It’s quite popular to speculate about the future. Speculators have suggested all manner of possible futures from post apocalyptic nightmares to shining high tech utopias (or vice versa, even). But what will the future really look like? No, I don’t have some sort of crystal ball. I don’t actually know what the future will look like. However, it is possible to make a few educated guesses.
The biggest thing most of the high tech futures get wrong is just that. The high tech. The technology looks too technological, and far too ubiquitous. Sure, that seems like a logical extrapolation from our own present situation, but think about it. How fast are we burning through resources like fossil fuels? How about rare earth elements – the weird and wonderful things that make most of our technology actually work? Sure, the immediate term future is likely not going to look all that different from our current world, but what we are doing currently is clearly not sustainable for various reasons so what will happen when the tiny ball of resources that the tip of the inverted pyramid is balanced upon is exhausted?
Well, it will not be the apocalypse. Humans are nothing if not resourceful in the face of danger. I’m speaking of the species as a whole, not of any one particular person, here, so put that objection away. So what will happen? Technology will fade back into the background substantially. It will be used for practical purposes. Stuff that works for the job it’s doing will be kept instead of replaced to have the newest thing. We will go back to building things to last instead of just barely survive the warrantee. Technology that doesn’t actually help with our lives will become the nearly exclusive domain of the rich and powerful simply due to the cost of obtaining it. Rather than having a gigantic television screen with fancy set to boxes, several game consoles, etc., in addition to extra television sets around the house, we might have a single screen of more modest size. We might have a set top box and maybe a device that plays movies from discs. Most of us will probably still carry a communication device and that will probably be all the computation we need, but if the cost of the technology gets too high, expect land lines and shared work stations to return to the fore. Centralized computing resources will likely become the norm rather than the exception (the “cloud” in currentspeak) as the cost of hardware increases. Expect our lives to become simpler and slower. With the price of fuel going ever upward (it probably won’t ever run out), people will drive less and walk more. Public transportation will have a major uptick in smaller urban areas where it has not yet made inroads. Rural areas will likely slip back to using animal power rather than mechanical power except where there is a real benefit to the mechanical devices. You may detect a theme here – economic realities will dictate the future rather than available technology. But barring an actual apocalypse of, erm, apoclyptic proportions, the technology will not go away. It will still be there, just relagated to the background where it belongs.
The future will also hold nuclear power stations around the world providing for the baseline load on the power grid. Much of what is currently done using fossil fuels will convert to electricity as the fuels become more and more expensive and far outstrip the capabilities of the so-called safe power generation technologies. Nuclear power is clean when implemented properly and once the hysteria dies down or reality forces the issue, it will be used. Other sources like solar thermal, geothermal, wind, hydro, etc., will, of course, continue to be developed and used.
The future of humanity will likely also involve colonies in space, both on other worlds and on artificial stations. This will happen for two reasons. One is because eventually we will have to leave Earth, but the primary one is resources. We are going to need the resources eventually and there are untold tonnes of raw materials just whirling around between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, let along on the rocky planets and moons. Even the gas giants hold resources – fuel for reactors, for instance. In space, the technology will be more visible, but even then, it will be relegated to the background as much as possible, doing what it needs to do and being built to last.
That’s the good future, of course. Obviously something could come along and completely knock the stuffing out of us. That could be a natural disaster of global magnitude, say an extinction level event due to an asteroid impact. It could just as easily be self inflicted. Perhaps due to the massive impact of such an event, the predictions for these circumstances tend to be a little more realistic. It would be grim if humans survived at all. Since a future where we don’t survive is not particularly fun to contemplate (though in such a future, the Earth still goes on much as it always has), let’s assume we survive it and let’s assume we escape from the immediate aftermath and manage to form tribes that rebuild some form of civilization. What would that future look like?
Believe it or not, it will probably look very much like the good future outlined above. Consider that the same developments will be necessary in either good or bad cases in order to survive long term. We will have to adapt to a lack of fossil fuels. We will have to adjust our technology to work with the materials available. Material science will have to advance away from petroleum based materials. In the post apocalyptic version, this might actually happen faster and the resulting world could very well have a much lower permeation of technology, simply because the people living in it will not have had the resources to maintain the infrastructure build up during our current golden age (and yes, we are currently living in a golden age, problems and all).
Next time you are watching a movie or television series or reading a story about the future, think about how that future could even work. What would be required for that to be possible? Does it require some magical new breakthrough in phsyics? Does it require an infrastructure that could not have survived? Or is it more realistic? Leave aside the obvious magic like FTL travel (something we’re pretty certain is not possible). Does what remains make sense if you replace the thing that requires FTL travel with something that doesn’t? You may be worried that this will ruin your enjoyment of an otherwise good story, but it can be a fun exercise and can reveal hidden gems in a story you thought was terrible in the first place or may reveal the plot holes in one that seemed brilliant.