What Do YOU Imagine the Future To Be Like?

If, say, you got a chance to go into a time machine, and fast forward, say, 100 years into the future, what do you imagine you would open the door of your time machine to?

The future you imagine, do you imagine it to be the clean, spartan world seen in movies like A.I. and Minority Report, or do you imagine a more apocalyptic world like Terminator?

For me, I'd like to open the time machine to the futuristic world that resembles future Tokyo in anime's, but more and more, I imagine opening the door to my time machine and the first thing I'd have to do would be shoot someone.

It was actually a nightmare I had recently, about being stuck in the future, with no way to get back. All of my family was gone, and I was extremely sad that there was no way to ever see them again. I was living in the charred out remains of what was once my parent's home, and I had to look out and shoot crazies who tried to steal what little I had. Not surprisingly, all my phone gave me was static, most likely from the radiation.

If you got stuck in the future, would you try to look up what happened to your loved ones, and try to track down any remaining relatives? If you ended up in a world where society has completely fallen apart, or humanity wiped itself to near extinction because of nuclear war, would you try to carve out a living for yourself, or would you just let the zombies kill you?

Same thing different century.

Probably.

Adapt or give up?

Don't need time travel to answer that question.

Like The Fifth Element, but without the aliens.

We'll all have flyin' cars. And they'll fold up really tiny, so you can just put 'em in your ass, instead of having to find a place to park 'em. And we'll all wear silver, metallic jumpsuits. With plexiglass fishbowls on our heads.

OK. Not so much. Things'll be pretty much the way they are right now. Cars will get marginally better gas mileage and will look wild to us, but because the change was gradual, they'll look normal to the people of the genre.

While fashions will come and go, the white t-shirt, Levis 501s, and Chuck Taylors will always fit in. I'm not going to guess what we'll see as far as tats and piercings, but I'll bet we'll have implanted cybernetics. The research spawned by all the amputations from the Iraq war will have borne fruit as far as artificial limbs, and implanted RFID tags and small electonics ranging from cell phones to recorders to data organizers will be commonplace.

I would go to a museum before I left to see what to expect.

I can say that, just walking down the street, 2007 doesn't look too much different than 1977, even though there have been some stunning developments in that time.

What will 2107 look like?

My guess is: pretty good. Forget the dystopian views; they're wrong. Things ARE getting better and at an accelerating rate. If I had a choice between living now or living 100 years from now, I'm stepping into the time machine, baby.

People will still live in houses, eat, wear clothes, and need to get around, so most of our everyday things will stay the same. Barring some revolution in science, people will probably still travel long distances in winged vehicles. Somewhere along the line, we'll stop using oil for fuel.

Computers, already ubiquitous, will be everywhere and in everything. People will be interconnected in ways that will make the Internet seem primitive. Memory will be cheap and high-definition video cameras will shrink to microscopic sizes, allowing everyone to record their entire lives for easy playback. Expect some legal changes as a consequence.

Everyone will be much, much richer, just as you're probably much, much richer than your great-grandparents.

Old people will be legion. And they'll be more active and healthier than ever. Heart disease and most forms of cancer will be bad memories by 2050.

Anthropomorphic robots will become commonplace sometime this century and they'll be smart enough to go about business autonomously on behalf of their owners.

There will be virtually no part of your body (other than your brain) that you won't be able to replace with an organic or mechanical substitute. The era of enhanced humans is about to begin.

Human beings will land on Mars and maybe even a moon of Jupiter or two before the century is out. Although human travel to the stars is centuries away, our first interstellar probes may take flight before 2100.

By 2100, humans will know pretty conclusively whether there are other intelligent, technologically active species in the Milky Way. If there are, we will, of course, not be able to contact them, but at least we'll know they're there.

People will still watch TV though it will probably become three-dimensional and highly interactive before too long. Movie theaters, long gone, will be an old-fashioned concept, like penny arcades.

The Muslem shift in Europe will accelerate. Whether this results in widespread social problems remains to be seen, but the Europe of today is very different than the one 100 years from now. Same thing with the Hispanic shift in the United States.

The global warming scares of the 1990s and 2000s will be remembered somewhat fondly, not because they headed off catastrophes (the catastrophes predicted in the literature of the time will have long since been shown to be considerably exaggerated), but because they increased environmental awareness among the population.

Though it will remain the world's poorest continent, no one will starve in Africa any more. By 2100, stable, liberal, democratic governments will have been in place from Egypt to Zimbabwe for many decades.

The state of Palestine's largest trading partner will be Israel.

People will still debate what the proper role of government is.

People will still read books and, no, not e-books but genuine printed-on-paper books.

The omnipresence of information technology will make most crime a thing of the past. In the future, only a moron commits crime because capture and successful prosecution will become virtually certain.

Nations will still maintain militaries, though war between nation-states is all but obsolete even now. The trend will be towards fewer, higher capability assets. Hypersonic, stealthy, robotic aircraft will dominate the skies up to low Earth orbit. Small numbers of bulletproof, invisible, mechanically enhanced soldiers will be just the ticket for interventions. Forget laser blasters; small arms will still throw metal projectiles.

Space tourism begins in earnest around 2030 when new technologies drastically reduce the cost of reaching low Earth orbit.

Canada, the U.S., and Mexico will be much more tightly integrated economically than now. The days of Mexican hordes sneaking across the U.S. southern border will be long over.

People will still go to McDonald's for a quick meal. And drink Coca-Cola. And listen to rock music.

Life will be pretty much the same. Some will still be cynical. A few will realize its better than ever. Most won't give it much thought one way or the other...

I think it's going to be dramatically different in ways most people can't imagine. I think do due war and natural disasters, civilization may be taking major leaps backwards in terms of technology. I'm not talking about post-apocalypic Mad Max-style future, but I think all of our little doo-dads and gadgets....along with most electrical devices in general.... will be obsolete. There's going to be a huge de-population of the human race, and society will have become more simple.

I predict that in 100 years the Middle East will be one giant Wal-Mart with a huge parking lot. Y'know, after all the nuclear bombs clear all those pesky people and cities out of the way.

In 100 years any children I have will hopefully still be alive so I hope it's a comfortable and safe place for the elderly.

Water. Everywhere.

What? That's what everyone has been telling me.

Kevin Costner is a filthy goddamn liar.

Well yeah, the comb over proves that.

I can't believe the conservative predictions you are all making. Not much different than today? Do you live in caves?

People, the 21st Century is when everything changes...

And you gotta be ready.
My worst nightmare: Something like a mix between 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and [wiki]Idiocracy[/wiki] with a bit of Snowcrash thrown in.

My dream for the far future (something past 100 years) would be humanity evolving into something like Iain M. Bank's Culture or Ken MacLeod's Solar Union in "The Cassini Division". (Star Trek, as much as I like it, already seems kind of steampunk by today's technological standards.)

But I honestly don't know, and any prediction I make will likely be very wrong.

Right now I am reading the book Accelerando that starts out in a very near future where, as the book's title suggests, the pace of technological change is "speeding up". (Read it for free HERE)

In even 100 years, given the rate of current technological acceleration...well, I think the changes between 2008 & 2108 will be orders of magnitude larger ten the changes that took place between 1908 and today (baring major NBC war, asteroid strike, major global pandemic, or massive arctic [wiki]gas hydrate[/wiki] releases from global warming.)

(Really folks, the Third Wave is old news...so TwenCen!)

Nanotechnology, biotechnology, AI, ubiquitous computing, will all change the world in ways most of us can't even begin to contemplate - or predict. I don't know if we are headed for a full scale [wiki]technological singularity[/wiki], but maybe something a lot like one. And what's on the other side, I dunno. If it really is a singularity, nothing like what exists now. Biology itself could very well be replaced by some sort of bio-nanotech ecosystem.

But if that's not possible because of physical constraints, I still don't think most of us could really grasp what the world will be like when computers become so small we can, like Douglas Adams predicted, "sprinkle them like dust" everywhere, and every thing around us, all the "dumb matter" becomes "smart matter", when every human brain is linked into a World Wide Mind [yt="WWM"]Z_VVsKUFXc4[/yt] (think World Wide Web, but the link will be by nanowires implanted in our brains - a technology that exists today).

Will people even need to learn or read in a traditional sense anymore when you can literally say "Operator, I need to know how to fly a Huey."

(Will we all get instantly dumb when the network goes down!?)

But you think computer viruses are bad now - with implanted computers and nanotech we could wind up with a world where we all have to get vaccinated for memes. Invasive programs and nanotech buggies that try to reprogram us. Imagine a friend you know who's an atheist libertarian who suddenly announces that he's a Mormon. Or a whole town of traditionally Christian folk turns into a fundamentalist Islam enclave. This is why keeping up to date on your cybervaccines is important folks!)

What will the economy be like when nanotechnology means that most good services and even information are practically free. Add space travel and asteroid mining (easy when you have nanotech) and we may have a true [wiki]post-scarcity[/wiki] society.

The economy as we know it won't exist. Somethign else will take it's place.

I think by 100 years will see true AI, but it may not come about through people trying to purposely make it by making computers think like the brain, but as computer neural networks become smaller and more and more complex, it may just happen. Maybe something like in Peter Watts Maelstrom, where as the internet get more and more complex, and computer programs get more and more complex, and smarter and autonomous and able to re-write their own code, and adapt, and interbreed (exchange code) - a kind of cyber-ecology will arise, with an evolutionary arms race fueled by competing counter programs, and intelligence will evolve from it naturally.

Not to mention what society will be like when people and AI's live side by side, and "people" are a wide mix of biological and cybernetic and who knows what else. Some people may start out as intelligent computer programs, and some people will become computers. Most people will be a mix of both, along with who know what kind of biotech alterations.

Or biotechnology and nanotechnology make real, final death almost nonexistent. Or at the very least, people already live much, much longer. (Already becoming a problem today.)

I expect to be here in 100 years!

And while I don't climate change (global warming) is no big deal (that's just naive and uneducated, imo) I don't see it as the end of the world. But - man made or a natural cycle - it will create economic and sociological upheaval. Economies and populations will shift, or disappear, and new ones will arise. Amazing new technologies will arise rapidly as people adapt. But the natural world will be different. We are already in te middle of the sixth great mass extinction in Earth's history. It happening. Things will change. We may even prevent it, or reverse it, but the technologies that let us do so will change us.

And that's just the beginning.

Bring it on.

Costco.

Costco's the size of cities.

(I prefer Lethe's libraries the size of cities idea, but let's be realistic. It will be Costco.)

We still won't have a decent space program, we still won't have been to Mars yet. The space station will have crashed into a large Asian city causing world uproar and worldwide sentiment against space projects.

Fundamentalist Christianity will have swept over the world, causing further backlash against science. It will be illegal to even mention evolution in public, and heresy will once again be punishable as a crime in the western world. No candidate has been elected in 50 years unless he or she was a church-going Christian. Speaking in any manner that can even be perceived as a slight against Christianity has ruined the careers of everyone from local TV hosts to presidents.

In the US, the Supreme Court, stacked with radical leftists, will have finally made a decision on the 2nd amendment, declaring it obsolete and striking it from the bill of rights. In California there was almost no difference felt since guns had been outloawed there since the third Swarzeneggar administration. But in several eastern and southern cities and towns the local police forces were wiped out in the firefights that ensued when the cops tried to collect peoples' guns.

Muslim extremism has taken root across the world, and most of the formerly civilized world lives in constant fear of terrorist bombings, even in formerly unconcerned small-town America. Despite airline security that now involves instant DNA testing and blood sampling, terrorists have succeeded in flying A380s into the new Freedom Towers, Giants Stadium during superbowl, Giant tourist hotels in the UAE and Koala Lampur, Wimbeldon, Buckingham Palace, the USS Ronald Reagan, and several Ford plants across America.

The US Air Force was unable to intercept any of the above aircraft because they're still flying unservicable 1970s vintage F-15s thanks to Congressional budget cuts driven by the growing public backlash against the military after president Chelsea Clinton's series of invasions of various mideast and African countries.

Political Correctness has reached levels undreamed of. It is a crime to refer to any person with ANY reference to their physical appearance, belief system, handicap, nation of origin, etc. Special police units are formed to investigate allegations of defamation, and law firms specializing in Hate Thought Crimes are on every street corner.

Meanwhile, while police are busy tracking down "criminals" who say "crippled" instead of "Differently-Abled-American," the rate of armed home invasions and street crime has risen to levels many times those of the early 2000s. Even households in formerly quiet small towns can expect a 50% chance of a push-in robbery by a knife-wielding drug addict, thanks in part to Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton's Federal Disarmament Act of 2020, which banned the manufacture of guns and ammo in the US, and required the confiscation of personal firearms in towns of certain population densities.

It could just as easily be Tesco, which would be rather ironic...

I was going to formulate a long-ass reply, but I think if you take Paladin's prediction, and bryce's, and blend the two together, you've got a pretty accurate look at the shape of things to come.

Good thread, BTW.

I'm just waitin on my upload to the orbital ring baby.

After stepping out of the time machine, I check the status of my bank account as the interest would have made me a multi-millionaire by then.

Mmmmm anchovies!

Think of the money you will save with the water bills for the fields.

I'd love to know why you think that, you need to spend more time in some western countries other than the USA I think.

If you climb into a time machine today and jump 100 years into the future, you'll find yourself in an asteroid field, for I have destroyed the earth by then.

So not much different from today, then?

Hell, I don't even like driving the 20 miles to work, I ain't leavin the country!

Just more so.

Flying cars.

Where are the flying cars?

Yeah, but ya rent will be $65,000 a month and a loaf of bread will be $218.