SCI FI PI

Would you like to have a peek at the future? See what's going to happen in 2032 and 2092?

Sure you would!

When it comes to the future, we're always keen. That's why loving Sci FI is so great - what will become reality one day is more often than not mirrored in what we watch as entertainment today.

“Imagine a very smart networked computer attached to every genetically engineered maize plant in a field in a poor rural backwater of Uganda. And that they discuss how fast they're growing via wifi and agree a nutrient plan to optimize growth, including restricting water to one particular plant that's shadowing a couple of others. The farmer, aged 80, harvests them via a quadrotor drone from the comfort of his air-conditioned farmhouse. (The quadrotor is powered by methanol fermented from their discarded husks.)

When he needs to sell them, he hires a self-driving cargo truck to come and pick them up. And maybe hitches a ride to the clinic in town in the unoccupied cab to get his anti-cancer booster shots updated. Implausible? Partly because in the long term, things change more than we expect. But mostly because he's one of the 20% who don't live in cities.”


This is just one of the visions for the future that Hard Sci Fi novelist Charlie Stross has laid out in his recent essay World Building 301: Some Projections in which he makes predictions for what the Earth is going to look like in 2032 and 2092.


As expected, many of his 2032 prognostications don’t stretch the bounds of reality too far, they just expand on current trends.

For example, in 2032:

FOOD
“Fish is probably going to cost more than beef products because we're on course to comprehensively f*** over the largest commercial fisheries, allowing opportunist species to replace the ecosystems we're strip-mining. Oceans are likely to be dominated by squid (edible) and jellyfish (not edible). There might still be freshwater fisheries with food species fed on processed jellyfish. Cultured mammalian tissue is likely to be available. It'll be of about the same consistency as Quorn and will lack mouth appeal, but some folks will take to it.”


MEDICINE
“HIV will be curable — either through better anti retroviral drugs or through gene therapy (note that this is a first step towards developing a prosthetic immune system). Cancer ... we'll know a lot more about it. Many types of cancer will be manageable, albeit as a major nuisance illness subject to recurrent outbreaks and requiring unpleasant medicines to treat it (like HIV today).”


ELECTRONICS
“Moore's Law will have played out by 2032; we'll have circuitry where the feature resolution is on the order of one or two atoms. Can't make it smaller. Can stack it vertically. A 2032 smartphone (and literally everyone will have a smartphone, or its successor) will compare in power to a 2012 iPhone 4S or Galaxy Nexus as one of those compares to a 1992 computer — a Macintosh Quadra 840 or a 486DX PC running Windows 3.1. The distinction between RAM and static storage (SSDs) will have faded to a gradation of access speed dominated by caching, displays will consume very little energy and have pixel pitch so fine that the human eye can barely see them, battery life will exceed one day in ordinary use, and gigabit wireless connection speeds will be the norm outside the home or office (at home/in office it'll tend towards the bandwidth constraint imposed by the atmosphere, i.e. 1-2 tb/sec shared between the devices in any given opaque-walled room or cubicle).”

So, lots of squid for dinner, cancer not so much a problem, and we’ll be able to illegally download old movies like Prometheus and The Hobbit much quicker. Coolio.



Charlie Stross. Would you eat this man?



But it’s once Stross starts casting his eye a little further into the future, to 2092 – “it’s going to be a world full of old people who are afraid of the sky” – that things, from our innocent 2012 perspective, start looking a little freaky:

CLIMATE
“The climate will be well and truly f***ed because we're not able to take preventative action far enough in advance to avoid the worst effects. Large chunks of the earth will have heat emergencies every year that render them uninhabitable by human beings without powered refrigeration. These chunks include some of the most densely populated areas (notably India and China). On the other hand, they coincide with maximum insolation, so the solar power to run the aircon will hopefully be available.”


FOOD
“Not many changes, except synthetic meat indistinguishable from the real thing (Kobe beef steak made from vat-grown Kobe beef muscle tissue!) will be available and is probably cheaper than the real thing. Not to mention not requiring the land surface and secondary energy inputs of animal husbandry. There's time for social accommodation to make the foodie scene get truly weird. Expect Charles Stross gammon steaks to be served at SF conventions.”


WORLD POLITICS
“…it’s not unreasonable to expect a gerontocracy dominated by the elderly, with a small, poor, disenfranchised youth sector.”


ENERGY
“Solar will be ubiquitous; cells as cheap as wallpaper will ooze carbon-neutral diesel oil, or come with built-in storage batteries.”


ELECTRONICS
“We should have computing systems powerful enough to manage a synapse-level simulation of a human brain in real time and then some. We'll also have had time to map out the human neural connectome, even allowing for it to be harder than is currently apparent. Either we have the ability to simulate a human mind, or it's impractical (either for ethical reasons (what happens when you switch it off?) or because the quantum woo-woo pedlars like Roger Penrose are correct, or because synapses are a distraction and the real mechanics happen at a molecular scale).”

Stross’ essay is a great collection of extrapolations that read more like science probability than science fiction.

And it’s fascinating when comparing it to a recent discover of predictions made in The Ladies Home Journal in 1911 for what the world would be like in 2011.



You can check it out in full by clicking here.


Of course, there’s the usual quaint, bizarre assertions that didn’t come true, like there will be no C, X or Q in our every day alphabet because we’ll all be using truncated, phonetic language (well, actually, the bit about phonetic language did sort of come true – C U L8ER LMFAO), or strawberries as large as apples will be eaten every day.

But on the whole, most of the predictions are pretty spot on – give or take their being framed in the technology of yesteryear.

For example, it predicts:

AIR CONDITIONERS
“Hot and Cold air from spigots – hot or cold air will be turned on from spigots to regulate the temperature of a house as we now turn on hot or cold water”


EMAILING PHOTOS
“Photographs will be telegraphed from any distance. If there be a battle in China a hundred years hence snapshots of its most striking events will be published in the newspapers an hour later.”


SPY SATELLITES
“Balloons and flying machines will carry telescopes of one hundred mile vision with camera attachments, photographing an enemy within that radius. These photographs, as distinct and large as if taken from across the street, will be lowered to the commanding officer on the ground below.”


AND FAST FOOD JOINTS!
“Ready-cooked meals will be bought from establishments similar to our bakeries of today. They will purchase materials in tremendous wholesale quantities and sell the cooked foods at a price much lower than the cost of individual cooking.”


Yeah, bring on the squid and Stross gammon steak burgers! We'll see you in 2032 and check off what turned out to be true. Until then...