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."

Comments

There won't be a New York

[tjstork]

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.

America in 2108...

[Anonymous Coward]

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]

Re:America in 2108...

[LaughingCoder]

I am continually amazed at how many people on \. are unable to understand the notion of a trend. It really isn't difficult - 8th grade algebra really. But alas, there is also a trend that shows a dramatic decline in the quality of public schools, so I guess I shouldn't be too surprised at the inability of many folks to appreciate such advanced concepts. Here's a short primer. You take some data samples over a period of time (say, for example, percent of GDP spent on the military). You plot those points on a graph and connect them with lines. Really advanced people then apply some sort of smoothing function called a moving average to eliminate local peaks and valleys. Then you do this really tricky operation where you fit a function to the points. The slope of the function allows you to predict future data points even before they happen! The graph on this page (url:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_history_of_the_United_States) shows a nice example of how US military spending as a percent of GDP has fallen over 100% since the 1950s. You see, it slopes downward - that means a decrease. It is not too hard to imagine what that line will look like 50 years from now -- you kind of just trace it in a similar fashion, continuing it on its established trajectory -- gosh, look, since it's going down that means that military spending is going down. Imagine that! Now for a user exercise, go find some data points indicating the number of Spanish speaking people in the US. Plot those points on a graph and see what it tells you. Hint: it's going up, pretty dramatically actually. You can repeat this process for the percent of children in 1-parent homes, or the number of Americans who are married. Amazingly, I think you will discover, much to your dismay, similar graphs exhibiting similar trends. Could it be that I didn't pull these projections out of my ass? Could it be that the statistics really do verify that these trends are real? If you want me to check your answers once you've finished your homework I will be glad to.