Thread: Predictions for 2112 and beyond

In the spirit of a recent thread, but keeping it separate so as not to highjack it, I was curious to see what you all predicted for 100 years from now.

Here are my predictions:

1. The world population will return to levels comparable to 1000 A.D. due to a shortage of fossil fuels, fertile land, and advanced medicine.

2. Paper currency will have lost all value, and precious metals will be highly rare because of hoarding practices over the preceding 100 years. This will result in a barter economy.

3. People will have very high levels of technical knowledge but will be otherwise mostly illiterate. Gangs will scavenge junkyards for mechanical and computer parts to create the tools they need, however, new manufacturing will have completely ceased as raw materials and fossil fuels become more and more scarce.

4. Large mammals will become endangered as their natural environments begin to die out due to drought and other climate changes. Reptiles and amphibians will be abundant as forest lands turn to marshes and planes turn to deserts.

5. Fast transportation no longer exist. Large, armored vehicles may be used occasionally during wars, but only very rarely. As a result, individuals will be highly indoctrinated into small bands or tribes that compete against each other for food or other resources.

6. The most advanced technology will all be weapons. They will be held and protected by powerful warlords to protect resources such as a fresh water river or fertile land.

7. After several generations, the larger world will seem so distant and out of reach that it will take on the look and feel of legend.

8. Most of the medical knowledge gained over the 200 years prior to 2112 will be rendered completely useless as the vast majority of people become immune to penicillin and other antibiotics (due to the vast amounts put into the mass produced foods during the early 21st century). Doctors will resort to herbal, holistic, and superstitious methods to heal their patients, but for serious illnesses they will be mostly powerless. Three in four patients undergoing any kind of invasive surgery will die of infection.

9. Religion will not die out, but it will be transformed. Without any communication to a central authority or a larger community, smaller communities will put the most educated among them in charge of learning the scriptures they have chosen as sacred. These new clergy will be in charge of not only interpreting scripture, but also they will be in charge of more general education for those children who have the opportunity to receive it.

10. Eventually, individual communities will set up autonomous governments, each with their own set of laws independent of each other.

Sorry if this was depressing. If you have a more optimistic point of view, let's hear it.

… and we'll see the introduction of the 39th actor to play The Doctor in the acclaimed "Dr Who" series.

There'll be giant, floating eyeballs patrolling the streets, observing the weak human-folk and informing the lord of the eyes of any suspicious and/or illegal behaviour, all of which will be punishable by death.

Eastenders will still be on, though, so it's not all bad. . .

My nan will probably still be alive, bless her.

11. A 35 year old person will be considered really ancient.

Btw re 8. I think that with the strengthening of viruses and bacteria by modern medical practices, we'll have an even harder time of it then they did a thousand years ago.


Generally, I don't know why we're so eager to guarantee this as our collective future. Maybe it's something we all deserve.

- We still won't have flying cars.
- We still won't have holographic AI butlers/maids in our homes.
- We will still be using windows.
- Life will more or less be the same, with some extra conveniences.
- Global Warming will finally be debunked, and the next hip thing will be car vibrations inducing earthquakes.
- Desktop computers will still exist. In fact, with the rise of popularity of computer-managed homes and voice recognition, desktop-like computers will see a rise in popularity.
- Organic food will become the norm and "carbon-based" food will be the next hip thing.
- China exporting business will collapse. Countries will put prohibitive taxation on china to protect their economy.
- Another 10 or so wannabe dictators will show up in South America.
- The US will still be at war with the middle east.
- Nikes will completely fall out of fashion.
- Brazil will still use Nikes.

@themorresho and Rustgold: I'm genuinely taken aback by such pessimism.

1. Fusion energy has, perhaps, become commercially viable and supplies the world with an unlimited supply of cheap, clean energy. [I would like to flag this one as the most pivotal, and, unsurprisingly, the one which cannot be relied on.]
2. The progress of photovoltaics improves the efficiency of solar power to the point that it's cost effective, and countries with an abundance of uninterrupted sunlight (Spain USA, Brazil, Australia etc) shift their power generation demographic towards solar. [Assuming a lack of fusion.]
2. Advances in nanotechnology renders antibiotics and the likes of radiotherapy obsolete.
3. The human lifespan increases proportionally with the improvement of nutrition and medicine, and the average first-world citizen is able to work well into their eighties.
4. Advances in carbon technology such as nanotubes provide the ability to create incredibly sturdy structures, allowing for nigh-indestructible, earthquake proof skyscrapers (which could be far taller considering the tensile strength of said materials) and perhaps, most ambitiously, space elevators, ridding humanity of the necessity for such expensive rocket launches).
5. A manned mission to Mars has taken place.
6. I suspect that by this time an International base of operations on the moon is in hesitant planning stages, but may not be realised for some time.
7. Solid-state research yields the untold wonders of quantum computing and near-room-temperature superconductors, which would allow for truly incredible computing power and the likes of Mag-Lev into public transportation.
8. Cancer will not have been cured.
9. Biotechnological advances have all but eradicated congenital conditions via an optional screening process at conception, and have increased world crop yields by untold factors.
10. Oil and Gas, as predicted, will have run out many decades ago, and numerous wars were fought for the last of it. Regardless, the advances in renewable resources were sufficient to avert major international conflict.
11. The world population will most likely exceed approximately nine billion. In developed, first world countries, the population will be much smaller than it is now, but in developing countries it will continue its trend of exponential increase, steadily levelling off perhaps by this time.
12. No flying cars. Mag-Lev, though. Mag-Lev.
13. Advances in robotics will still be in its infancy. You will have no house-maid, but personal computers will be integrated with personal 'assistants' as standard, due to the significantly greater advances in AI.
14. Nuclear weapons will most likely remain, due to the mere lack of time for such international tension to dissipate.
15. Weapons, by and large, will not be very different, with perhaps the exception of Railgun technology.

Those are just some off the top of my head before bed.

Most importantly, I'm fairly sure that things will be pretty much the same; just a little bit better than they were before.

Also, as a final note, I'd say that this thread is largely for personal imaginings than anything else, as predicting technological advancement has proven incredibly difficult at every point in history. Flying cars and robot butlers, have, of course not come, but the internet has, a far greater achievement.

Copulation will commonly take place in public. Only it’ll be here in twenty years or so, not a hundred.

People who know little about spelling, punctuation, grammar and word usage will still infest writing sites.

At the present rate, my 2003 Toyota will have travelled just under 50,000 miles.

The Yellowstone super-volcano will blow, not massively, but enough to destroy America's crops for a year and give everyone else a bad summer and crop failure resulting in mass starvation. Partially drug resistant forms of things like TB will achieve total resistance and, coupled with a virulent flu epidemic, and the afore mentioned starvation, will reduce the population to fairly small and isolated pockets. This will result in the diseases dying out and a total re-structuring of the social organisation. In a few hundred years time it will be viewed like the fourteenth century, when climate change and black death reduced the population of Britain to about half what it was and resulted in the peasant's revolt and the end of feudalism; unpleasant at the time, but generally a good thing.

Originally Posted by Olly Buckle

The Yellowstone super-volcano will blow, not massively, but enough to destroy America's crops for a year and give everyone else a bad summer and crop failure resulting in mass starvation.

sorry to disappoint, but that scenario as you described almost certainly isn't possible, let alone likely. a supervolcano with the size and geological composition of the yellowstone caldera, which has had almost 700,000 years to build up energy, can only have one liekly outcome: an eruption with enough force to kill outright a huge percentage of the north american population, followed by countless more deaths from air poisoning and ultimately causing a global or nearly-global decimation of agriculture for a period of time far longer than a year. if yellowstone erupts in the next hundred years without significant technological improvements, you can essentially count on the end of civilization as we know it.

Originally Posted by felix

Flying cars and robot butlers, have, of course not come, but the internet has, a far greater achievement.

abso-frickin-lutely! see, that's the problem with most of these speculators (and most science fiction, actually). they all too often get carried away imagining technological advancement as consisting of machines and hardware. obviously there will be some advancement in those things in a hundred years, but i expect it to be surprisingly minimal. IMO the real progress will be in cyber-based technology, particularly in the arenas of communication, information and entertainment (computer games you can actually 'be in', conference calls where the communicators are manifest in a 3D form of virtual reality, etc). as far as artificial intelligence goes, i think it will be small - a computer that functions to voice commands and understands context - instead of larger - robotic housemaids. i don't think people really want robotic housemaids, see. maybe its just me but i dont find a lot of those types of futuristic living ideas very appetizing. who the hell wants some weird android walking round their house mopping? since when was mopping that big of a chore? these things have to be cost effective you see, and any robot that can mop will likely not be worth spending thousands of dollars on just to avoid a few chores.

Originally Posted by felix

@themorresho and Rustgold: I'm genuinely taken aback by such pessimism.

Not pessimism, rather just being realistic.

Just start looking at all of the things oil is used for besides fuel. Then add copper, lead, zinc, tin, & silver all to be depleted before we run out of oil, plus phosphorus following soon after. Iron & aluminum isn't so far behind that.

Simply put, there's going to be nothing left to keep our society running, nothing to fertilise crops with, nothing to build technological products with, nothing to make medicines with. We're going to have a hard landing, and one we collectively deserve.

i don't know, rustgold. i'd say with enough investment there's a decent-to-good chance we'll invent a decent oil substitute in the next hundred years. don't ask me to come up with any ideas, i know little about chemistry, but oil is one thing i'm not quite so worried about. they used to say the same things about coal, you know, back when steam power was still the basis for transportation and industry. and then they came up with oil for the former and nuclear for the latter. even if we don't come up with a perfect alternative for oil, i believe we'll find suitable alternatives to generate electricity. and there's still probably enough oil left to sustain the economy for a few years. remember a lot of potential oil fields have not been developed yet.

to be honest, i'm at a loss to understand why we don't use nuclear energy more. it's almost one hundred percent clean, a hell of a lot more efficient, and you can power a whole nation with a fraction of the number of coal/oil plants you'd otherwise need. it seems that nuclear power, in combination with solar, hydro, wind etc alternatives in appropriate locations would minimize reliance on fossil fuels. for instance, the hoover dam is capable of powering the entire city of las vegas. that said, i'm not hugely in favor of some of the sillier uses of windmills (i.e putting them on the rooftops of suburban homes where the power generated is barely enough to heat a shallow pan for five minutes) and solar energy needs a lot of development to be cost effective, but these are nonetheless all ideas worth developing and in the meantime we can and should use nuclear power on a far greater scale. the problem is people are just too damn paranoid about it, and for no rational reason. sure you have the occasional fukushima and chernobyl, but with enough investment and good management those kinds of disasters can be minimized to a level of almost complete reliability. most people who object to nuclear power overlook the fact that countries like france have used it for decades and have never had a problem.

also another theory that i quite like is the idea of developing hot deserts like the sahara, which are otherwise fairly pointless as far as the environment goes (since little lives in them) into energy generators - vast 'sun fields' consisting of hundreds of square miles of solar panels, harnessing their year-round sunshine to provide exportable amounts of electricity. and why not? this theory has many advantages. aside from the obvious clean energy they would produce they could also have an important geo-political impact. most of the desert countries, such as westen sahara, the sudan, morrocco etc are desperately poor and in need of meaningful industry. with investment from foreign energy companies we could work with the governments of such countries to put in place a system whereby we build these solar fields for them. we would receive cheap electricity and, in return, these countries could tax the exported energy, using the profits to then develop themselves into the 'energy superpowers' on a par with present day saudi arabia and venezuela. it really isn't a particularly complicated idea. in fact, we pretty much have the means to do it already. all it needs is significant investment and careful planning to implement. within one hundred years i cant see that being an issue.

don't buy into the fear-mongering quite so easily.

If I was, say, 50-ish at the time everything went pear-shaped, I'd see the end of civilisation as we know it as a rather exciting experience to attempt to live through.

That's just me and my romantic streak again. In reality...

BBC News - Japan finds rare earths in Pacific seabed

I read a similar article in New Scientist a while back, I thought that you guys might find it interesting.

Regarding fossil fuel substitutes, there's no technological reason why we'd be stuck, as we already have the ability to artificially produce gasoline in small amounts via an application of solar energy, have many renewable resources developing rapidly towards the point of being cost-effective (namely Wave energy and Solar) and also nuclear fusion really isn't far-fetched (it's already possible, the problem lies in getting more energy out of the system than you've put in).
It's just easier to use fossil-fuels, and so the distribution of fossil fuels to renewable resources won't change massively until the faucet runs dry. However, the shift towards renewables is on the increase; as somebody mentioned, Vegas has the Dam, and the country of Iceland is powered 100% by Geothermal energy.