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The City of the Future
Ponca City, We Love You writes "One century ago, many Americans still had not seen a movie or ridden in an automobile. The New York World greeted its readers on January 1, 1908 with a stirring rumination about the past and future of America: 'We may have gyroscopic trains as broad as houses swinging at 200 miles an hour up steep grades and around dizzying curves,' the newspaper said. 'We may have aeroplanes winging the once inconquerable air. The tides that ebb and flow to waste may take the place of our spent coal and flash their strength by wire to every point of need.' Today the NY Times asked ten knowledgeable New Yorkers to imagine New York City a century from today. Their visions include archaeological excavations at the Fresh Kills landfill, the waterfront at Third Avenue and Seventh Avenue, a dome over Central Park, and a virtual reality grid superimposed over the city."
From Ken Perlin, professor of computer science at New York University "... everyone's eyes will be implanted with tiny displays. All the information we need about the city will be accessible to us without conscious effort: where to go, what to buy ... how to hook up with friends."
... will be heroes"
;-)
And not surprisingly, Robin Nagle from the New York City Department of Sanitation predicts "Sanitation workers
On a lighter note for the holiday season, here are the Christmas Lights of the Future!
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
All that link leads to is a registration page.
Sorry to put a damper on things, but, in the nuclear war of 2072, New York City will be incinerated. In the year 2108, there's only going to be a bunch of glassy craters inhabited by trash and rats.
This is my sig.
I've come to really respect scientists who tell reporters to shove off when they ask about the world of the future. So much of future technology has to do with culture, and so little actual science, that it's like asking what color of clothing will be 'in' on 2106.
Everything will be taken away from you.
New York in 100 years? It will continue to be a maximum security prison.
Most Americans still will be unaware of what true science is. The country will have turned into a religious backwater, filled with power hungry zealots whose only purpose is to quash logical opposition. The division of the Bible belt will have moved up to the 49th parallel and all scientific progress south of the Canadian border will have been halted. Religious leaders will shout that if it's contrary to the Bible, then it's heresy and should be destroyed... otherwise, it's redundant and should be destroyed anyways. Religious leaders and politicians will be one and the same, and surveillance will be everywhere. Every American will be implanted with the equivalent of RFID tags that not only transmit location but also a plethora of biometrics and thought patterns; monitored 24x7 by the Federal Bureau of Morality. Computers will become an extension of people and connections will be strictly regulated and every point of contact flows through the government. Sexual relations will become outlawed -- procreation will only be authorized and then performed in a lab by extracting DNA samples. Alcohol will be banished, except for the excessively rich religious leaders/politicians who manage to bribe their way into keeping their own stash. Citizen rights will be replaced with privileges, and habeas corpus will be a long forgotten archaic concept. Everyone is guilty until proven innocent; after all, bringing the innocent to trial would be unfair.
Welcome to the future of America. It's closer than you think. [dfe82306ee91753eedb08098fd4ad2e3]
That wouldn't happen to be a pun, now would it?
at the rate we're ruining our current turf, we'll be fortunate to even have any land left to build on.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071229/ap_on_sc/ye_climate_records;_ylt=A0WTcVgednZHP2gB9wms0NUE
is it time to get real yet? A LOT of energy is being squandered in attempts to keep US in the dark. in the end (give or take a few 1000 years), the creators will prevail (world without end, etc...), as it has always been. the process of gaining yOUR release from the current hostage situation may not be what you might think it is. butt of course, most of US don't know, or care what a precarious/fatal situation we're in.
for example; the insidious attempts by the felonious corepirate nazi execrable to block the suns' light, interfering with a requirement (sunlight) for us to stay healthy/alive. it's likely not good for yOUR health/memories 'else they'd be bragging about it?
we're intending for the whoreabully deceptive (they'll do ANYTHING for a bit more monIE/power) felons to give up/fail even further, in attempting to control the 'weather', as well as a # of other things/events.
http://video.google.com/videosearch?hl=en&q=video+cloud+spraying
dictator style micro management has never worked (for very long). it's an illness. tie that with life0cidal aggression & softwar gangster style bullying, & what do we have? a greed/fear/ego based recipe for disaster.
meanwhile, you can help to stop the bleeding (loss of life & limb);
http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/12/28/vermont.banning.bush.ap/index.html
the bleeding must be stopped before any healing can begin. jailing a couple of corepirate nazi hired goons would send a clear message to the rest of the world from US. any truthful look at the 'scorecard' would reveal that we are a society in decline/deep doo-doo, despite all of the scriptdead pr ?firm? generated drum beating & flag waving propaganda that we are constantly bombarded with. is it time to get real yet? please consider carefully ALL of yOUR other 'options'.
the creators will prevail. as it has always been.
corepirate nazi execrable costs outweigh benefits
(Score:-)mynuts won, the king is a fink)
by ourselves on everyday 24/7
as there are no benefits, just more&more death/debt & disruption. fortunately there's an 'army' of light bringers, coming yOUR way.
the little ones/innocents must/will be protected. after the big flash, ALL of yOUR imaginary 'borders' may blur a bit? for each of the creators' innocents harmed in any way, there is a debt that must/will be repaid by you/us, as the perpetrators/minions of unprecedented evile, will not be available. 'vote' with (what's left in) yOUR wallet, & by your behaviors. help bring an end to unprecedented evile's manifestation through yOUR owned felonious corepirate nazi glowbull warmongering execrable. some of US should consider ourselves somewhat fortunate to be among those scheduled to survive after the big flash/implementation of the creators' wwwildly popular planet/population rescue initiative/mandate. it's right in the manual, 'world without end', etc....
as we all ?know?, change is inevitable, & denying/ignoring gravity, logic, morality, etc..., is only possible, on a temporary basis. concern about the course of events that will occur should the life0cidal execrable fail to be intervened upon is in order. 'do not be dismayed' (also from the manual). however, it's ok/recommended, to not attempt to live under/accept, fauxking nazi felon greed/fear/ego based pr ?firm? scriptdead mindphuking hypenosys.
consult with/trust in yOUR creators. providing more than enough of everything for everyone (without any distracting/spiritdead personal gain motives), whilst badtollin
This has nothing to do with TFA per se, but if you're into this stuff you should check out the excellent blog Paleo-Future, which is dedicated to "the future that never was" -- how people in various times over the last 140 years or so have thought the future would look.
Read my blog.
The Singularity will almost have certainly taken place by 2107, making the future existence of cities a moot point. Even if not, the constantly accelerating pace of technological development makes it absurd that anyone can accurately predict any major shifts in the world a century from now, much less ten years from now. As a minor various examples, consumer VoIP was non-existent and unforeseen 10 years ago, no one knew the impact of Half-Life, there were no dual-core multi-GHz CPUs, and we were largely unaware of the Islamist war of aggression against civilization. Google didn't exist either. Now missing all those micro-variables, how can you generate macro predictions? If I could predict the future, I would have wormed my way into Google, pre-IPO.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
New York will be under water, owned for foreigners and be infested with alligators with huge advertisements covering entire buildings with lights.
I don't think we can really 'predict' the future, of course. We might have truly artificial intelligence, brain-machine interfaces and very advanced cybernetics along with genetic engineering *really* advancing. Nuclear power is going to be really used and not just feared... and we'll have new problems that we can only dimly see like losses of personal freedoms due to corporate greed, an out of touch government and seemingly out of control costs.
No! It's a *SIG*. Keep the Special Interest Groups away! (Con joke!)
Most probably the population of Earth will be greatly reduced due to the shortage of energy. That means hundreds of millions people will die unless something miraculous happens. Do not forget that our civilization depends on cheap energy and energy will be much more expensive in the future.
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
December 30, 2007
The World of Tomorrow
By JIM RASENBERGER
ON Jan. 1, 1908 -- New Year's Day one century ago -- The New York World greeted readers with a stirring rumination about the past and future of America. The title of the article was simply "1808 -- 1908 -- 2008." The World began by marveling at how far America had come since 1808, then turned to the question of the future: "What will the year 2008 bring us? What marvels of development await the youth of tomorrow?"
The essay's visions were not timid. "We may have gyroscopic trains as broad as houses swinging at 200 miles an hour up steep grades and around dizzying curves," the newspaper went on. "We may have aeroplanes winging the once inconquerable air. The tides that ebb and flow to waste may take the place of our spent coal and flash their strength by wire to every point of need. Who can say?"
Predictions about the future were a staple of New York journalism in the early 20th century. Newspapers, including this one, frequently solicited prominent citizens for their thoughts on the future of the world, of America and, most urgent, of New York.
The city was vaulting into the 20th century with a haste that almost demanded prediction-making. As the population grew by 130,000 a year, New York's infrastructure exploded.
Within the 12 months of 1908 alone, New Yorkers would see the cantilevers of the Queensboro Bridge joined and the cables of the Manhattan Bridge spun. They would see one tunnel open under the East River and another tunnel open under the Hudson. They would see the tallest inhabited building in the world, the 612-foot Singer Building, completed on lower Broadway, only to be immediately overtaken by the steel skeleton of the 700-foot Metropolitan Life tower on Madison Square.
What next? New Yorkers were besotted with the possibilities. Architects and visionaries imagined a "cosmopolis of the future" with thousand-foot towers connected by webs of tall bridges and served by aircraft. Meanwhile, the very air seemed to buzz with the infant technology of wireless communication.
"When the expectations of wireless experts are realized, everyone will have his own pocket telephone and may be called wherever he happens to be," one magazine predicted in 1908. Equally farsighted was a prediction made by Dr. Simon Flexner, the first director of the Rockefeller Institute. The same New Year's Day that The World was conjuring gyroscopic trains, Dr. Flexner declared that human organ transplants would someday be common.
The point of such predictions was not necessarily that they were accurate but that people cared enough about the future to bother thinking about it. With that in mind, 10 knowledgeable New Yorkers, from the Nobel laureate Paul Nurse (Simon Flexner's successor) to a 12-year-old girl named Kate, were asked to imagine the city a century from now.
Whether their visions turn out to be right or wrong, whether they are bleak or tongue-in-cheek, all are generous efforts to wonder about the lives of New Yorkers of 2108, as those New Yorkers of 1908 once wondered about ours.
KEN PERLIN
Inventor; professor of computer science at New York University
In the same way we now have enhancements like pacemakers, it's reasonable to suppose that in a hundred years everyone's eyes will be implanted with tiny displays. All the information we need about the city will be accessible to us without conscious effort: where to go, what to buy, when the next subway will arrive, how to hook up with friends. We'll be able to see a virtual reality superimposed over the physical grid.
This city is all about intensity of purpose and connections, and technology will only make it more efficient and more fluid. And in a city that is so multicultural, communication will be easier. A hundred years from now, you and I could be having a conversation in two languages and translation would be automatic. I could look at a newspaper written in any language and have the translation superimposed on my vision
No. The New York City of tomorrow is here right now. Most of the building that will be here then are built already. More then you may think were already there in 1908. New York is physically highly resistant to change. There will be some differences yes. Fresh Kills is well on the way to being a major park. (No really) If anything the radical changes will be occurring in Hoboken and Jersey City. They are the natural extensions of the city and with the Access to Regions Core project, future PATH tunnels, Cross Harbor Tunnel and likely increased ferry service the west shore of the Hudson will become just another borough except that they'll be independent cities in another state. Oh and the Mets may have won a World Series by then (We can't give up hope!)
Ubiquitously - A Ubiquity Developer Community
None of them predicted a radioactive hole in the water.
I find it funny how these predictions are always based on current trends. Nothing going on today will have anything to do with 100 years from now apart from maybe the trend of smaller and smaller electronic devices. These predictions are pointless when a dozen other factors such as the economy, politics, the environment, and security are equally powerful influences on the outcome of the future. A hundred years from now, California could fall into the ocean, terrorist could set off a biological catastrophy, or a meteor could fall from the sky and kill most of the world population (I'm looking at you 2012).
Having visited Shanghai just last month and I must say I was very very impressed. Traffic lights, the weather, the transport system were all on track to be more modern as compared to what we have here in New York.
Sadly, the status quo here in New York will not change anytime soon, and that will seal our fate mainly because of corruption.
Ken Perlin will probably be close to the mark. 100 years from now you'll be able to get regular injections that contain millions of nano tech devices. These devices will travel through the blood to parts of the body they need to work on (e.g. the brain) and then construct interfaces that link wireless information networks directly into your consciousness.
I don't think there will be implanted displays as such. Rather, you'll just received the information you request and the display will be superimposed on your eye sight via nano circuitry where the optic nerves connect to the brain. That way you can still 'see' the information you want without distractions by just closing your eyes. This scenario may sound far fetched, but it has a much greater chance of gaining traction in society if all it involves is a simple injection. No painful surgery, no mess, no fuss.
> We may have gyroscopic trains as broad as houses swinging at 200 miles an hour up steep grades and around dizzying curves
... seems like progress started to pass the USA by about 30 years ago. I don't imagine in 100 years much will have changed, unless you look to China or Europe.
Somehow odd that the rest of the world got the 200 MPH trains, while the USA stagnated technologically and is left with a train system that's the embarrassment of a first world nation.
Trains, cell phones, TV, broadband internet
Goddamn MyMiniCity links
The RIAA tracks your DNA and listens to everything you hear through implanted microphones, extracting micropayments wirelessly for everything you hear.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
I would hope that the nanobots would be under one's direct control. So if you decide that you want a new appendage, you can set them to it.
its not gonna be all that shiny and new. it probably gonna be pretty dirty. Trust me, i live in New York. Also, the story said some "knowledgeable" and intelligent New Yorkers, and not many intelligent people go to School of the Future (the brains are at The Salk School of Science!)
Scotty thats not funny! Beam down my clothes RIGHT NOW!-Capt. Kirk
.. the future tech, just like Ken Perlin patented his fixed-up procedural noise.
I know, I know... "what!? it's patented??? But it's a textbook example in a gazillion books - and none of them mentioned anything!". yeah, sucks to be a graphics developer just realizing this - I know.
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6867776.html
Back to his patent-free but discontinuity-happy noise.
Ancient city ship. Make it happen.
Funny, I think we will try nano-bots. The initial results on test animals will probably be too horrific to guarantee future funding, but it won't matter, because the knowledge of the human machine will outpace the need for such devices.
Very good multimedia presentation of what New York will look like in the near and far future if we would just leave it alone.
http://www.worldwithoutus.com/multimedia.html
My rights don't need management.
I think that is the most relevant/topical myminicity link yet. I was just about to make a Budgieton joke myself.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
Tinyurl redirects to minicities are the city of the future
"We may have aeroplanes winging the once inconquerable air"
The Wright brothers flew four years earlier (December 1903), so if they publish something in January 1908, I'd think they'd know about it. Or were the brothers keeping it secret?
Eat shit and get pounded up the ass. You sir are an ASSCUNT!
Will it become a place where Latin American and African Christians live in tense coexistence with Moslems, while absentee landlords from Asia own everything? Will whites become so rare that New Yorkers will stare in fascination at white people? Jews will have long since have converted to Buddhism or intermarried with others, that they are a regarded as a mysterious ancient people like the Druids or Manicheans. The world's economic center of gravity will have long since shifted South and East, so New York will be a historical curiosity like Philadelphia or Pittsburgh today. (In their time, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh were the apex of American culture and technology.) At the request of France's Islamic government, the Statue of Liberty will be replaced with a statue of Sayyid Qutb, every schoolkid will take museum trips to the "Palestinian Holocaust Museum", Chinese financiers will turn Central Park into a replica of the Forbidden City, while trendy New Yorkers will receive cosmetic gene therapy to look more Arab, African, or Hispanic.
More likely enlarge an existing appendage
The appendix being a natural candidate for enlargement -- especially if you don't pay your taxes on time!
I expect a huge statue to be erected in honor of Snake Plisken in the New York of the future. Fictitious character or not, it's the only decent thing to do.
Technology is the wild card that throws predictions to the wind. It's what differentiates modern civilization from the ancient Greeks, Romans, Sumerians, and every other now-dead civilization.
The cheapest form of Energy widely available today is coal, providing the majority of electrical power in the United States. It produces power as cheaply as $0.05 per watt, a rate that has now been matched by Solar power. Nicely enough, solar power is at its peak right at the same time that energy use is at its peak, (during hot, sunny days!) so the usual complaints about "peak load" are largely mitigated.
Combine that with our improved efficiencies of everything from lights to household heating, and the effect is magnified.
I predict that energy will be cheaper in 2050 per KWH than today. Nonetheless, technologies that save power will be in far greater use than they are today, simply because the cost of being efficient is also dropping. We're moving from an economy of scarcity to an economy of plenty, and one of the first industries to be hit by this is the recording industry.
Technology is advancing, and is continuing to advance, driven by the combination of cheap resources, a highly refined economic / capital investment system, and a generally well-educated population. Now, the interconnectedness of internet-based technologies takes the whole dynamic of education and technology and kicks it into hyperdrive.
There will be many challenges, of that I am certain. But I'm equally certain that we'll face the challenges faster than they accumulate. Technology continues to advance the power of the able, and meet the needs of the weak.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Futurama? New New York? Ain't youse guys been watchin' it?
"It's time to take life by the cans." ~ Bender ("Bendin' in the Wind", ep. 3-13)
One hundred years from now New York Times will ask its reader to imagine how NYC will look like in the year 2208.
If enithin kan gow rong it whil. (Murfey)
New New York rocks! NYC will look like what Old New York loks like in futurama!
Scotty thats not funny! Beam down my clothes RIGHT NOW!-Capt. Kirk
under one's direct control...
Yes and no. Yes, they'll do what we want them to (in a sense). No, because they'll be running MS Windows 2112 with "RIAA & MPAA & Disney compliance enforcement kits". So, between the daily reboots, the slowing to a crawl as you try to cross a busy street, and having your body force you to turn yourself in to the IP Police every time you mention a trademarked or copyrighted word without a license... yes, there should still be a few seconds remaining each day for the bots to do what you want (assuming you have a proper subscription for the thing you wish them to do).
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
**WHOOSH**
I'm working on a little surprise for the minicity jerks.
stay tuned.
MP3 Search Engine
can it involve dynamite? please let it involve dynamite.
Makes me wonder if I would get a noodly appendage...
Freedom is strength, Ignorance is peace, War is slavery.
1) A moderately frequent detail in science-fiction stories was lights that would automatically turn themselves on when someone entered a room and turn themselves off when there was nobody in it.
I remember thinking this was utter nonsense, because, based on the price of photocells, relays, iconoscope tubes, or whatever it would have taken to do this circa 1950 or 1960, it didn't seem within the range of credibility that this would be economically feasible... especially given the low cost of electricity (and the expectation that nuclear power plants would soon make electricity "too cheap to meter.")
2) Google is not really equivalent to Isaac Asimov's Multivac, but it is a recognizable approximation. You do type in questions... in natural language if you like, Google is smart enough to ignore the extra words!--and it does draw on a huge worldwide base of human knowledge and present "answers" in direct, human readable form.
3) Flat TV you can hang on a wall. For a good five decades, Popular Science and the like were trumpeting invention after invention that was going to make it possible to have "flat TV you can hang on a wall." (One was a very shallow CRT, only a few inches deep, with an electron gun that fired in from the side and electromagnetic fields that deflected the beam toward the phosphor...) This hung fire for so long I thought I would never see it in my lifetime.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Why go to such lengths as nano-tech? Contact lenses, man! (Credit to Rainbows End, by Vernor Vinge)
[clever sig]
Or Godzilla! That would be fun!
I agree that we will probably see at some point a virtual world overlaid on the real one. You will wear something that let's you see the virtual layer, and by so doing allow the virtual layer to see you. People will be able to walk through the city from their computers (or whatever they have) and interact with other virtual people or with real life people who are wearing the device that lets them see the virtual world.
Everybody will absolutely be connected to everything at all times. You think the cell phone is neat? You think it's cool that I can hop on my phone and access the internet? This is only the beginning. Connectivity will become as ubiquitous as air. Information that is at our fingertips today will be readily and instantly accessible by our brains in the future.
If we don't blow ourselves up by then.
or else!
For example, the United States is now entering the most severe recession since the Great Depression. Hispanics migrants never really wanted to leave their home countries; economic necessity made them head north. Due to the recession there's less work, they're sending less money home, and a few have started heading back to where they came from.
Mexicans sending less money home, studies find
More indications that money flow slowing to Mexico
Mexicans Miss Money From Relatives Up North: "Like Mr. Rivera, some of the men who went to work in the United States illegally have returned discouraged. And less work means less money to send home -- particularly from the southern United States and other areas where Mexican migrants are a more recent presence."
You're right about the military being 'a small shadow of its former self', though.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
Kudos for linking to the printer version...
Other than KIM HASTREITER (Co-founder and co-editor of Paper magazine) who is just fuckin' around, CAROL WILLIS (Founder and director of the Skyscraper Museum; curator of the exhibition "Future City") who is showing some common sense, KATE KAPLAN (Seventh grader, School of the Future, a New York City public school near Gramercy Park) who actually has some intriguing ideas (Portable chip toilets? How would that work?) - other predictions are just a case of "Have hammer - will nail everything."
PAUL NURSE (President of Rockefeller University) is also nailing things with his hammer but at least he is using some common sense not to nail jello to the wall.
Only rich will live in New York? Who will serve them? Robots? Then how come there are poor if robots do our work?
And if you think that the point of being served is to get things handed to you so you don't have to get up...
Serving is about commanding other humans.
Robot that says "How high Sir?" when you tell it to jump just ain't all that fun.
$200-300 barrels of oil? Conservative...
Wasn't there some mention of about only 50 more years of oil? And with dollar going so far down... Why not $200.000-300.000 a barrel?
Detaching oil from dollars and all those dollar bills in the world used by countries solely to trade for oil "coming back home" - what else besides guns in people's faces will make them use your printed paper instead of someone else's to trade in valuables?
Now... Germans seem to have learned their lesson in forcing the world to do stuff they want of it - by using guns.
It took them only 2 world wars and 40 years of the country divided by other people's cold war.
So far, Americans don't seem to be catching on.
I sure do hope that they do. And soon. Or we all as a species might be fucked.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
This doesn't mean disaster - it just means "poorer" by our standards. People will still live rich colourful lives. But they'll do it on 2000 calories a day, if that.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
And that will piss us all off enough to construct a giant cube shaped ship and destroy (oops, I mean assimilate) other cultures and planets.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
The big NYC financial houses are already selling themselves to Arab and Chinese investors. This trend will continue. NYC will become a UN of finance, a place where the various world financial powers can meet and make deals. There will be no middle class in NYC. The population will be the uber-wealthy and the low paid service workers they employ. America will still be the place where the rest of the world sells their stuff, but they won't be selling it for US dollars. Americans will be on the dole or working in foreign owned sweatshops, and buying shit on credit. You won't retire, you'll work till you die, if you work at all.
Ex-president Chelsea Clinton's granddaughter will be running for president against a Saudi prince whose last name is Bush. American Idol will still have more voters and generate more interest than the presidential election. Canada and Mexico will complain about US citizens illegaly immigrating to their countries.
The New England Patriots will be working on a 1900 game winning streak, and Bill Belichek's head will be in a jar on the sidelines. Athletes will be grown in axoltl tanks. A new Slashdot ID will be a very large number. Windows 2108 will be late, bloated and buggy. The Linux kernel will still be licensed as GPL v2, and will be at version 2.6.something.
Apple will issue an update to the iPhone that breaks the hacks that let people install third party applications. Time Machine will let you restore files you haven't created yet. My iMac will be getting its 2000th logic board replacement.
This post will have been moderated into oblivion, but my clone will still think it was funny.
no, I'm going to 'help' them a bit and get them kicked off minicity. The weak point is they give us a link... so the beneficiary is known, even if not by name. It seems they're desperate to get some traffic to those links, ok, I'm game.
MP3 Search Engine
I also doubt you'd be looking at any newspaper if technology were at that level (it's already getting fairly rare where I live). That sort of prediction reminds me of the person who creating an automobile that looked like a carriage, complete with a fake horse head thinking of using technology to advance something not overly different to today.. I also wonder about the necessary intervention between the senses and reality that would be required for real time audio conversations, I think it more likely that two people coming face to face without a common language would use some sort of text input to converse, but I wonder to what extent the possibility of no absolutely ubiquitous language would still be there. They will be heroes because people will recognize how sanitation workers are keeping the city alive. I doubt sanitation workers would be recognized as heroes, despite the fact that reality will match what was described (reuse to the nth degree). I don't know if an archaeological dig would be seen as informative about their past (our current age). After all, in our age, we don't need to resort to such methods to understand the world of the 1800s, and our record keeping is as meticulous as it ever were. I know about the Ford Model-T, without ever having seen one in person, I know about the emergence of repeat-fire rifles in the 1860s, that the weapons commonly in use in the 1700s were not rifled. I know about the beginnings of heavier-than-air flight in the early 20th century. Archeology doesn't come into play until record/artifact keeping is poor or inhibited by the collapse of a civilization. To say they will study our current age through archaeological means to me implies a really dramatically bad set of circumstances between now and then.
Mostly they keep to realistic projections, a lot of dystopian features abound, and it's hard to say without knowing the external forces whether the optimists or pessimists will be right.
I think the seventh grader is the most insightful (well, except the Jetson's style toilet..) "The Empire State Building will no longer be New York's largest building; it will probably be replaced by a giant Starbucks." Yeah, that about sums it up...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
If we don't find a new energy source to replace fossil fuels, industrial civilization won't last another century.
Since the Industrial Revolution, there's been a new major power source at least once every fifty years. Until the last fifty.
Think about it. In 1800, everything was human or animal powered, except for a windmill or waterwheel here and there, and a few wood-burning Newcomen steam engines pumping away. By 1850, the European countries and the United States had substantial railroad systems, and coal and steam powered factories. By 1900, most major cities had electric lights and street cars, and gasoline engine powered cars were starting to appear. By 1950, petroleum powered everything mobile, gas turbines powered aircraft, and nuclear power was just starting to work.
So what do we have now that we didn't have fifty years ago? Solar cells were demonstrated in 1954. The first commercial nuclear reactor started up in December 1957. Sputnik I had been launched. Megawatt-scale windmills had been tried (1941), but weren't worth the trouble in an era of cheap oil. Oil had been found in the Middle East. Natural gas was being moved through long pipelines. Even ethanol from corn had been tried. Every major energy source we have today was working in 1957. Nothing new and big enough to matter has come along since.
In the 1970s, there was hope that Government spending via the Department of Energy would yield something. Didn't work. In the 1980s, there was hope that the free market would yield some solution. Didn't happen.
What's actually happening is that all the old ideas that used to be too expensive are now competitive with oil. There's oil from tar sands. Deep offshore drilling. Ethanol from corn. Wind farms. Solar panels. At $100/bbl, these all look good. But energy is expensive from here on.
I keep seeing people claiming that China will own everything, Or all the cultural center will move to China, In this thread. As an old timer, I was hearing the same thing in the 80's but instead of China it was Japan. The same shrieks of fear of the yellow peril were cried. Americans business was told to learn Japanese. Books on how to emulate the successful Japanese companies were all the rage. People were terrified that the Japanese were buying up all are assets. No I am not making this up. Just watch some of the movies from that time and look at the setting or back drop "Rising Sun", "Die Hard","Gung Ho" to name a few. 1/3 of Shadowrun and RPG that was developed in that time period has Japanese takeover of Corporate America as a major back drop. Everyone was afraid in the 80's that Japan would own everything by the year 2000. (OK they own the Manga and cute Catgirl Market here). The reality is quite a bit different. I predict in 2107 that we will be running around talking about how the Martian colonies are buying everything, and soon we will be just a little backwater country with everything owned by them damn Mars Colonists.
You bring up a good point. Nanobot Enlargement Spam...
"seems like progress started to pass the USA by about 30 years ago"..yep, exactly the time period we let the black suited ferengi mercenaries who infest their vulture lairs in the above linked "New York City" high rise cliffs hijack the economy for their purposes. They sold "globalisation" as a pipe dream, a con, a hustle, and it worked-for them. Their entire business model revolves around foreigners doing all the work, yet only getting a pittance for themselves, and somehow this would be sustainable? How long is that viable before these foreigners decide they can keep all the fruits of their labors or trade them for something more substantial then digitally created electrons in a data base table? The answer is "now", right now, this second, year 2008 will be the great unraveling. It's started now, the prologue anyway, they are in panic mode, their only option is to keep dropping zeroes on the ends of digits in how much "money" they say they have. The best thing that could happen for the US right now is to kick NYC out of the union and go back to fair trade, and a balanced and well diversified economy, not their scam "free" trade. They sold off the entire carefully built up manufacturing infrastructure for short range profits and offered everyone "debt" disguised as credit and "paper financial products" which is even beyond an oxymoron, as most of those don't even come in cheap paper form. Useless.
Now that this roadkill they made is about picked clean, they'll be moving on to other carcasses. They couldn't care less about everyone else in the US, so why should we care about them or their total exploitative parasitic "culture"?
Is unabated pessimism.
In 1908, the sky seemed the limit and the predictions tended to focus on new, marvelous machines and how they would make life better for all.
In 2008, it's not so much about the technology or science but about how so few are wealthy and the general feeling is that we are on the edge of a long hard decline. The only upshot beeing that we'll somehow continue to have cutting edge tech.
Is it just me or are people genuinely very worried, frightened and so deeply unhappy with world affairs to the point that they think it's just crap from here on out and we should welcome an age of mechanized oppression?
To say no US Citizen would be able to afford to live in NYC while Oil Barons owned entire burroughs is complete and utter BS in my book.
It reeks of weakness and apathy. The same weakness and apathy that brings us all the people who whine and cry about Bush and his administration yet fail to do anything about it. The same weakness and apathy that has Americans crying about Global Warming, but they all shut their faces about it when they go home to waste several hundred kilowatts watching Survivor and American Idol.
This was supposed to be a dreamy piece, about "what if" and where "anything" could happen. What do we get? Hit over the head with "FAIL FAIL FAIL" again and again throughout the article. Not one prediciton was positive, each was somehow foreseeing a darker future where we are all worse off except the monied elite. From these predictions, it seems people have given up and the future they are grateful to accept is one where Asia leads and we just consume their tech and get whatever kind of living they give us.
Pretty sad if you ask me.
... at computer stores as people wait to purchase the first copies of Duke Nukem Forever.
There was a common theme of 'global warming will destroy NYC'. There also was society losing all freedom for the sake of security, and pining for the days of freedom. There was even the prediction of the largest building being a Starbucks, for god's sake, how much more pessimism do you need.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Godzilla sounded fun to me :(
Dec 23 2012
Solar Flare : ALL electronic systems on earth are destroyed.
Nuclear facilities all over the world become nuclear disasters.
War, Famine, Plague, and Death once again crush humanity under its feet.
Humanity in the year 2100 is barely alive. ALL knowledge has been destroyed.
ALL technology except the most basic [ like hammers ] is destroyed or forgotten.
Humanity has paid the price for its arrogance and pride. Hedonism and materialism have
successfully destroyed the people of the 21st Century. Not that anyone knows what year
it is anymore.
Mutant lifeforms are taking over the earth. Some mutated homosapiens are becoming dominant.
Other mutated species are gaining more intelligence. Homosapiens are no longer the
"dominant" species.
City of the future is a joke. There are NO cities. The population of the human race is under 100 000.
The few females/males that can reproduce are rare.
Goodbye humanity. You had your time. Looks like your idol called "money" has failed you again.
Your worship of HUMAN has destroyed you. Have a nice day.
bwah hah hah hah.
If they had the 3 seashells, even your bleak future wouldn't be all that bad. Oh yeah, and Taco Bell wins the war.
kinda hard without a physical location, but yes, I agree with you that would be a nicer solution alltogether.
MP3 Search Engine
Ok, myminicity .com assholes. Playtime is over.
.com people hopefully more traffic than they were bargaining for.
I've really had it with the myminicity.com crowd, and to put a stop to this nonsense I've set up a little website.
Stop posting your myminicity links here and elsewhere, if myminicity.com wants to grow they can surely find a way to do it without inconveniencing others.
If you don't then I'm calling on the rest of the audience here to report those links to the site above and if they want to help a little further to place a 1 pixel image tag on their website which will give the myminicity
For starters I've placed a tag on the http://ww.com/ homepage, feel free to come and help.
This is just another spam wave and if this doesn't get stopped now then it will be seen as a vindication of the principle and before long there will be 100's of sites doing this.
Rewarding your users for bad behaviour has to be one of the most annoying marketing tactics that has ever been devised.
MP3 Search Engine
IMHO, the nanobots will only work for a certain type of mentalities. Most of them will go insane, harm themselves or other people because they won't be able to handle it. To manually control aspects of the body using the mind through nanobots means you have to change how the brain processes time and a persons relationship to their body as an object. Today's psychology is very limited. There is a lot of conflict concerning the validity and political motives behind the fields true effectiveness. Nanobubbles, I think that's what they are called, would be a better solution. It's simple, practical and much more realistic. They can contain medicine and can be deployed with extreme precision. It's been on one of those 2050 shows some time back. Nanomachines can be tricky and it will take years, maybe decades for anyone to create a realistic model that will be safe for general human use.
who the hell wants to be alive in 2108? People already are willing to f*** a hole in a stall with their eyes closed and not care whats on the other end, what makes you think they give two s***s about improving the general quality of life for Humanity, now let alone in the future?
They've modernized the weather in that thar Shanghai!? :/
we've got some catching up to do
Why imagine a future city when one can build it using game engines like Oblivion
Unless they put all the garbage out to sea on a barge, or maybe send it into space on a rocket from the Mafia.
What? You didn't like MY vision of the future but Saudi Arabian New York and underwater New York are OK?
Or the feudal New York where dance is the king?
Or did my guess strike too close to home?
I did base it on current economic and global trends.
Dollar going down, oil running out, US military spending gajilions of dollars on projects like that energy satellite or MF-in lasers on the MF-in planes.
Yeah... a regular troll-fest there.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I mean, where are the Duke Nukem forever-jokes?
Yeah yeah, I know it's actually moving along now; damn those developers killing off our beloved memes.
The first big change will be devolution from Manhattan-centricity. No one in the city or state has the political will to upgrade public transportation to accommodate the jump in ridership to work in Manhattan, so people will look to work closer to home. The devolution has already begun, with Jersey City in the lead (yes, technically not part of NYC, but for all practical intents and purposes it is), with Brooklyn not far behind it, and with Queens (Long-Island City) bringing up the rear.
The second big change will see the decline of automobile use in the city. Bikes will reclaim lanes, and pedestrian-only areas will be created in locations like Times Square, Midtown-east, Herald's Square, and around the WTC site. Also, tolls on the bridges and tunnels and reduction of parking opportunities will make it too expensive and inconvenient for 90% of car commuters.
The third big change will be an overall increase in greenery in the form of trees, planters, and green roofs. They'll be implemented to reduce energy usage and improve air quality, and consequently bring down the sky-high asthma rates for children in the city.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Cars.
Still.
Won't.
Fly.
Bills will still take 2 decades to pass, and my decendants will all be working blue collar jobs.
Oh wait, I won't have any. I don't have a wife, and I don't get laid! Fuck the future then.
None of them mentioned the imminent release of Duke Nukem Forever...
Insert witty comment *here*. I'm fresh out of wit...
... in a matter of a couple of generations.
Palestinians were expelled and colonized in a matter of a few years.
Jews were almost exterminated in Europe in less than a decade.
Native Americans in all the American continent were obliterated in 5 generations or less.
Lots of things can happen in 100 years.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Bwahaha! I never thought about it but yes, the Borg will most likely be born from angry /. readers of the future.
Moderation: +1 pwnage
Try to imagine a city of the future? A century from now, or a few years from now - either way it doesn't really matter, we won't be here to see it. According to the all-knowing Nostradamus, the Mayan calendar, etc, the world is going to end by Dec 21, 2012.
See http://www.2012endofdays.org/general/Predictions-for-2012.php
People are doing their best to make sure that we ruin whatever natural resources we set our grubby little hands on. So even if the world doesn't implode in 2012, there won't be much left to enjoy. Think of the Matrix-esque "Desert of the Real."
--- "To ignore race and sex is racist and sexist!" -- Jesse Jackson