[QUOTE=Hari Seldon]
I expect life in 3007 to look a lot like life in 1007. All the low-hanging fruit (fossil fuels, high-grade ore deposits, high-quality topsoil) will be gone. Scientific knowledge will be taboo. Everything in electronic form will be gone. Perhaps most paper versions will have been burnt. Somewhere, there will be a society that keeps some things alive, as the Arabs did in 1007. But our civilization will never rise again because we have used up the material basis for it.
The continental seaboards will have flooded and, as CO2 recedes and the ice returns, reappeared. The oceans will be full of fish again. Life expectancy will be 30 years, but this will be a combination of half the people born dying within a year and the other half living to 60 years. Perhaps some knowledge of antibiotics will be retained. But the global population will be below a billion, maybe well below.
Space is a non-starter. Fifty years after Sputnik, the only thing that has come out of it are comm-sats and a fair bit of scientific knowledge. There is simply no reason to settle the moon and certainly no reason to go further. I could, of course, be wrong, but I think that if there were reasons, we could expect to see their shape fifty years later.
Read the sci-fi of 1957. I did (and still enjoy sci-fi). Has any prediction of 1957 come true? Yes, Astounding in 1940 or so made a prediction of nuclear bombs, but that came true within a few years, so was a short-term prediction. But where are the helicopters in every garage? Where are the moving sidewalks (airports, that’s where) that Heinlein predicted. The farms in the sky? Did anyone predict the PC? (Asimov came closest with his idea of a world computer with public access terminals.) Did any sci-fi writer predict global warming? Did any predict that most of us would spend 2 or more hours a day in traffic jams? Or any of the other dystopic features of modern life? Don’t look to sci-fi for predictions of the future.
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Well I could stick to just Heinlein and say he predicted Water Beds, the Internet as a giant educational and news gathering tool and even predicted the behavior we would consider surfing. Computers running a significant portion of our banking, infrastructure and commerce. A North American leader who consulted an astrologer, the re-rising of fundamentalism in America after decades of it slowly dying off.
Those were off the top of my head. I promise you there is much more. Much of what you are referring are his juveniles and should not be treated in the same light as the hard Science Fiction of his Future History.
Things that may still come true, is facts like Government will not be the source of our true entry into space but rather a commercial enterpriser. Let’s keep an eye on Richard Branson in the next decade.
BTW: I don’t think Sci-Fi writers were suppose to be Nostradamus, but rather entertaining writers that engaged our interest in potential futures.
Jim
