Predicting the future is tricky business.
It’s hard enough to anticipate what you’ll be doing next week, let alone a year from
now.
And while attempting to project decades into the future is damn-near impossible, plenty
of people attempt to do so on the regular regardless.
They’re called futurists, and it’s their job to predict what the world will look like
in hundreds of years from now and beyond.
Keeping the varying accuracy of predictions in mind, we wondered what today’s futurists
had to say?
Here’s what some leading minds think.
The world population will be over 9 billion.
Disease will be more common, as everybody will be physically closer to everyone else,
and chronic food shortages may be the norm.
We'll also have to start cutting down on our energy consumption: If humankind continues
to use energy at the rate it does now, and population growth follows expected trends,
we will need the equivalent of three earths to support ourselves by 2100.
Which is, obviously, impossible.
The majority of people will live in cities, which will be increasingly more integrated
with nature and plants.
It’ll be standard procedure for skyscrapers to have parks and sky gardens, for example,
and buildings will be covered in vegetation designed to filter out pollutants and retain
CO2.
Wars will involve not only land and sea, but space.
Moon bases will play a crucial role in global conflicts; because the moon is essentially
a massive plot of undeveloped land over which nobody has legal ownership.
These bases will serve both to defend against attacks from other nations and to launch offensives.
Air travel will be exponentially more awesome.
When flights are under-booked, the seats will automatically shift and rearrange themselves
to provide maximum comfort and space for travelers.
Transparent walls will flood the cabin with natural light, and best of all, you’ll be
able to get anywhere on the planet in under two and a half hours.
Robots that walk around and do stuff will be more common.
They'll be deployed for mundane chores as well as dangerous tasks normally undertaken
by humans (for example, clean-up at a disaster site), but the possibilities are really endless.
For example, if you want to check out the conditions of an Irish hostel before booking
a room, you might rent out a robot in Dublin and have it do the legwork for you, controlling
it from your living room and receiving live video and audio from the walk around.
We'll start incorporating nanotechnology into our bodies.
For example, a device in your head might eliminate the need for a computer screen by projecting
images (from a Skype meeting, a video game, or whatever) directly into your field of vision
from within.
In other words, we’ll really start to become androids.
Also, say goodbye to grocery shopping!
Refrigerators will be seamlessly integrated with online supermarkets, so a new tub of
peanut butter will be on its way to your door before you even finish the last one.
Going into the doctor for a checkup will no longer be necessary.
You’ll simply run a scanner over your body, and the results will be forwarded to a health
network.
This actually exists now in a more cumbersome form, but as with any technology, it will
become smaller and more affordable over time.
Advances in holographic and nanotechnology will make teleconferencing much more realistic:
Rather than jumping on a Skype call, you might meet with a virtual hologram of your boss
in your living room.
As such, telecommuting will become far more common.
So, guys, what do you think life will be like in 2100?
Leave your comment below.
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