Year 2110 predictions

In My Humble Opinion
1

… Or even 2100. Does anyone have an article for credible predictions based on well thought out socio-economic-political trends? I’m thinking a big question mark will be whether we come up with viable renewable resources. I can’t imagine there being a 100 years worth of oil reserves on the ground.

I doubt we’ll have flying personal anything but instead will have highly efficient ultra fast transit systems. I have to think that computers and the Internet will be even more ubiquitous as they are today, even in the 3rd world. My birth country of El Salvador for example has seen high increases in Internet accessibility and usage. 44% of schools (Spanish) now have access to the Internet, which to me, is a pretty awesome achievement for one of the poorest nations in the Americas.

I’d like to hear about Utopian and Dystopian predictions. Cheers! :slight_smile:

2

Check out the book The Next 100 Years by George Friedman, who runs a company that specializes in predictions. He gets pretty specific; to quote the Publishers Weekly review, “The armed border clashes between Mexico and the United States in the 2080s seem relatively plausible, but the space war pitting Japan and Turkey against the United States and allies…”

3

I predict that I’ll be dead by then.

4

The internet is already becoming ubiquitous. From 2000-2009, usage grew by 890% in Latin America. At last count 25.6% of humanity used the internet at least once in the last month (1.733 billion), including 30.5% of people in Latin America.

That number is important because I remember checking the internet world stats a few years ago and the number was something like 1.2 billion.

It’ll probably only be a decade before internet penetration levels in the developing world are on par with the developed world at 50-75%.
I doubt we use oil in 100 years. Personally I think we’ll have affordable alternatives in 30 years.

Its almost impossible to predict 2110. However Goldman Sachs made some predictions about various economies in 2050. The same Goldman Sachs whose lack of planning helped collapse the economy. So take it with a grain of salt.

By 2050:

India & the US will have roughly the same size economies at about 38 trillion each.

China’s economy will be 70 trillion, bigger than the US & EU-15 combined

Brazil will have a larger economy than Germany & France combined

Mexico’s per capita income will be about the same as Japan or Germany, around 65k.

US per capita income will be 91k

Vietnam will have a bigger economy than Canada

Anyway, read ‘the singularity is near’ for a book on trend predictions on technology. I think Kurzweil is too optimistic in his timeline, but his ideas are interesting.

5

Lions goof up another #1 pick in the WFL(formerly NFL)

6

Thanks for the book suggestions, I shall check’em out!

7

Flying cars. Definitely flying cars.

8

The problem with these predictions is that they assume that the underlying energy and materiel supply situations will remain optimal, and that the planet will be able to handle final waste removal and treatment. I am not convinced that this will be the case. I’m hoping for breakthroughs that will among other things give us a replacement for fossil fuels, will enable us to use carbon as a building material, and will open the way to space, but I’m planning for the opposite. :frowning:

9

I read an article the other day that in the future they may end up “mining” garbage landfills to get to all the shit we consumed and wasted. Take the current shortage of rare earth elementsfor example. Guess we’ll be mining the Moon and Mars by then!

10

Look at predictions for the year 2000 from the 1920s - or even the '50s – and you will recognize that there is essentially no way for any predictions about 2100 to have any accuracy whatsoever.

11

I think modern technological advancement will have plateaued by 2110. Weapons, computers, handheld technology, biomedical, etc. will still advance, but not nearly at the rate we’ve seen in our lifetimes. A number of factors will cause this:
[ul]
[li]The Asian market, surpassing the U.S. in a decade or two, will demand cheaper, disposable technology. As a side effect, innovation will be stifled.[/li][li]Microprocessors will become fast enough that further improvements on speed wouldn’t be noticeable. Quantum processors will be realized, but won’t be cheap enough for everyday products.[/li][li]Machine guns won’t improve much since what we have today can’t really be improved upon. Bombs will become slightly more destructive, but hydrogen bombs will still be the gold standard.[/li][li]Advancements in radiology (e.g., MRI, CT, angiography, EEG, EKG) will continue, but our understanding of human physiology won’t be much greater than it is today. We’ll know about as much about the human brain in 100 years as we do now. Technological research will be stalled in favor of research on procedural methodology. Pharmaceuticals will continue to get better.[/li][/ul]
In contrast, our knowledge of the cosmos will make huge headway over the next century. Not only will we discover thousands of new extrasolar planets, we’ll also have a good working idea of how to get there (though the costs will still be prohibitive). A gamma-ray burst will come close to our solar system, creating new theories and shedding new light (no pun intended) on the formation of black holes. New theories as to the birth and death of the Universe will abound, but we’ll really come no closer to knowing for sure. An infrared telescope will be built that will be powerful enough to get a very blurry image of the hot remains of the expanding boundaries of the Universe, strengthening the argument for the Big Bang Theory.

Human living conditions won’t improve much. Africa and much of Asia will still be an economic wasteland. The standard of living of Europeans will remain mostly unchanged while that of the United States will decline. Mexico will actually improve its technological and economic situation to emerge as a force to contend with on the world political scene.

Africa will still be a mess. An accord to improve economic, human rights, and technological conditions will be signed by the U.N., but it won’t be much more than symbolic. Many nations will back out on the debt relief they promised, citing their own economic troubles. The borders of current African nations will change, while some nations will disappear completely.

12

Laughable, it’s amazing how many people think America is going to be a s***hole in the future despite the fact it’s the only developed nation will a manageable birth rate.

Predictions For 2110:

-By 2110, according to the generational theory humanity will just have shouldered a Crisis and be entering a “High” comparable to the 1950s.

-Most of the world including all major powers will be democracies. There may be a few holdouts but those countries will be utterly isolated and possibly subject to coordinated international intervention.

-There will be no centralized world government unless First Contact with extraterrestrials has occurred but the world will be united by free trade pacts and coordinated socioeconomic policy-possibly even a global currency.

-Expansion to space will be well underway. Both the Moon and Mars will be settled and possibly even the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. The terraformation of Mars will by this point have begun and significant settlement will already have happened.

-The United States of America will still be a great power and wealthy. The USA will be the dominant nation of a North American Union stretching from the Arctic Circle to the Panama Canal and be centralized as the EU is now. It will certainly have one currency-the dollar. The United States of America will have a dominant position in space and be leading the terraformation of Mars. Thank to it’s replacement level fertility rates America will have a (compared to elsewhere) a young work force and a vigourous economy.

-South America will be prosperous and heavily dependent on America. It may or may not be part of the NAU.

-The European Union will either be in severe economic trouble or have some solution to it’s rapidly declining birthrate. Europe will be a continent of old people with median ages well in the forties or even fifties. It’s economy will be barely able to support the massive social welfare programs and some solution will have been made. Russia will either be part of the EU or the lesser partner in an alliance with China.

-China’s communist government will have fallen long before with no or minimal violence. China will also have gotten rid of the One Child Policy. It may have the largest single economy on Earth and be a world center of industry. It will have a vast army and air force but will be jealous of America’s superior position in space. Korea and Japan will not be in China’s economic sphere but be rather in America’s.

-India will be prospering mightily as the world’s most populous country. Much of the problems related to the caste system will have been solved possibly through the growth of Christianity, Buddhism, and Jainism-all of which reject the caste system. India will have far better relations with Pakistan (the Kashmir problem will be as ancient and irrelevent as Alsace-Lorraine is today). India will be powerful militarily but have minimal presence in space.

-The Middle East will have transitoned from an oil based economy to such things as tourism or industry. Most of the Middle East will be democratic, semi-democratic or mild dictatorships (at worst). Islamism would have died out long ago.

-Africa will remain the poorest continent on Earth but compared to today’s levels far better. Drastic anti-AIDS measures (such as the death penalty for AIDS infected) will purge that continent of the scourge combined with some AIDS medical treatment.

13

Brian Stableford and David Langford wrote a book in 1985 called The Third Millennium: A History of the World AD 2000-3000. They’re science fiction writers and weren’t claiming to be writing non-fiction. But they were attempting to make predictions that were at least plausible.

And how did they do? They didn’t even make 2000 - the year their predictions started. They had the Soviet Union as a going concern for several more centuries. So their thousand year history went off the track within six years.

14

I didn’t say the U.S. would be a “s***hole,” I just said that the standard of living will decline.

15

I think we will have a thought controlled communication device that will allow people to surf the web just by thinking about it.

16

It may or may not in the short-term but in the long-run Europe’s aging population and massive social welfare programs will not be able to compete with America’s relatively young population.

17

I’m not sure what you’re saying here. The US is already far more centralized than the EU is or is likely to become, and it’s likely to stay that way at least in the foreseeable future.

18

I meant the North American Union.

19

Computers will be faster, food will be less healthy, and advertising will be more annoying. Everything else is too difficult to predict.

20

One specific idea I read recently was that materials printers will become more common. Fifty years ago the idea of the laser printer seemed ridiculously awesome; in fifty years, we’ll be able to print out simple plastic objects (with some electroplated metals) from design specs available online. A result will be that many pieces of technology will adapt to accept printed pieces. The first person that figures out how to make a printer that makes all the pieces for a printer will blow everyone’s mind.