The future in 1000 — 2000 years

Friday, September 9, 2016

Now, let’s see.  No fable, nothing about Gunther, no chapter about Bud, no time traveling, no lovesick moping around after any girls, nothing about the mysterious and ancient Great North Trail.  What are some of the other themes?  Oh yes, hippie days, days of my youth, chemistry, photography, getting my finger chopped by the lawn mower.  Then there’s always writing itself.  Unfortunately, all of the themes are dry holes.  Nothing about cowboys or Indians.  Man!  If a person is only as good as their next piece, I don’t know what to expect.

P. and I put up nearly 40 campaign yard signs for Margaret MacDonald, Democrat, running for state Senate.  Holy cow.  Then we purchased a countertop and sink for our bathroom.  Goody.  Now I’ll have somewhere to keep my dental floss, etcetera.

Tonight we have tickets to see “In Conflict,” a play at NOVA about soldiers in Afghanistan.

The future:  I think the world will look congested, like Iwakuni, Japan; or Istanbul or Paris or any other old populated place.  Streets will be narrow and buildings will occupy every extra square inch of land.  People will learn how to become excruciatingly polite because the rude people will have become extincted long ago.  People will communicate through all avenues:  writing, speaking, physical actions, like dancing; electronic texting, and real-time video communication.  Yellow post-it notes will survive the next several millennia before something like the etch-a-sketch takes their place.

The word extincted will refer to persons killed by mobs of torch-bearing persons.

Men and women will be impossible to tell apart at first glance.  People will naturally gravitate toward those in the opposite “camp.”

People will be vegetarians because meat will be too costly for anyone.  Cows will be kept for milk, chickens kept to lay eggs, but most of the people will eat rice and beans and other grains, vegetables, and legumes.  Kale will be a delicacy.  Same for various kinds of mushrooms and seaweed.  Berries will sell for many astrobucks.

Oil as we now get from oil wells will be used exclusively for manufacturing medicines and for lubricating machinery.  All electricity will be from renewables, such as plants, wind, solar, hydro.  Nuclear will have been deemed too dangerous and old reactors will be strictly quarantined.  (See “extincted.”)

A typical household will consume very little electricity to light its LCD bulbs and to heat water for cooking.  Wealthy people will have central heating with geothermal systems, but most people will dress warmly and sit within warm modules in their otherwise-cold houses.

Transportation will be by foot, bicycle, velocicycle, public transportation or electronic teleportation.  Private cars will be obsolete because there will be no fuel to run them, not even electricity.  Sure, important political figures will have private transportation, but mostly by air, not by road.  Air transport will be via balloon, not propeller, not by jet.

Language will become ever more concentrated.  English will sound different than it does now.  You know how a teenage girl talks these days?  Everyone will talk that way in the future.  Fast and high and with lots of new words that will take the place of entire sentences and paragraphs.  A person from our era would not be able to understand a future English speaker.

Prisons will be larger than ever.  In fact, every normal person will be in some sort of prison, depending upon their trustworthiness.  There will be twenty grades of prison, from minimal minimum (M&M) to heavy duty locked away (HDLA).  In every case, the sentences will be just six months before one can be released to the next lower level of security.  It would take about ten years for someone in HDLA to earn total freedom, but before then someone would likely have bludgeoned him to death.

Weapons?  Everyone who isn’t in prison can have all of the firearms they want.   Trouble is, hardly anyone will not be in some sort of prison.  Paranoia will be deemed a crime.  Since the paranoid tend to purchase weapons, many will have their weapons confiscated before they are locked away.

Drugs?  All drugs will have been decriminalized and prohibition repealed for everything.  See the remarks about weapons above.

Lucky people will actually work and have jobs.  Most people will simply exist.

What will people do?  People who work will make things.  All working people will create art of one kind or another when they are not tending crops, collecting eggs or milking cows.  Many people will spray paint public transportation with graffiti.  Some buses and trains will have so much spray paint they will weigh too much to move.