How would the world be in 2100?

Discussion in 'General Science & Technology' started by aaqucnaona, Dec 6, 2011.

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Should we have a moon base by 2100?

  1. Yes [pls explain in posts]

    80.0%
  2. No [pls explain in posts]

    20.0%
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  1. aaqucnaona This sentence is a lie Valued Senior Member

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    I mean, what can we predict from recent trends? Can we espect a moon base? How about man on mars? Surely telescopes and other methods would be powerful enough to know of life on other planets? Would we have a actual first contact? How about computers? Wristwatchs doing rat brain simulations? Would be robots be realistically useful or common? Would AI be invented? What about resources? Fossil fuels will begin to run out, what alternative will we have? Biodiversity, will it be maintained? How will the sciences progress? Would we figure out a theory of everything?
    What do u think?

    Ps. I suggest making this a futurism discussion sticky or something.
     
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  3. Pincho Paxton Banned Banned

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    I think we will have about 7 people living on Mars as an experiment. I don't think we will have first contact, but more likely a Radio Transmission received. Computers will do a lot of the work that we have to do manually at the moment, like 3D model making, music creation, film making, 3D from 2D. Wristwatches could contain your credit card so you can buy things with them. Robots will be far more common, and useful for things like hoovering, and ironing. AI would not be called AI, it would have a name more like RLI (Real Life Intelligence).

    The Theory Of Everything is already solved!

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  5. kwhilborn Banned Banned

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    Surprised we don't have a moon settlement now.
    - We should store knowledge/DNA on the moon so if we ever wipe ourselves out the next generation of space explorers a few thousand years from now can learn about us, and all the species we managed to destroy.
    - One of the oldest civilizations we are aware of claim space travel (Sumerians said their gods were space travellers), maybe there is a few footprints already there from before Armstrong. Hmm. Probably not.
     
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  7. Jim S Registered Senior Member

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    Predictions usually end up wrong, but I think that if the world's population keeps going up the future won't be all that pretty.
    I think we should have been working on a moon base a long time ago, the space station doesn't seem to have any purpose and flying the shuttle in low earth orbit was dumb too.
     
  8. chimpkin C'mon, get happy! Registered Senior Member

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    I suspect we'll either be colonizing the solar system or look like the late 1800's meets modern Africa.
     
  9. smellincoffee Registered Member

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    It has the same purpose as our work with Skylab: we're seeing what the human body does when exposed to such a radically different environment. Can't very well go to Mars if we don't know what our systems need in order to adjust to a chronic lack of gravity, right?

    I just read Michio Kaku's book on life in 2100. Some of his predictions were thrilling, others horrifying. I like the idea of genomic medicine and being able to grow replacement organs as needed, but he also sees a growing lack of distinction between the real world and the virtual world. To him, we'll be constantly connected.

    It seems to me that we're in a disruptive era of human history at the moment.
    Frankly, I think we're in for an energy crisis. We have a world utterly dependent on petroleum, either as an energy source or as a raw material to be processed into other goods we depend on (like plastics), and...what are we doing to prepare for the day oil runs out? It's a finite resource and people aren't thinking long-term. We live with the attention span of a gnat.
     
  10. aaqucnaona This sentence is a lie Valued Senior Member

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    I am reading afew books by Toffler, they are quite insightful, especially since they were written in the 70-80s.
     
  11. Annal606 Guest

    Ahh! I stand corrected then, Thanks for clearing that up.
     
  12. aaqucnaona This sentence is a lie Valued Senior Member

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    What ?
     
  13. convivial Registered Senior Member

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    Is there any theory on how humanity could kill off themselves entirely that isn't very speculative? And protecting sensitive material on the moon would be very expensive, no? There's some base in Russia, I think, that has material from most of the world's plants and animals, inside of a mountain.

    Most First World people beyond a certain wealth have roughly stagnant to slightly negative birth rates. That's actually bad, but illustrates that population explosion isn't a problem once people have a high enough standard of living.

    Hmm? Explain?

    I Googled him and the year after reading your post and came upon this page which includes a video series of his speaking on the matter: http://futurepredictions.com/2011/0...hio-kakus-new-book-the-physics-of-the-future/ Do you mind going more into what you found exciting and scary from his book? He spoke of just a few things.

    I trust smart people with dollar signs in their eyes to invent solutions to eventually significantly reduce or eliminate the need for oil. I briefly Googled about the subject, coming upon this http://www.infrastructurist.com/2011/09/19/is-the-world-running-out-of-oil/ with one passage reading:
    "[...] peak-oil doomsayers underestimate the amount of oil that can ultimately be recovered from the ground and discount the importance of how the economics of supply and demand shape the new technologies that are key to extracting oil from hard-to-reach places."

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  14. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    You haven't been reading your memos. The second derivative of population went negative thirty years ago, i.e., the rate of increase began to fall steadily. It is universally predicted to reach zero before the end of this century, i.e., population will reach a maximum just barely into eleven figures and then start falling.

    The reason for this is that prosperity has turned out to be the best contraceptive. Various reasons for a high birth rate in the past included:
    • An infant mortality rate of ~80% meant that of fifteen children, on the average only three would survive to perpetuate the family/clan/tribe, to run the family farm/business, and to support their parents in their old age.
    • The pre-electronic and especially the pre-industrial economy did not produce enough surplus wealth to provide pensions and health care for people who could no longer work, so their children were their only lifeline.
    • Family planning technology was primitive, ineffective, and in many cases conflicted with ancient taboos, so it was difficult to reduce the birth rate.
    • More than 99% of the human race were farmers living a subsistence lifestyle with no opportunities for hobbies, entertainment or other recreation, so staying home to care for (and create) children was all they could do in their meager spare time.
    Today, in countries where twelve children was the norm it's now eight; where it was eight it's now five; where it was five it's now three; and where it was three it's now less than two. Throughout the developed world the fertility rate of the native population has dropped below the replacement level of slightly more than 2 children per woman (allowing for today's almost statistically insignificant infant mortality rate).

    In Japan, a culture traditionally uncomfortable with immigration, this is already causing an economic catastrophe. A rapidly shrinking population of working people can't support the social security and medical care of a rapidly expanding population of retired people. In Europe and the USA, immigrant families with their higher birth rates are propping up the increasingly elder-centric economies (in the USA the colossal "Baby Boom" generation began retiring this year) while the native-born grumble about their cultural impact and naively ignore their economic necessity.

    As competent governance slowly spreads throughout the world (in my childhood millions of Chinese were starving to death, today they have TVs and cellphones; the net migration rate from Mexico to the USA is now zero; for the first time since anyone's been keeping track, less than half the population of Africa lives in poverty), this expanding wave of prosperity will reduce the birth rate below replacement level for the entire human race--for the first time in tens of thousands of years.

    When this happens we will be faced with a problem that has not existed since far back in the Stone Age: Every economic model since Adam Smith is based on the unspoken assumption that a steadily increasing population of producers and consumers will be its engine of wealth creation. While our citizens squabble over the second-order effects of a slowing birth rate, the first-order effect is going to smack our grandchildren upside the head like a slow-moving planet-wide combination earthquake-hurricane.
     
  15. aaqucnaona This sentence is a lie Valued Senior Member

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    First order effect = increase in wealth will stop? What will the economy be like thereafter?
     
  16. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Okay, since I voted I guess I'd better follow the rules and explain my "Yes."

    Humans need a frontier. Deep down inside we're all cavemen--nomadic hunter-gatherers living in small extended family units--compromising with our inner nature all day every day in order to live in one place in harmony and cooperation with anonymous strangers. (As I've noted before, the few hundred generations since the Agricultural Revolution, the first Paradigm Shift, have not been enough time for evolution to reprogram our instincts. This is why dogs, with their more than ten thousand generations plus our selective breeding, always seem to be better adjusted to their lives than we are.)

    Every now and then our inner caveman gets fed up and begs us to move back to a place where we can live in the manner for which we're designed. A few hundred years ago we could seriously consider flipping civilization the bird and going off to live in Alberta, Australia, Siberia, etc., trapping beavers or wallabies or whatever they eat in Siberia and making a tent out of their skins as shelter from the rain and cold.

    A few people actually did this. Many of them didn't live long enough to write home and tell everybody how wonderful it was, but a few managed, often by going through some really icky rites of passage and being accepted into one of the Paleolithic tribes that still existed back then.

    But most people read and re-read these reports of the "wonderful life" in the uncivilized world, looked around carefully, and decided that their own life really wasn't so bad.

    Today we can't do that. No one can make a carefully informed and reasoned decision to put up with civilization's problems and stay here, because there's virtually no frontier anymore. It would take far more than some community college classes in survival skills and a shopping spree at REI to prepare yourself to survive in the few remaining outback areas like the Alaskan wilderness. It's something you'd have to have spent your life planning for.

    So the millions of people who haven't really made peace with civilization (come on now, every one of you knows a couple of these people and I'm sure one or two of you are these people!) can never honestly sit down and make a rational decision to stay or go. They stay because there's nowhere else to go except drugs, jail, an endless series of restless and unsatisfying changes of partner, abode and career, or the increasingly popular option of pretending to have beaten the system when what they're really doing is hiding out at the very bottom of it.

    So yeah, we need a moon colony. We need a space program. Mankind needs the hope that there is still a frontier, a place where people who don't fit in here can go to get away from it all. It will give us all some much-needed clarity about our lives.
     
  17. Jim S Registered Senior Member

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    Fraggle Rocker - which memos did I miss? Anyway the world's population has risen from about 1 billion in 1800, 2 billion in 1930, 3 in 1960, 4 in 1974, 5 in 1987, 6 in 1999, and now about 7 billion. Whether it's in 1st or 2nd world countries don't much matter, we have only the one world to live on and it is capable of only a finite amount of food, energy, etc. There is certainly an amount of people that will exceed that limit. We don't know what that number is or when we will reach it, but it's closer now than it was yesterday. The graph of population is upward - not always at the same rate - but hasn't gone down or even leveled off yet.
     
  18. 420randomness Registered Senior Member

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    everything has its beggining so also its end.. we are just observers of something like a wanabe circe
     
  19. convivial Registered Senior Member

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    Desire for adventure isn't rational cause to spend billions and billions of tax payer dollars at the expense of helping solve many other problems in the world. Rich people can fund such endeavors with their own money.

    I'm not seeing anything in this paragraph that wasn't really addressed by FR or myself. How about finding an article from a source that smart people would deem credible that supports your position?
     
  20. Jim S Registered Senior Member

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    Do you mean my position that the world's population is increasing? Do you doubt that? Wikipedia is where I got the numbers - google.com public data showed a graph - it's been on the news that the population hit 7 billion. Even a dummy like me can read and understand simple stuff like that. Maybe smart people like you could too. The rate of increase has slowed, that means it's still increasing - right?
    Projections of it levelling off are .....projections ..... predictions. They are always right on huh.
     
  21. convivial Registered Senior Member

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    No, that it's a problem, or will be one.

    The wealthiest, most advanced groups of people have already done this, and there's no reason, IMO, not to extrapolate from that.
     
  22. superstring01 Moderator

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    It is if you take into account the fact that:
    • As human being, our survival depends on getting a sizeable portion of our population living off of the Earth. Regardless of the statistics, the very fact that a single meteor strike, the eruption of Yellowstone or the release of some crazy plague can wipe out out entirely means that curing every ailment (or even a majority of them) is not as existential for our race as is making sure there are enough of us off world to survive any catastrophe on world.
    • As intelligent beings, we stagnate. We are expansion driven. We need a frontier to explore and to be an inspiration for continued unity. Social cures are important, but they rarely inspire innovation, invention and unity like those inside our current frontier.
    • Many of the technological advancements that are helping solve many of those problems now were developed specifically for the space race

    ~String
     
  23. river

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    that business has relised that to control the people by economic suppression equals less wealth

    that banks don't control the world

    that diverisity and community can live together

    that we , Humanity , as a whole , defeat the concept of the world government

    that goodness towards ourselves , Humanity and its rewards is understood fully

    and pool the strengths of each nation , peoples , to reach for the stars
     
    Last edited: Jan 7, 2012
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