Fifty years into the future, given that the USA and China doesn’t start a third World War and the world doesn’t mess up its finances and politics too catastrophically, I believe that energy will be free and climate change will be solved with some finishing touches. Humans will enter a new age of innovation with revolutionary discoveries in physics and mathematics. Competition, bigotry and the ugliness of human nature will still stubbornly persist, but we will never think of ourselves in the same way ever again, because humans will have changed into another species.
Old problems will have been solved, some will have been retained, and new ones will arise. But at least two trends will are clear.
The future will bring prosperity in a number of ways. The first of these comes in the form of free energy. By 2070, the technology of nuclear fusion using magnetic confinement, already more than a century old, will have been fully mastered. The USDeptEnergy’s research already indicate that nuclear power by far outcompetes any other source of energy, renewable or fossil fuel, by a factor of two to four. Solar or wind won’t be the solution to climate change, because they fundamentally are unable to generate energy on a scale remotely comparable to nuclear energy, and they pose other problems in terms of storage and productivity time. By Einstein’s E= mc2, energy will be such a common commodity that it would be unfathomable to put a price tag on it.
The path there will not be easy. Great governmental funding will be needed, and the current entrenched interests of fossil fuel and renewable energy sources will prevent nuclear energy from entering the grid. But gradually, the invisible hand will guide the virtually free energy into the market, and it will naturally outdo any competitor. It is only a matter of time after the consumer has come to terms with the fact that nuclear energy is a completely mastered technology, and the likes of Fukushima or Chernobyl will almost never occur again.
Then virtual reality (not the gaming headset, but a virtual version of reality) will dominate every aspect of our lives. From our productivity to entertainment, from safety and security to family life. This is an inevitable trajectory. The 2060 generations will be characterised by their inextricably interwoven engagements with the Internet and the alternative reality behind screens. Our physical realities will satisfy our need for information and entertainment less and less. The Internet simply connects us to everything and everyone, a super-market where the demands of every consumer can be identified and satisfied by producers.
Instead of having to pay privileged institutions to learn we can simply search up the OpenCourseWare from MIT. When we need to propagate new ideas or have certain questions answered, we turn to Google, Quora and Medium. Gaming, video streaming and social media have become an inextricable part of the Gen Z life. They connect with people and organizations they have never met, yet call them friends or followers. The foundations and monuments of society are already built upon virtual fabric. If we are to make progress, all of it will be based on virtual reality.
However new problems will surface by 2070. The human life will have been so virtualised that our current biological being will struggle to sustain what they weren’t evolved to manage. Furthermore, the great misbalance will be brought to the human mind. It is built with two different mechanisms, one for reflexive thinking and one for reflectional thinking. The overload of instantaneous information and satisfaction will spoil the reflexive mind, stimulating it constantly and raising the bar for the utility of satisfaction. The reflectional mind will become much slower, and eventually we will have become passive creatures of consumption.
We will lack insight, lack deep thought, lack the visceral enlightenment and enjoyment of prolonged effort and thought. Our biological bodies, built to traverse plains and leap over cliffs and being antifragile (the term coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb), will struggle to sustain itself without coming under the regular strain of exercise. Frequently we would find ourselves becoming overweight, our glucose levels too high and running out of breath after a barely strenuous exercise. Screen-time and long-term-sedentary life styles have an underlying impact to our hormone systems, and to put it simply, our bodies will be screwed up.
The lack of face to face social interaction, where we observe each other’s expressions and learn to experience humanity, will make us suffer. Our social-perceptive system was built when we relied on each other for survival, and upgraded when we relied upon each other for trust and belief to build the fundamentals of common-wealth. Today, social interaction has become simply typing on keyboards and saying morbid or attention-seeking phrases to people you barely know.
I believe that 2070 will be the age of complete virtual consumption, but will also be the age of physical ills, mental regression and depression.
Again, nuclear energy and virtualisation will only be two aspects of the 2070 society. They are important ones, but by no means the only. But the progress of humanity can be described as follows: we gain better understanding of Nature and learn to manipulate it better to increase accessibility, efficiency and wellbeing. Our own human nature will endure, and we will never stop in our wrestle for control and superiority. New problems will arise, old problems will persist, but hopefully we will move forward.
