What will The Future look like?

What do you think the future is going to look like?

I think in the long-term...

There's going to be a ton of solar collectors everywhere. I don't know what they'll look like (they might just look like a leaf, might be gasoline producing algae,etc.), but they'll be out there eventually. The reason being is that the amount of solar energy hitting the earth is more than 20,000 times the amount of energy we consume from fossil fuels every year, and so that is the final frontier. Plants have been taking advantage of this opportunity for many millions of years, so why wouldn't we?

Electric vehicles are going to become common place. With advances in battery and ultracapacitor technology, affordable long-distance electric vehicles will become commonplace and declining net oil exports won't hold us back.

With the ton of solar collectors everywhere, and a way to efficiently store that energy with tomorrow's batteries, we're going to have a bustling economy, none like we've ever seen. More minerals will be produced and mined, more houses will be built, more fresh water will be available with desalination plants enabling a greater supply food and supporting a larger population. There's going to be more prosperity than ever.

There will also be robotics, advanced artificial intelligence and quantum computing enabling us to do things we can't imagine. There will be virtual reality simulations that will be virtually impossible to tell from real-life, disabilities will be solved at an increasing rate with advanced medical technology, cancer will be largely cured with highly targeted drugs that are "programmed" for a particular cancer's genetic strain. There's going to be advanced medical imaging technology that will allow us to see every nook and cranny where blood cells go, as we'll program similarly sized cells to do that for us.

With advanced artificial intelligence, we'll solve problems and innovate like never before. Creativity will increase by a large margin.

We will take over the solar system.

Now the question is...

Has someone else already?

And are they watching us develop? Perhaps with us in their quantum computer's simulation or perhaps Earth is essentially an intergalactic zoo of some sort and we just don't know it? Statistically speaking, it would seem incredibly unlikely we would be the first and only ones to be sentient if it'll be possible for us to create sentience on other planets or perhaps within our own advanced simulations on the future's quantum computers.

yah, for the elite.
for the rest of us, just the opposite.

more houses :lol:
you poor naive bastard.
think hi-density shoeboxes.

In the future, we'll deal with climate change by heaving more fossil fuel at it.

We'll heave fossil fuel at farming, to get the water and fertilizer.

We'll heave more fossil fuel at making the indoor climate tolerable as the climate I live in expands to cover more of the world.

I know this is what we will do, because where I live, in this climate, we've been doing it for 100 years. What's going to make it stop?

We can't even imagine how deep we'll dig to get more fossil fuel. We'll go after that frozen methane, and even mine landfills for the plastic.

But on the bright side, as fossil fuel grows in cost, more alternative stuff will get built in once it becomes cheaper (without a tax incentive as now), and as batteries improve electric vehicles and other alternatives will gain in popularity. Some of the fossil fuel will be newly made, in algea ponds and other ways to get it. Hopefully in my area they will see the folly of putting 12 acre feet of scarce water on the land to grow pecans, and grow oil instead.

We will water our crops with Gatorade and wonder why they keep dying....

[youtube]BBvIweCIgwk[/youtube]

The future in the next 20 years will look 95% identical to the present. It's the 5% that will blow your mind.

I predict that governments will become increasingly small, while simultaneously becoming huge. That is, there will be considerably fewer services, but the bureaucracy will become increasingly large (despite what every opposition says).

Private transport will become so cost effective, efficient and easy, that large public transport projects will cease to eventuate, and probably go backwards. Gridlock will look identical, but smell better. Cars will still dominate the roadscape.

Schools will palm more of their responsibilities to colleges and universities, and university degrees will become useless without a 2-6 year postgrad. Yes, the PhD will become the new B.Sc./B.A.

We will all reach a point where we stop living longer, and start to regress. Too much cheap processed food will kill us off.

The worlds human population will max out at 10 billion and start to taper back a bit. Regions considered unproductive for food growing will have water and fertiliser pumped to them if need be, but the increasing standard of living in the developing world will mean fewer babies per mother, and demand for food will stabilise.

Manners and social skills will get worse as we've all forgotten how to interact with people without a keyboard between us.

Handwriting will become an option in school by 2033.

Australia will have it's second female prime minister, coinciding with the first Labor government to be elected in 20 years (sad, but lets be honest here).

The 5% will be stuff we can't even imagine right away. Like we saw uses for the internet, but never saw facebook coming. That 5% will change how everything works, except our addiction to fossil fuel.

It would get really hard to imagine, if cheap, non waste producing fusion came to be. It might happen, but not for cheap.

By now we were supposed to have skinny bodies with big heads because we are so intelligent that robots would do all the work. :lol: The promise of pay TV: no commercials. :lol:
World peace and prosperity, the pie in the sky; hand delivered by a super-man of satanic origin who will be worshiped world-wide.
Reality check: then comes wars and rumors of wars, pandemic plague and pestilence, famine, mega earthquakes and storms, scorched earth, decimated seas, only bitter water to drink worldwide, signs in the sky warning that the door to heaven will be closing for ever.

[youtube]hfDuCXwS7gw[/youtube]

For all you doom and gloomers this is the future.

the next 100 years will see the rise of the corporate state. Think Foxcon campuses expanded into full towns, then cities, then regions, then fianly the defacto goverment in a region. Most likely this will start in places like South Africa and China, but the cost savings for the corporations will see the idea spread all across the world. All persons living in each region will be employees of the Corporation. All services such as schools, police, medical, housing will be provided by the corporation. People will be free to leave, in theory. But with everywhere owned by a corporation, there will nowhere to go without prior permission from the corperation. People will quickly find that leaving will lead to them being branded as trespassers anywhere they go, and when they get caught, they will get pressed into work gangs or shot. Humanity will become the new cheap power source in the next century.

The corporate mentality is one of profits above all, and left unchecked, the corporation will serve it's own needs with no regard for the consequences for anyone else, including its self in the future. In the next 30 years or so, you will see a gradual tapering off of money invested in green power sources. with corporate consolidation of housing and transportation, we'll just need less energy, and with the tax burdon and goverment regulations dieing off with the goverments that suported them, coal, natural gas, and oil shale will still provide enough energy. Likely they will also be harvesting sea bed methane. Wind energy will also continue on from it's peak 30 years from now, but likely won't be expanded past that.

The Energy supplies will dry up, but as the corporations take more controll, individuals standard of living will slowly decline, and will have less ability to consume power. The total energy consumed will slowly decline untill there are only a few of the very wealthy Coporate heads who have any need for things like fosil fules. The rest of us will be happy with out 10 watt bulb, our 2 meals a day, and our generously provided 8 foot by 6 foot personal family unit stacked in adorm colony, with generously provided heating up to 50 degrees 8 hours a day, and a half extra water ration for employees in good standing any time the heat is over 100.

We don't really need great batteries to support solar, we just need a big enough power grid to get the power from where the light is.

Iceland have more geothermal power than they know what to do with. Our planets core is hot! and we want to cool down. We should tap in to it more.

In 10 - 25 years ( I hope ) A 36v 200ah AfterLiFePo10 battery will fit onto my current 36v 25ah batery box

In ? - ? years there will be no need for bateries, we will all just be pulling positive ions from the atmosphere

And the one constant through all of time, My wife will still hate my ebike

friendly1uk said:

We don't really need great batteries to support solar, we just need a big enough power grid to get the power from where the light is.

Iceland have more geothermal power than they know what to do with. Our planets core is hot! and we want to cool down. We should tap in to it more.

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Energy intensive mobile applications need big batteries. Can you imagine powering front loaders by wire? How about hauler trucks or semis?

Well, the solution may not necessarily come in the form of big batteries or "big" ultracapacitors, maybe we'll have other revolutions in energy transmission. Though you'd think we have mastered the art of energy transmission by now...

There seems to be interesting developments in this tech: http://www.treehugger.com/clean-technology/worlds-first-high-capacity-flash-charging-electric-bus-system-tops-charge-15-seconds.html

(Notice the ultracapacitor bus is in Switzerland, the country with the highest GDP per capita in the world. Personal incomes are like three times higher than the United States, so purchasing expensive ultracapacitors to service their crowded downtown cores doesn't faze them)

If people really are too stupid to ditch cars, then they will actually deserve all the miseries and deprivations they have in store.

I don't think people are quite that stupid, even if some of them are. I live in a forward-looking neighborhood of a forward-looking city, and cars are on the decline among people I know. Those are the same people-- educated urban folks from their late 20s to their early 50s-- who would have been tooling up with more cars at any other time in living memory.

At the rate things are turning to shit I don't think we'll have a future to look forward to.

lbz5mc12 said:

At the rate things are turning to shit I don't think we'll have a future to look forward to.

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It's that very same dynamic that will spur innovation and we'll have more than a future to look forward to.

Complacency leads to disaster, disaster leads to innovation.

http://micgadget.com/28174/knockoff-makers-can-produce-any-type-of-battery-within-5-minutes/

http://micgadget.com/34258/chinese-fake-external-battery-packs-comes-with-sand-bags/

"The more things change, the more they are the same."
- Alphonse Karr

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. . . .Which should have continued: The more they are the same, the more things change. Technology succeeds when it supports or is supported by existing technology. I liked the old article in the 'Key Reporter' where the told of the belief in England that the rise of the railroads in the 2nd half the 19th century meant there'd be few horses by the beginning of the 20th century. Yet the biggest known population of horses known in England was at the beginning of the 20th century, they were hard at work moving the railroad cars around in the stockyards. Ooops.

Everyone keeps talking about the death of brick and mortar stores, but around me they keep building new buildings for them, with apartments in them so people can live closer to the store. Do you really care what the technology is? Isn't it more important what it does to you?

"Every man has three characters - that which he exhibits, that which he has, and that which he thinks he has."
- Alphonse Karr

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It's going to be a time of no trust. The ongoing rise of Fascism is unavoidable not only because rust never sleeps, but because the technology just keeps making government ownership of you easier and easier. People have been so concerned about these "Chips" they'd implant in your wrists and they could track you with it. NOW the talk is of a mere tattoo, it's already working technology. The Supreme Court says law enforcement can take DNA from anyone they want if the "ARREST" is serious enough. In the future EVERYONE will have been arrested for a felony. So picture the day you wipe your nose, toss the Kleenex in the trash, then walk away just in time to miss seeing it become part of a murder scene. No, they won't convict you of murder in that case, but where there's smoke there's fire. Don't do that again, or one of these days you WILL be on trial, with your DNA turning up in all the wrong places as proof you're a one person crime wave. The Phillip K. Dick short story 'Minority Report' is about a guy whose job it is to arrest people the computer predicts MIGHT commit a crime in the future, but the computer suddenly predicts HE will. Oh, he did commit a crime, he ran away when they tried to arrest him.

The real culprit of all this is the obsession with data harvesting. I've been trying to buy a plastic grinder, but it looks like I'll never get it. They just keep demanding all this information about my "Company," all these STATISTICS for the use of something I'll be experimenting with, etc. The people who are supposed to be ANSWERING questions are refusing to but then are insistent on having theirs answered. Such is the perfidy to which they commit these days.

'If we are to abolish the death penalty, I should like to see the first step taken by my friends the murderers."
- Alphonse Karr

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At least when they DO beat you/kill you/take away your property from your heirs it will be for a good cause. They always claim it is. Such as all the punishments in the Obamacare bill. Your crime is not doing enough for the government aims

Did you know that the property you live at has a 50/50 chance of being considered "Blighted?" Below the average/median whatever value for the neighborhood. Which gives them the right to buy it for below market value, even if you don't want to sell. That's what code enforcement is all about, REVENUE.

Happiness is composed of misfortunes avoided.
- Alphonse Karr

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The best way to avoid all this nightmare is to enter into a REPEAL era. So many evil laws gotta go, before they do even more harm than they already have. Of course, those psychopath enough to be willing to have YOU pay any price for their benefit start whining about "Going backward." And, because rust never sleeps, they are always on the attack. Pointing the finger and babbling about SOMEONE ELSE lacking self awareness. Funny how these people talking about others having no self awareness are so visibly lacking any self awareness. Basic concept: Incompetence is the inability to recognize the difference between incompetence and competence. In short, their mouths are lying about the lack of self awareness in others because they lack the understanding of something that Alphonse Karr DID NOT say:

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt

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So today Barbara Boxer was whining about people being upset by 'Operation Prism.' The pain in her voice as she was again forced to recite her dogma of the whole point of government being to PREVENT truth, justice, the American way. The Boxer Manifesto, if you will. I can hardly wait until she is no longer enduring her incredible self sacrafice by being the Senator who may well cause more pain that any other elected official. Of course how bad might her replacement be? Don't you just love that they care more about their DECISIONS about technology than whether it works or not?

As far as releasing the heat at the core of the Earth to cool the surface down, I could see where that would backfire. But I don't know that we'd ever get enough geothermal going to cool down the core away. Nature delivers energy on its' own timetable, not ours, so of course we need better batteries to store what we can skim from nature.

But in the future there will be those who envy us now for our not having some technology that they have but don't want, just as they will wonder how we survived without other technology they have that maybe we wouldn't want. We do the same to others in the past, right? Basically in their own way they'll be living just as we are now. As we in our own way are living much as people always have, recognize that or not. If you're unable to recognize the irony of slavery in the American colonies being created by a BLACK man, the first slave owner, who was supposed to be one of those first slaves yet he went to court to insure that the others would be his slaves, maybe you're not ready to make predictions of the future, especially where Fascism is concerned.

(When Abraham Lincoln gave the speech that included "Better to remain silent. . . ." he attributed the quote to a journalist who hadn't actually written it, so it is believed that he actually read an article by Samuel Clemens with a biblical quote similar to that in it.)

http://blog.modernmechanix.com/what-will-life-be-like-in-the-year-2008/

http://blog.modernmechanix.com/more-leisure-for-man-in-the-automatic-age/

Complacency leads to disaster, disaster leads to war, war leads to innovation or so as envisioned by people like John McCain.

Toorbough ULL-Zeveigh said:

yah, for the elite.
for the rest of us, just the opposite.

more houses :lol:
you poor naive bastard.
think hi-density shoeboxes.

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Greater wealth disparity means labor will be relatively cheaper. That means, finally, I'll be able to afford all those peasants to build my 100-room mansion.

Who cares about the lower classes, anyhow? We all know almost all innovation and true productivity happens at the top. The only thing the poorer classes know how to do is breed themselves into deeper levels of poverty.

lbz5mc12 said:

Complacency leads to disaster, disaster leads to war, war leads to innovation or so as envisioned by people like John McCain.

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True, just as many roads lead to Rome, many roads lead to innovation. Necessity is a big one and the need to stay alive counts.

The military need for better batteries for the robo/bionic soldier will be where those great new EV batteries comes from. The need for the soldier, of course, will be to go get those fossil fuels.

As for the adoption of EV's, I can assure you that all the rest of Texas still wants an F350 double cab one ton pickup. Austin is as non typical of the state as Santa Fe.

Nations and states will disappear, corporations becoming new nations and states. Maybe. Corporations and nationalists will have a big fight.
Smaller languages, like ours, will vanish. It is happening right now. Few decades, and we don"t have own language anymore. Universitys have switched to english. Science can not be made soon with our own languages, because english takes over everywhere. When languages disappear, cultures disappear.
Whole world turns into one big giant english-spoken cultureless mass. Maybe. Or when cultures and nations disappear, people form small nationalist groups again, and what used to be one big nation, will be full of tiny, fragmented nationalist gangs fighting against each other about everything. E-vehicles will take over globally. Slower here in the north though, because of climate. Climate is the main argument used against bicycles here.
"totally useless during the winter", etc. All kind of privacy will disappear. Everybody will know everything about everyone. This will change us as a people, has allready. All your sex life, your medical records, your voting behaviour, your bank accounts, your offences, etc. Whole world will know, and people start to even require that. They want that everybody knows everything. Nobody will want privacy anymore. Price of elecricity will skyrocket, and governments will start to tax electricity heavily, like gas now. 80% tax on electricity. Drugs will become legal, because cultures disappear, and this means collective moral codes will disappear. Religions will disappear, there"s no need for collective moral code anymore. Maybe. Quality of food wil be a big issue. There will be enough food to keep everybody alive, but it"s crap food. People will start to farm again. Not because they are starving, but because they want true quality food. Quality of food will get that low. Either whole world will turn in to a one giant Global Nation, and people feel they lose their identities, or nationalism will win, and we have lots of new small countries and new small wars. Can people tolerate to lose their own identity and language? Should they?
I do not know.

dogman said:

As for the adoption of EV's, I can assure you that all the rest of Texas still wants an F350 double cab one ton pickup. Austin is as non typical of the state as Santa Fe.

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But Austin is still in Texas, and up until now, Austinites in their working years acquired cars instead of letting them go. There is also some switching to hybrids and electric cars, but that's neither remarkable nor the trend I'm talking about. The most community-involved and educated people in Central Austin are more and more often opting to cope with tough economic conditions by living close in and doing without a car, rather than keeping the car and living in some outlying cesspool. That is a sign of things to come, in my opinion.

The folks with big trucks are just doing what they do (which is what others thought up for them). But the folks who make tomorrow's culture in Texas are moving away, just slightly, from cars. I think it's a promising indicator that the rest of Texas and the world might eventually move out of the 20th century and away from its proven failures.

Doing without cars in Texas? My relatives are spread out in the counties of Bexar, Comal, Blanco, Gillespie, others around, etc. I get to Austin on occasion when I'm out there. All I see is quite a car culture, couples with two cars and a truck, or TWO trucks and a car. (Common in my family.) Californians would take the train between LA and SF, but north of San Antonio to Corpus Christi is a routine drive. One of my relatives commuted over 60 miles to college everyday, another as far or farther to work at the Toyota plant.

Now we have quite a number of people without cars in California, but it's a long way from a trend. Even the serious bicyclists need their cars.

Toorbough ULL-Zeveigh said:

yah, for the elite.
for the rest of us, just the opposite.

more houses :lol:
you poor naive bastard.
think hi-density shoeboxes.

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That reminds me of the society of Battle Angel alita (One of my favorite anime films):

[youtube]IeVznLn0ZFI[/youtube]

The elite's city in the sky, the hapless dregs of society left on the ground.

Can't find good pictures of the city, Zolom, online. Weird, I guess the film isn't that popular.

Another good city is the Kingdom of Zeal from the undisputed king of video games of all times, Chrono Trigger.



Mon chateau en las nubes.

Dauntless said:

Now we have quite a number of people without cars in California, but it's a long way from a trend. Even the serious bicyclists need their cars.

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They need no such thing. What they need is transportation, and better imaginations.