It’s impossible to know, obviously, just predicting the next 5 years is a fool’s errand. So just imagine the kind of fool trying to look ahead 80 years. But along the way, we’ll look back at predictions of today from the last. See what we can learn from what they got right and wrong, and apply that going forward.
We really did our best when looking at this to take our own biases out and just look at the facts, the long-term trends, while considering the social and economic factors at play. This is a realistic look. Not good or bad, but just playing the odds. Before we forecast the look of the future, we will see what the predictions are about the LED of today.
The year 2000 was the end of the millennium; there was no exact writing from scientists that specifically predicted anything. But can find some pieces of literature and novels set in the far future, but sci-fi as a genre pretty much didn’t exist before the early 1800s. In the 1800s, people didn’t really think much about the future as this drastically different place where people lived lives we couldn’t imagine with impossible technology. How much the world changed in the 1800s, that before then, people didn’t live that much differently than they had 100 years prior, but by 1900, people were driving cars, making phone calls, and working alongside machines in giant factories. It’s no surprise that this is when science fiction first showed up, because for the first time, people could see technological progress happen right before their eyes. And then project that progress forward and imagine a different world in the future.
Jules Verne, the famous author who wrote some classic novels, including Around the World in 80 Days, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. And there was a book that remained unpublished and was later published in 1994. It’s called Paris in the twentieth century, and as the name suggests, it’s set in Paris in the year 1950, which matched some accurate things like
The expansion of suburban living, gas-powered cars alongside filling stations and asphalt roads, advanced forms of public transit like subways and elevated trains, fax machines, a basic Internet, and career women. Most predictions were about the technology-based advancement with sophisticated lifestyle aside, also with some natural changes in climatic conditions as well.
The future picture of 2100, towards a hotter world
The world will be hotter in 2100, with more extreme weather and more natural disasters such as hurricanes and wildfires. It’s impossible to know right now, as it will depend on our actions during the next 80 years. There are different scenarios for the world being 15 °C to 5 °C hotter by 2100. There is a bug difference between these two extremes, but note that even if we reduced all our cars ' emissions today, the world would still keep warming for decades due to all the extra carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere. In this best-case scenario, natural disasters such as droughts, floods, hurricanes, and wildfires will become more frequent and more intense. Global warming isn’t only about warming; it’s also about having more extreme weather. The worst-case scenario of a 5 °C increase seems to be far-fetched, but there is still the risk that it may happen or that it may get close to it, which would be disastrous; millions, if not billions, of people would die, and big swathes of earth would be uninhabitable.
Demographic projections are usually relatively accurate, as death and fertility rates don’t change drastically over time; however, the further into the future, the more chances there are that some of these rates will vary considerably, wreaking havoc in those projections. The world population will peak around 11 billion people by the end of the century and then start shrinking as fertility rates go down. But recent study projects a more rapid growth of women’s fertility rate due to advances in women’s education and contraceptive use, with the world population peaking around 9 billion people by 2100.
All projections agree that most of the growth will come from Africa, bringing its population to 4.3 billion based on the more widespread forecast. Asia would peak mid-century and then shrink, but continue being the most populous region globally with 4.7 billion people. This means Africa and Asia will be home to 9 out of the 11 billion human beings living on the earth. This will have a significant impact on the balance of power in global institutions and global markets, on the ways business is conducted, and on the cultures that have a more significant impact on the world.
Moreover. There aren’t religious tensions anymore, the majority of the world is either atheists or agnostics, and a sizeable majority believe in God, but don’t strictly follow a religion. People who believe in a single religion are very few.
Almost all the transport is automated and runs on electricity. Self-driving cars, driving aeroplanes, is not even the pilots sitting in the cabin, because everything is automated and perfected.
All the crops planted around the world now are genetically different from what they were before. These crops could withstand even in harsher environments and hardly require synthetic fertilisers.
The life expectancy will steadily grow over the years. Now, the predicted life expectancy for people under 30 is 120 years. Quality healthcare and education systems, right from kindergarten to doctorate studies, are free of cost around the world. People who don’t work will get basic assistance from the government, which is good enough to sustain one’s life.
References
- activesustainablity.com
- ucl.ac.uk