What do you think the world will be like 200 years from now? I can't even begin to imagine it. Think about where we were as a species just 100 years ago.....How much more can we push ourselves at this rapid rate of innovation?
some things will reach a sort of critical mass that will force them to change, in ways it may be difficult to believe now that they can or will. the world isn't going to end, or sink into endless drudgery, when, nor because, the oil 'runs out' (becomes uneconomical to extract, in much the same way that gold and a number of other minerals, for the most part became) if the tyranny of the dominance of aggressiveness collapses because of it, this will be a good thing. though it may not appear at first to be. it is not, at any rate, much longer sustainable in its current form. no one will be denying climate change certainly, it will be a matter of historical record. but also only one among several contributing factors to what the world will have become. the kind of cars people drive today will long since have become impractical, and thus obsolete. i don't expect any one thing to replace them everywhere, but i do look for a likely inversion of the human population excess we are currently familiar with. disease and famine, as in nature, being the most likely cause of it. a condition we might still be able to avoid. it isn't cast in concrete what will be, but economic usurpation of what political process remains will most likely also have become a thing of the past. again not universally replaced by any one mode, but likely by a diversity of forms of thought and belief most have yet to imagine. 200 years from now, most of the things we have every right to fear now, will have come and gone, having run their course. i don't expect their doing so to take more then a decade or two. a decade or two that could begin at any time. as soon as right now, or be delayed perhaps another twenty or thirty years. i certainly don't expect to live through it. but the children of the children living now, those who survive it, quite possibly will. 200 years from now, however much is remembered or forgotten, will be a time of wonders and of hope. by that i mean the wonders of nature, as much, if not more, then those of technology. 200 years from now, the bad things, the unhappy things, we are headed toward now, will be things of the past, like hitler and the world wars and the bomb, are to us now. i like to think small form factor guideway based mechanical transportation will be rediscouvered and reborn. and at the same time, rediscovering our brotherhood with other creatures of this world. people won't be trying to impress each other with big fancy houses either, though maybe instead, with building them themselves, the whole infrastructure of private ownership of the land and the enforcement of building codes likely having collapsed, in many, even most places. there are billions of other worlds out there in the universe, but they are not ours to rob from those already living on them. the one we are on, is the only one we were given, and it is up to us, to stop destroying it, for ourselves and each other.
we probly will public about alien contact, as there will be no denying it anymore. we'll run our cars whatever on garbage and methanol/ethanol there will be major countries ie: europe being mosly one huge country, southeast asia pacific being another one, possibly parts of south america being another. mankind will probly have research bases permanetly on the moon and mars. we will have a wider knowledge of what the universe was and consisted of in its early days, and a better understanding of its future evolution. we will probly have discovered unimaginable things in the world of physics such as string theory, and could have insane inventions based on that knowledge. war will not completely end, although the united nations or whatever exists will be very powerful. the world will have 1 shell government. the pyramids will still be around.
I hope that 200 years from now the machines win and finally resolve the anomaly that introduces The One. Just make me someone important like an actor. But, I don't want to know nothing-nothing!
history has alwayz been like that. from ancient rome, to medival england, to the robber barrons of the early 20th century. no reason to not think that is going to happen. but seems like they are trying hardcore to take over the world these dayz, and now we have crazy technology n shit. maybe in 200 years there wont be a world that's anything liveable
while i am certainly capable of being proved wrong, i very much doubt this can continue to be sustained for another 200 years. far more likely that whole house of cards will have long since collapsed. leaving a world in which, for the survivors, what we think of today as poverty and wealth, will be very nearly meaningless. not because everyone will be rich OR poor, but literally, everything we think of as meaning, being a measure, of either, will just be non-applicable to the conditions that will most likely then exist. and for what its worth, no, the world has NOT always been like that. the barbarism that calls itself civilized has been several times on and off, but never contiguously for more then a few hundred years at a time. and while we haven't had a population IMPLOSION, (we've been having a population EXplosion, since the mid 1700s) since "the blaque palgue", it is not at all unlikely that within the next 200 years one will occur. not of course by a single epidemic. that medical science could of course eventually get a handle on, but a compounding of multiple epidemics and their vectors constantly mutating, and compounded by famine, and both a not at all unlikely consiquence of climate changes currently occuring.
Human population will be less than 1 billion and dropping. Climate change and the energy apocalypse lead to mass extinctions like man has never seen. Over 95% live in severe poverty. The majority has resorted to cannibalism to survive. Small pockets of heavily fortified self sufficient civilized communities remain. The worlds oil reserves are long gone, the last of it destroyed in the most horrific world war ever. Global trade, manufacturing, and mass food processing no longer exists.
severe poverty in this sense will be an almost laughable euphamism. think mad max meets a boy and his dog. not just global, but long distance trade, manufacturing, et al, and espeically large scale anything, like coal mining or oil drilling. but war, no there won't be enough umph left to go around to make "the most horrific world war ever". a few radicals and fanatics with pointed sticks maybe. oh sure, there'll still be maybe those big military bunkers in major nations, like "chyane mountain" will still be functional inside, but most of what is controlled from them will no longer be, they're connections to control anything outside from within them will have long since been scavanged by those on the surface using them in crude ways to survive. i'm not saying everyone will have lost the will to fight, just the scale of coordination to do so effectively by anything other then considerably more primative means. remember no new oil or even coal. when stock piles run out, everything that depends on them will be mostly useless in any sense that involves actually using them. more like improvised rusty swords, everybody dying of tetnis from them, and forward deployment depending on how far anyone can walk in the starving and diseased condition. no. i don't expect in that context war to be the big thing. rival gangs will fight over munitions plants, with the result of blowing them up and themselves with them mostly. individuals might knife, with rusty improvised blades too, each other over the last can of beans or peaches after that, but the ones who know how to survive won't be there to be among them. but like i say, that condition won't be prolonged either. those inclined toward belligerance will have killed each other off quickly enough, those smart enough or lucky enough to have survived while evading them, are the ones who'se children will be born and live to rebuild a very different kind of world, then either that context of carnage, nor the carelessness of how we live now. and in that reduced population world, nature will be healing itself too. this isn't 200 years from now either, but within the next hundred. in TWO hundred years all of that will be comfortably old news and object lesson history. for a much cozier population, in a wide wild and fascinating world to rediscover and explore. thing maybe jewels of aptor and the faceless man.
There will be full scale global thermal nuclear war. The last 20% of the worlds energy stores ( oil, coal, and nuclear ) will be in full possession by military powers before they are destroyed. The US, Europe, and middle east will be decimated, uninhabitable. Sticks and stones comes after that.
i rather seriously doubt it. i don't doubt the intention is there, and the potential, but they'd better hurry up and do it if they're gonna. otherwise it will be sticks and stones before they get a chance to. and i'm sorry, but that i find one whole lot more likely. and then it will be a very good world, with and because of the fewness of humans remaining in it. its the after all of this that i look forward to. not that this bod will survive to see it. but it would be nice to come back for a visit after its all over. and it WILL have become ancient history either way, by the time another 200 rolls around.
If you are around you will experience a series of sensations, some of which you may call pleasant and some not so.
I can't see how we'll go from nuclear powered war ships and weapons to sicks and stones without an apocalypse in between.
famine and disease, caused by global warming. you ain't seen nothin yet. (hitler couldn't see how the most powerful and technically advanced military of the time, which he had to start with, could fail to take over the whole world either)
what if the earth is flat and the moon is made out of green cheese? when i was little i was scared shitless i'd grow up to BE "the anti-christ" when i got a little older i started being more worried about chronic hysteresis.
Perhaps the precience(IMO) of THX-1138 will materialize. Looks logical to me. There has always been those who rule and those who are ruled. Even if only 500 humans are alive 200 years from now-those humans will likely stay true to our nature. Empathy is very localized and almost restricted to the small interactions between us and is not even considered on a global scale. Hence,war,starvation,deprivation of dignity and the basic human rights to life,liberty and the pursuit of happiness(sound familiar?) have not materialized, even now. Then again,by some miracle of intervention or consequence unforeseen--humanity could become civilized. Difficult to imagine on a large enough scale to avoid the chaotic end game we seem to be rushing toward. Humanity aside--the earth will abide.
well said, themnax. wonderful and futile at the same time, i also would like to roll back around after say 100 yrs or so and see what and where our existance has gotten to and about...i so like your mentioning the 'mutations' of agents (organic and chemical) which are bound to be pertinent.
