• Question: What dramatic changes would the world have in a 100+ years?

    Asked by to Nat, Nate, Roberto, Sam, Sarah on 18 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Nate Bastian

      Nate Bastian answered on 18 Jun 2014:

      Tough question, as it’s almost impossible to predict the future 100 years in advance. Think back to 1914, do you think anyone could even imagine the existence of computers, mobile phones, heart transplants or even vaccines. One thing is for certain though, we won’t be using coal or oil as fuel, because we will either have moved on to other fuel sources, or they will have run out, and we’ll be back to living in the pre-electrical power era.

    • Photo: Natasha Stephen

      Natasha Stephen answered on 18 Jun 2014:

      This is a really good question! It’s definitely nearly impossible to consider how much we will have moved on within the next 100 years because as Nate says, no one could have imagined what the world would be like today back in 1914!

      I’m not so sure on the fossil fuels thing though; we have reserves of most fossil fuels that will last for hundreds of years yet to come, they are just going to get more and more challenging to extract and use so it may not be worthwhile to do so any more. Hopefully technology will move on so that we are no longer so dependent on fossil fuels and instead we can use a renewable, greener source of energy.

      I would like to think that within the next 100 years, a big dramatic change for us would be that space exploration would become the ‘norm’ and that we will have had multiple people not only walk on the Moon but also on Mars too! We have so much more to learn about our own neighbours in the solar system, it would be a shame if our development didn’t allow for such exploration and discovery!

    • Photo: Sam Connolly

      Sam Connolly answered on 18 Jun 2014:

      It’s very hard to predict what will happen in the future, people usually get it wrong! I think the main things that are likely to happen are a big change to more efficient ways of doing things and automatic things. I think it’s likely that there will be a lot of electric cars which are all driven automatically by computers, which may even stop the need for anyone to own one, as they could just call one up with their phone and just use it while they need it. Computers are already being integrated into more and more things and connected together, so in the future almost everything is likely to have a computer in. Things like robots are also getting better and cheaper, so I’m sure there’ll be a lot more of them around in a hundred years time. Space travel will be cheaper and better too – it might be that almost anyone can afford to go into space in 100+ years! Apart from technology, it’s hard to tell, but I’d like to think there would have been a lot of progress in things like making sure everyone in the world has access to things like clean water, food and medicine, education and the internet. A hundred years ago most people didn’t have access to electricity, so hopefully a hundred years from now most people have access to computers and the internet! I guess we’ll have to wait and see… maybe people will live over a hundred years a lot by then!

    • Photo: Sarah Casewell

      Sarah Casewell answered on 18 Jun 2014:

      Nate’s given a really good answer there – at the moment advancements are being made so quickly. I was born in 1982. Mobile phones didn’t really exist and computers ran off a cassette tape. CDs hadn’t been invented let along MP3!
      By the time I was about 10, mobile phones were more portable, CDs existed and lots of people had a computer in their house.
      Move on only 6 years and everyone had a mobile phone (although one without a camera and internet)!
      Things are moving very quickly at the moment and we don’t know what new invention will happen next – or what will run out.

      Running out of coal or oil will be a problem for us as we all use so much that runs on electricity! Also mobile phones, laptops etc use amounts of very rare elements. We may run out of these soon as well and will have to find other ways of building batteries etc.

    • Photo: Roberto Trotta

      Roberto Trotta answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      It’s very difficult to predict the future this way! How could you have imagined 100 years ago what today’s world would look like? The kind of technology we have today would seem like magic to people a century ago.

      The great science fiction writer Arthur Clarke said: “Technology that’s sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic”. He was right!

      So I’m going to take some guesses here: in a 100+ years we won’t have computer screens and keyboard anymore, because we’ll interact with machines directly by thinking — telepathically. The world’s population will be concentrated in 50 Mega-Cities, each with over 100 million people in it. We will eat meat grown in the lab: organic meat will be a treat to be enjoyed only by the super-rich. We will take space-flights with the same ease as today’s airplanes. There will be underwater cities anchored at the bottom of the Oceans, and a permanently inhabited human colony on Mars. We will have discovered many planets similar to the earth, and found signs of life there. Telescopes with mirrors 100 m in diameter will give us incredibly detailed pictures of the Universe.

      But these are all just my guesses!

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