Possible Futures

[EmoBorg]

What Possible Future lies ahead for Humanity ?

1) RoboCop Movie Type of Future = Where the Government shrinks and Corporations take over running of certain government functions like police, fire fighting services. The future is a Corporatist style Governance of society, where most things are not free.

2) Alien Movie type of Future = Civil Government is still there but there is a strong corporate style influence in the government, where weyland yutani type of corporations launch space missions (Prometheus) and attach themselves to military operations (Aliens).

3) 28 Days Later Scenario = Future where there is a Global virus outbreak when the Mad Cow Virus mutates into a lethal strain and and is very easily spread by liquid or by air. This virus may have been bio engineered by military scientists as a biological weapon but they lose control of the virus due to an accident. All of Earth is infested and uninfected humans fight for survival.

4) Falling Skies Future = Aliens invade and conquer earth and humans become an enslaved labor force. Some humans resist, some are passive and some collaborate.

5) Star Trek Future = Where discoveries By CERN and other scientific entities leads to breakthoughs in energy technology, where energy becomes cheap, abundant and new energy matter conversion technology, that can change energy into any different elements, ends the conflicts for resources.

6) Firefly Future = Humans are forced to immigrate to other far away habitable planets when earth resources are too few to support the too many humans. Earth is eventually forgotten. Earth that was.

7) Terminator Future = Supercomputers gain sentience and rebel. They take over all nukes and launch those weapons at human settlements all across earth. Automated Factories churn out Hunter Killers and T 800s with Austrian accents to kill off the last remaining humans.

8) Matrix Future = Similar to the Terminator future except the computers use us as batteries (energy source). We Await for the ONE.

9) Avatar Scenario = We invade other worlds and exploit their resources . If the planets have native sentient beings, we try to be nice to them but we will take what we want. We will ask permission first and try to persuade them. If that fails, then we use force against them.

10) Fringe Scenario = We make contacts with various dimensions earth and end up in conflict with some of them over resources.

11) The 6th Day Scenario = Humans pioneer human cloning and those who can afford it keep blank minded clones of themselves for organ harvesting and downloading of their neural patterns into, if threatened with old age, fatal illness or fatal accidents. Thus Humans become immortal.

12) Starship Troopers Future = Earth is ruled by a quasi fascist military government because of the eventual failure of Democracy and Capitalism. We all do Military Service if we are able bodied and only those who served in the military can become citizens and gain the right to vote and stand for elected office.

 

[JarodRussell]

I'd take 13) Everythings going to be okay. For decades, if not centuries we envisioned futures that were either way too bright, or way too dark. But in the end, everything turned out to be more or less fine. No Zombie apocalypse. No machines taking over the world. No nuclear holocaust. No Big Brother society. No alien attack. And on the other side, no flying cars. No huge space stations. These are wonderful examples why fiction and reality are so far apart. We get a bit of the bright future (Internet, iPhones, green energy etc...) and a bit of the dark future (endless wars, terrorism, data privacy issues, etc...). But all in all, on a global scale, it's just fine.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

^ I think you mean 12, but in all other aspects, I agree.

 

[SmoothieX]

some combination of 2 and 9 for me.

We (USA) currently have a civil government heavily influenced by corporations - big oil, big tobacco, etc. And given humanity's history of imperialism, using force at times, 9 seems about right on a cosmic scale.

 

[PopBoy]

LOVE this thread. But you've missed out one: The Fifth Element future. Which i totally see happening. In short, its the same old - same old. Still defined by trinkets and materials we own just less space. We covet trips to places abroad like flosten paradise...filled with celebs and tv networks following them.

 

[Deks]

None of the above.
All movie or TV shows representations of the future are idiotic at best, and honestly, they have little to no grounds in reality because they have 0 idea of what our technology back in 1929 or today is capable of (let alone futuristic ones).

To that end, predictions of 'technology taking over' takes the cake in regards to being the most laughable, and of course preservation of the current socio-economic system which is on the verge of collapse.

 

[The Green Mushroom]

Aren't 1,2 and 12 happening now?

And what about the Handmaid's Tale future where the Republica...I mean an unspecified religious group turns America into a theocracy?

 

[RJDiogenes]

None of the above. A more realistic expectation of the future would be something along the lines of what Arthur C Clarke postulated in novels like Imperial Earth, The Hammer of God or 3001 (minus the Monolith). Give it 150 years or so. In the interim, William Gibson's got it covered.

 

[JarodRussell]

^ I think you mean 12, but in all other aspects, I agree.

He added new bullet points while I was writing the reply.

 

[sojourner]

<waits for Rama to show up>

 

[BillJ]

Asteroid hits Earth and kills us all.

Governments won't have the money to combat it and corporations won't think it's cost effective.

 

[Knight Templar]

This

The "We Muddle Through" Future.

Technology advances. Human nature advances considerably less slowly. There are more wars. But neither apocalyptic nor decisive. Some resources get a lot scarcer. Newer resources are discoverd. Corporations get more powerful then less powerful as opposed to government in a never ending cycle.

No alien invasions. No computer takeovers. No doomsday viruses.

 

[gturner]

I'll go with Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash", where the internet smears Western advantages around the globe so our microwave ovens are made in Tajikistan and our only comparative advantage is in software and fast pizza delivery.

Fascism is unlikely in the long term because it's not efficient to have society organized for a common purpose with the government controlling both management and labor, and one party states don't adapt and innovate across a broad front (they tend to go for big ideas). However, the platform frequently gets voted into power (Venezuela, etc) and it will likely keep recurring. Of the communist states, they will muddle on for a while and fall one by one (unlike the collapse of the East Bloc), since the surviving ones are not strongly interconnected.

I would anticipate losing small parts of Europe to Islam, due to demographics, with defacto enclaves at minimum and whole cities or states a long-term possibility.

What is probably very likely is that the information and surveillance tools we're developing will be badly abused by many countries around the globe, offsetting some of the technology's liberating and democratizing effects that we saw during the Arab Spring. As oppressive governments gain better abilities at eavesdropping on citizens and hacking networks, which they'll have to do to survive, their control will become more omnipresent and effective.

For disaster scenarios, the most likely is probably an engineered virus, since the tools and technologies are becoming available to basement hobbyists, much less megamaniacal governments, and too many scientists think potentially devastating information should be in the public domain (like the resent attempt to release the genetic sequence of an H5N1 avian flu virus modified for efficient mammal-to-mammal airborne transmission).

 

[Gotham Central]

I think that the corporate future is probably inevitable (at least in the US) in the short term. Some form of neo-gilded age with a small, insanely rich upper class with an ever expanding underclass and no social services to fill the gap is probably where we are headed in the near term. That, system, is ultimately unsustainable in the long run. Short of genetically engineering/drugging the populace into absolute passivity, eventually people will have enough abuse and strike back. What that will look like I have no idea.

The biggest problem with the corporate future is that it makes a devastating global pandemic more likely. In the US there is the belief that hug swaths of the population should not even be able to see a doctor, let alone have access to preventative care. As that sentiment permeates more of the global elites and they hoard more wealth and medical care to themselves, the make the likelihood of an uncontrolled outbreak more likely.

 

[gturner]

The biggest problem with the corporate future is that it makes a devastating global pandemic more likely. In the US there is the belief that hug swaths of the population should not even be able to see a doctor, let alone have access to preventative care. As that sentiment permeates more of the global elites and they hoard more wealth and medical care to themselves, the make the likelihood of an uncontrolled outbreak more likely.

Um, rich people hate going to the doctor just as much as anyone does, so it would be pretty bizarre for them to monopolize a system whose treatments <i>are often unpleasant</i>. Rich people aren't exactly lining up for chemo just because they can afford it and it's more adventurous than a fishing expedition in Thailand. Some of them probably overtreat their kids (dragging the tots to the doctor whenever they get a runny nose), but that wastes more of their time than the doctor's.

Is there a rich person out there somewhere, stockpiling vaccines? Why anyone would want to own more than a family's worth of any vaccine is beyond me, since sticking yourself fifty times is actually much worse than doing it just once. Vaccinating against a vast array of potential threats is also not recommened (some of the Soviet bio-weapon scientists took so many vaccinations that it messed up their immune systems).

 

[sojourner]

In the US there is the belief that huge swaths of the population should not even be able to see a doctor, let alone have access to preventative care.

Um, what? Who is this held by?

 

[gturner]

In the US there is the belief that huge swaths of the population should not even be able to see a doctor, let alone have access to preventative care.

Um, what? Who is this held by?

Tom Cruise, or does he just apply it to psychiatrists?

 

[Gryffindorian]

A Star Wars future, where the Earth looks like Coruscant - gigantic skyscrapers, repulsor-lift aerial vehicles, Droids everywhere, electronic gadgets and machines, maybe even aliens from other planets. Kinda like Futurama.

 

[captcalhoun]

a world of constant warfare and environmental collapse, where the survivors try to eke out a living in a ruined society and the population is falling thanks to the wars, the floods, storms, the new super-bugs and the choking pollution.

 

[gturner]

a world of constant warfare and environmental collapse, where the survivors try to eke out a living in a ruined society and the population is falling thanks to the wars, the floods, storms, the new super-bugs and the choking pollution.

Arguing against that is the plummeting rate of warfare (the 21st century total US casualties isn't near a bad day in the Civil War, and the rate is about 1% that of WW-I, and we were barely in WW-I). War deaths haven't exceeded drunk driving deaths from any state that starts with the letter 'M'.

Likewise, the environment is is staggeringly clean combared to the 1970's, to the point that we're having to measure the pollutants we used to wade through in parts per trillion quantities. The polar bear population has exploded since the 1970's because we're not shooting enough of them.

If you look at deaths from storms, the trends are all drastically down across the past century. Flooding deaths have plummeted, tornado deaths have plummeted, hurricane deaths have plummeted. Heat deaths have plummeted and freezing deaths have plummeted.

I know once you live in a nice house in a beautiful neighborhood with weather warnings from multiple radars and medivac helicopters on call, it's nice to pretend that your life is actually at risk and you're braving all sorts of deadly catastrophes, but it is just a fantasy. The only environmental risk we face is from the all-you-can-eat buffet and three-drink happy hour specials.

Based on the data and trends, over-indulgence is the long term risk we face personally, so the OP's question is more about what could break this cycle of comfort and joy.