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The Future

09:13 / 04.03.04

As a kind of vox pop companion to Sax's thread about the collapse of society in the Headshop, I thought I'd ask you lot what you think about the future. Where do you think we'll be in two hundred years time, or even by the end of our lifetimes? Back in caves, or colonising Venus? How does this make you feel - happy, sad, exhilarated? Will anything change? Will it all change?

Well?

09:16 / 04.03.04

200 years? Feh!
I thought we were supposed to be done in 8.

09:27 / 04.03.04

It's 2020 that we're done for, isn't it? Isn't that when we have the big global warming catastrophe?

I have a big fear of the future but this entirely relates to the fact that I have a son. Any parent fears that their child will grow up to a horrible world; apparently when I was little my Mum used to fear that we'd have had a Nuclear War by about now.

I like to think that we'll be a people at one with themselves and the Universe by 2200 but the reality of it is that we'll have probably bombed each other to bits by then. And if we haven't done that then we're certain to have ruined the planet ecologically and made it uninhabitable for ourselves.

So all that will be left is perculiar blue plants that thrive on noxious gases.

And cockroaches.

10:52 / 04.03.04

i don't care what happens in the future what will happen will happen if the world is destroyed we only have ourselves to blame i live each day as if it is my last because i know that with the leaders we have at the moment our future is unpredictable

11:03 / 04.03.04

And you feel that punctuation goes against living that way, presumably?
Living each day as if it were your last tends to lead to big credit card bills when reality sets in.

I think we'll be fine. There will continue to be new developments, both technical and medical, and big scares about each of them, but then people will carry on living, loving, having babies and doing the best they can.

My main fear would be that things will swing from the current, fairly secular situation (in the UK, at least) and we'll see a big religious movement grow up, with strict morals and rules that I wouldn't be happy with.

11:04 / 04.03.04

like it wasn't when there were other leaders?

where i live, society's been roughly this shape for about five-hundred years. it just feels like arrogance to me to assume that it'll change irrevocably within my lifetime.

but i won't go into my fear of apocalypse = avoiding the issue of one's own death theory here. actually i think i just have. sorry

11:40 / 04.03.04

Funny you should ask this, because I actually come from the future. Let's see now...

2015: America will go metric. Cities will come to a standstill as people queue up outside civic halls and sports centres to be converted by hastily trained metricians. Confusion about the correct units to use will lead to several people going in 6 foot tall and coming out 6 centimetres high. These people will be re-converted to a more appropriate size, but the enlargement will leave them looking a bit pixillated and less detailed than they should be.

2018: Hundreds of lives will be saved every year by the discovery that a person falling from a great height can cheat death by looking at the ground through a pair of binoculars turned the wrong way round. Astronauts will achieve orbit by standing at the top of a ladder and looking the wrong way through a very powerful telescope.

4004: Humans will have evolved into fish-like creatures that swim through the air. Their food will be grown on Mars and deposited on the surface of the Earth's atmosphere, where it will float about like fluffy clouds of bread for the fish people to swim up to and nibble at (or bring down with rocket-assisted harpoons if they're feeling lazy). We will all live in ruined castles and travel about in giant plastic divers.

Does that help?

12:00 / 04.03.04

I was at the supermarket yesterday, you have to queue up and wait for a till to become free a loudspeaker lets you know when a till is free.. so some guy decides he wants to go get some yogurt and then comes back to the till he was meant use but by then someone else has come along and is using it... I've never seen so much chaos, people we're losing it, scrambling around trying to find a free space....

I don't hold much hope for us

12:18 / 04.03.04

Saveloy: That helps a lot, thanks. Phew!

unheimlich manoeuvre

12:50 / 04.03.04

in the future...

Russia will join the EU (Eurasian Union) in a move to counterbalance the ascendant China.

USA will be renamed the Islamic Republic of America after a brief but bloody civil war.

Taiwan, Nepal, Korea, Singapore and other renegade provinces will be reunited with the People's Republic of China.

The messiah will return in the guise of a black french woman (sans-papiers). She will be ridiculed and die of a drugs overdose in a private correctional facility.

New medicine and technology will allow the indefinite extension of human life, although not in health as new diseases are discovered on a daily basis.

Tryphena Absent

13:34 / 04.03.04

colonising Venus?

Not likely with the funding space is getting right now. Anyway the majority of people here think it's a bad idea that Bush wants to go to the moon! How the hell do you expect to colonise Venus if you don't want people to collect samples from the moon?

13:47 / 04.03.04

Yeah but that's Bush innit, most people think it's a bad idea to let George Bush out of his bedroom in the morning. "Colonising Venus" sprung to mind because - I think - of a series of books I read back when I were a yoot, an Usbourne series about "the future". The only one I can really remember was "Future War" which had giant robots on the cover, but one of the other one's talked about seeding Venus atmosphere to generate rain so we could colonise it. Tch, it's 2004. It's already the future, and we haven't even started.

14:06 / 04.03.04

Perhaps we should start a Barbelith lottery syndicate, win a shed-load of money, buy an island and move to it to prepare for The Future and What It Might Bring.

We could usher in a brave new world on Barbelisle and then colonise the rest of the planet. And go to Venus.

14:08 / 04.03.04

I reckon I'll have a chance to see space as a tourist if I live as long as my grandparents are. That'll be cool.

Biological advances are probably going to figure largely in the near future. Since cloning caused a stir lots of funding for similar projects was opened up, so perhaps we'll have cloned organ transplants elongating our life span?

I suspect that most of the cool stuf that's going to happen is stuff we can't really conceive of right now, I'm looking forward to the surprises.

14:47 / 04.03.04

Sax: What are the chances of us orgainsing a lottery syndicate after the Mixtape fiasco?

14:56 / 04.03.04

Oi! That's still ongoing! As a matter of fact it nearly gets completed in 3067 but is lost in the teleporter before the final track can be put on.

18:58 / 04.03.04

Read a little history.
Look at some cave paintings.
It`s allways like this.

20:34 / 04.03.04

I dunno about you, but I always thought that the future would have happened by now - you know, all the bacofoil outfits and hovercars and so on. It's the 21st century, for God's sake...
The mundanity of life sans ray guns and food pills disappoints me greatly. I only hope that this situation will be resolved ASAP.

20:39 / 04.03.04

I dunno about you, but I always thought that the future would have happened by now - you know, all the bacofoil outfits and hovercars and so on. It's the 21st century, for God's sake...

Nah, the toys are being kept from us by the looks of things. What about the cars that run on water? You hear about them being made but then they never appear. Like petrol's the better thing or something.

Oh wait a minute : water wouldn't cost a shitload would it, ahh, sorry i was late to click there.

Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo

15:10 / 06.03.04

In the future, all TV will be pay per veiw and Americans will continue to get fatter until their weight crushed the rest of the world under their mighty Nike shoes.

And I will continue to tell the neighbor kids to get the hell off of my lawn.

22:30 / 07.03.04

I think that within 60 years we will have longevity treatments of some sort or another that can expand the human lifespan to 150+ years.

I believe that thinking optimistically about the future helps the present seem brighter and causes me to strive towards making the future as beautiful as I think it can be.

The preceeding was an opinion sponsored by my current identity, and as such does not mean it is always held by the entity commonly known as "Pooka" - Change is Good, after all.

-Pooka

14:41 / 09.03.04

in 2200? there won't be any future.
in 2150 will come ufo's from betelgeuse and will kill everybody except eagels, but they will eventually die too.