Short Circuit's Journal: How do you think the world will be different in 50 years?

Alright, so I'm working on a writing project with a few other people where we're creating a science-fiction universe with the intention of allowing it to be used in others' fiction projects, such as stories, books, webcomics, etc. (It's licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license)

I'm doing research to find potential avenues of exploration. To this end, I'm asking people of different backgrounds a complicated question: How do you thing the world will be different in 50 years?

Here are a few points to consider (Feel free to go beyond these, of course.):

• Who will be the dominant global economic and military powers?
• How will technology change our lives? What technologies will be responsible for the change?
• What social changes will we see?
• Examine your current job. How will your job be done differently in 50 years?

Party pooper

[Captain Splendid]

Not to rain on yer parade or anything, but unless Nuke plant development ramps up real quick real soon or Cold Fusion gets perfected in the next few years, a good chunk of the planet will be dead in 50 years, while the rest fight each other for arable land, because without cheap energy, 6 billion souls is pretty much impossible.

Re:

[Short Circuit]

So...the world will need cheap energy due to a lack of oil?

I wouldn't worry too much. As energy becomes more expensive, public support for nuclear (and other sources) will increase. The first commercial nuclear power station [wikipedia.org] only took three years to build, so I wouldn't worry too terribly much about how soon it's started.

Re:

[Captain Splendid]

Yeah, that works real well for the handful of industrialised nations with the facilities, know-how and cash to do it, and do it quickly, but for the other 250 countries, It's going to be a much different story. There's also a huge difference between building a reactor quickly, and building a reactor safely. There's going to be enought problems to handle without turning chunks of the landscape uninhabitable.

Re:

[Short Circuit]

I really didn't write this journal entry so that we could argue, I'm only looking for ideas.

So you anticipate a post-apocalyptic world. Can you describe what lead up to it, and what technology and life will be like in it? How will life differ by geographic location? What systems of government will be in place?

Re:

[Captain Splendid]

So you anticipate a post-apocalyptic world

Not so much post-apocalyptic as..."crunchy". Despite being a doom-and-gloomer, I think humanity will survive peak oil. However, even in the best case scenario (ie Nuke plant building ramps up NOW), there's going to be some major changes. For starters, the developing world is going to get screwed even harder than it is now. Not that big a deal to us suburbanites, but it will make the world a much smaller place, and whatever resentments and feelings they have

Re:

[Marxist Hacker 42]

There's also a huge difference between building a reactor quickly, and building a reactor safely.

Actually, that's a big reason why China will very well beat us out for world superpower by 2020- they've got a *completely safe* *assembly line created* nuclear reactor- the "T40 pebble bed", IIRC- and they're already exporting it. It's only here in America that we didn't realize that low-heat, low-power, sealed breeder reactors are safer than the old kind, and have no waste (because it simply keeps using all

As a neural network specialist...

[benhocking]

• Who will be the dominant global economic and military powers?
  • In 30 years, we will have created truly human-like intelligence in silico. In 40 years, entire world populations can be simulated using a relatively small number of computers. In 50 years, they will be the dominant global economic and military powers. (Only being 70% facetious.)
• How will technology change our lives? What technologies will be responsible for the change?
  • See above.
• What social changes will we see?
  • We will either have most work

Re:

[Captain Splendid]

although I'm not quite as pessimistic (wrt energy concerns).

I'd be interested to hear what your thoughts are on that, and how you arrived to your conclusions. I strive not to be pessimistic, becasue it bums me out as much as anyone else, but again, even the best-case, realistic scenario is still pretty nasty IMO.

previous means of energy production that were prohibitively expensive will no longer be considered so

Problem is, from my understanding, we should have been conducting these changeovers q

Willful ignorance

[benhocking]

I'd be interested to hear what your thoughts are on that, and how you arrived to your conclusions.

Willful ignorance, my friend, willful ignorance. :) (Combined with some blind faith.)

Not only that, but it will hit us harder than the oil problem. Mind you, after we shed a large chunk of the population, it may not be.

See? Energy problem solved.

Re:

[Marxist Hacker 42]

I think we'll hit 8 billion first (in about 18 years).

Weren't we supposed to reach 15 billion by 2010 based on the logarithmic curve that seemed to be population rate expansion back in 1975?

I think you're misremembering

[benhocking]

I believe our rate of growth has slowed a little, but not by much. They might have predicted 7 billion by now (from 1975), but I doubt they were that far off. Seeing as we only had 4 billion years in 1975 [census.gov], I doubt they would have predicted a nearly 4-fold increase in only 35 years. At the time, the growth rate was about 2% per annum, so a naive calculation would have had us at about 4.084 billion x 1.02^35 or approximately 8.17 billion by 2010 (as opposed to the 6.838 billion currently being predicted for 2

Re:

[Marxist Hacker 42]

I just remember in my one philosophy course in college (the only one OIT offered- Philosophy of Engineering, of course) the Rome Project calculations were referred to- complete with the now infamous half-full glass with liquid doubling every decade statement. We're a bit behind that curve in that it predicted 7.5 billion by 2000, 15 billion by 2010. But then again, the same set of curves predicted we'd hit infinite pollution by 2015. So clearly we've done some work since then. The population curve was a

Found a reference

[benhocking]

I found a reference to the Rome project [modernhistoryproject.org] you're talking about. Unfortunately, this one doesn't mention any population growth estimates. Ah, here's a book review [jstor.org] on it. It seems like you are misremembering it. :)

Re:

[Marxist Hacker 42]

That was the 1972 Club of Rome, which preceded the 1975 Rome Project- they redid the numbers. To tell the truth, the only thing I ever saw was the charts- which we spent a good class period laughing at (by 1992, it was already obvious that these predictions were FAR off- it was listed along with the Tacoma Narrows bridge as an example of how engineering can become science).

stagnation

[Bill Dog]

* Who will be the dominant global economic and military powers?

China, and China.

Economic:
1) In 50 years the baby boomers will have completely passed thru our country's social benefits system, straining it and ripping the country a new one, economically-speaking/debt-wise. Similarly in Europe, with an aging population, and people living longer and consuming more health care dollars, esp. in the last years of their lives.
2) Globalism will have moved almost all of our middle class to upper middle class into th

Re:

[Short Circuit]

An interesting science fiction universe and future will have to start from an earlier part of our history, and somehow take a different path. Or start from a completely made-up universe.

I disagree. The rich may hold almost all of the wealth, but they won't be able to stop making babies, and inheritance will tend to spread the wealth pretty thin. A few scenarios may arise from this:

1: Inheritance laws get changed. Someone's going to push for that, when they realize that they're not going to get a whole lot of money from their parents' death. I don't know how, though. Perhaps mandated distribution favoring the firstborn. Other kids will leech off the handouts of the firstborn, or be re

Re:

[Marxist Hacker 42]

. The rich may hold almost all of the wealth, but they won't be able to stop making babies, and inheritance will tend to spread the wealth pretty thin.

Where do you get that? The rich have already largely stopped making babies- the average family in a first world nation lasts for six generations. That's it. Beyond that, they've gotten too rich to care about people or having children, and rich enough to have abortion-at-will. The few that last past six generations are full of only one child families. A

Re:

[Short Circuit]

Huh. I suppose I just have a hard time seeing how folks can shrug off the impulse to reproduce.

So, what, will they form a wealth-backed royalty?

Re:

[Marxist Hacker 42]

So, what, will they form a wealth-backed royalty?

Not much of one. The Carnegies, for instance, died out- and gave us a nationwide chain of public libraries. Adams, Smith, Rockefeller, Schlitzer, I know several families that got rich and died out, leaving no heirs. The same thing is happening in Europe.

That's part of the whole problem with immigration in my point of view- we need 500,000 immigrants a year RIGHT NOW, just to keep the labor force stable, due to the fact that this demographic even impacts

Re:

[Marxist Hacker 42]

2nd reply in light of the previous entries. Yes, the divergence between the rich and the poor is growing- but the rich will always need UMC lackeys who will eventually if ambitious enough, become rich. MC wages are going away. But in the long run, just as the robber barons left behind public works projects and eventually spread their wealth among charities through their wills, the ever-decreasing population of first-world rich will as well. And the whole game will start over. Probably with a depression