What Will The Next 100 Years Bring?

Anonymous Poster · Jan 6, 2003

Given the daily demolition derby in the school parking lot, and on the roads, I don't look forward to flying cars.
Just imagine, Becky, or Bobby in a flying car with celphone attached to their ear, eyeballing the GPS assisted navigation system/gameboy/Xbox, warping thru the sky above your house. It ain't a comforting thought.

Trev · Jan 6, 2003

Just imagine, Becky, or Bobby in a flying car with celphone attached to their ear, eyeballing the GPS assisted navigation system/gameboy/Xbox, warping thru the sky above your house.

Yeah, but they'll have super-secure and reliable computers to do the navigating. Let's just pray that MS doesn't have a hand in writing the code, though. The "blue screen of death" could take on a whole new meaning.

Jeff396 · Jan 6, 2003

Just imagine, Becky, or Bobby in a flying car with celphone attached to their ear, eyeballing the GPS assisted navigation system/gameboy/Xbox, warping thru the sky above your house. It ain't a comforting thought.

Nah, by then all that stuff will be surgically implanted in your head at birth due to the hands free legislation imposed by Congress./w3tcompact/icons/smile.gif

Jeff

BigDave · Jan 6, 2003

surgically implanted in your head at birth 

How about genetically bio-engineered new be a part of the human genome. If we are close to cloning today, we may not recognize what humans will look like in a hundred years. One thing that may give you all a little comfort...they won't look like me. /w3tcompact/icons/laugh.gif

patrickg · Jan 6, 2003

Great stuff, guys. Late 40's and 50's flying cars in every garage. Does this imply a rebirth of general aviation? Curbing unlimited liabilitywhich killed genav?

What about credit cards and ID? Voice print, retinal scan, IR tatoo, "INSTANT" genetic ID?

What of Area 51, Smithsonian aerospace museum anex?

Will cattle be genetically re-engineered to have opposable thumbs to enable them to answer the phone and place calls to their representatives in the wake of PETA excesses to grant citizenship to all domesticated fauna?

Whooweee... And to think my great grand mother (who died in the 50's) came to Oklahoma in a covered wagon from Texas to participate in a land rush with her husband. Even my mom's family had no indoor plumbing til they moved to town after her dad's death. Her dad plowed with a team of horses and never owned an internal combustion engine. They had no electricity and had no running water. They were not the exception in rural Oklahoma. My mom has seen a lot of changes in her lifetime. I am curious to see what additional improvements and changes will come down the pike during my tenure.

When comparing what was predicted to happen from vantage points of 50 and 100 years ago versus what actually happened, it will be a difficult task to guess what will happen in even the next few decades, much less the next 100 years.

In a few more decades when native Engillsh speakers are in a definite minority, will the USA conduct business in English, Spanish, or what?

Will home cooking decline further? Will microwaved frozen meals be the closest thing to home cooking still practiced? Will there still be grocery stores selling fresh raw food that requires home preparation or will "manufactured" food be "normal"? Will a garden be a quaint anacronism, tolerated but not encouraged? Will the keeping of domestic animals for food be tolerated by a society schooled in PETA compliant dogma?

Will marriage be deinstitutionalized and made into a simple domsitic contract with renewal and cancellation clauses or just dropped as old fashioned.

Will Dick Clark still make personal appearances?

Patrick
Patrick

Bird · Jan 7, 2003

my great grand mother (who died in the 50's) came to Oklahoma in a covered wagon from Texas

Bet she didn't call it "Oklahoma" though, did she?/w3tcompact/icons/wink.gif My granddad told me about moving from Bowie, TX, to "Indian Territory" in a covered wagon when he was 5 years old./w3tcompact/icons/laugh.gif

Anonymous Poster · Jan 7, 2003

Rancor: Have no idea and any "guess" based on extension of current trends would probably be fallacious. However, what I do know, is that civilization is not based on technology. It is based on the value systems that bring it into being and maintain it. And it is certain that those value systems are being destroyed (how, and by whom, I dare not say since we don't want to get into religion and politics here). The consequences of that destruction will play themselves out in their own way. The world has been through all this before. Struggle->assendancy->power->softness->weakness->decay->collapse. It is the life cycle of civilizations playing themselves out exactly as the life cycle of the individual lives that make up its constituancy play themselves out. Do you realize that it has only been within the last 100-150 years that the major cities reached the simple hygenic standards of fresh water/sewerage systems that existed in the major Roman cities 1,900-2,000 years ago? We, the "west", are riding a descending intellectual wave which peaked in the late 1700s and a descending material wave that peaked in the early 1900s. Do you realize that a person at a given age and given stage of their career in a given occupation has to work more hours to earn the price of a 1500 square foot house today than their counterpart did 100 years ago? Think about that when you are being distracted by "high tech". So, where are we in the downward cycle? Hard to say. Possibly, conditions are similar to conditions in the Greco-Roman world at the death of Marcus Aurelius. But that is a guess. History does not repeat itself exactly and using the exact same details. But it certainly does in the broad strokes. Sorry to confuse anyone with the bigger picture. JEH

JTD · Jan 7, 2003

A flying CUT might be interesting. Solve some manuvering problems in my swampy areas (created by the beavers). Have to get a new version of the tilt meter.

cowboydoc · Jan 7, 2003

I don't think #3 will ever happen. Look at today. People spend more time, money, and resources thinking of themselves rather than others. We are all so busy we never have time for anything more than ourselves.

#7 will be the opposite. With the way we're going with technology I can guarantee you it won't be long before the average age is in the 80's. The 90's and 100's I don't think will be too far off.

The rest I agree with.

What I worry is that with all the small countries getting nuclear weapons and the undertow of people who are way too liberal in this country and won't stop them I can also see a next hundred years where we're blasted back to the caveman days as well.

rancar · Jan 7, 2003

"...any "guess" based on extension of current trends would probably be fallacious."

Maybe....and then maybe not. Guessing suggests decisions are made in a vacuum. We all know there's enough externalities that impact our daily lives that influence the minute details in our decision making processes that we can do better than 'guessing.' We have intelligent minds and we can use them by making logical deductions based on current trends. Every day we all make decisions that are intuitive in nature based upon subjective assessments of our respective political, religious, and normative values. We can make extrapolative determinations of potential future trends based on analogies....analogies being experiences gained elsewhere to project possible future trends and impacts.

Think about that when you are being distracted by "high tech".

Not sure what you mean here. High tech is a reality not a distraction or figment of the imagination. The two of us communicating here and now in cyberspace is simple evidence of this. Just punch a few words or a phrase in Google and the whole information world opens up with tremedous resources that previously required hours of physical research in a library. So, if high tech is a distraction, it's one distraction I gladly embrace.

However one looks at it, whether it be guessing or deductive reasoning, it's fun for us all to wonder what the future may hold. And I'm sure most nearly everyone does this from time to time.