Thinking About: The Future

I’ve just finished a batch of 10 SF novels based on a variety of Future Earth’s and it couldn’t but make me think about the planets future (not that I don’t do this anyway on a regular basis). Most of the scenario’s outlined in the novels where, in my opinion, rather unlikely or just too far fetched. I don’t think that a general nuclear war is likely any time soon for instance. It’s not that it can’t happen, or won’t happen, but I find it difficult to conceive of the circumstances where such a thing might come about. I do think it likely, however, that at some point in the next 25-30 years that a nuke will go off somewhere – probably as the result of terrorism. The most likely candidates for an actual nuclear exchange between states are Pakistan and India but I think even those odds are pretty long at this point. I think that its probable that Israel will be stupid enough to attack Iran on the suspicion that it will sooner rather than later develop nuclear weapons of its own thereby initiating a balance of terror between the two countries that Israel simply cannot abide. I predict that any war between the two will not go well for the Israelis or the region as a whole.

Internationally it’s pretty certain that China will continue her rise to world domination and that the USA will continue her decline. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least that the single Super-power of the future is China rather than America. Presently I see two options for American decline – the slow path or the fast path. I’m hoping for the slow path as the fast one could get very messy for the rest of us. The Europeans will, as always, muddle through. The present malaise in the Euro-zone will continue for a few more years and then, I suspect, get steadily better. I predict that there will be a lot more integration coming up and we’ll probably end up with a United States of Europe before too long – say 25-30 years. The UK – if it still exists after Scotland pulls out of the Union (followed by Wales I suspect) – will sit on the sidelines as always.

The climate will definitely get worse before it gets better. Global Warming is too advanced now – even if we actually start doing something about it today – not to have a negative effect on human existence for decades to come. I predict several major disasters where at least tens of thousands of people will die directly due to climate events. It will take at least two, though probably three, such events to occur before world opinion demands something be done about it. This will be too late (if it isn’t already) to avert some bad times before we shift the worlds economy along a much more sustainable path. Advanced technology – particularly in the field of biology - will certainly help there. Our knowledge of the genetic code will enable us to literally weather the storm ahead. Many species we take for granted will go extinct but others will be created by us. The world’s ecosystem in 100 years time will be very different from today – and that includes us too. Our knowledge of our own genome will initially allow us to build better drugs but that will be child’s play compared to first fixing and then improving our own genes. In the not too distant future we will command our own evolutionary path. Where exactly that will lead is anyone’s guess at this point.

Hopefully in the next century we will finally get off this rock and start moving out into the Solar System. This will be the start of something really big. With the amount of virtually free energy and the staggering amount of natural resources out there it will make the Industrial Revolution look like a small cottage industry in a poorly resourced 3^rd world nation. The future of humanity is most definitely in space.

The next 100 years are going to be quite something – both terrifying and awe inspiring. It is pretty certain that, as our powers continue to grow, we will do some truly horrifying things to each other. I can only hope that we don’t go too far or are actually stupid enough to put our very existence in peril. If we manage to survive the next century relatively intact we should be in a position to become a system spanning civilisation. Once off the Earth in sufficient numbers to make any individual colony viable it will be very difficult indeed to stop us going further. We are ingenious enough and crazy enough to both dream of going to the stars and actually getting there. Given enough time and luck I think we can move out into the Galaxy. That’s if we can survive long enough to make the first steps off world. That, I think, is the hard part. It’s quite possible that most civilisations never make the leap into deep space because, in any number of ways, they’ve managed to kill themselves off before being able to do so. Maybe we can be one of the few to make it. Wouldn’t that be fun!