble old -timey “personal computers.”
Of course, we cannot let the enslaved people know anything about this. If they begin to suspect, the zlorblax will confuse them by filling their heads with random fish bottle mangrove carpool.
I don’t want to be the forecaster of doom , but I’m going to cast my vote for the charred rock. We can’t even share the roads and I’m thinking the world isn’t going to make it much longer if we don’t figure out to live peacfully together .
Human nature is not likely to change. Even a thousand years from now there will still be love, and lust, and hate, and greed, and idiocy, and genius, and cruelty, and kindness. But we seem to be hard-wired for war. In the aggregate we’re vastly better-off as a species now than we were in 1007, by virtually any measure - but we now have the means to destroy ourselves entirely. At the height of the Cold War, Faulkner said he thought that humanity “will not only survive, it will prevail.” I hope he’s right… but I have my doubts.
My vote: a peaceful, bustling, technologically-advanced and diverse republic spanning the Solar System. Who knows? We might even have a FTL drive by then, but the odds are very much against us meeting intelligent aliens anywhere in our galactic neighborhood.
The human race as currently constituted is vulnerable to events, but the planet has been here for more than 4 billion years. The odds of something occurring to turn the place into a charred rock within the next thousand years are vanishingly small. Letting all our nukes go bang at once would be bad news for some higher order creatures, but it would only be a minor bump for the planet as a whole. If we really, really went for it we could possibly engineer a runaway greenhouse effect, but I doubt it.
Anyway, from the perspective of a thousand years time, we will be looked back on as we currently look at earthworms. Just another creature with a common ancestor. In 3007 there will be no distinction between organic and machine life, no sentient being will need to “die” (such a quaint concept!). Fuck knows what kind of society that will be, but the seeds of immortality have already been sown.
Well I’ll take your words as a vote for postive future. I’m only hoping I can leave it having made a difference for at least one person through sacrifice and doing good deeds when the opportunities present themselves.
Me too. The other thing that you can do (and I’m no longer sure that I want to, and currently don’t have the opportunity anyway) is to have children. Continue the billions-of-years-old line of stupendous badasses[sup]TM[/sup] that are your ancestors, every single one of whom has struggled against adversity to reproduce: end result - you.
I’m only hoping I can leave it having made a difference for at least one person through sacrifice and doing good deeds when the opportunities present themselves.