Who says it will be transported any great distance? It may be grown on the aforementioned urban farms.
How much hay do you think a horse needs every year? Or to put it another way, every horse will need a certain amount of acreage reserved to grow fodder for that horse, roughly equivalent to the acreage of pasture that horse would need if it were grazing on its own. You aren’t going to find any such acreage in an urban environment, or a suburban environment, except to the superrich who might keep horses as an affectation.
If transportation costs are so high that you can’t afford trucks, you won’t be able to afford horses either.
An all electric vehicle will be an order of magnitude cheaper (not to mention much more effective) than any horse drawn transport could possibly be. Remember, we don’t generate electricity from oil, oil is used almost exclusively as transportation fuel. There are dozens of other alternatives–alcohol, biodiesel, coal-to-liquid, electric, compressed air, natural gas, propane–heck, even solid fuel coal steam engines.
Even if gasoline was $100/gallon in 2020 we’re not going to see the return of horse-drawn carriages. But of course, gasoline can’t get that high because at that price the dozens of other alternative fuels would be so much cheaper than gasoline that demand for gasoline would plummet.
We’re likely to see more investment in mass transit and even bicycles, but the mix of transporation options in 2020 won’t be massively different than in 2010, it doesn’t matter what price gasoline is. That mix will change in 2030 and 2040, but it’s never going to include horse drawn transport, because if economic decline reaches the point where horse-drawn transport would make sense we’ll have starving mobs killing and eating the horses instead.
There will be universal nationalized health care in the U.S., but health care expenses will still be growing astronomically. Premiums will force most people to take the national plan and there will be the usual grumblings about inadequate health care. Only the wealthy will be able to afford private health care coverage.
The national debt will be a crushing burden on the U.S. economy. People will have to wait until they’re 70 to get full social security coverage. China will be the dominant economic power.
All rental videos will be on-demand and streamed to people’s home TVs.
Commercial jet-packs and flying cars are still not available, but wristwatch cell phones will be all over the place! Ubiquitous computing will rule.
Oh, a few more predictions of my own, I don’t mean to just carp on everyone else:
China will be going through massive social and political dislocation. It’s economy will be chugging along OK, but remember that China’s economy is half the US economy, despite having four times the population. That means that as of 2010China is still poorer than Mexico, per capita. Having the largest economy in the world doesn’t make you rich if you’ve also got the largest population in the world. When China’s GDP is larger than US GDP, we’ll still be four times richer than they are, per capita.
Economic growth in China and India will be GOOD for the American economy–as the Chinese internal market develops we’ll start to see a shift in the trade balance. After all, what good does it to do hold billions of US dollars unless you use those dollars to purchase goods and services from the US? At some point the Chinese government is going to have to stop priveleging export industries and allow imports, otherwise the system will collapse. Right now their policy of keeping their currency artificially low means that it is artificially cheap to purchase Chinese goods.
And this means that all those Chinese factory workers are being forced to work at well below their free market value. They aren’t rioting over this yet, because the economic improvements over the last two decades have been so dramatic. But what happens when there’s a burp or a hiccup? Imagine mass movements of hundreds of millions of workers demanding a larger share of the pie. How are you going to keep them down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree?
China today is in some ways equivalent to America in the 50s. After decades of economic depression and war, things are humming along nicely. The guys who lived through the depression and the fighting were happy as anything to have a nice factory job, and a nice house, food on the table, the kids going to school instead of working, and a car and a TV. After the 30s and 40s, the 50s looked like paradise to those guys. The conformity and respect for authority in the 50s were because people felt that authority had earned that respect.
So after the decades of turmoil, China has had a few decades as a normal country. Eventually the Chinese people are going to take that for granted, instead of being profoundly grateful. And then they’re going to demand some changes be made.
Not much different than it is now.
I’m trying to think of technologies that are now in common day-to-day use that weren’t around in 2000, and can’t come up with much.
- Incredible increase in storage capacity in hard drives and other memory storage devices.
- MP3 players and small multi-function devices (iPhone, etc).
- Mass market GPS devices, and greater GPS integration into many other devices.
- Digital cameras with a picture quality equal to or exceeding 35mm film.
Yes, there was some miniaturization, and prices dropped for electronics, but that’s about it. In 2000, there was inexpensive broadband Internet access, relatively fast computers, cheap printers and scanners, two-way digital cable television, DVRs, inexpensive cell phone service with fairly small phones, and so on. Car styling isn’t radically different, at least compared to the differences between 1990 to 2000 or 1990 to 1980.
Culturally, there have been a lot of changes, but again not much that wasn’t predicted or anticipated in 2000.
Hopefully, on the Census form, they will have “male”, “female”, and “other” (at least) as choices of gender or sex.
All the LeftBehinders will get together and fix most of what’s fixable. The other stuff we won’t care about too much, what with all the partying.
The space aliens will eat many of us before we figure out how to virus up their iMacs.
Ten years might be a little soon, but almost certainly within twenty:
More oil wars*. I can see a lot of possible scenarios (most likely a middle-eastern country deciding to preserve its precious resources), but no matter who starts it, I expect the US will be the winner – unless China gets involved, in which case things will be very messy.
No matter who ends it, the outlook will not be great for most smaller countries.
- Yes, I mean more.
A lot of the stuff in this thread I can’t see happening in 10 years, as it’s just too short a time for major infrastructure change. But this I think is going to be a major change in the future. We’re already seeing it today with youtube, where anyone at home can make a video, upload it, and become popular and famous. Internet memes used to be one of those cultish things that only those who hung around the internet a lot would catch on to, but within the past few years they’ve expanded into the mainstream. Some of the big celebrities of the future won’t be people hired by an agent and professionally employed through a studio, they’ll be regular joes who put up a video of them doing something cool/weird/funny.
There are many fan videos out there that are actually quite well done and almost comparable to the real movies from which they’re based, both in terms of effects and storytelling. It’ll come to the point where stuff fans make will actually be in competition with the stuff big studios make. It will fundamentally change the way all entertainment is made and distributed.
Augmented reality will have arrived as a mainstream technology, along with all the associated privacy and social concerns.
Is there a thread from 2000 of us predicting life in 2010?
Asian carp will be living in the Great Lakes.
Mental enhancement drugs, (brain steroids) will be in use. There will be some nasty side effects.
The words liberal and conservative will have fallen out of use.
The phrase “dark side of the moon” will mean the nighttime side of the moon, not the far side.
fag and gay will mean cigarette and happy
Lady Gaga will be the supreme ruler of the universe.
Not quite the same, thing, but wikipedia (yes, with all its flaws) strikes me as something major that really wasn’t available 10 years ago.
And wikipedia tells me that the iPod was introduced in October, 2001.
Blu-ray discs, 2006.
Satellite radio started in 2001.
Online bill payment wasn’t really going on in 2000 - automated payments were, but not online payments.
OK, deep one for you: television will be completely all sports, all the time. Nothing else. Sports. Here and there will be “national” weather reports that show only the East Coast.
Just analyzing the trends is all.
My own guesses are:
-
The U.S. embargo with Cuba will end, leading to great prosperity at which point it will become a haven for vacationing and new business opportunities/investments
-
China and India will become more powerful, build up their militaries, and invade Mongolia and Pakistan respectively in a land grab to get more resources.
-
As China and India grow and their standard of living becomes better, manufacturing prices will increase, leading to a shift to Africa and South America for cheaper manufacturing.
-
The euro will be adopted as the official currency of several African nations
-
Same sex marriage will be accepted in 50% of the U.S. states
-
All entertainment other than live theater will be available on demand
-
I for one think gas prices will remain roughly the same since new technologies (electric/ fuel cells) will require less gas per distance traveled, which will balance out the diminishing supply over time.
-
All new construction in Arizona, California, and other sunny states will be required to have solar panels. Existing homes/businesses will get huge tax breaks for installing them. Solar panels will also become cheaper and more of a do-it-yourself Home Depot kind of product.
-
Some form of inexpensive genetic screening will be used to determine the best drug to treat a condition based on your unique genetic make-up.
-
Food science will improve drastically with people actually creating good tasting and healthy ‘junk food’. Regular junk food will be vitamin fortified so that even the very poor are getting somewhat healthier food.
Art Deco will be revived; styles from the 1940’s will become popular.
-people will be anticipating the “roaring 20’s”
-Bill Clinton wil be accepted as a sage senior statesman, his advice will be sought
-Israel and the Palestinians will hold “peace” talks
[quote=“figure9, post:52, topic:532732”]
Asian carp will be living in the Great Lakes.
QUOTE]
But they won’t be creating any major problems. The carp won’t be hugely abundant until after least 30 years. That’s after the population goes through the lag phase and enters the exponential growth phase. People get complacent around year five from now, and laugh at those that warned about the carp problem, because the carp problem is not causing immediate problems, and fail to take easy measures that would prevent the carp from reproducing in the Great Lakes.
Carp eventually become a very large part of the fish biomass of the Great Lakes, but no one cares much, because by that time there is no substantial salmon fishery because no one can afford the gas for boating on the lakes.