The current debate over Fracturing displays an extreme situation.
The existence of oil and/or gas shale was known 50 years ago. 50 years ago, the concept of going to the extreme expense of extracting the oil/gas was dismissed as “Waaayyy too expensive”.
The fact that we are now going after it says a great deal about the quality and quantity of remaining reserves.
You don’t go to the expense of fracturing if you have plenty of liquid oil.
When oil gets priced as the rare and exotic stuff it will become, we won’t be burning nearly as much.
Who knows, maybe sailing ships will return with rigid, high-efficiency airfoils as sails.
China will send people to at least the moon as a way of demonstrating their ascent back to their old position at the top of the global heap.
After that, the scientific community will need to settle for whatever cheap probes they can get funded. Unless somebody comes up with dirt-cheap space travel. Cheap enough to make asteroid mining profitable.
Personal transportation will be electric - we are seeing this now. Light rail will continue to grow as (in the US) cities start re-building their inter-urban rail lines (major scandal re what happened to them).
Nuclear will be the default power source for most of the globe, esp Europe with its density.
Direct photovoltaic will be used in homes, and wind will eventually figure out how to be quiet and not kill too many birds. Hydro will be embraced by the Third World as cheap and easy, damn the environment. Solar farms still fry wildlife and blind pilots - their uses will be limited.
Nuclear is the only one which can be plopped down where needed and not add to Global Warming*
which, if not corrected real soon, makes any rosy image of 2050 highly unlikely.
In 2050, in all civilized nations, the Muslims will have enough of a majority to start voting Islamic clerics into public office. By 2100 all advances in science and education will be wiped out by the new Islamic Constitutions. All women will wear hajibs and lose the right to drive a car. People will be executed for showing any type of public affection. All non-Muslim holidays will be outlawed.
Wives and children will be caned as a means of discipline. Gays and pagans will be slaughtered into extinction.
I’m glad I won’t be around to see the horrific slide back into the dark ages.
If the current population, workforce, and disability growth rates remain roughly constant…
52% of the US workforce will be “disabled”. My rough, back-of-the-envelope calculations show that we’ll cross the 50%-disabled line in 2048.
But I’m convinced the western drought will have far larger effects on our economy and stability. It seems to me the current rates of reservoir decline will cause a large population shift away from places like LA and Phoenix. I wonder if the population CG will have to shift back toward the Great Lakes, because of water.
Maybe - just maybe - we will know what happened to the Malaysian airliner.
The world economy will be shifting to breeder nuclear reactors and solar, with some fringe uses for other sources like wind. People will not have implanted chips, because that makes it too hard to upgrade, but phones and TV and the Internet will be fused. Speech recognition software will eliminate keyboards. China will be struggling with the enormous gap between its rich and the rest of its populace, but will replace Russia as the world’s other superpower.
The world economy will be recovering slowly from the financial crash when the US and Europe encountered the difference between what was promised in entitlements, and what funds are available. Their crunch drives down China, and further hurts the geriatric Japan, who will be hurt by rising labor costs in places to which they outsource, like Viet Nam.
Much of MENA will be split into fundamentalist Islamic countries, who will stagnate in internecine squabbles about doctrinal purity and come up with relatively little in technological or social progress. Israel will still be there, and so will the Palestinians, with Hizbollah and Hamas waging low-grade warfare to drum up support for Iran and the other Islamo-fascists.
There will be less than a hundred bookstores still in business in the United States. (Which I’ll define as a store which devotes over two thirds of its business to the sale of new books.)
We’ll see considerable advances made in the ‘War on Cancer,’ but medical science will still fall far short of being able to provide a blanket cure-all for these diseases. We’ll have leukemia and a few others completely nailed, though.
You’ll need an IQ of at least 160 to pass the Cisco certification exams.
Social inequity problems will make inner-city areas look like war zones. Affluent areas of major cities will become increasingly more isolated and guarded, with paramilitary private security forces patrolling the wealthiest ones.
People will still be talking about Breaking Bad.
We might have some sort of rinky-dink Moon base, but humans will still not have set foot on Mars.
I agree with some of your other predictions, but I think this one is way off. Speech recognition may help with some tasks, but there’s no way that keyboards will be replaced. Can you imagine an entire office of people trying to get work done by talking to their computers?
Creating any non-trivial document would be virtually impossible through speech recognition. How do you edit? “It was the best of times, it was the worst of climes. cought Excuse me, I meant to say ‘times’ both times, not climes. Please delete ‘climes’ and substitute ‘times’. Anyway, where was I? No, don’t write that.” The amount of effort it would take to produce even a simple document is mind-boggling. It’s not that it can’t be done; it’s that the majority of people wouldn’t want it to be done that way.
Most of us probably won’t even be using voice-controlled microwaves or stoves, and that’s a much better fit for voice control.
I’ll add a prediction here: most cords and cables will disappear, replaced by wireless data transfer and even wireless power transfer. We won’t need to have twisted cables snaking through the dusty territory behind our entertainment centers. Many appliances won’t have to be plugged into an outlet. You just unbox the appliance, and turn it on. It will automatically receive power from your home. (There will still be power lines coming to your home, but from there many devices will operate without the need for outlets.)
Close, but the thing is that brute force is very inefficient. I do think the new approaches that have been found to work for image recognition tasks that were impossible until recently shows that the approach is a good one. And IMHO it will be even better once we apply it to more optimized feedback and memory for the new artificial brains.
The global birth dearth, or baby bust as some call it, will be in full swing. Some countries, such as Japan, Italy and Iran, will be in serious danger of extinction. Others will find their economies crippled by the imbalance between the growing elderly population and the shrinking working age population. Some will become dangerously unstable politically.
The United States will probably remain a major military power, but the era of U.S. hegemony over virtually the entire globe will long be over as its ability to project military power around the globe will be greatly diminished. The American middle class will be much smaller than today, and, though a facade of elections and democracy will be maintained, the American government will be an oligarchy for all practical purposes (if it isn’t already).
Changing climate and weather patterns around the globe will lead to mass migrations lasting over decades.
Manned space expeditions beyond Earth orbit will have been abandoned.
China will undergo serious economic troubles and at least some political instability. The current rocket-like pace of growth can’t last forever, and when it’s over there will still be hundreds of millions who never shared in that prosperity. The problem of age demographics will hit the Chinese particularly hard due to its one child policy and contribute to its economic and political woes.
Due to the lack of military powers strong enough to fight one, a massive war similar to the first and second world wars probably won’t happen. Terrorism, insurgencies and local wars over territory and resources will still be around.
Racial, ethnic, religious and class prejudice will also still be around and will be just as bad as they are today.
Or maybe we’ll get wiped out by an asteroid or a mega-volcano or something. Eat, drink and be merry, gentle readers.
…that was my flippant way of asking you exactly what demographic shift you think is going to occur in the US over the next 35 years that will cause the Muslim-American population to grow from less than 1% of the population to “enough to elect Islamic clerics to office”.
Wow! That just gave me a flashback to the 70s, and it didn’t even involve drugs or bellbottoms…
Speaking of fashion, by the 2050s, men’s shorts will become so long they will be indistinguishable from regular pants. Someone will invent a radical new kind of men’s lower garment where the legs end way above the knee… wonder what they’ll call it…
Are we gonna have flying cars by 2050? I’m thinking of the kind of cars and traffic lanes that we saw in the movie with Bruce Willis - The Fifth Element. Also there was the movie with Harrison Ford - Blade Runner.
In both films, we saw very similar traffic lanes and cars that operated on many different height planes. That just looked real exciting and I’d love to try and drive in a system like that.
