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26 August 2011
It's the Friday Night Question, chosen at random from The Book of Questions...→[More:]
#7: Do you think that the world will be a better or a worse place 100 years from now?
There are always better things and people alongside their counterparts who are worse. Old people always want the young people to get off their lawns. I don't foresee that changing much.
Better. It's gotten consistently better over the entire modern era, and I"m really not sure that the Western world's relatively slight economic malaise is enough to counterbalance the really significant improvement in 3rd world quality of life. I think if we think it would be worse, we should ask "For whom?"
Environmental problems are pretty serious, but humans will adapt to whatever the conditions become.
The trend for the world has continued toward improvement for millennia, but the 'short term adjustments' sometimes last longer than 'only' 100 years, and current conditions MIGHT be the beginning of one of the bigger bumps in the road. I'm not unhappy that I won't be alive to see what it'll be like in 2111. Or 2031, likely. (My 2003 Congestive Heart Failure had a 50% survival rate past 5 years so I'm living on time borrowed from a loan shark.)
Of all the times/places to live in, I was lucky to have been a white male in California in the 2nd-half of the 20th/beginning of the 21st Century. But so much of my generation, like so many before, is seriously disappointed that things didn't become perfect in their lifetimes.
Anyway, my apologies to all you who are younger and/or in most other parts of the world.
Diabetes and leukemia will probably be eradicated, solar and wind power may be more highly developed, wars will continue, economics may not be based on the free market, but manipulated by oligarchs, and new technologies will change the way we communicate, medicate, and educate. Will life be richer? Only those who have highly developed social skills and very functional family ties and loving relationships will enjoy the next century. But that fact has been true since the beginning of recorded time.
Definitely better. Advancements in technology and medicine, a better standard of living for a broader spectrum of people, increased longevity, perhaps the beginning of long range space travel (Live long and prosper...), though I think that might be more like a thousand years, perhaps a world court to settle disputes instead of war (dare I hope). And likely a number of things we've never thought of. We're really in our infancy. I wish I could be around to see it all.
Humph, I guess I'm not quite the curmudgeon I pride myself on being.
Depends on who you are.
The wealthy will be much better-off, as always.
Everyone else? I'm not hopeful, at this point. So...I'm going to go with "worse" on balance.
Better.
We learn from mistakes and there are a lot of mistakes to learn from.
100 years is a lot of time for new developments and improvements to be put into action, diseases to be cured and new technologies to be discovered.
For a rather pessimistic person, I'm hopeful for the future. I see the beginnings of things now that could be amazing given the time and research. There's a lot of possibilities out there and we can't screw them all up.
Better, because most of the human population will have been culled by famine, war, disease, and shortsightedness. The ones who are left will have had a bit of time to take seriously the lessons that we continue to ignore, to work together like a good sentient tool-making species should, and to show the planet some goddamn respect after she wipes out almost everyone they knew.
Worse. I am increasingly less sorry I won't be around to see 2050. I feel this way every time I read National Geographic. The damage we are doing to our gorgeous planet's land, air, and oceans is huge and irreversible. I don't think the coming season of famine and war, not to mention extreme weather, will be fun either.
photo by splunge
photo by TheophileEscargot
photo by Kronos_to_Earth
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