Noobert wrote:I wanted to post here, in hopes to see what other people think of the direction the world is currently heading.
My personal opinion is that we will eventually either do one of the following:
1) We will make this planet unlivable due to the amount of pollution, and waste of resources our ever growing population is consuming for pathetic needs.
2) We will end up fighting over the last of the resources in the world, causing World War 3 to become a reality.
3) We will finally realize that we are destroying this planet with each year, and do something about it and stop focusing upon petty things and focus on doing things for the greater good of the planet.
4) We will focus all of our efforts back into space to explore, colonize, and procure resources for our planet instead of monopolizing everything on the earth.
Mind you when I speak of these four topics it is a very distant future, but I believe these to be a very real outcome if something is not done.
Personally though..I dislike most of humanity now because we are lazy, greedy, arrogant, pathetic, cowardly, wasteful, and stupid. Very few people now a days do anything for themselves anymore. They need everything to be spoon fed to them.
I tell people I read books, and they go "LOL, YOU READ? HAHAHA, LOSER!"
..I mean, really? If this is our future - please kill me now.
I disagree with many things that noobert said in his OP. Essentially though, it depends on the timescales involved and intensity of the effects. The past two hundred years have seen an insane amount of changes in technology and lifestyle throughout the world. Society now if far different, and it's fair to say that in two hundred years society will be different again. Which way it goes is the interesting debate.
To address noobert's points and his possible predictions individually:
1) 'Unliveable' implies that literally nothing will be alive on this Earth. I do not ever believe we can damage the planet that much, unless there is some insanely major accident (1000x worse than a nuclear explosion), which we are not even currently technologically capable of. Increased pollution globally and worsening conditions for life as a result as possible, but we will still survive it, just might not be so pleasant to be outside.
2) A more likely situation. As it was already pointed out we are already fighting wars over what little natural resources we have left. But again I will make the point that it's only in the last 200 years where we have even been using coal and oil in large quantities. If/when it runs out, the human race won't die completely. Infact i'd put my money on alternative energy and fuels being common place by the time the natural resources do run out. Nuclear Fusion experiments are coming very close to creating power, given 10 years they will be viable, clean energy sources. That is why the world has been pouring hundreds of billions of all currencies to those experiments, because our future depends on it.
3) A good ideal, and leaders across the world have already been working for many years to promote and address this. It is a very difficult thing to achieve globally, but people will be forced to do so by diminishing resources and worsening conditions on the planet as a whole. As technology improves in the future it will be less about what it can do, and more about doing it cleanly and efficiently for the good of the wider global society and the planet.
4) There is one single problem with space exploration. Space is big. Vastly so. And we cannot travel through it at any speed. Regardless of whether neutrinos did actually go faster than light, or if the partly unplugged optical cable messed up the results, we still won't be able to push a ship through the global speed barrier. Relativity is a **Filtered** to deal with once sub-light speeds increase close to light. Realistically, without some form of FTL travel, we will not be able to build colonies outside of our solar system. Nowhere within our solar system can support life as we know it, which means it will be far too difficult to colonise elsewhere. Of course, should there be some magical new "unobtainium" that we require in the future, which can only be gathered from the rivers of Io, we will engineer a way to do so. But the general populous will never settle on another planet under the current understanding we have of the universe.
Now having addressed those predictions, I will make a very general predictive statement of my own:
"The future development of technology will dictate the future development of society."
In essence that is the key to the future. The development of technology is governed by the economical climate in the world, as investment in R&D is required to improve technology. When the larger, innovative technology firms hit financial trouble (example case study - Sony in a couple of years) then technological improvements will slow down. But all the while consumers have money and are buying the new technologies, that R&D funding will remain in place.
Therefore assuming our exceptionally fragile and fundamentally flawed capitalistic economical system somehow survives the next 50 years, and R&D investment continues, the next prediction that needs to be made is a technological one. What is the next major step that technology will take? And how will that shape the world we live in?
That is in itself a very difficult predication to make. Take the clock back 30 years, no-one could have predicted the internet or the impact it has had. Many of us now carry around smartphones that allow us to access almost any piece of information we wish at the literally touch of our fingertips. But the development of post-internet technology has followed a trend, useability. Devices are being built to be smarter. Even now voice-recognition is becoming a major influence to the technology companies. I can literally talk into my Samsung Galaxy S2 and ask it to do simple tasks, and it can do them. Over time, those simple tasks will be become more complex, to the point where we will be talking to a basic AI within our pockets.
Once we are there, and almost true AI software is developed, why not build it into other devices. Robotic cooking machines that make your dinner for you. Cars that drive themselves. The possibilities at that stage are almost endless. And yet is far closer than we realise.
Ultimately, it will be the development of a true AI that will really change things. Most likely initially created by a single government to help maintain an intelligence system. It will at first be kept under wraps for a long time, but eventually others will build them too. Within 100 years from the creation of the first true AI, we will have many all doing their own functions across the world. The entire global system could one day be run by them. It's either a very scary thought, or a very comforting one.
~Norbe~
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For Rome!