In the next 10~100 years how do you see the future of Earth? Is it a somewhat utopian society, with clean sources of energy e.g. nuclear fusion, or super efficient solar panels, and larger cities that are cleaner? Do we have a sustainable and green agriculture that produces maximum food for minimal waste? Has medicine found the cure for cancer and other life threatening diseases we have nowadays? Maybe even medicine that grows missing limbs for amputees etc. OR Is it a grim future where food, water and other resources are scarce? Countries fighting an endless war for these resources, and people fighting each other for endless resources. Is a nuclear war imminent? Are massive cities mostly made up of ghettos? Are the rich beyond imaginable wealth and the poor living in absolute poverty in the ghettos?
Well if there isn’t some natural disaster or disease vector which wipes out a few billion people the world’s population will reach 10 billion by 2061. That’s only 50 years from now so IMHO the future is grim h
That means I'll probably still be alive when the world's population is double what it is now. Not a happy thought.
I think its around 6 billion When it reaches 10 billion we become the disease that nature needs to eradicate. h
7 billion now. Inside 10 years we'll be at ten if there's no overt cause of mass death. IE holocaust, famine, epidemic, etc.
"always in motion" was a good line, and true. the plagues will slow us down and whittle us down and we'll be better for their having done so and what we had to learn, those of us who did, to survive them, or we might even avoid them, and be better for having having done what it took to do that. either way, they'll be a more sensible number of us, which will be a lot fewer then there are now. but that's for much later. after we get passed what we may or may not. i'm betting we will. but not on by how much.
i don't see "it" as "my", but i do see it resulting from the incentives all of us togather statistically create.
to think and live as one organism ... as of now I don't feel global society has 'matured' to the extent that this could be even vaguely on the table
"can you hear the evil crowd - the lies and the laughter - i hear my insides - the mechanized hum of another world" steely dan
the future in the general society could be disastrous but yet this generation of the youth is exploiting for a greater change! If we all want a future of peace full of altruistic acts and utilitarianism then individually we must act on that path to see the future become what we would like to see it as.
The earth has always balanced itself in the past. I think it will do it again. The earth won't withstand a huge rise in population for long, it hardly maintains what we have now. People will change their ways or it will be forced upon them. I think the most exciting thing that I will witness in my lifetime will be a worldwide oil shortage. For better or worse.
that pretty much sums it up. we can avoid extremes of unpleasantness by switching to cleaner sources of energy and means of transportation and drastically reducing the human birth rate. or, as is more or less equally likely, we fail to, for reasons of political and economic stubbornness. in which case nature's corrective methods take place. as for "exciting" things, that more likely won't actually be all THAT exciting to witness, peek oil is one of the three. the economic collapse of capitalism being one we seem may be witnessing currently. massive epidemics and famine, not sparing the till now more fortunate parts of the world being the major third. at any rate, i would love to be born on this world sometime maybe two or three hundred years in its future, after the dust of all this has settled and become another historical event of a nearly forgotten past. a world in which oil, coal and uranium will very likely be no longer happening, but in which the knowledge, and perhapse means, of wind, solar, micro-hydro, et al, survive, and little people sized trains propelled by that energy stored in some form on board them. but a world of greatly reduced population, in far greater harmony with its natural environment as a result. but again, that won't likely be until well after the time of the (non) "events" in our near future, which either way, eventually, lead to it.
The utter failure of the world's countries to do anything effective about global warming points to future failures to do anything about sustainable energy, water scarcity, epidemics, and population growth. I have grown pessimistic. Perhaps if we can get rid of enough Republicans from the US government, it might turn in the right direction. The Democrats, with all their corruption, at least still believe in science (most of the time).
a very good summation, with which i agree entirely. though i don't see anything as being inevitable either way. but i also see the resulting societal breakdown as being of a temporary nature, lasting perhaps little more then a decade or two, and the minority who survive the subsiquent population implosion learning from the mistake, and population remaining much too small to repeat it, even if they were dumb enough to want to, for a very much longer period of time. and dam how i'd love to be living in that time, AFTER such a collapse, when people will have both learned how to stop kicking ourselves in our collective ass AND be a hell of a lot fewer then we are now.
