What does the 21st century have in store for us?

[willy88]

It is simply amazing what has happened in the last century. Since 1908, we have created vehicles that can not only fly, but can fly many times the speed of sound. We have explored the solar system with machines. We have created weapons that are able to destroy entire cities. We have created vast networks of incredibly complex computing machines.

So what does this century have in store for us?

Are we on the a brink of a golden age, with worldwide peace and prosperity? Will we recede back into the stone age? Will we be destroyed by ourselves or our own machines? Will we transcend to a post-human state brought on by technology? Will we continue as we are now, eventually conquering the solar system and possibly the galaxy?

It's very difficult to know for certain what will happen this century. I think this century could possibly be the defining moment in human history, or it will be our end.

There's definitely something on the horizon, and I'm not quite sure what it is.

Any thoughts?

 

[simonpro]

Inanswer to all your questions: No.

 

[Urwumpe]

Spam and pr0n. Maybe also a few wars. And a 80s revival.

 

[bujin]

Worldwide peace and prosperity is extremely unlikely. And while there are still people out there with bronze age beliefs but access to space age technology, reversion to the stone age is certainly a possibility (probably far more likely than worldwide peace and prosperity).

The rate of technological advancement is pretty exponential, so I think we can expect some remarkable discoveries and advances over the course of the next 100 years - but if I knew what they were, I'd be a millionaire! You only have to look back over the last 10-15 years to see how far we've come. When I went to university in 1995, the internet was barely even born. Now it's in a very large proportion of people's homes. Mobile phones were rare, and when people had them, they were like bricks. Now almost everyone has one, and they're not just smaller, they have an impressive range of features. But go back 15 years and I don't think I really envisioned any of that. So who knows where we will be in even 10 years more down the line.

Unfortunately, I think we could be in for an uncomfortable 21st century though. People are too selfish to respond to problems that we face, or are too naive in thinking "it won't happen to me", and by the time they come around to understanding the real dangers that are facing us all, it'll be too late.

Incidentally, I read in this month's BBC Focus magazine that the guy who developed Freon (CFCs) in the 1930s for use in refrigerators, styrofoam, etc... had actually considered using bromine instead of chlorine compounds. If he had done so, we would now all be dead or dying from the complete collapse of the ozone layer by the 1970s, long before anyone would have known what was happening.

Sometimes our survival hinges on a 50/50 choice.

Sobering thought. I think I need a beer...

 

[Ghostrider]

According to Captain Jack Harkness of Torchwood, the 21st Century is when "everything changes".
I'm not about to contradict Captain Jack Harkness. No sir.

 

[GregBurch]

Back in the 1990s, I was very involved in a number of “futurist” organizations, attending conferences, meeting the people whose names have become identified with popular notions of accelerating technological change, and even making some small contribution to some of the work of these groups and people. In those days, I was devoting almost all of my non-paying time to working on these issues.

Back then, I was very optimistic about what the future would bring. But even then, because I was one of the few people in these circles with a deep background in the humanities and politics, I was often among the small subset who voiced caution about how “human factors” could end up slowing things down and throwing the bright future off track.

By the end of 2001, I had almost completely reoriented my personal (i.e. non-paying) study and work. For five and a half years, the majority of my reading (dozens of books and tens of thousands of pages of other material) was devoted to what, for me and many, many other people in the developed world had been a blind spot: Islamic studies (history, ethnography, theology, textual analysis and criticism … the list of topics I covered was pretty broad, but also deep in as many areas as I could find the time and energy to explore). It’s only in the last couple of years that I’ve begun to take a break from these studies and broaden my reading back out again.

Suffice it to say that my outlook on the future is much darker than it used to be. I now realize that what bujin writes above, that there are “people out there with bronze age beliefs but access to space age technology” is one of the key elements of how the rest of this period in history will work out. When this is coupled with the “hyper-democracy” that the developed world has come to embrace, in which there is very little break on political pandering in media-amplified sound-bites, I have to constantly battle waves of despair at the prospects that lie ahead.

Basically, I think we’re in a race between survival and transcendence. Two days out of three, I don’t think we’re winning.

GB, THHotA