It's hard to say, but I tell you, we'd BETTER HAVE FLYING FUCKING CARS. I'm getting tired of waiting on that one.

Better! I have a pessimistic disposition, but it seems like advances in science and technology and knowledge in general will continue to make the world a better place.

Better, although I will probably not be around to enjoy it.

Let me put it this way: With 100 year collections of Lolcats and Hungover Owls, how can the world not be a better place?

The roughly 500 million people who will be left after the mass die-off will inherit a world of beauty and abundance, but man will they have a bunch of shit to clean up.

I think despite whatever advances come our way, the world will be pretty much the same.

Yes!

My first thought is, man, when The Book of Questions was written in 1987, 100 years seemed like a long time. Now 100 years seems like an eon, because things change so fast we can barely recognize the world as it was 20 years ago.

I think the world in 100 years will be awesome for those of us that can afford it. If you live in a rich city and can afford white plastic toys to amuse yourself with, the future will be beautiful. If you live anywhere else, your life may be a little more rustic than your parents had it, and your expectations won't be nearly as high as those we had in 2011. We'll be back to medieval levels of class separation. The haves and have-nots will be VERY far apart.

I'm solidly on the dystopian side, with BOP's and BP's scenarios representing the best of many possible outcomes, but the bunch of shit to clean up will be kept mostly out of sight and out of mind and the dream of upward mobility woll be finally squashed by 22nd Century Economic Theory. But they will have that 100+ years of Lolcats, 120+ years of Hip Hop and Alt Rock and 150+ years of Star Trek & Doctor Who reruns to keep the masses happy on their non-productive hours. Super Bowl CXLV will be played by robots but it'll still be interrupted by Budweiser commercials. And the fourth reboot of "Lost" will make a lot more sense than the previous three. I will have been dead for at least 70-80 years (since my CHF eight years ago, I have already passed the 50th percentile of survival) but my automated MetaFilter account will continue to say "I told you so" until mathowie's grandchildren sell the site to AOL (yes, it'll still be around).

Yeah, it'll be great if you're one of the few who are born into the bio domes or a nice safe orbital environment. The rest of the people? The hideously mutated shambling remnants who have to share living space with the last results of the terrible gene experiments of the 2050s won't have it so good. If there are any people at all, that is, or if there is any culture out there but a few last starving villages of quasi medieval scavengers digging up plastic for fuel from giant garbage heaps.

If people are around they'll probably make do like always ave.

But without shellfish.

With the new eco-neutral flivvers and the return low-calorie Soma Classic, it'll be pneumatic.

I agree with TPS - about the same, give or take a few swings across the ideological and economical spectrum.

I'm an optimist for my own life, a pessimist for lives beyond mine. I think the world will be awful, and I struggle about the moral implications of bringing children into a world I think will be awful.

I'm an optimist for my own life, a pessimist for lives beyond mine.

Years ago I read that bunches of studies show that this is true for most people - when asked to predict their own futures, they feel optimistic about their own lives and their possibilities, but when asked to predict the futures of others, they see doom. I'm not finding the perfect link to describe this, but one of the factors is described here, the actor-observer effect, optimism bias, more here. This is how it's possible to have thoughts like "The economy is going to hell, everyone's going to be poor and hungry, it's terrible" while at the same time expecting "But as for me, I'm going to be all right - I have savings and my career is going fine, I'm planning to retire."

I think it will be worse, but then I think really bad shit will happen and we will rethink our way of life and things will eventually be better. But as long as we can still maintain the status quo in terms of standard of living for the rich with bandaid fixes, we will do so and resources will continue to dwindle and wealth will be increasingly unequally distributed etc.

I'm split 50:50. I believe in evolution, so people should be getting smarter and more likely to survive, which is going to require changing.
But, we may poison the planet, or blow each other up, or both, faster than we get smarter.

Ardiril, you made me laugh, thanks.

Miko, I think part of it (for me at least) is also an awareness of my own privilege. I probably will be ok, because I'm white and straight and educated and fairly well off and reasonably healthy, etc. I don't feel like my how my life goes is very representative of how any else's life will go, especially as I see the split getting bigger in the US between the rich and the poor.

So hard to answer this one. Better in the sense that people will have learned and invented more, and life will undoubtedly be even more interesting. Worse in the sense that I expect the effects of global warming to be profound and distressing -- extreme weather, food shortages, and political unrest.

Surprisingly I don't have much of a feeling about this one way or the other. I get sort of stuck. Better for me? Better for humanity? Better for the galaxy? I have vague feelings of some cataclysmic sort of upheaval which will leave things ultimately better but really really shitty in the short term. But not anytime soon.