Sorry to all the naysayers out there who think its all going to shit. 2,000 years from now we in 2006 will be hardly remembered. If at all The stars will be places we spend an afternoon at. Care of PanStella Hypershunt liners. And humans will be immortal, Self renewing beings without fear of death. Able to create universes. The earth will be free again to be what it is..free of us and destructive technology. For we will have migrated by the billions throughout the gallaxy. And we wont watch reality tv. This is why the naysayers shout death and desruction... They HATE the idea that things wll get WAY better. and their end will come before that Occam will not see it.. but he rejoices in the truth of it. For he knows we can do it...cause what can be done.. humans will do. Trust in our childrens children to survive and flourish. THAT.. is faith.. based in precedent. The only faith worth having. For have we not come from digging the dirt for tubers and eating offal, to space stations and world information networks? Occam
The possibility for your future doesn't necessarily mean that it is the most probable. The most probable is one full of death and destruction. Famine, starvation, and epidemics. As long as there remains the possibilty for the future you are describing then there is hope. i wish i could share in the certainty of your optimism. but i can't. We are locusts, yeast, virus. Once we are done feeding on the corpse of what used to be such a beautiful blue ball we will struggle, lash out, and die. Maybe not all of us, there is a chance that a few will remain, back to digging up tubers. we are dinosaurs. we are living fossils. And the people(perhaps non-human) who dig up the remains of our impulsive short sighted industrial civ 2,000 years from now will most likely not understand you and i anymore than we can understand the hopes and dreams of a t-rex.
i'm more inclined to aggree with occam then with the collective suiside fixation of so called western society. the continued existence of our own species is an option we may or may not choose. there's nothing predestined nor cast in concrete about it either way. if the culture we in the u.s. and perhapse to some degree in great britan and even a bit less in the rest of western europe, were the natural and inevitable condition we are enculturated to immagine it to be, this would indeed not bode well for our collective species. yet it is not. my faith too is based on precident. the observable precident of diversity being the nature of the only reality i have ever observed. i'm not so sure that isolating ourselves with our artifacts from the sources of our collective birth is so much a thing of progress, though i do love having a refrigerator and the existence of things like narrow gauge railways and this computer. and i do look forward to a future of exploring more of our surroundings then our own immediate solar system. also one of living in closer harmony with such natural surroundings as our very lives ultimately depend upon. something will happen to our population on this planet, one way or another. but for the many who do survive that, and especialy their offspring, i look forward to the kind of world they will inheiret. one with tecnologies not based upon combustion, nor inharmonious with nature's cycles of renewal. one where that tecnology is used almost exclusively for infrastructure and creativity. one where nature and the forrest and the dust beneath our feet, wherever we may tread, is looked upon as the sacred trust of all existence that it is. our own nature will evolve if it has to, but i'm far from convinced that it is as well understood as it is often commonly, and i believe erroniously, considered to be. we are not born in sin nor sainthood, but in a world that gives us a choice, many choices, collectively, that affect the conditions each of us experience, individualy.
I agree with razorofoccamm to an extent, I would have said the possibility of our incredible future, because as far as I know right know things are pretty shitty, and as much as my logic tells me when it's over it's over" except for the small hard to undertand glimses,or fleeting moments. The way it's going to be incredible in my opinoin is, well if where to make it out of these times where in it's something that will be done as a whole or near whole, to me what we have to do to accomplish that, and what we need to do to survive says alot about who and what we are. I guess kind of like a conscioussness shift, but not something like magic that will just happen it's got to be made to happen. peace
i truly believe we must get to a breaking point before we will see change..it will get worse before it gets better, but that doesn't mean that "the end is coming" there are many people on this planet that want change, and i believe it will come..i may not be able to see it in my life, but i'm sure that the world will succeed in begining anew like the seasons change
Summer Yes.. this is most likely.. Occam cannot deny that pop overload will mostlikely result in a dieback. maybe even a few nukes will be tossed about...but this wont kill us. 500 nukes have already been detonted in testing alone.. and we are still here. We set off 15 mt nukes in pacific and no-one even knows of them. Humans are damn resilient. With technology, 5 times that Occams great grand child will walk on other worlds.. And thats a wonderfull thing to know. At last.. we leave the cradle Occam
Then we go into space to find it.. everything we need is but 3 orbital vectors away. And we own space, cause the tech is easy. The materials to do it abundant. Just requires commitment. Occam
well my one caveat about that is "beware the slash and burn mentality". you know there's this story i heard, and i'm not going to draw it out to tell it with the justice it deserves, but it seems, there was a nasa team that was going arround to different cultures and places collecting short phrases in differrent languages to tell people from other worlds if we ever run into them, and they got this phrase from the people on some rez in the southwest someplace where they were practicing how they'd walk arround on mars, or other world environments where the'd have to be on life support to even be there. well to make a long story short, and yes i know i'm telling this all messed up, but anyway they got this phrase from the tribal elders there, i can't repeat it cause i'm no good at remembering things specificly like that, but anyway they tried to find out what it ment and no one would tell them. every time they asked someone what it ment they'd just laugh and refuse to tell them. well to make it short of course, and you can probably more or less guess, at a rough translations at went something like "don't trust these white guys, they come to steal your land". i just had to through that in. i think exploration and research are good. you know to me, i find exploring and creating the two things that actualy gratify, that everything that is gratifying contains some element of one or the other or both. so i think space and research are good, very good, and we need to be doing more of them. but i don't see that as a panacea nor as an adiquite substitute for being responsibly frugal with limited resources, even with nature's cycles of renewal. what is really important, i believe, besides getting a handle on population, is learning to do things, just as comfortably and gratifyingly as we do now, or reasonably close to it, but with the priority of doing so in ways that are harmonious with our natural surroundings and the diversity of them and upon which they and ourselves ultimately depend. i really think it is THAT, and an end to idiological and religeous chauvanism, that will bring us this incredible future, which also i see as what the baha'is mean by the most great peace. using tecnology to live closer to nature is what another artist friend of mine, well actualy just an aquaintance on the net, but when he saw what i was trying to depict and my motivation for doing so, that was the succinct summation he came up with. and i like that one myself. it isn't that any tecnology is going to prove to be a panacea nor remove from us the responsibility and consiquences of how we use it, but rather that our priorities and how we use tecnology, how we treat each other and our environment, really that's what makes the kind of conditions we all have to live under, so that togather, collectively, even if not always individualy, it is after all, up to us. =^^= .../\...
Themnax... Occam proposes 1.No walking about on other planets.. Waste of time. None are habitable without massive input or resource..that we cannot afford. 2. Our moon however is prime real estate. Perfect as a 'BASE' to expand human dominion. It is the core of any step outside earth orbit. 3.All mining for resources and energy ON EARTH can end. With the application of the human WAR budget redirected to space for the next 20 years. Thats 1.5 trillion US dollars a year. 25% of the US gnp. This is doable and WELL within our technology. We CAN go to the asteroid fields and pull billions of tons of metals into earth orbit We CAN go to saturn and pull trillons of tons of fresh water into earth orbit. We CAN Set up orbital arrays to beam huge amounts of energy to earth surface. Imagine. no more power stations . no oil spills. no chernobyl disasters. No metals mines ever again on earth. However this does not solve another prime problem. Occam has fathered one child only. for he believes there are too many people. He fathered one child only BECAUSE HE BELIEVED SUCH. [call him the anti catholic...heheh] Each paired group[man/woman..woman/woman.. man/man] Must restrict themselves to ONE child This planet and our species needs only 3 billions Not 6.5 And religion and ignorance is to blame for much of this. Are we but vermin that breed untill the resources fail? Occam
we think that this shit on earth that we are going though is the fault of "others" (=corporate companies, illuminaties, the pope, rich asholes, religion, capitalism, evil forces, bla bla....) BUT i think this isnt happening by chance, WE need to learn something of the problems of we have. WHY? because we are part of it, we are actually creating this problem, each of us> why do we consume/drink coke/eat too much meat/buy bananas, coffee, harmburgers so the rainforest gets burnt down etc?.... the whole vibe of destruction and greed that we are actually seing around us and blaming on others is actually inside each of us, in some people more, in some other, less. we need to make conscious efforts to change to world. begin inside you, in your mind, then around you, changing habits and consuming less. EACH of us is part of the problem. the future is NOT written, you create it every second of your life. the future COULD become great, but it will take an amasing effort..... or it could just become total total SHIT. remember: every second of your life you can choose between doing/buying/thinking/saying/wanting this or that .... between alternatives. we make choices every second, it's time TO WAKE UP FROM THE OLD DREAM and make new kind of choices.
freakon and occam, i couldn't aggree more. as of course you've probably noticed me trying to make that same point over and over. even just not expending what we are so contorted as to in effort and economics to defacto thrash ourselves would be a major improvement. surely we can do at least that. and what we could have if we invested our own sweat, that WE ARE ALREADY SPENDING AGAINST what we could, can, and i believe at some point will, have, more wisely and sensably is beyond our wildest dreams of gratification, with quite possibly a resaulting signifigant reduction in the amount of it required thrown in as a bonus. yes our solar system is a challanging but interesting and potentialy quite rewarding resource. and it's pretty unlikely we'd be robbing from anything immaginably construable as life to do so. it's still expesive to escape earth's gravity well. perhapse another incentive to establish a more perminant foothold in near space. and there are of course more econimcal ways of doing then the poprockets that essentialy all that we have at the moment. none are without their risks. but compared to the risks of continued priority focus on preperations for war, they are perhapse not so unacceptable. as someone pointed out, we are quite litteraly six billion or so, ones, and togather it IS in our hands. the hands of how we live and what we choose to have be most important to us. to try and impress each other while arround us our house is burning down, or to take no more then what we need and can ourselves enjoy and thus lives free from the dominance of anxiety and want. for all of us. =^^= .../\...
Stars are simply made of Gas. There is no solid layer and even the fastest machine could not get you to the nearest star before you die. I imagine that the first virtical take off car will be the forefront of our future. For the rest, check out Bladerunner.
Then the forefront is here, and has been for years http://static.howstuffworks.com/gif/flying-car-front.jpg The reason no flycars are available is obvious. How would the cops chase them?. AS each costs more than a helocopter. The law enforcment simply says... no. Also the quality of human driving skills even on roads is abysmal Imagine flyingcars falling into playgrounds. PS.If humanity decided to go to the centuri system [4.3 LY] we could get there in 30 years. Occam
wd40 and vaseline will still be invaluable things. Did anyone know that Vaseline has over a million uses? I can think of a few But the future will not be as wild as many films portray it as. I am sure that in terms of technology, it will be more contained and become smaller than ever before. DVDs will be replaced by Blu-ray and the cinema will become available in HD. Also smokers prepare for bad news. prices for ciggerettes will be like twenty pounds for twenty ciggerettes. Petrol prices, by then people will start using other ways, possibly oil fat from chip shops. As for flying cars, I think it is possible but it is more likely going to be smaller planes. I often wonder how I will percieve Olivia when I am fifty
All our record stores will have mp3 or ipod terminals. You simply walk into one of these record stores and connect your device to a slot in the terminal and select what tracks you want downloaded. You insert a store card or cash and pay for the track and then take a reciept. There will be random reciept checks but apart from that, it will make going to a record store, less hassle as all the popular tracks will be highlighted. So like being at home with a special virtual friend, you can find the tracks you want and download till the sun sets. Record store will be seen as a retro name. The new name will be Ipodia. So go to any Ipodia store. There may be technology enabling subscription on Ipods so you don't have to pay at the Ipodia, you simply get a certain amount of files you can download per month for an all inclusive fee. Oxford Street will be pedestrianised and will have trams replacing our buses. As the Queen will be dead, we will have the Kings head on it. Want more visions of the future, simply give us a holla
well the day after tomarrow is, tecnicly the future, but futurists generaly tend more to think in terms of 50, 100, 300 or 1k or more years. in a thousand years you'd likely not recognize much of anything. in 300 you'd most likely still be able to recognize quite a bit, but, most of the assumptions we today take for granted will be looked upon as nuttier then a fruit cake, as most of them, of course, are. some will also of course, be replaced by others, perhaps just as nutty, just not entirely obvious from what they are now. but for the most part, over that long a span of time, we do grow, in ways not obvious from either direction (and not generaly those most widely assumed either). in 50 years, well i've lived 50 years myself, and a hell of a lot of crap looks a whole lot just about the same. some of this is nostelgic immitation, often ham handed and inept. some is just what cultures are. we can count and see and measure the gains and lossess. while substantial, they are greatly outnumbered by what has yet to chainge signifigantly. one thing i for sure expect to 'see' (though i may not be arround to personaly see it) is the slow death of the private passinger automobile, at least as we now know it. brought on by indeed the inevitable decline in petrolium extraction and the availability of its derived products. this means one of two things or some combination of both. a, a lot more walking, and or b, reemergence of, obviosly NONpetrolium powered, public transportation as a demographicly signifigant infrastructure. beasts of burden are a third option, though one i don't see as likely to find universal favor. i could of course be mystaken about that. for all their care and feeding, they do beat the hell out of sore feet when being the only available alternative. less then a hundred years ago people got along just fine without most of what the availability of cheep oil has enabled us to take for granted. to me, it seems fairly obvious, once forced to by reality, we will certainly find inovative ways of doing so once again. indeed it is precisely this which gives me much hope for the increadable future as occum suggests. i actualy foresee a return of public places, like benches with little minigardens arround them or in conjunction with 'roadside minishrines', to stop and rest your feet (or even feed and water your mules and oxen, and while admitiedly a bit optomistic, quite possibly ultra-light-rail, powered by solar cells and stored energy, or some other means such as continuous mechanical cables turned by wind and water energy where this might be in sufficient abundance) and the main thing being people not tearing these things up because everyone being just as dependent on and bennifiting from such things as everyone else. again one more reason to look forward with a hope that has real possibilities. =^^= .../\...
