I must tell you all, I am fascinated by the future. Maybe the fact I have always been an avid Trekkie has something to do with it, I don’t know. I also am awed by just how far we have come in my lifetime. If current trends continue, it should be an interesting future. And many of us will live to see it all. Heck, someone born today may live to see the 22nd century. Why not?
And that is what this thread is about. The future. Specifically, the very distant future.
I specifically choose the year 3000, because it is a nice round number. And it is the beginning of the next millennium. (Well, actually 3001 is the beginning of the next millennium;). But humor me a little on that too.)
What are your predictions for the next millennium? I would prefer if they are purely your own. But you can cite things you read. And remember, this is MPSIMS. So they don’t necessarily have to be scientifically accurate or valid. By all means, make them as wild as you want too.
I can start the discussion by adding a few of my own. First of all, it won’t be called the year 3000. Because by then we will have ditched the Gregorian and Julian calendars. We will all be disembodied brains a là Star Trek, because that way we will be free of our body boundaries. And everything will be done on a simulated plane by a big master computer anyways. And population will be strictly controlled. No one will be born anymore, and no one around will die anyways.
Those are my not-too-wild predictions. Yours of course may be much wilder, if you want.
I think a lot of the unconscious assumptions we have about life, existence and technology will have totally broken down by then due to scientific and tech advances. So we can’t really predict much.
Look at how much we’ve accomplished in just the last 150 years. There is no telling what the year 3000 will be like. But if I had to guess I’m assuming we’d be like the Q in Star Trek TNG.
Humanity will be reduced to a pre-industrial existence by resource exhaustion, nuclear war and climate change. Either a low-technology medievalish civilization or outright reduced to hunter-gatherers, depending on if agricultural turns out to be possible in the new climate. Regardless, this continues until humanity becomes extinct; advanced civilization never rises again.
I’m positive about the future. Humanity will live in a post-energy-scarcity economy, having got over its issues with nuclear power. Populations will still be subject to food production limits. I think that the rate of technological progress will have slowed considerably. There may or may not have been another world war, but it will turn out to have negligible long-term impact. I hope humanity will have found a way of side-stepping the limit of the speed of light and begun to colonise the galaxy; failing that, we will have colonised the solar system.
And sensible people will party both on NYE 2999 and NYE 3000.
By 3000, most of humanity will have long since ceased to have use for much of a physical presence on the planet. Brains will be wired into VR and people will live VR lives of great satisfaction. For those wishing for a 24/7 VR life, bodies will be stored in large buildings – effectively, human parking lots – with machines taking care of most bodily maintenance issues, including healthy intravenous diets and procreation. A token rotating staff will of course have to remain on duty to maintenance the machines and take care of individuals needing more vital medical attention. With so much of humanity in a state of minimal existence for much – or even all - of the time, the need for food and other resources will be vastly reduced as well.
Experts who warned of the dangers of such a society will be ignored because the nature of the VR existence will prove too compulsive. Although initially only an option for the rich, the technology will inevitably become available to most everyone else via pirating and/or increasing affordability.
Nature will reclaim much of the planet. No one will care who Donald Trump was, what the conflict on the Korean Peninsula was about or nuclear weapons. The central focus of all humanity will be on maintaining VR and it won’t even be all that costly.
(Slightly) more seriously, I more-or-less agree with DerTrihs and MoonMoon although not to quite such an extreme. I suspect that resource depletion, especially oil, will put the human race back to a pre-industrial-revolution existence, perhaps as it was around the 16th or 17th or 18th century, assuming no cataclysmic double-plus-nuclear war. If that happens, then it’s possible we could bomb ourselves back to the proverbial stone age. (ETA: I should add, I envision this depletion of resources happening rather sooner than 3000.)
We may already be at a stage where, if civilization is bombed back to the stone age, we will never be able to re-build again. I’ve read, somewhere, that we’ve already depleted all our natural resources to such an extent that it will never be possible to repeat the building of civilization.
Perhaps I’m a bit more optimistic than some, but I think things will be fine by 3K.
After the great die off, which will happen between now and 3K, whether due to global warming, unsupportable population levels (which we’re pretty much at now), nuclear war, asteroid impact, lack of potable water or Yellowstone supervolcano eruption there won’t be enough people left to have a war even if they wanted to. Their will be isolated pockets of survivors eking out a subsistence level existence and being enthralled by tales of Netflix and Internet Porn by the 30 y/o elders of the tribe. Ironically they will worship the God Aol.
Think about it, no more wars, no more pollution or CO[sub]2[/sub] emissions, no Red vs. Blue, no more guns, no more abortions, no more Trump, no more Clinton (Hillary or Bill) and perhaps most importantly, no more IRS.
This is simply rubbish. There’s at least 100 years of oil left (granted some of it will be difficult to recover) and hundreds of years of coal, and metals and the like can be recovered from existing items. And any future civilisation can jump straight from steam to nuclear power. And then there’s the possibility of some clever clogs finding out how to synthsise oil from air.
Seriously though, consider how a person alive in the year 1000 might have answered what life would be like in the year 2000. Now consider how spectacularly wrong they would have been. That’s what we’re dealing with here. Even guessing what life will be like in 100 years is a major challenge.
Personally my money’s on near- or total extinction of humanity.
Things will be sufficiently different that were one of us dropped into 31st century society, we’d continually be agog, mouthes agape, uncomprehending of nearly everything we see.
Coal can be converted into oil, and there is enough coal for hundreds of years (at least 1 trillion tons of it). Why wouldn’t we develop other forms of transportation (like electric vehicles) within the next few hundred years? or alternative fuel sources like hydrogen, compressed air, etc. Electric cars have advanced quite a bit in the last 20 years. Some nations are mandating all vehicles be electric by 2040 or so. Oil from coal should last us until the 23rd century.
Resource depletion (and pollution) is a problem, but of them peak oil doesn’t really worry me. I do wonder about depletion of helium, phosphorus or things like that though.
