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

Trains?

[calebt3]

We may have gyroscopic trains as broad as houses swinging at 200 miles an hour up steep grades and around dizzying curves This just shows how far we have come. Dan Quayle once said "The future will be better tomorrow." These days nobody would take the train idea seriously. Now the goal is teleportation.

Paleo-Future

[jalefkowit]

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.

Energy crisis

[little1973]

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.

Re:Energy crisis

[KnowledgeKeeper]

Most probably the population of Earth will be greatly reduced due to the shortage of energy.

I concur. But, the problem isn't just energy. Thinking of peak oil? What about peak metals Copper is already getting pretty thin. Not only that, the copper for our today's use has to be 99.95% pure. Zinc is on the list, too. The estimate is that there is 26% of Earth's copper bound in non-recyclable state (ie. landfills) and about 19% for zinc. Some estimates mention total depletion in 100yrs.

I guess we're living in the oil age between two stone ages. What's worse, humans are the first and last chance for highly intelligent and technologically advanced species. Think about it - our development effectively started when our ancestors started getting metals out of the Earth's crust. What is next intelligent species (or our human successors) going to use to transit themselves into the next iron/bronze/golden age? Nothing. If we fail to transform into successful space dwelling species while there is enough energy to escape the gravity well we're a failure because in that case we're designated for extinction. I guess this guy said it best.

We are Borg. Resistance is futile !

[Macka]

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.

Re:America in 2108...

[LaughingCoder]

Actually, if you want to extrapolate trends, I have a few for you to consider. Unlike your sensationalistic and inflamatory extrapolations, mine are based on actual, statitisically verifiable trends: - Children raised by one parent will be the norm. Two parent households will be rare.
- America will be a mainly Spanish speaking country
- Marriage will be almost non-existent
- Government will be "responsible" for all the care-and-feeding of the large majority of the population,
and will meet these responsibilities through ever-increasing taxation of the ever-shrinking productive members of society
- The military will be a small shadow of its former self


All of these trends are very evident today, have been gaining momentum in the past 20 years, and show no sign of abating. No serious person can say with any validity that the America of today (2008) is more religious than the America of 1908, and to imply that religion is ascendent in American society today is pure BS. In fact, the opposite is demonstrably true. The military is undeniably in decline, as is the "nuclear family". And demographics clearly point towards a majority Spanish speaking population mid-next century. None of these points is really arguable.

Welcome to the future of America.

Re:View of New York in 100 years

[Typoboy]

Or just go see I Am Legend

Already wrong

[mcrbids]

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.

Re:An excercise in absurd futility

[QuantumG]

Wow. Someone who still believes in the Singularity. Awesome. I'd suggest you go read the Commonwealth series of books by Peter F. Hamilton, but they're probably a bit heavy for you. Suffice to say, the nature of super-intelligences is that they are only dangerous if you let them get out of control.. and it takes an abundance of investment to get a proto-intelligence to the stage where it can improve itself at any significant rate, and by then you'll have so many possible applications of the technology that there simply won't be the economic need to develop it to a threatening level.

Some "futures" that DID come to pass

[dpbsmith]

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.

Re:Some "futures" that DID come to pass

[MichaelSmith]

4) High density solid state storage: 8 gigs on a SD card the size of my thumbnail

5) Mobile phones. Talk to anyone from just about anywhere, whenever you want

6) LED lighting. Christmas lights this year were totally over the top. The lights you can attach to your person or your home are no longer limited by light globe technology or cost

re 2) The web really goes beyond anything projected for IT in the past. Few writers envisaged a situation where anybody could publish pretty much any media from pretty much anywhere and have any other person access it. Consider teenagers and myspace as a simple example. The forecasts from 1950 talked about ordering more milk from the supermarket computer, but nothing as emergent as what we have today.

NYC in 100 years will be similar but different

[Ralph Spoilsport]

It will still be a huge city, but a much poorer city. Think something more like Rio or Lagos. there will be very rich areas, but many incredibley poor areas. The sky scrapers will be largely empty, as no one is willing to climb more than 10 stories. The trains will have stopped running some 10 years earlier. The exurbs in Jersey were plowed back into farmland in the 2070s, and the Satellite cities are filled with industrial mire. Many of the residents will have left to Pennsylvania and Maryland and New Jersey to engage as farmers. The natural gas gave out decades ago, so heating is done with wood and what little coal is left. There is some electricity that comes from some few solar panels and a light water breeder reactor (one of the few that was built before the collapse and depression of the 2020s and 2030s). America pissed its wealth away on bullshit back in the late 20th and early 21st century, and in the 22nd century it no longer has the resources to feed itself much less build gyroscopic trains.

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

Re:America in 2108...

[Xeth]

I'm reminded of a scene from The Simpsons:

Disco Stu: "Did you know that disco record sales were up 400% for the year ending 1976? If these trends continue... AAY!"

There are more logical, thorough debunkings of your (and all others') wild speculation, but I leave them to other posters.

ready

[jacquesm]

Ok, myminicity .com assholes. Playtime is over.

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 .com people hopefully more traffic than they were bargaining for.

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.

Re:There won't be a New York

[tjstork]

"And there was a great earthquake, such as has not been since men were on the earth, so mighty and so great an earthquake. And the great city came to be into three parts, and the cities of the nations fell." (Revelation 18:18-19)

I think it is widely held that John was talking about Rome.