Imagine the future.
- Thread starter Nix
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Only thing getting in the way is if we can't get to space in the first place before capitalism collapses.. which it is bound to before we can make an economy out of our solar system, which again then is only staving off the inevitable if we could manage it.
I'm also with these guys pretty much to save typing;
If we get there it will be some mean feat.
I'm also with these guys pretty much to save typing;
Well we will soon run out of oil, and other known resources do not give enough power for space travel so i think we're going to be stuck on earth for quite some time. I think during that time the world will have adapted and learned to live without oil and found new ways around the majority of things. Flight would take longer but get there eventually. space travel? well... I think we would be too caught up in advancing new things such as car engines that run on different resources to be too worried about space travel. All in all i see humans still being 99.9% on earth on 500 years time. We'd essentially be trying to get back up to today's standards, but using easily available, and renewable resources to do so.
This is assuming that a nuclear war does not break out at some point when we do run out of oil
If we get there it will be some mean feat.
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What abour the moons of uranus?
Uranus is a right **** hole.
Suit me down to the ground
and now that I have typed that sentence out, what a really annoying saying that is. 'suit down to the ground'.
where the **** did that enter our (my?) language from?
I bet it has a lot of resources inside it. I bet that by the time i'm 80 i will have drilled uranus.
Some of you have serious issues with renewable resources don't you! We are already starting to get into a position where we could conceivably be running essentially oil free in 30 years (with a big push) but we still have a couple of hundred years of oil left so on need to push that hard. With the forward momentum of fusion and the constant increase in efficiency of solar, wind and tidal collection I can see a huge proportion of our energy needs (at least in the west) satisfied by renewables/start of fusion in 50 years. Energy is unlikely to really be a problem. Other resources however probably (space, food, fertile land, certain minerals (especially as new tech comes online)), that along with human inability to be nice to each other and the environment (otherwise known as laziness, selfishness and greed) will mean that we will never become a utopian society...
500 years time... We will still have blocks of the planet like they are now. Some rich nations and some poor nations. World currency, probably not unless there is a massive shift in the way economies work.. Almost every country will have the ability to go into space and at some point between now and then we will have a period much like the discovery of the Americas and the expansions of empire, minor wars, settled mostly in space and masses of piracy as we all race to stake claimes on planets and moons, before destroying them with rampant mining operations, much like we do to this planet at the moment.
Essentially technology will have changed but not human nature...
500 years time... We will still have blocks of the planet like they are now. Some rich nations and some poor nations. World currency, probably not unless there is a massive shift in the way economies work.. Almost every country will have the ability to go into space and at some point between now and then we will have a period much like the discovery of the Americas and the expansions of empire, minor wars, settled mostly in space and masses of piracy as we all race to stake claimes on planets and moons, before destroying them with rampant mining operations, much like we do to this planet at the moment.
Essentially technology will have changed but not human nature...
Wish people would stop saying we'll run out of oil. We're going to run out of cheap oil and have some serious issues as a result. The oil itself will never be completely consumed, it will just reach a price that prohibits it's current wide range of uses. The challenge is whether we can offset the loss of cheap oil with renewable resources and new ways of doing things such as distributing food, constructing buildings and developing technology.
Population expansion and the resulting strain on resources, both in an economic sense and a literal sense are going to cause us a world of worry and will be among the biggest challenges mankind have ever faced.
I expect in the timeframe you speak of, we'll have had one large war and multiple smaller wars, purely based upon resources and the overcrowding that has put such a strain on them. It wouldn't take a whole lot to push us over the edge in terms of food production or energy production. Remember things don't need to run out completely for problems to occur, a doubling or tripling of the price of oil or food would cause serious issues that would almost be irreversible based on our current population and lifestyle.
As for space related stuff, I've always favoured the Babylon 5 way of thinking. Unified world government, slowly colonising local worlds with a long term vision of distant earth-like planets but no technology to travel anywhere near that far. Long range 'sleeper' type exploration vessels would be sent out until we end up having first contact with a new civilisation (in B5's case it was the Centauri). At this point I doubt it will go as well for us in reality as it did for the humans in B5 (where the Centauri traded advanced jumpgate technology for unique resources upon earth which they coveted). I expect if we ended up in a similar situation the far more advanced race would be far more likely to just take what they wanted, since we wouldn't have the slightest hope of competing with them anyway.
We're certainly a major population (and belief) cull away from becoming a unified world with more common goals.
Population expansion and the resulting strain on resources, both in an economic sense and a literal sense are going to cause us a world of worry and will be among the biggest challenges mankind have ever faced.
I expect in the timeframe you speak of, we'll have had one large war and multiple smaller wars, purely based upon resources and the overcrowding that has put such a strain on them. It wouldn't take a whole lot to push us over the edge in terms of food production or energy production. Remember things don't need to run out completely for problems to occur, a doubling or tripling of the price of oil or food would cause serious issues that would almost be irreversible based on our current population and lifestyle.
As for space related stuff, I've always favoured the Babylon 5 way of thinking. Unified world government, slowly colonising local worlds with a long term vision of distant earth-like planets but no technology to travel anywhere near that far. Long range 'sleeper' type exploration vessels would be sent out until we end up having first contact with a new civilisation (in B5's case it was the Centauri). At this point I doubt it will go as well for us in reality as it did for the humans in B5 (where the Centauri traded advanced jumpgate technology for unique resources upon earth which they coveted). I expect if we ended up in a similar situation the far more advanced race would be far more likely to just take what they wanted, since we wouldn't have the slightest hope of competing with them anyway.
We're certainly a major population (and belief) cull away from becoming a unified world with more common goals.
Don't count on fusion for anything for at least 50 years.
and even then if the economical energy production method requires He3 don't count on it for longer still.
Well 50 years was the earliest timescale I was thinking of really. 50 years for the first commercial reactor to come online.
Either way I see no issues with energy as renewables will almost certainly be able to take up the slack. If the worst comes to the worst there is plenty of coal for electricity consumption...
more like 50 years for the first successful energy producing research reactor, even longer for commercial.
only if tidal power kicks off in an efficient way, atm most renewable are more expensive than nuclear (and that's after subsidies).
Also atm you can't build any more wind farms in brition as they **** with radar, apparently you can't tell the difference between a plane and a windfarm.
They're trialling using the materials from stealth planes in them to solve the problem though, but it might not work and will certainly drive the price up to an even more uneconomical level.
only if tidal power kicks off in an efficient way, atm most renewable are more expensive than nuclear (and that's after subsidies).
Also atm you can't build any more wind farms in brition as they **** with radar, apparently you can't tell the difference between a plane and a windfarm.
They're trialling using the materials from stealth planes in them to solve the problem though, but it might not work and will certainly drive the price up to an even more uneconomical level.
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We have 50 years to create more efficient technnology. The good thing about renewables is their relativly short construction time. A nuclear power station could take 10 years to construct and another few years before to design and get permission. A wind farm/tidal farm can be set up in half that.
Also I don't think it's an issue with telling the difference, that would be easy, one is stationary and can be subtracted, problem is the farms hide/scramble the area behind them, meaning anything coming from that direction will be much harder to spot through the increased noise.
it's not so much the efficiency as the maintenance and set up of it. (it costs a lot to maintain an off shore wind farm)
You can't compare wind to nuclear, nuclear provides a constant base load wind produces power completly at random compared to demand.
atm for all the windfarms that are running we have to have a gas plant sitting there burning gas and keeping the turbines running so it can be immediately sped up when the wind drops.
irc to provide a reliable base load from wind you'd have to over 2/3's of the country.
tidal has much more promise because it's reliable and constant, but you can't turn it up.;
That and you still have the cost and problems involved with having 6,000 small generators all wired up along the bottom of the ocean, compared to just 6 in a nice dry land space.
Aye that's a better description, but it still means you can't build them until it's fixed.
You can't compare wind to nuclear, nuclear provides a constant base load wind produces power completly at random compared to demand.
atm for all the windfarms that are running we have to have a gas plant sitting there burning gas and keeping the turbines running so it can be immediately sped up when the wind drops.
irc to provide a reliable base load from wind you'd have to over 2/3's of the country.
tidal has much more promise because it's reliable and constant, but you can't turn it up.;
That and you still have the cost and problems involved with having 6,000 small generators all wired up along the bottom of the ocean, compared to just 6 in a nice dry land space.
Aye that's a better description, but it still means you can't build them until it's fixed.
True about maintenence, but then nuclear power stations cost a fortune in manitenence and decomissioning (although I don't know how they compare to each other so will leave it at that).
Wind was just an example, i'm talking about renewables in general, all of which take much less time to plan, set up and get running. You're right about the non continous nature of certain renewables which is why we are trying to aim for a mixture of multiple different types of energy producers.
Either way we're talking 500 years in the future here (at least the topic is supposed to be), I don't think we're going to have a problem getting there and we will certainly have transport that doesn't rely on oil that will transport us as fast, if not faster than we are transported now. TBH I'm guessing a lot of cross ocean travel (say UK to US/Oz/Asia) will go via space as you'll be able to go a lot faster up there and disturb less people.
Wind was just an example, i'm talking about renewables in general, all of which take much less time to plan, set up and get running. You're right about the non continous nature of certain renewables which is why we are trying to aim for a mixture of multiple different types of energy producers.
Either way we're talking 500 years in the future here (at least the topic is supposed to be), I don't think we're going to have a problem getting there and we will certainly have transport that doesn't rely on oil that will transport us as fast, if not faster than we are transported now. TBH I'm guessing a lot of cross ocean travel (say UK to US/Oz/Asia) will go via space as you'll be able to go a lot faster up there and disturb less people.
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