Featured Does the future look bright to you?

Great thread. I voted "bad in the near term but good after a while" as it always is at the end of the long term debt cycle.

Baby Boomers created the world we're living in, and are gonna leave it in the next few decades. The changes are gonna be big and so will be the wealth transfer.

You know how it goes. Strong men create good times -> Good times create weak men -> Weak men create bad times -> Bad times create strong men.

 

I think the future of humanity will have aspects of it that will be far better in many ways, but also far worse. Essentially, from a meta perspective, I don’t think the future or humanity will be better or worse. I actually have a hard time thinking of different eras of humankind as more positive or negative than each other.

I realize this will be very unpopular way of viewing things and it’s actually a bit vulnerable for me to even voice this opinion, because of how charged I know this question could easily be. Mainly because it has implications for how I interpret the past.

When I look back into history I am not able to honestly say that I see a clear better or worse, overall. I think t’s too difficult to come to a qualitative conclusion, for me. There’s too many heavy and subtle realities that potentially stack-up and weigh-in on both sides of the scale. Too many variables to take into account on both sides.

It’s obvious to me that strong arguments for either position on the fate of humanity can be made. I expect most will argue that the future of humanity will be some form of grim. (What about you, @Reason? I’m so curious.)

I think humanity’s future will be radically different. I believe it will be fraught with new and remarkable advantages and developments, alongside horrifying disadvantages and unprecedented challenges.

 

I feel like there is no future anymore.

 

If we avoid self-inflicted extinction long enough to settle other planets? A little brighter in the sense that we’ll keep spreading like a tech-enslaved virus until the universe fights us off. But hey, that’s just in terms of humanity existing.

Aside from that, it will be bright, dark, beautiful, ugly, painful, and probably weird af.

 

According to this post I saw the other day, this was a navigation system prototype conceived in the 1950s.


And this:


The smarty pants back then weren't so wrong. It's interesting how our predictions will work out.

Spoiler: Ngl. This one made me chuckle

 

Try reversing the question - do you think the past of humanity looks positive? Sometimes it was and sometimes it wasn't. It varied across the world in different places at any one time too.

I see the future being the same. There will be good times and there will be bad. The immediate future, over the next 100 years, will a time of great transition, as was the last 100 years, and it could end either way, with a new dark age or a springboard into greater things. The great challenge for us is whether we can live in balance or whether we can only survive by consuming what cannot be renewed. This is a great time to be alive because we stand at the end of our childhood and have to face life as an adult species for the first time. It's frightening but what a ride we are having!

Go out further, a million and ten million and a hundred million years into the future, and I see our descendants spreading across the galaxy, though they might not look much like us by then. Those too will have good times and bad because that's what life is like.

 

I'm looking forward to the future.

The next decade or two may involve a lot of change, perhaps even upheaval, but I see this as an opportunity for things to get better.

 

I voted for bad in the near future but good after a while.

There is, I think, a desperate need to remove the profit motive from certain areas of life and I'm not sure that can happen without a period of real dystopian shit and how that will end I have no idea.

But I believe that people, as in the general mass of people, will get through it. It might not be particularly overtly violent for many people but the way out won't be found in rationalism - it will be in rediscovering what it means to be human, whatever that means...

 

This is what I believe. I think we're on the verge of a fundamental shift in our understanding and approach to existence. We're not meant to live in a world ran like this, and we know it.

 

We see brightness beyond the future. No vote.

 

Csar Bomba?

 

Tzar Bomba

For the coming 10-20 years a major factor on human future would be within the biomedical field.