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crazytumblweed999 t1_j1q1h31 wrote

I would argue there is no way to accurately predict the future of our world over that long of a timescale. If you'd asked people in 1022 what the future would have looked like, they would not have predicted machines that do labor much less the European discovery of the Americas, which means no Colubian exchange (horses and diseases in the new world, tobacco, tomatoes, blueberries, potatoes and a massive influx of gold and silver).

If you look at the changes of the 20th century alone, humanity went from no heavier than air travel to landing on the moon in the span of 60 years. Major political upheavals rewrote the map of the majority of world, from the treaties at the end of WW1 that carved up the middle east to the post WW2 cold War realities of nation states and spheres of influence to the advent of nuclear arms fundamentally changing the reality of international conflict. And all of that was just 100 years.

That doesn't even account for the outliers and other massive possibilities that could occur at any time. If the Carrington Event (a massive solar flare) had occurred in the modern age, most to all of the industrial world would be wiped out and we wouldn't be able to discuss it on Reddit. First contact with extra terrestrial societies would fundamentally alter every understanding we currently hold. A new disease, a possible nuclear disaster involving a misfire of weapons, asteroid, who knows? But any one of the events could happen today and would drastically alter the next week, much less the next millennium.

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Blitzed5656 t1_j1rbayx wrote

That's was a nice way to explain the flaw in the premise of the question.

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CharleyZia t1_j1qrnxb wrote

Hard agree. When you examine speculative future artwork it's all 'this wild tech ensconced in our current world' - with our values, social structures and expectations, legal/policy institutions, etc. Evolving people in chaotically morphing contexts is always the X factor. Tech, low and high, are our tools.

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crazytumblweed999 t1_j1qssa4 wrote

To be fair, usually speculative fiction uses wild tech advances to examine current social values, but this is a good point to bring up.

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Hrspwrz t1_j1s6dim wrote

machine learning, robotics is the future. Whether or not machines become sentient is another question, but imo we should make damn sure they can never think for them selves.

Sometimes I wonder if skynet already exists and controls more than people think economically before technology actually catches up to make a brain for them in a small package. as of now, we need an entire facility to have the same floating point operations as one terminator. that's like thousands of homes worth of power to do it. Makes you wonder how skynet would even evolve. Would they keep an adhoc blockchain type of neural network, or have massive facilities that cannot be assaulted easily miles underground and simple have all the robots empty shells that are just being remotely controlled? D:

in any case, the future is machine learning and automation. The only people who win are the shareholders, and everyone else will lose as a result.

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poli_trial t1_j1qt4zs wrote

>I would argue there is no way to accurately predict the future of our world over that long of a timescale. If you'd asked people in 1022 what the future would have looked like, they would not have predicted machines that do labor much less the European discovery of the Americas, which means no Colubian exchange (horses and diseases in the new world, tobacco, tomatoes, blueberries, potatoes and a massive influx of gold and silver).

OK, true but the difference is that back then people didn't have knowledge of the fact that a separate continent existed to which they could travel and powered mechanization wasn't yet imagined. Conversely, today we do know that Mars has water on in and that makes it possible for us to imagine living on it (even if never get there) and since we know nuclear fusion & fission is possible but just something we've yet to harness, we can imagine a world of abundant and nearly free energy. Of course, it's self-evident that no one can accurately predict the future but I'd argue the OP just asked for opinions and people's imaginations. IMO, it's a question worth pursuing so that we can collectively begin to consider if we want to go those directions or not. We have a lot more knowledge now to predict the course of human kind than people did in 1022, we should use it!

>If you look at the changes of the 20th century alone, humanity went from no heavier than air travel to landing on the moon in the span of 60 years. Major political upheavals rewrote the map of the majority of world, from the treaties at the end of WW1 that carved up the middle east to the post WW2 cold War realities of nation states and spheres of influence to the advent of nuclear arms fundamentally changing the reality of international conflict. And all of that was just 100 years.

And yes, again, it'd be hard to predict political events and the details of how anything will play out. There's a lot of random chance involved. At the same time, 100 years ago you could have reasonably made the prediction that the US would become the preeminent global power and today it's also possible to make such predictions about China based on how sustainable you think their economic and political model is.

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captainstormy t1_j1ro0k1 wrote

100%.

As fast as technology and science move these days even 20 years is hard to predict but you have a chance. 50 years gets real fuzzy. 100? No way. 1000 years? That's so far away we can't even fathom what it would be like.

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xiPLEADthe5th t1_j1r66vk wrote

Horses are a European thing

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crazytumblweed999 t1_j1rgpjw wrote

Yup. The Columbian Exchange was Europeans bringing Horses and equine/bovine diseases to the new world while bringing back tobacco, potatoes, tomatoes, and syphilis among a few other things. It's actually quite interesting the things we think of as European staples (potatoes and tomatoes specifically) that came about because of the Columbian Exchange.

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UniversalMomentum t1_j1u9tai wrote

Why did you pick 1022 instead of a date more like 300 years from now?

I don't think a Carrington Event actually has enough energy to do that much damage. You'd probably need many magnitudes greater energy to really bring down most industry and even then a lot of it would not be effected much because it's not sensitive electronics.

Volcanism is probably the most commonly reoccurring major global disaster beside just good old fashion climate change over time. I don't think disease or nuclear war will change the outcomes all that much really. Most people would still live in almost any of those kinds of scenarios and that means progress would probably just keep going.

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crazytumblweed999 t1_j1ubnkx wrote

I picked 1022 as it was 1000 years ago in order to show the vast difference in how our world looks now as opposed to that point in order to show that speculation on a thousand years in the future is futile. To adress your point, consider the world 300 years ago in 1722. The US doesn't exist as an independent nation, the modern nation state of Germany doesn't exist except as a loose coalition of states under the banner of the Holy Roman Empire, the middle east is almost entirely under the control of the Ottoman Empire and the Mugal Indian Empire is one of the most advanced nations on the planet, dwarfing and dunking on their one day colonial dominators the British Empire. Consider the massive differences between then and now, then try to consider how little of the modern world would have been predictable from the 1722 perspective.

The Carrington Effect's damages were minimal then because the world didn't rely on electricity and electrical signals in the 1800s as much as it does now. Such a solar flare would cripple most electrical devices on the planet, start massive electrical fires in wiring systems and crash virtually all man made satellites. Stop and look around yourself right now and tell me how you plan to survive the next week without electricity of any kind. How much cash do you have in your pocket, assuming you could even find someone who would take it? Do you have a well or do you exist on metropolitan water/sewer? I think you'd find that a lack of electricity would be quite a detriment to your life for as long as it would take to fix and replace damaged systems.

There is a really good YouTube essayist named Lemmnio who does a good video about potential end of humanity scenarios. I highly recommend it, should that be your kind of entertainment. I definable agree that a volcanic winter would be a difficult to predict disaster, but nuclear war would achieve much the same thing. As we've seen from Covid 19 even a relatively mild (by comparison to the plague or the 1918 flu pandemic) pandemic still causes massive problems, all of which effect prediction of future events.

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