The World of 2120 AD?

[Yora]

I decided to put this into Media Discussions instead of Science & Technology, since I am more interested in how people imagine the future these days than how engineers estimate their progress.

Some days ago I came across the phrase "the future has been cancelled". No clue what it originally referred to, but I saw it in something related to retro-aesthetics in contemporary culture. And it had me thinking that at least in my experiences, science fiction had for a long time created lots of vision of how life would be a hundred or two hundred years in the future. It seems to have been very popular from the late 1800s to maybe the 60s. After that seems to have been a period where near-future urban decay was quite popular (the wider space in which cyberpunk exists).
And since then I think I have not really been following science fiction very much.

Do we even still have visions about life on Earth a hundred years into the future now? I also noticed a strong trend in sci-fi games from the last 20 years that went away from lasers and hover cars, and instead you have worlds like Halo that are set 500 years into the future but people still use machine guns, cars with wheels, and helicopters. Aside from space ships, human technology and culture does not seem to have evolved at all. It's a distant future that is deliberately un-futuristic.

That being said, I could all very well be that I just don't follow any of the contemporary science fiction worlds that deal with the future of Earth when the younger generations of today have reached the end of their extended lives. Or has the future indeed been cancelled and our culture isn't looking forward to the world of tomorrow anymore? Which I wouldn't necessarily see as an intellectual crisis or sign of cultural decay. Maybe it really was just a fiction fad that was caused by industrialization and lasted for a century.

[Lord Raziere]

If I were to make a vision of the future today...and want to be idealistic about it?

It'd probably be Solar tech. just, solar panels on every building, every form of transportation being run on electricity and communal, recycling everywhere, huge emphasis on every thing being sustainable, refined versions of the social media we have today to fix some of its current problems, lots of farms being local and full of variation in its crop, cultures that emphasize some form of collectivism and selflessness and to do your part, at some point we'll figure out how to connect movie theaters to the internet and just put stuff made on it on the big screen...

its the corporations I'm not sure about, because while I'm sure some form of big budget mass media will persist, I'm not sure if it will do so in its current form with the current companies that do it, and I'm not sure if copyright law will remain in its current form the way media and internet is going, because its so easy to copy and paste and such and so on in so many ways, that there are more remixes of some songs than the song itself out there for example. and its only going to get easier and easier as the technology improves and as we figure out ways to easily edit and make something you could previously only do with something big budget and limited to big corporations. so in this idealistic vision of the future, franchises work very differently, where companies basically become something like DMs Guild or Mario Maker on a massive scale and while they would have a canonical core, a lot of what they'd sell or give you would be fan-created content on their site or program or whatever.

like at a certain point we'd just get Marvel Maker, or Pokemon Maker and such and so on while there would be core games and such, they'd release much less often while fan-created stuff would be much more frequent and basically everything will be high-quality fan fiction made by fans for fans. especially with fabbers being a thing. thats honestly where I see that going.

governments I see getting more decentralized, just to make sure the big civilization we have is manageable.

as for things like lasers, robots, and that sort of thing, we know rocket packs are unfeasible, laser guns if they become a thing won't work like they do in movies, they will just be a constant beam if visible at all, and you just use them to burn people from afar in a slicing motion. robots are probably going to be a thing, but it remains to be seen if a bad thing or a good thing. robots and artificial intelligence are kind of the big wild card in this that will make or break anything else that involves them. I honestly can't imagine them being anything but this big scary question mark that we just hope won't screw us over too badly.

thats what I imagine it to be. its going to be a lot of collectivist, semi-open source kind of stuff that cares more about communities and not being so uptight about what idea you really own, but less uptight about what job you do as long as your contributing to the overall good or whatever. I can't really put it into a simple concept, because a lot of it, I see as less stratified and pyramid like we get with the economy today, and our relationships to various things about the world being more healthy rather than any single improvement that will be the next big thing or whatever, its complicated.

[Mechalich]

Do we even still have visions about life on Earth a hundred years into the future now? I also noticed a strong trend in sci-fi games from the last 20 years that went away from lasers and hover cars, and instead you have worlds like Halo that are set 500 years into the future but people still use machine guns, cars with wheels, and helicopters. Aside from space ships, human technology and culture does not seem to have evolved at all. It's a distant future that is deliberately un-futuristic.

That being said, I could all very well be that I just don't follow any of the contemporary science fiction worlds that deal with the future of Earth when the younger generations of today have reached the end of their extended lives. Or has the future indeed been cancelled and our culture isn't looking forward to the world of tomorrow anymore? Which I wouldn't necessarily see as an intellectual crisis or sign of cultural decay. Maybe it really was just a fiction fad that was caused by industrialization and lasted for a century.

Starting roughly in the 1980s (in the US, but it holds more broadly as a trend) the broad culture sphere of speculative fiction shifted from being dominated by science fiction to dominance by fantasy. There are many reasons why this happened, both due to overriding societal trends and also to emergence of specific cultural touchstones (Star Wars is a big one, D&D is also significant) but as a result the market for 'futuristic' stories came to be dominated by fantasy stories set in space rather than idea based science fiction.

Halo, for instance, is a military space fantasy where society is based on today's lifestyle, or even a past lifestyle in a futuristic setting. The actual story is built around ancient modes and the advanced technology is merely trappings, not directly integrated into the story itself.

Mid-range future science fiction is still a thing (and in terms of the thread title, Kim Stanley Robinson wrote a novel titled New York 2140 just two years ago), it just doesn't have the presence in popular culture it used to. Additionally the recent era of speculative fiction has been dominated by visions that are either at least moderately dystopian (ex. Snow Crash) or deeply invested in some measure of transhumanism (ex. Blue Remembered Earth) or both (ex. The Rapture of the Nerds). The RPG Eclipse Phase, which was assembled by mining the core technological elements and themes from the last two decades or so of this sort of fiction is a distillation of where all of this is going. It also prominently features a hard takeoff singularity case, which is relevant. The Singularity, whether it will or will not happen, how it might occur, and when it conceivably happen, casts a massive shadow over any sort of 100-years out novel that might be written today.

[5crownik007]

People walk around, not really looking at the street in front of them, but the digital interface projected into their field of vision by their neural implants. Poverty is nonexistent, obesity is significantly curbed as people use their neural implants to control their biological impulses. Of course, some live without, but they are typically viewed strange in society, like someone without a cell phone today. The neural implants allow people to do things like block other people from their perception- their brain simply edits out that person from reality, removes any feeds, replaced their likeness on the street with that of another person, and makes sure the other person's implant does the same. Crime is also almost completely unheard of due to this, as criminals are quickly caught, either by the victim's neural feed being recorded and replayed, or by the criminal's being examined remotely. Societies may use this feature for immoral, Orwellian reasons, such as to implant thoughts or even remove ideas from the consciousness of society.

Electricity is mostly generated by renewable sources- not because humans stopped using oil, but because there was no more oil left to burn. By majority, power is generated through nuclear fusion, then fission, geothermal and hydroelectric. Solar became unpopular as the skies blackened and extreme weather events made the fragile panels vulnerable to damage- the same reason wind power also became nonviable. Power stations are well maintained, because they provide the source of life in this world. Nuclear waste from aging fission plants is usually buried deep underground, instead of being left in cooling pools for decades, like they used to be. Fusion plants are quickly overtaking any other source of power, as helium-3 is mined on a colossal scale from lunar regolith like the new oil- clean oil, is the marketing brand.

The environmental catastrophe was not averted, but simply sprinted into, headlong without looking back. As the planet ran out of coal, oil, gas and other fuels dense in chemical energy, the following civil unrest only made the problem worse, as infrastructure that relied on the electricity generated by fossil fuels was destroyed in anger by mobs of starving people- wondering why the food was no longer in the stores, and where the ambulances were for their family, and where the police was for the criminals, and where the fire brigade was for the burning houses. But, decades passed, the crises ended(not without casualties exceeding that of history's greatest wars, mostly to starvation and rioting). The environment did not re stabilize, but humans simply moved to other areas, waiting for the planet to recover(which it never will). Extraterrestrial travel was quickly ruled out as the answer to the environmental problem, to quote some of the greatest thinkers of the time, "There is no planet B. Any problems we have on Earth are 100 times harder to solve on another planet with no air to breathe, no water to drink, no magnetic field to protect from radiation."

Weapons became more widely disseminated among the population, mostly because of the collapse of society and people needing to defend themselves. It became much easier to procure weapons when so much of the world's population died, because there were so many guns to go around. Firearms are still the primary small arms weapon of the world. While directed energy weapons are real, their primary constituents are Microwave Area Denial Systems, Electrolasers, dazzlers and blinders- weapons not particularly designed to kill an opponent. Their use is specialized, due to their limited operating conditions. MADS became popular with police forces attempting to disperse rioting crowds.

Space travel a pursuit still relegated to near fiction- excluding the attempts to find alternate fuel sources for civilization. Once the economic incentive became utterly undeniable, space travel was inevitable. Competing companies perfected the design of chemical rocket engines, created hybrid air-breathing to closed-cycle engines. Single-Stage-To-Orbit spacecraft, which would then refuel at stations in low-earth orbit made space travel cheap enough to sustain an economy. Unfortunately, there's no other reason to go to space. "Because it's cool" isn't good enough for the churning gears of civilization. The only people in space are still astronauts- but astronauts working for the companies who pay them to find things, maintain harvesting robots, repair old spacecraft. Kessler syndrome's fatal conclusion was barely avoided by a collective industry wide effort to divert space debris into the ocean. Tiny chunks of spacecraft were systematically caught, decelerated and dropped into the sky to burn over the course of decades. There is still less than 6% of the debris removed, but the removal is at a greater rate than accumulation.

Governments that managed to survive the collapse are shadows of their former selves. New nations which rose from the ashes divided once again across ethic and ideological grounds. Too many mini-wars broke out as tiny nations "reclaimed" lost territories and then quickly collapsed, merged into a larger, more successful state. The existing states in the present are numerous but homogeneous. Hundreds of international accords were created to regulate and control other nations, making a soup of countries superficially different from one another. Due to the collapse of civilization, the transnational corporations from the old world completely disbanded. There was no amount of American Dollars saved in offshore tax havens which could save them from running out of oil. They all collapsed, leaving behind remnants that barely resembled the greater whole. No industry could survive without transportation or electricity, both of which were fully dependent on oil. There are new corporations now, but larger by an order of magnitude, and having even greater control over the human population due to the widespread use of neural implants. Elections influenced by search engines ensure that corporate interests get the desired result. The soup of nations was created by corporations, seeking an easier target for plutocratic exploitation. Democracy is dead, its corpse being used to puppeteer the masses- not to any end other than accumulation of wealth for those at the top of the corporate ladder.

Welcome to 2120. Your life is theirs. Your eyes cannot see the real world, just the approved version. You own just enough to be satisfied, but not enough to change anything. You're not going to space. You're going to work.

[HandofShadows]

"The future has been canceled" I take it generally to mean that the optimistic view we had of the future of flying cars and clean utopian cities is not going to happen. Another take is that we as a culture are slowly becoming unable to create anything truly new, groundbreaking, or able to cause an upheaval to the current system. Things are really not going to change despite all the high tech toys we have.
　
It’s also the title of a song by Dead Cross.
　
As for 100 years in the future? I don’t think we can accurately predict 20 or even 15 years in the future. Things change way too fast. How many people 20 years ago would have predicted the death of the video rental store? Not many. There is a LOT of technology that should come online in the next 20-50 years that MIGHT greatly change the world. Fusion power, cybernetics, genetic engineering, material sciences, Mind Machine Interface, Artificial Intelligence and more.
　
The problem is not only how with technological advances change things but also what we *allow* to be changed. Let’s take a look at an interesting technology, mind mapping. Now you may think what big about mapping out the human mind? When the human mapped it allows the ability to do things to the mind. Say implant a fake memory, erase a memory or alter memories already there. The human mind could even be read someone could know what you think. Now there could be great benefits to this. People can learn a skill in just a few hours, the impact of traumatic memories could be reduced or you can remember a great concert despite not having been there. But there is a HUGE dark side to this as well. If someone in power decides that you shouldn’t remember something, you don’t remember it any more. You could be programed to be happy in an oppressive state. A freedom fighter could be remade to be a loyal soldier to fight the rebellion or sent as a sleeper agent to betray it. What happens in a society when you can’t trust your own memory about anything? For example, what if you don't remember there are 54 States in the USA?

[J-H]

Right now, it seems like we're in Heinlein's "Crazy Years", referred to as being around this time period in several of his novels.

Soma & telescreens (Logan's Run & 1984) have been replaced by social media, ubiquitous internet devices, and internet rage mobs on those who dare to disagree with the cause du jour. We haven't been to the moon in almost 50 years, and it's taken this long to just start to get private space travel going, and they still aren't putting people into orbit consistently. The pace of "hard" technological change (1918 biplanes to moon missions in ~50 years; steamships to nuclear carriers in about 60 years) has stalled in favor of "soft" tech (IT, software, medical), and some studies indicate that average IQs are actually dropping decade-over-decade.

With those trends, I think there's a lot less of the optimistic "we're going to keep growing" type S-F that I grew up with, where humanity colonizes the solar system, spreads across the stars, continues to create great feats of engineering, etc.

[Mechalich]

Right now, it seems like we're in Heinlein's "Crazy Years", referred to as being around this time period in several of his novels.

Soma & telescreens (Logan's Run & 1984) have been replaced by social media, ubiquitous internet devices, and internet rage mobs on those who dare to disagree with the cause du jour. We haven't been to the moon in almost 50 years, and it's taken this long to just start to get private space travel going, and they still aren't putting people into orbit consistently. The pace of "hard" technological change (1918 biplanes to moon missions in ~50 years; steamships to nuclear carriers in about 60 years) has stalled in favor of "soft" tech (IT, software, medical), and some studies indicate that average IQs are actually dropping decade-over-decade.

With those trends, I think there's a lot less of the optimistic "we're going to keep growing" type S-F that I grew up with, where humanity colonizes the solar system, spreads across the stars, continues to create great feats of engineering, etc.

A lot of the older space exploration heavy SF involved handwaving a variety of problems - which were in many cases known then - with various futuristic technologies that were pure phlebotinum. In particular, they involved a lot of cheating to get around the tyranny of the rocket equation, and tolerance for that sort of thing has gradually fallen off within the community as a consequence of the 'hard sf' movement. At the same time, the rapid development of computer technology has opened up an entirely new path to the stars - traveling as pure data (ex. Diaspora by Greg Egan) - that bypasses many of the problems of manned exploration, and this is a growing approach in science fiction, however, it's tied into transhumanism and the willingness of the popular audience to embrace transhumanism has been...mixed.


Somewhat unrelated, it's probably worth mentioning that science fiction authorship has undergone significant broadening in recent years, and a wide range of new voices from different backgrounds have been increasingly heard. These different perspectives often have vastly different ideas of what an optimistic future would look like compared to the old guard of authors from the first 3/4ths of the twentieth century. For example, on the most notable pieces of mid-level future science fiction to splash into the popular consciousness in the last decade is Liu Cixin's Dark Forest Trilogy, which is particularly tied to the experiences of the author's time and place. Forum rules don't really permit a detailed discussion of this, but a wider range of inputs ends up with a wider range of outputs.

[halfeye]

Brexit is a brick wall to speculation. It might or might not happen, and the future here is very different depending on whether it happens or not.

The not rich are getting relatively poorer, and people are already becoming angry about that, it's a trend that seems set to continue, I'm not sure whether it can.

All in all, I dunno.

[J-H]

I think that strays into politics a bit much for the forum. Ultimately though, I think human ingenuity and development does better when it's not drowning in a sea of conformity and bureaucracy, whether it comes from remote officials or the social pressure to align with the top items on your Newsfeed.

Social media was, perhaps, inevitable, but I think the internet was a better place before it existed.

Counter-argument: It's really easy to find "how to do X" on Youtube (and Youtube is close to being social media), versus having to search through pre-video written articles. Downside: Youtube killed a lot of forums and websites.

I suspect the most productive engineers and designers who are working on the engineering of the future (as opposed to the software packages) are not spending their time on Facebook or whatever.

Also - widespread use of uniform technology can be bad for science, if everyone assumes it was "done right the first time": https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/z...lished-studies

[BeerMug Paladin]

Ready Player One isn't a good enough future for you?

I think speculation about the future in regards to science and technology is an inherently political topic (which does not bode well for our future).

"The future has been cancelled" as a phrase, I think, is partly a cultural (not necessarily largely conscious) recognition of this phenomenon. But that's all I'll say on that. However, there's another angle that is also worth considering.

I think there's largely a recognition that all the early science fiction ideas that people were tossing around just seem like more fun when they are treated like fantasy devices rather than potentially real technology. Not to say that approach can't be thoughtful, but I don't think that's the priority of most creators of the genre. So the future is better when it's undefined, disconnected with our modern understanding of society and science.

As a consequence of this, we don't see a future society, we get our modern society but with future toys. A superficial future, without any cultural advancement.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as one usage of science fiction is as commentary on our ideas about our current society and our supposed ideals.

[Rodin]

There's also a failure to recognize "the future is now" moments.

I have on my desk a device the size of my thumbnail a device that can hold an entire library's worth of knowledge...and I'm not even using it for anything right now. With the push of a button, I can have a face to face video conversation with a family member on the other side of the planet. I've seen live TV interviews with people who are IN SPACE.

It may not be flying cars, but the technology we do have exceeds the wildest dreams of many an early sci-fi writer. Part of the difficulty of writing the world of 2120 AD is imagining it, because we've already achieved so much of what previous sci-fi writers dreamed up.

[Yora]

Someone mentioned the 80s as the time when fantasy started to overtake science-fiction. Which might not have been coincidence. The 80s were also the time when fantastic electronic devices became accessible to regular consumers. And when we got many of the futuristic gadgets into our hands, we noticed that they didn't solve all our problems or changed the world in the way we expected to.

These days, pretty much all technology that was speculated in the 50s to 70s is either reality or has been proven impossible by our current understanding of physics. And still, when I look at the average German village or small town, they look exactly like they did in old photos from the 70s, just with different cars in the drive ways and solar panels on the roof. You see the occasional robot lawn mower doing its thing by itself, which is pretty futuristic when I think back to 1990, but it doesn't feel like a meaningful change. Perhaps people today just have a much more realistic perspective on technological progress?

I think the biggest technological revolution of my lifetime will be fusion power. The scientific principles are well established and we have several proofs of concept. The only real obstacle that remains is making the magnetic containment generators more energy efficient so they don't use up all the energy that the fusion creates. And one fusion reactor that should do that is currently being build. This really is not fantasy. There is nothing in physics that indicates it shouldn't work.
The consequences of fusion power would be massive. All human economic activity basically comes down to energy. First it was human and animal labor, then steam power, and now petroleum and nuclear power. When we say things are expensive, what we mean is that they require a lot of energy to make. There are so many resources we could use, or machines that we could build, but they are too expensive because they would need so much energy. There is enough water in the world for all people, it just takes energy to purify and transport it, which is too expensive for many places to afford. There are many much cleaner alternatives to polluting technologies, but they require too much energy to be economical. Conflicts about resources are usually not about the resources actually being rare, but about the resources being accessible at an affordable price. And a lot of major conflicts that are ideological on the surface really just use ideology as a justification of claims over resources. Now the first commercial fusion reactor will be extremely expensive, because it's parts are so expensive. And the parts are so expensive because the materials and production are so expensive. And materials and production are expensive because they require a lot of energy. The fuel for early fusion reactors might be quite expensive because it requires a lot of energy to get.
But once you have a good number of fusion reactors in operation, they provide the energy required to get the materials cheaply, produce the parts cheaply, and get the fuel cheaply. That means they provide the energy to make more fusion reactors cheaply. When you have cheap energy, everything becomes cheap! Fusion power will be the most important technology since the steam engine. Maybe even the most important technology since agriculture. It will be a complete game changer. Such a complete game changer that I really have no clue what the game will be. The ITER reactor is planned to be completed in 2025, which is very soon. But I don't expect the technology to make its full impact for a considerable time after that. Once you have a first operational prototype, another long time will pass while people are developing the first commercial models, and just having four our five across the world won't change human civilization. It will take a long time for that technology to provide a majority of all energy on Earth and really change what we think of as economy. But 50 years from now, when I'll be in my 80s, changes will start to become apparent. A 100 years from now, fusion power will have made the world at least as different compared to now as the internet changed the world today from 100 years ago.

[J-H]

Fusion power's been promised for a long time. I'll believe it when it gets here :)

We may have something like Battletech's lore's Kearny-Fuchida FTL drive. "The math was done for 90 years, but everyone thought they were just a couple of cranks."

[OutOfThyme]

Fusion power's been promised for a long time. I'll believe it when it gets here :)

We may have something like Battletech's lore's Kearny-Fuchida FTL drive. "The math was done for 90 years, but everyone thought they were just a couple of cranks."

There's definitely work being done on things like ITER, but the phrase "fusion's always 60 years away" exists for a reason. The good thing is that once the first fusion plant is built, the next ones are going to be significantly faster to build because there's been plenty of advances in science in the process of designing said first plant to begin with.

[J-H]

Only if there are no accidents. Nuclear power is still safe and non-polluting, and yet the US hasn't managed to build a new nuclear power plant since before I was born.