What Does The Future Hold For Us? As many fans of Star Trek already know, many of the inventions they thought up have come to pass, such as flip phones and some of the medical devices, but there is something they have said which seems to be prophetic. I wonder how many people can guess what I am talking about? When I first heard it said, I thought to myself this would be impossible and never work, but since then I have changed my mind as riches started to be discovered on asteroids, meteors and such. Have you figured it out yet? I am talking about the scene where Kirk tells someone that no one gets paid anymore and indicates people work for fulfilment. This seemed to me to be absurd at the time, after all money and wealth is what makes the world go around. How could one shop for food without some type of exchange of currency? Then it hit me, space travel will ultimately do away with the value of every valuable mineral including gold, silver, platinum, and every other mineral and gemstones. As we explore space and start mining, will reduce the value of all precious metals because there is an unlimited amount of them out there. At first humans might try to control the amount going on the market, but as the technology for mining in space advances and spreads, there will be no stopping people from doing this unless wars are declared and that seems to be useless because these riches will be everywhere within reach and no one country or company, or even the United Nations would be able to protect every object which contains precious ores. This means there will be a big problem. If there are no more precious metals and gems, what will be the incentive for doing business? Will people do business just to feel fulfilled as Kirk said? I don’t think so. What would be the chance of other things becoming precious which could never be found in space and what could these objects be? One thought which comes to mind is art. Is there a chance fine art could become a method of payment? There could never be enough art in circulation to satisfy the world if it was used as currency. The second point is most people would be in poverty, because they would never have the chance to own fine art. What about exchanges of technology? That wouldn’t work because that would be even more limited than art. What could replace the value of all our riches and be used as some sort of compensation for purchases? We may already be preparing for this problem by testing out a new way to compensate people without using money which is either backed by precious metals or by the might of a country, which is also dependent on riches. I think some of you can already see where I am going with this. The thing which might replace the world’s money is bit coin, but a more robust version of it, in the future. This will be where the world could get together and agree on the value of bit coins which could be carefully regulated. Think about this, if several different denominations are agreed upon and the value set by treaty with every country in the world, which would be very hard to do by the way, we all know there are some countries who never agree on most anything, we could have a working currency. So how would we get this to everybody in the beginning? I guess one way would be for everyone to trade in their money for the equivalent in bit coins and mandate all government payments to be in bit coins along with all money paid and received by companies and people. It would almost feel like what we are doing already. Many of us no longer use cash for major purchases, but use credit cards. Credit cards are just an electronic transfer of data, which eventually depends on money somewhere in the chain of events. By going all electronic, the actual cash could be eliminated. This system is still a monetary system, because if we all agree on the value of something, even an electronic currency, it then has value. This still is not the system Kirk was talking about. We don’t know what the future holds and the entire economic system could be different in the future. We might even discover some super rare elements which would replace gold and silver, along with other precious metals and still have a way to keep the old system going. Maybe there might be a barter system in place in the future, but this doesn’t seem to be practical. Let’s assume for a second that Kirk was correct and there is no more money changing hands in the future. Why wouldn’t this work? I believe human nature would prevent it. People have a built in urge to do better than the next person. They don’t seem to all want to be in the same boat no matter what their profession is. It seems when the future comes, they will be passing out chips with all the knowledge needed for certain professions and it will start with the rich and powerful getting the best chips which will allow them to get the best professions, leaving the lowest for the rest of us. These chips will be embedded in our bodies according to scientific reports. That will make some of us super beings who might get the best of everything. Controlling these chips could create a form of value. One of the things which seem to be inevitable is there will not be enough work for everyone as robotics take over most of the jobs so there will need to be some way to compensate those who have no jobs. Without the chance of getting work, those people could become an unhappy sub class. One of the hopes for them would be space travel. They might be able to make their lives better by colonizing another planet. I would imagine it would start out with Mars, but there might be a small colony on the moon. Of course, we would have to terraform Mars to make it more earth like for those living there. The future will be an interesting place and might be considered alien to people from this century. I say this because we are on the cusp of incredible discoveries in every field and might not even recognize the planet a hundred years from now. It doesn’t take long for an advanced technological breakthrough to change everything.
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