Looking Into The Future

It is always fun to think about what the future might be like. What has made this pursuit even harder to do is the fact technology is moving so fast. In the last fifty years the human race has advanced more than it has all the years before that time. We have gone to the moon, explored other planets and now most of us carry a computer in our pockets called a cell phone, which is so powerful it has more power than the computers which filled rooms with their parts and pieces just a few decades ago. Think about things this way, a person predicting what the world might be like today who lived in the 1500s might have said the horses would be much faster because they would be better nourished or ships would be a lot bigger and be able to hold far more sails. Those that heard him might have replied, “Are you crazy, how could ships get any bigger?”

I am going to try and guess what the future of mankind might be like 500 years from now. Some will say this is a fool’s errand, but I will give it my best try. I want to say first we will have to survive without a devastating nuclear war for any of this to become a fact, but here goes. I would like to start with alien life. We know the universe is vast and there are trillions of planets if not more situated in what could be trillions of galaxies. Recently we have located some which seem to have the ability to sustain life as we know it. I say as we know it, because there certainly could be other types of life which need either different requirements to live or need none. 500 years from now hopefully we will belong to the universal equivalent of the United Nations. There will be many alien races we will interact with and we will be conducting trade with them. Maybe we will be able to avoid wars, but we may find we cannot exist in their presence without some sort of protective shield, because either they or we will have organisms on our body which are harmful to the other. We carry many germs around with us and I suppose aliens might have their own germs.

As time goes by we are going to find a way around the limitation of traveling faster than light. I hear much about folding space, but it is hard to imagine we will have to move space around to travel. Not only that, but other races may not want us to disturb space even if we could do it. In just a few years after the airplane was invented we accomplished something which science said could never be done and that was break the sound barrier. I think we will routinely be flying much faster than the speed of light, but will need sophisticated shielding to accomplish this since even a grain of sand run into at these speeds could have devastating effects. On the other hand it could turn out we will perfect a way of being able to pass right through these things with our ship without any harm by altering time in some way. As time goes by, platforms will be placed on different worlds we visit more often and our atoms will be transferred from one platform to another instantly using what Einstein called Spooky At A Distance.

People will no longer need their devices. There will be no cell phones, tablets or computers. There will be a very tiny chip inside of us which will be so powerful we can use it for anything we want. It will not only be our phone and our computer, but it will be able to link to everything we do. This will give us the ultimate means of using any type of transportation and being able to control it even if we never did this before. Imagine the equivalent in the future of renting an airplane and being able to fly it without having had any lessons and being able to do this while sleeping. This chip will allow you to do these things and will operate off the current inside your body. If you are in danger it will put out a location signal. There will be no more people getting lost in jungles or on mountains since they will be rescued within a few minutes or hours.

Sickness will be a thing of the past if we can break the hold on the drug companies and their maintenance pills. Medicine will no longer be necessary as your chip will put out a signal to your auto immune system when it detects early signs of a disease and will reinforce your immune system to be able to cope with any known disease. Doctors will not be very happy as they will be monitoring mostly replacement parts work done by machines, that is if we don’t figure out how to keep our parts like new.

The entire system we have today of doing work and getting paid will have to become a thing of the past, because robotics will replace so many people in the workforce there will not be enough work and it may come to a point that only about 5% of the population will have enough work to sustain them. I don’t have any idea what this system might be, because it is hard to imagine today since we have always conducted business on a work for pay basis, in one way or another. Perhaps housing and food quality will be tied to what level you are in society. Money may also vanish and a system of electronic transfers take its place much as a credit card works today.

Education is very important today, but it could become a thing of the past in the future. Even today there is talk of implanting chips in people which will have all the data they need to access for a profession. Many have said this will be abused, because the powerful will get chips allowing them to have premier professions and the rest of us will get the chips for the service jobs. I am not sure about this since I believe there will be no service jobs for people since robots will take them over. People need something to do, or their will be massive unrest in the future, so something will have to be thought of and it might turn out to be space exploration. Most of us might be assigned areas in the universe to explore and the human race may fan out to the stars.

None of us will be around 500 years from now to see how much of this, if anything comes true, but I feel these guesses are just as good as any.