What Will Life Be Like In 100 Years - Part 1
One of my favourite things to do is to look back and study how we humans have advanced over thousands of years, what the major milestones were and how it reshaped our lives.
It gives you immensely useful perspective of the most important events in history and positions you well to look forward to the future and what it brings. It is really, very interesting and exciting to think about what the world will be like in the future.
Given the current extent of our technology, and all the cutting-edge research going on in various fields, one thing is for sure. In the coming 100 years, our world and lives, will be so profoundly different that it will be akin to something straight out of a science fiction movie.
Making predictions about too far into the future might not be possible and will at best be vague because we wouldn’t have enough data, but making predictions about the next 100 years is certainly doable (although it is certain that there will be many surprises there too).
So, let’s take a look at what life might look like in the year 2117.
1. Cities
Over population is one of the biggest problems for us right now and if things don’t change imagine how big of a problem will it be in a hundred years. It is predicted that by then, world population will reach 11 billion people. That’s a lot!
To house these many people, our cities will need to evolve. Not only will we make buildings taller, we will also make them deeper, so that we are able to live both above the ground and underneath it.
Also, underwater buildings will be a thing. With land resources scarce, we will turn towards building small cities underwater. There are many projects already researching this. Also, our homes will be 3-D printed and made within a day with designs that can be downloaded from the internet!
2. 3D Printed Food
Just recently there was a report that a NASA funded project created 3D printed pizzas which is aimed for use in space for astronauts. In a hundred years, we will be able to virtually print any food in hour homes.
Just download a recipe from the internet (from world class chefs if you’ve got the money) and just print it from the leisure of your home and enjoy! This will be very useful for our space travellers of the future too.
3. Printing Organs
Right now many people die across the world because they are not able to get their damaged organs replaced due to various reasons. This will be a thing of the past in the future. Basically we could be able to solve this problem in 2 ways and it would be totally our choice.
In the first option, our organs, be it the heart, liver, pancreas, lungs, anything, will be 3D printed using our own stem cells in a matter of hours and will be ready for transplant. In the second option, bionic organs will be available for sale and they could just be fitted into the body.
Why would anyone want bionic organs over natural organs? Well, bionic organs will provide enhanced features and give you extra “capabilities” that you don’t get with natural organs. We humans will have begun merging slowly with machines. It might begin with smaller parts and take time, but we definitely are heading down that road.
4. Genetic Modification of Humans
With the help of gene editing and nano-robots that will flow around our body on a constant repair mode, we will be able to increase our life expectancy be a lot. By how much, no one can predict, but it will certainly be close to 150 years.
We will also be able to halt ageing so after crossing a certain age or whenever you like, you could stop ageing till the day you die and look the same for the remainder of your life. It will be really….odd, when your grandma will look as young as you but she will be like 60 years older than you!
It will also allow us to make designer babies with selective traits. Obviously this would mean that everyone born would be smarter, stronger, healthier and any other traits the parents like.
All this could, of course, be banned however by the government because it would just mess with the natural ways or maybe we will evolve as a society to accept these. In that case, it will certainly be a different world.
5. Clear Energy
Fossil fuels would have been the things of past. We will have mastered nuclear fusion and the whole world will be powered by a combination of nuclear fusion and solar power with space-based solar arrays that beam power back to Earth.
Other forms of energy generation may not be around as they are just not that efficient compared to the two major ones: solar power and nuclear fusion. In any case, the Earth will be powered only by clean energy which means our environment will be on the road to recovery.
6. Travel
Our travelling will be very different from now. There will be only autonomous, electric vehicles with drones forming a major part of our transportation needs. There will be roads and there will be cars on those roads but flying cars will be an equally if not larger part of travel.
Also, travelling across the world will be much, much faster and we will possibly be flying at hypersonic speeds (5 times the speed of sound). This will enable us to go from anywhere in the world to any other place no matter how far, in a matter of hours. And flying within the country, will be only a matter of minutes.
There are a lot more ways in which the world, and with it, the human life, will change in drastic ways. New avenues will open up that were never thought possible and the world will be very unrecognisable from the one today. Stay tuned for Part 2 of this article for more where I talk about future computers, space travel, money, jobs and more.
If we haven't sent ourselves into a new dark ages before then by the time we get to 2117 I fully expect us to have colonized Mars, Asteroids, and potentially some other planets. I suspect we will use drones to accomplish many more things than we can imagine today, and they will be the key to our rapid exploitation/use of our solar system and beyond. We are tool users and virtually every tool has benevolent uses, and malevolent uses. I suspect we'll have issues with the malevolent use of many of these as well.
Yes, this century will be the decider. We can easily wipe ourselves off the face of the planet with so many tools at our disposal. Also, the singularity (AI becoming as intelligent as us) will be a huge turning point too.
Hopefully we manage to ensure our survival :)
I've been skirting some new thoughts within myself around the concept of singularity and us creating an AI or other Artificial Life Form that is beyond our capabilities.
I haven't really settled my thoughts on this.
Yet lately I've begun to wonder if the life/AI is truly better than us and carries on is this a bad thing? I don't believe it has to be.
Our biggest threat is actually ourselves more than the AI/Creations. Those things danger does not come from within the creations themselves, but rather the fact such great tech we tend to focus on turning into weapons more than any other type of tech. So if our progeny end up being used for Malevolent purposes and are better than us that would be a bad thing.
If our progeny are benevolent and better than us, then I think we may be looking at it out of fear and that actually would be a good thing.
Like I said I haven't really settled the thought yet. It is one of several things I still bounce around in my head and think about sometimes that I haven't quite formed an opinion on.
I too believe that AI will be our ultimate creation. The creation that creates other creations. What that means for us as far as our "purpose" goes, I have no idea. It might end up finishing us off or it might end up helping us evolve into the next stage whatever that might be.
One thing is for sure though, with time, AI will only get more and more intertwined with life itself and maybe, just maybe, even run our world as a "government". Society may not accept it now but someday who knows.
All this is so revolutionary and so out there that we can't even see the whole picture right now. How can we, when we don't even have enough data. I guess, with everything else, we should let the natural unfolding of events and find out when they do.
P.S. I cover the AI aspect in the part 2 of this post.
I think AI that can do basic things and extrapolate orders will be a useful tool VERY soon coupled with drone technology.
Things like building structures for humans to live in, in orbits, on planets, etc. Why couldn't we use drones for this almost now? The issue with doing this at planets and distance is the delay in communication. That is why you need the AI to extrapolate and understand tasks. Be able to say "make the ground look like this, and put your spoils/waste here" and have it be largely autonomous so the delays in communication are not as big a deal but mostly used to update tasks.
We talk about sending a manned mission to mars, and other places. I personally think we should send a small army of drones outfitted for various tasks to such places and construct a place for humans to show up and already have shelter, and such in place.
Mining asteroids. Drones seem like they would be awesome for that. Also though I am saying Drone... they don't have to be small. You could have tons of smaller drones mining asteroids and loading up cargo in a large drone that can bring ore and material to us, to a space based refinery/smelter, etc and a lot.
This is also where I see the true power of VR being super valuable. We can use this VR to make drones potentially be extensions of ourselves. The key though is the delay in communication over distance, so that is why the drones will need to be able to interpolate and fill in steps to accomplish something for a task without needing us to constantly twitch them this way or that.
You hit the nail right on the head. AI coupled with drones will change everything for us. That's why I hinted that drones will play a major role in our future development projects.
Sending them to other planets to have structures ready for us might still take time as sending a lot of them in space requires large rockets as the payload will be just huge. But we will get there eventually.
On Earth, drones will carry out a lot of different functions. Dubai is already making ambulance-drones that will carry people from their location to hospitals. Also, one country (I forget the name) is going to use drones to plant hundreds of thousands of trees to combat deforestation using drones which will shoot seeds from the air and into the soil at fixed intervals to effectively and efficiently grow forests upon forests.
And all this is already in the short term. Imagine their range of capabilities in the future. Very exciting indeed.
Nice articles.. love it