The Campaign Builder's Guild

Another spin-off from the forum game: what do you imagine the future might look like in 50, 100, 500, and 1000 years? 10000 years?

A few questions to consider:

1. Will we still have distinct nations separated by imaginary geographic borders, or will this model have been partially/completely replaced by some other mode of organization?

2. If we still have nations, who will the dominant powers be?

3. What will the human lifespan be?  Centuries or roughly the same as today?

4. Will we still have money?  Will we be post-scarcity?

5. Will we have artificial intelligence?  Strong or weak?  How long will Moore's Law hold (some say its already faltered, but will we eventually plateau completely, and if so, when?)?

6. Will we still go to war with one another?

7. Will we still have religion?  Will religion change substantially?

8. Will we still have books?  That is, material, paper books with spines and covers and words made of ink?

9. Will we have colonized other planets?

10. What will our primary energy sources be?

11. Where will we be on the Kardashev scale?

12. Will post-secondary education or its equivalent be ubiquitous?

13. Will we even still be around, or will war, ecological disaster, self-replicating nanorobots, or some other apocalypse wipe us out?

Feel free to add questions as well as speculative answers.

In the interest of not clogging up this thread with my blabbering and essay after essay on each time period, I will simply link to two very relevant websites:
 
ATOMIC ROCKETS
ROCKETPUNK MANIFESTO  

The future will be awesome, even if it takes forever to get here.

Great links!

I've een pondering this thread all day and I can come to no single definable answer, just more questions.

If you look at all the things that have changed in the last 50 years (since 1960), we can extrapolate that the world as we know it will look radically different.

50 years ago, the world was divided into two armed camps, always on the brink of nuclear war. The world was dominated by European interests, little thought or care was given to the majority of the world (unless it tried to switch allegiance to the other camp). The average citizen of the 'developed' world had around 3 outfits - 2 for normal day-to-day life and their Sunday best. Religion still held the hearts of men and women in the 'west' (just look at how people thought JFK would do the Pope's bidding). Computers (as we know and love them today) were basically non-existent to the average person, who also had just a single TV for their entire family (which was probably quite large by today's standards).

Etc., Etc., Etc.

We cannot begin to really comprehend how much the world will change in the next 50 years (let alone 100, 200 and further).

Still, one principle I think will be carried forward is the use of technology. It will continue to get faster, smarter and smaller as time goes on. Eventually we'll have computers in our heads that allow us to instantly (and wirelessly) access the equivalent of the internet. At that time, knowledge, as we know it, will be a wholly different beast (does one truly need to learn in a class room when one can simply download the information, or better yet experience it through mental interactivity?). What of friendship and love? We could, in theory, jack into each other's minds and literally hear/see/experience the other? How would that affect morality and intimacy?  

We will eventually colonize other worlds, yet those worlds will have a profound affect on the human form. Just look at how a skull morphs when one looses their teeth (your skull literally becomes a different shape). This principle can be extrapolated into lower-g environments such as space, luna and mars. Humans may very well become a very dimorphic species, or simply split into many different species.

We're 10 years away from achieving Fusion power, that will profoundly affect the world as, for the first time in our species' existence, we will be able to draw more energy than was required to generate it in the first place. What does that mean for the developed world? The Third World? So much will change once we achieve fusion power.

Ten thousand years?

A boy can dream.

As a counter-point to EE's guesses, I'll have a go.

A person of today thrust a half or even a full century into the future will acclimate rather quickly. Though the past fifty or 100 years has been one of rapid advancement, it is simply unreasonable to assume that humanity will continue at an exponential technological advancement. Indeed, most major devices of the day will be remarkably similar to our in function; perhaps diverging in form, though the amount of change is limited by the constraints of usability and practicality.

Fusion might be seeing limited deployment in highly advanced societies. Humanity will still not have a permanent, civilian colony in space. Artificial Intelligences will be prolific, if narrow in scope, and we will still be waiting on our robot butlers and jetpacks.

I did not mean we could not acclimate quickly but the world will look vastly different than we imagine it. Look at the original Star Trek, they still used circuit boards and (big) vacuum tubes. They even processed data on the magnetic tapes!  Their vision of the future tech was quickly out paced by modern ingenuity.

The Internet fundamentally transformed life for billions of people (we could not have this debate with out it) yet no vision of the future truly predicted anything close to the internet (and the way it has permeated our society).

Your idea of technology is correct, we will derive new tech based on the needs and wants of the people limited by what has come before. How could the Automobile be invented with out the knowledge of the steam engine and the horse-drawn carriage? How could the horse-drawn carriage have been invented with out the knowledge of wheels, domestication and wood craft? How could any have come about with out man's own desire to travel on his butt?

Fun! I need to sandblast the rust off my brain, and since I've been playing a lot of Starcraft lately, my thoughts have been on sci-fi. I'll take a stab.

Quote from: Steerpike2. If we still have nations, who will the dominant powers be?

4. Will we still have money?  Will we be post-scarcity?[/quote]6. Will we still go to war with one another?[/quote]8. Will we still have books?  That is, material, paper books with spines and covers and words made of ink?[/quote]10. What will our primary energy sources be?[/quote]12. Will post-secondary education or its equivalent be ubiquitous?[/quote]13. Will we even still be around, or will war, ecological disaster, self-replicating nanorobots, or some other apocalypse wipe us out?[/quote]

I think we have thousands of years left on our species. We've remained largely the same for quite some time, so I don't expect any drastic evolutionary changes any time soon (geologically speaking). Disasters could change this, but many of those can't be predicted. We're pretty boned if an asteroid hits us; it will probably be a century or a few before we can deal with that well enough.

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Most of my ponderings of the future are more sci-fi. What would happen if we discovered the existance of human-intelligence extraterrestrials, even if we didn't have direct contact? What would that mean to people? How would that knoweledge alone change the world?

And where does technology have to go as of right now?

Quote from: XeviatConsidering how long it has taken us to build space sations, I think this will be a long way away. Mars lacks a suitable magnetic field to protect it from radiation, so anything on it needs to be shielded and reinforced. Without something valuable to collect from a planet's surface, I think it would probably be easier to just stay in orbit.

I saw a program that showed how a thick atmosphere will be more than enough to block out/absorb the radiation. Since we already have the tech to give Mars an atmosphere, I think we'll see it colonized sooner rather than later. This will become a more pressing issue as our global population caps out at 11-12 billion people. The chance to own a piece of land, rather than live in a crummy city apartment, will be a driving factor in our extra-terra colonization.

Quote from: XeviatSolar. It's simple, abundant, and doesn't take away from anything to collect. I think within the next hundred years we'll be away from oil and switch to alcohol, biodiesel, or man-made natural gas (which is simply using plants as the method of collecting solar energy) as a stopover to a fully electric solar grid.

I don't think fusion will be done small scale. There's no need with a giant fusion reactor 8 light-minutes away.

Except we still haven't been able to design a solar panel that's nearly as powerful as a Nuclear plant. A Fusion Power Plant, needs a golfball sized hunk of frozen Hydrogen with a hundred Lasers shooting at it at once. It's vastly more economical than people realize.

Quote from: XeviatI think our ready access to information is making trivia and fact knowledge more and more obsolete. What is important is how to interpret and apply that knowledge, not the knowledge itself. I can read up on how to build a computer, but without training it would be a slow process. I do think post-secondary eductation will further separate into cultural and technical schooling though, more than it is today.

I totally  agree with this. Right now there's a fierce debate amongst Universities as to what their purpose should be - is it to educate and enlighten people or is it to train people for their chosen career paths? There's a lot of pros and cons to both sides. Personally, I fall more towards a mix of the two (exposure to a diversity of subjects can make one a more well-rounded person, thus allowing one to become more adept at handling random situations at the work place).

Great replies  (really loving that blog, Horse).  Here's my take on a couple of my own questions, based off Xeviat's replies.

[blockquote=Xeviat]
This one is interesting and potentially touchy. A program I saw recently showed that strong magnetic fields on and around someone's brain can impart the sensation of being "with someone". The scientist theorised that we developed this sensation to believe there is more to the world and our existance so we could cope with our mortality. In a theological light, a creator could have given us this "sixth sense" to communicate with it, so the "discovery" could go either way.

I do think we're due for a new prophet, though, or at least a new widespread interpretation of things, very soon.[/blockquote]This one's very interesting to me too.  My personal prediction is that religion will stick around for a long, long time - barring crazy political paradigm shifts, forever - but that organized religions that want to survive in the long term will grow increasingly gentle, mild, moderate, and less dogmatic and puritan, concerned less and less with policing morality and more with cultural identity and personal happiness.  Pockets of hard-line fundamentalism will linger for awhile, but I think (touch wood) theocracies are on their way out.  The death throes of religious extremism will be unpleasant, but will eventually pass.

I expect nonreligiosity (including but not limited to atheism, agnosticism, and especially ignosticism) will gradually increase in the western world, and as globalization takes full effect and as the gap between the west and the developing world shrinks, nonreligiosity will rise globally, though I certainly don't think atheism will become globally dominant in the near future (cool chart for 2005).  Being "spiritual" in a non-denominational or even non-religious way will increase as well though, I'd bet.  I doubt that major scientific breakthroughs would negatively impact future religions, since most religions will have grown flexible enough to reconcile almost any aspect of faith and fact.  Alien contact would probably strike a bigger blow to religion, but I think that's extremely unlikely, unless FTL travel turns out to possible after all.

It could all go the other way, though, which would get very ugly, very fast, with militant neo-theocracies entrenching themselves, but I'd like to think that most of the planet's saner than that at this point.

[blockquote=ibid.]I think this all depends on energy production. But this comes from my own economic/political views; I don't think we can fully get away from a "rewards based" economy. Money at its heart is just a placeholder for bartering. And it would probably be more trouble than it's worth to police people and make sure they do their fair share. I think there will still be money, at least as long as we still think like humans.[/blockquote] I agree with this, pretty much.  If we ever get fully automated robotic industrial labor combined with ubiquitous renewable energy and further coupled with a stable population (i.e. not doubling like mad every few decades) and the presence of strong AIs, I could see money becoming worthless and the economy would no longer require much in the way of human input at all.  Competetive instincts might be funnelled into sports, games, intellectual debates, etc, but humanity would be faced with a new, major problem: what the heck to do with ourselves now that we don't have to scrabble week after week to feed, clothe, and house ourselves.  That's a lot of ifs, though, and even with the necesssary advancements I doubt the elimination of money could happen for at least 500 years, probably 1000 or more, unless the singularity arrives in full force, in which case all bets are off anyway.

damn dirty apes.

Quote from: Steerpike[blockquote=ibid.]I think this all depends on energy production. But this comes from my own economic/political views; I don't think we can fully get away from a "rewards based" economy. Money at its heart is just a placeholder for bartering. And it would probably be more trouble than it's worth to police people and make sure they do their fair share. I think there will still be money, at least as long as we still think like humans.[/blockquote] I agree with this, pretty much.  If we ever get fully automated robotic industrial labor combined with ubiquitous renewable energy and further coupled with a stable population (i.e. not doubling like mad every few decades) and the presence of strong AIs, I could see money becoming worthless and the economy would no longer require much in the way of human input at all.  Competetive instincts might be funnelled into sports, games, intellectual debates, etc, but humanity would be faced with a new, major problem: what the heck to do with ourselves now that we don't have to scrabbe week after week to feed, clothe, and house ourselves.

This is my prediction: developement of automation and AIs (and they need not even be self-aware) will reduce (not eliminate) the necessity of human work input, while at the same time all professions become increasingly more about the operation and maintenance of these high-tech systems. Thus there will be less and less jobs available, and more and more specialized training (and at some point, rare individual talent) will be required of the workers.

This will gradually lead to a radically different structure of economy, wherein a small minority of mankind, made up of extremely highly educated individuals, alone produces all the goods and services to cover the demand of the entire population. The rest of mankind will be perpetually unemployed and probably uneducated too (No sense wasting education on people who will never produce anything of value. Especially since they'll be easier to keep under control that way.)

Money will still be used, but only by the minority that is the worker class, who use it for the exchange of luxuries among themselves. The rest of the world subsists entirely on welfare. Because ANY kind of goods or services they could possibly come up with can - and already are - produced faster, cheaper and at a superior quality by the technocracy, the masses have no means of earning income, and thus possess no purchasing power. This arrengement mandates the transfer of all political power to the small worker class. Seeing as they do all the work (thereby also keeping the media, governmental and military systems running), they very naturally will be the ones who get to call the shots.

Quote from: Elemental_Elf The Internet fundamentally transformed life for billions of people (we could not have this debate with out it) yet no vision of the future truly predicted anything close to the internet (and the way it has permeated our society).

On this point I will disagree, there has been speculation about the possibility of a worldwide communications network for well over 150 years (at least). Of course at the time the concept was envisioned as something more inline with a gigantic intercontinental system of telegraph lines but the idea itself was the same, nigh instantaneous communication between any two points on earth.

Quote from: NomadicOn this point I will disagree, there has been speculation about the possibility of a worldwide communications network for well over 150 years (at least). Of course at the time the concept was envisioned as something more inline with a gigantic intercontinental system of telegraph lines but the idea itself was the same, nigh instantaneous communication between any two points on earth.

Their vision of the future was still limited by the technology of their day. The internet is vastly different than a Telegraph or even a telephone. We may have inklings of what is to come but the way it is implemented will be very different than what we imagine currently.

[blockquote=Ghostman]This will gradually lead to a radically different structure of economy, wherein a small minority of mankind, made up of extremely highly educated individuals, alone produces all the goods and services to cover the demand of the entire population. The rest of mankind will be perpetually unemployed and probably uneducated too (No sense wasting education on people who will never produce anything of value. Especially since they'll be easier to keep under control that way.)

Money will still be used, but only by the minority that is the worker class, who use it for the exchange of luxuries among themselves. The rest of the world subsists entirely on welfare. Because ANY kind of goods or services they could possibly come up with can - and already are - produced faster, cheaper and at a superior quality by the technocracy, the masses have no means of earning income, and thus possess no purchasing power. This arrengement mandates the transfer of all political power to the small worker class. Seeing as they do all the work (thereby also keeping the media, governmental and military systems running), they very naturally will be the ones who get to call the shots.[/blockquote]This is a scary prospect, but a possible one.  My hope would be that with enough abundance (i.e. lots and lots of easy-to-make energy) the population wouldn't be merely reduced to living off welfare, goods and services would literally be free: our entire concept of exchange would be made moot.  I'd actually predict that this would lead to a far higher level of education on average, but it wouldn't be technical or career-oriented education, but rather learning for its own sake, a totally academic or "pointless" form of learning - learning as entertainment, as means of pure self-development.  Even if formal higher education becomes limited or non-existant save for the elite, as information becomes increasingly easy to come by via the internet and other tech, people will probably be decently self-educated.  Admittedly this is the extreme utopian possibiliy.  Perhaps your somewhat bleaker picture might morph into mine over time, given the right economic transitions.

Do you think the artists, the actors, the directors, the academics, the video game designers - heck, the tabletop roleplaying designers - will disappear once the uber-worker seizes control of the now-automated means of production?  If we did have narrow, non self-aware AI and the superelite working class have dedicated their lives to becoming technocrats, they'd likely not be the most creatively inclined individuals.  What about the people who make custom, artisan furniture, the racecar drivers, the dancers, the athletes, the singers, the priests, the social workers, the fashion designers, the organic farmers - hell, what about the prostitutes?  What about lawyers, doctors, dentists?  There are plenty of products - usually artistic or social ones - that don't lend themselves to automation.  Isn't it possible that instead of becoming an unemployed parasitic mass existing only to consume at the beck and call of the technocracy humanity instead will simply orient itself away from labour and focus on different pursuits?  Sure we won't have soldiers and factory workers anymore, sure there won't be a lot of corporate middlemen, but unless the technocrats are brutal fascist dictators who outlaw art and education - which I doubt would ever happen, again, touch wood (!) - I think a good number of us might still have "careers," even if we aren't being paid per se.