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The Future: The Next 100 years

This is what I'm most pissed about. When I was young we were promised focking flying cars by this point in time. Where are my focking flying cars!? :mad:


Since the general vibe of this thread has a negative tilt I'll add my bright and uplifting obiter dictum..

I think the planet has far too many humans living on it for the amount of available resources. The number of people continues to rise and the amount of raw resources continues to plummet. Therefore, it is a simple conclusion that at some point, a hundred years sounds plausible at the current rate of expansion, somewhere someplace the pressures of such a situation will bring out the worst in mankind and/or the unseen biological heebie-geebies which will be primed for mutation. Yes, it's a very general sort of sentiment but there is a very real truth at its core. I think man's biggest and most difficult hurdle is greed (which can be very easily linked to ego, but I think greed specifically is the most damaging culprit).

Well, on the bright side, population growth rates are going down; at the moment, Europes population is actually going down. And perhaps us running out of oil will lead to companies finally replacing it with more "green" type energies, but that might just be me hoping

But I do see your point in the whole greed thing. To tell the truth, only time can tell what will happen in the future; you can only hope that we will overcome. Of course our flaws like greed will likely always exist, but there is hope that we can overcome our more immediate hurdles. You can always trust mankind to perservere, for better or for worse.
 
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Nezzer said:
Malthus is wrong.

I've never heard of Malthus, I'll look him up later on when I have more time. I want to make sure that I don't sound like I'm being argumentative, cause I'm not looking for an argument, but it just makes sense that if there isnt some massive wiping out of a large number of humans, in addition to a healthy shift in how we live our lives in terms of consumption and baby-making, then there will be a point in which the population will overcome the ability of the available resources to support so many people. It takes a very small fluctuation in food production to have a big effect, and thats only talking food, not other types of resources. Then add a healthy dose of good old fashioned greed and you've got a sick polarization of already limited resources.. people on the other end get desperate and sad sh!t happens.

I think the next 100 years will show more frequent and pronounced situations like this because world population will continue to grow and certain societies actually teach its young that principles are disposable and greed is good *ahem*..
 
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This is what I'm most pissed about. When I was young we were promised focking flying cars by this point in time. Where are my focking flying cars!? :mad:

Well, we are probably not in the same timezone but they told me (when I was a lad) that in the future I could have a video phone call on a hand held device...YES....
Don't despair, you will get your Fokker Flying car. You will just have to wait until the oil resources have expired...
Chin up lad...:)
 
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Except for the fact that oil is in pretty much everything.
i.e. plastic.
The biggest problem is the oil companies. They play a giant role in global economy moving trillions of dollars yearly and they won't go down easy if a new efficient fuel source is dicovered. Sustainable development is no good for these fellas.
 
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well it all does come down to the oil companies, really.

However, I'd remember tht as of right now, many countries are saving their oil desposits for later. North America has far more oil than we are drilling. Europe has a few. They just discovered that the rctic sea floor is in fact covered with oil wells. And Siberia has a vast array of untapped rescources.

And, whats more, we are actually closer than one might think; while now we are dependent, electric energy could theoretcially unhinge our addiction. And there are many runners up for this. Personally, my preffered one is high-temperature conductors that would allow easy energy transport; aka solar feilds in the Sahara, ect. Of course, I've also heard of one goverment (I can't remember which) talking about solar feilds on the moon. A bit far-fetched, but if you figured out how to transport it easily then I could see it happening.

As for nuclear war, that threat is mostly gone. Everyone has finally gotten the whole "mutual destrcution" thing down pretty well, so it would only occur under 2 situations
1)if one nuclear nation tried to invade another nuclear nation directly, with the intent of total destruction (instead of just fighting over such things as feilds of influence, ect).
2) some idiot gave fanatics nuclear armaments

Heres just one funny little fact, before I end my rant:
Charles Dickens once said, way back about 150 years ago
"If its individual citizens, to a man, are to beleived, [the United States] always is depressed, and always is stagnated, and always is at an alarming crisis, and never was otherwise".
Shows a little more about our attitude nowadays, eh?:D
 
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Nein! I'd rather eat my rose-colored utopian force field for breakfast! After all, the streets outside my house are clean today.. I think I'll decide tomorrow to live another 35 years and not give a damn about those filthy slaves at Foxconn. It's all my imagination anyway. Row row row your boat! *eyes closed fingers in ears* lalalalaeverythingisgreatlalalalaformelalalala
 
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Nein! I'd rather eat my rose-colored utopian force field for breakfast! After all, the streets outside my house are clean today.. I think I'll decide tomorrow to live another 35 years and not give a damn about those filthy slaves at Foxconn. It's all my imagination anyway. Row row row your boat! *eyes closed fingers in ears* lalalalaeverythingisgreatlalalalaformelalalala


Well, see, I'm actually genuinely not concerned about the filthy slaves at Foxconn. I've already got my iPhone 4, so why should I really care if a few more of them try to do a Peter Pan? After all, every one of them that bites it reduces ecological pressure, right? And every one of them that bites it helps to bring the male / female ratio in China back closer to 50-50, thereby helping to promote future world stability.


So, really, why should I care about them?
 
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The biggest problem is the oil companies. They play a giant role in global economy moving trillions of dollars yearly and they won't go down easy if a new efficient fuel source is dicovered. Sustainable development is no good for these fellas.

Oh i forgot to say that, what will happen with the food transportation? As far as i know, there are no boats/airplanes that are working with something else than oil/petrol.

Fusion will give us enough energy to create plastic and various fuels easily. We already made quite some steps ahead with making oil out of dead plants that havent been dead for that long.
 
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If captain planet taught me anything, and I'd like to think he did, heart is the most important power of them all.

I would think the guy who got heart would be extremely dissapointed.

"I'll give all your friends the amazing abilities to control the elements and control the forces of nature; you...well, you get a heart ring. Well, on the bright side, they need you to summon some other guy, so your not totally useless!" :p
 
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Well it all depends on how the world copes with us running low on cheap oil. If we get an good alternate fuel source in time most of our problems will be solved. Lets just wait for fusion.
Man made fusion generators are still a long way off. Fission is where it is at for the foreseeable future. Outside of the Chernobyl and the Three Mile Island incidents (which still barely compares to all the oil spills and coal mine mishaps over the past century) and, nuclear fission is probably the safest and least environmentally destructive form of energy generation which nations could entirely rely on. Comparatively other such "green" methods require enormous sized fields of wind turbines, solar panels, and/or crops (is turning cheap food into fuel really a good idea?) to produce the same amount of energy a nuclear plant does.

However, that does not fix the problem of manufacturing and transportation industry's reliance on oil. Until some new kind of miracle material becomes really cheap (my vote is on titanium or, more likely, carbon fiber related materials), humans will be stuck along our current path. Based on what steel has enabled humans to do so far, just imagine what a new material akin to that would do for the whole world.
 
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Man made fusion generators are still a long way off. Fission is where it is at for the foreseeable future. Outside of the Chernobyl and the Three Mile Island incidents (which still barely compares to all the oil spills and coal mine mishaps over the past century) and, nuclear fission is probably the safest and least environmentally destructive form of energy generation which nations could entirely rely on. Comparatively other such "green" methods require enormous sized fields of wind turbines, solar panels, and/or crops (is turning cheap food into fuel really a good idea?) to produce the same amount of energy a nuclear plant does.

However, that does not fix the problem of manufacturing and transportation industry's reliance on oil. Until some new kind of miracle material becomes really cheap (my vote is on titanium or, more likely, carbon fiber related materials), humans will be stuck along our current path. Based on what steel has enabled humans to do so far, just imagine what a new material akin to that would do for the whole world.
Yeah but ain't gonna happen as long as certain corporations can still get money out of oil business.
 
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