So all I need to give me the skills needed to fix my own pipes is a better sort of “repair manual”? Riiiiiiiiiight. :rolleyes:
Snigger. Have you ever actually worked with plumbing? things in the real world stick, jam, are badly placed, etc .etc. etc. And not everyone is DIY manual friendly. Good luck with that.
I think reality will be virtual by 2100.
[quote=“Evil_Captor, post:62, topic:547725”]
I think once we get to the point of augmented reality you’ll be able to say “It’s stuck” and get a lot of different suggestions on how to take care of it. You may even be able to access a real life plumber who can give you some tips which would be much cheaper than having him come in. In reality we’ll probably just call a plumber for all but the most simple jobs anyway.
I don’t think my flying car will survive the 21st century.
Pardon me for thinking the robots will solve all my problems.
Let me preface this by saying I don’t think these will disappear, and I sure as hell hope they don’t. As this is a thought experiment, though (considering few if any of us, including this message board are likely to be around in 90 years), I can conceive it.
Conservatives (at least in my neck of the woods), hate libraries. They see them as a place where homeless people and Mexicans congregate to loiter and get free goodies on their tax dime. When the economy started falling apart, that was one of the first things they went after, and they came out swinging. We have an amazing library system here with 16 branches. Before their funding got slashed, they were open 85 hours a week and did transfers every day. The hours got slashed, and slashed again, and slashed again, and now they’re open 30 hours a week (closed Sundays and Mondays) and do transfers once a week (which they’re backlogged quite a bit on.) They’re pushing to start closing branches altogether now, and though there are petitioners outside the libraries gathering signatures all the time, it will probably happen.
I won’t belabor the point with regards to liberal arts educations, but suffice it to say they feel similarly about those. They see them as impractical and a waste of tax dollars (when it comes to grants and state universities-- which are the only ways the vast majority of Americans can get a degree.)
I’m not entirely pessimistic about the survival of these two things, but a 22nd century without them is far, far from inconceivable to me.
I’m a bit more confident that this one will be gone by the end of the century. Fast food as we know it is unsustainable. The entire model is propped up by government subsidies of cheap, malnutritious foods that are already causing a public health crisis, which is only going to get worse, and are starting to cause environmental crises, which are only going to get worse. Do you really think a double cheeseburger only costs $1? That’s a fake price. Do you think it makes long-term sense to turn 6lbs of grain into 1lb of beef on a massive, global scale? The antibiotics they’re feeding their cows so that they can survive on unnatural diets of cheap, government-subsidized corn are breeding super-bacteria. The fertilizer they’re using to grow all that corn is running down the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico and creating a dead zone. This cannot last 90 more years; not as a business, not as a public health menace, not as an environmental menace.
Now, you’ll say, “they’ll just serve healthy, sustainable foods through the drive-thru window.” Maybe. Two things, though, if this happens (which I find unlikely for a number of reasons); it will be expensive, and thus non-ubiquitous, and the product itself will be unrecognizable as today’s “fast food.”
The way we eat is being critically examined, dragged into the public discourse, and reevaluated now for the first time in a long time (look up Michael Pollan if you don’t know what I’m talking about.) I really hope that, by the time 90 years have passed, our descendants can look back on fast food as a ridiculous blunder, shake their heads, and laugh.
I think you have it backward. High rise apartments are caused by inefficient or non-existent public transportation. Efficient public transportation leads to bedroom suburbs around the train stops. The high rise apartment blocks you see in China are because they are walking or riding a bicycle to work.
I live in Orlando and I checked the prices for some of the high rise condos close to downtown. 250k for a one bedroom? At those prices no one can live there except except rich singles and DINKs and they probably have a beach house or condo for the weekend. Rising gas prices, might cause people to get a hybrid or an electric, but it isn’t going to get them to move downtown. They are supposed to build a light rail system in Orlando, but that will give people even less incentive to live in a high rise.
I don’t think the public library will go away, but keeping the brick and mortar plants seems kind of doubtful. I can already download e-books directly from the library web-site, complete with expiration dates. Even if I want a paper book, I can have it delivered to my house.
Finland has made a 1mbps connection a legal right and plan to go to 100mbps by 2015.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10374831-2.html
With that kind of bandwidth it doesn’t make much sense to kill trees to transfer information.
Maybe but in 90 years two things will happen. There will be lots of new technologies like genetically modified crops and perhaps factory-produced meat which could allow this food to be produced cheaply without subsidies. Secondly people will be richer even after adjusting for inflation. If you assume a 1.5% growth rate for per capita inflation-adjusted income, a pretty conservative figure, the average person will be around 4 times richer in 2100. Even if all the subsidies are removed they will still be able to afford fast food which will also probably be more tasty and nutritious by that time.I don’t understand why the stock market will go away. Are you saying there will no longer be publically owned companies?
You sound really optimistic that these things are going to happen. Like those people who, when I was a kid, would say “I’m going to keep smoking because by the time I get lung cancer they’ll have a cure.” Or how 'bout the jet pack, the meal-in-a-pill, or the flying car?
If the economy craters, then all bets are off–we could be eating rats and living in piles of smoking rubble.
But it seems to me that the economy in 2110 is going to be a lot larger than it is in 2010. Meaning, most people will be a lot richer. Maybe not comparable to the improvement from 1910 to 2010, but some. So imagining that people will be something like 4x richer in 2110 than they are in 2010 isn’t ridiculous.
So even if food costs a lot more in 2110, even if it costs 10x as much, if we’re 4x richer we’ll be able to pay such prices without blinking.
But food prices today are a lot lower than they were in 1910. You read old books and hear about people paying rent in tenement apartments, but unable to afford food. Nowadays you’d be out on the streets long before you’d begin to starve. So housing costs have risen, but food costs have fallen.
So the mix might be different in 2110, things that are relatively cheap might be relatively expensive and vice versa, and there might be a lot of things that turn out ot be pretty expensive, but if everyone is a lot richer we can absorb the higher costs more easily.
It’s 2100 A.D.
Newspapers are more or less a thing of the past, replaced by hand held computers (we already have that tech now.) from the internet (and imagine what the internet would be like by then.
Skyscrapers-There will be more people on the Earth without the land, so the only way to expand is to go vertical.
The personal computer as we know it will be much better, faster and reliable. Most computers will be in people’s pockets.
The television as we know it will no longer exist, due to computers. I rarely watch TV today in 2010.
Landline telephones will be obsolete. Today in 2010, a lot of us don’t have landline phones, we use cell phones. Personally, I would never have a landline phone. I remember living in the USA and how expensive the bills were.
The automobile as we know it will be smaller and hopefully run on some other type of fuel by then. However, the alternative fuel (or gasoline itself) will be prohibitively expensive for most people to afford.
**Strip malls **will still be around. People need to shop. Perhaps in the next 100 years, the shopping mall we know today will be vertical to save landspace.
The **print magazine **will last longer than the newspapers by a few decades, but it will die out in favor of the internet.
**Corporate radio **will still be around. People listen to the radio in their cars. A lot of the music will be coming from the internet, and there is no reason why intellegent radios in cars with internet capability wont be invented and used.
[legal, mass produced]** cigarettes** will fall out of favor and will be prohibitively expensive. Hopefully, marijuana will be legalized soon which would be a godsend.
Fast food will be around forever.
Traditional, public K-12 education will last. Kids need to go to school.
Traditional post-secondary liberal arts education will be around forever, as long as there are kids going there, and parents paying for it.
Paper money will be a thing of the past, replaced with scannable cards. This wont happen fully for a long time. People like cash and don’t want to give it up.
The stock market will never die as long as there are people who want to make money.
The public library will always be around. A good library does many things besides lending books. Historical records can be researched there. People can study. There will always be drunken bums who will sleep one off in the library.
The major motion picture. There will always be movies. I don’t understand why anyone would pay money to go into a theater when they can wait several months for the film to come out on video. There will always be movies, however, and hopefully, the movie theater will die a slow death.
That’s because government handouts to industrial farming have produced gross surpluses of cheap corn and soy that are polluting our land and waterways, wiping out life in the Gulf of Mexico, and making us all obese diabetics with ticking time bombs for hearts. We may be able to go on whistling Dixie while we ignore this for a couple more decades, but no way can it last another century. The real cost of food is a lot higher than we’re used to paying, and though some will think it painful, we’ll all be a lot better off when we as a society come around to that reality.
Re: skyscrapers: I understand overpopulation, but you think we are literally running out of land?
The personal computer: I can think of two ways off the top of my head that it could disappear by then: phones with good projector screens that do just as much, and biointegration.
Corporate radio: Has been in trouble for awhile and it’s getting worse as mp3 players, internet “radio” (remember, that’s not actually radio), etc become more popular. Once ads are no longer selling for enough to make the endeavor worth it, the corporations are going to cut and run, and radio will be back in the hands of local small-timers.
The major motion picture: Is doing alright for now, but there’s more and more competition every day. In a few decades a high school kid will be able to make a movie like Avatar with a few of his buddies and a couple cases of Mountain Dew. Indies are only going to get more popular, and as filmmaking becomes cheaper and more accessible, I could see short films and serials making a big comeback. Movies probably won’t die on any practical timescale, but I could see the big studio picture being a thing of the past in 100 years.
Would you call public transportation in New York inefficient? I wouldn’t, and there are plenty of high rise apartments there. Yes, they are expensive, but that is because they are so desired.
I grew up in Queens not far from the Nassau county border, and I worked for 3 out of four college summers in the city, and took the same public transportation to three different jobs, all within walking distance of each other. But even efficient public transportation takes a lot longer than living close to work - and it is all made possible by having a lot of businesses in skyscrapers serving as the hub.
I work in an office part environment now, but while there is light rail it is far enough away to be inconvenient to walk to, and to get to it from my house would be almost impossible without a car. The first three places I worked here are even further, The distributed office park environment makes efficient public transportation almost impossible.
Maybe, but not a movie that anyone but his friends would ever want to watch. Any idiot can write a novel today, but few make the investment to actually do it and even fewer write stuff that isn’t crap.
You’d be surprised. I’ve been involved with the local film scene for several years now, and I’ve seen countless indie, ultra-no-budget, and student films. Some of them are great. About 95% of them are steaming piles of crap, but interestingly, that’s about the same ratio I find among studio pictures.
[QUOTEI’m a bit more confident that this one will be gone by the end of the century. Fast food as we know it is unsustainable. The entire model is propped up by government subsidies of cheap, malnutritious foods that are already causing a public health crisis, which is only going to get worse, and are starting to cause environmental crises, which are only going to get worse.]
[/QUOTE]
Hamburger is made from scrap; fast food companies do not raise whole cows to turn them into hamburger. Cheap hamburgers are a byproduct of the same industry that provides; steaks, milk, cheese, yogurt, leather goods, plywood glue, fire extinguisher foam, sutures, pet food, dry wall, asphalt, tires, soap, candles and many more products.
Before the amount of available hamburger decreases enough to make fast food disappear we would have to sacrifice steaks and prime ribs from the grocery stores and nicer restaurant menus. After that we would have to basically shut down the dairy industry, that means no more, or very expensive, milk, ice cream, cheese, and yogurt. After those steps we would have to get rid of our love affair with our meat eating cats and dogs or pay out the nose for their food. The leather industry would take a hit affecting everything from couches and car seats, to work gloves and shoes.
Kids being born right now are going to live to see 2100, what portion do you think are going to want to give up these things.