
The Year 2512 - huetsch
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/11/2512.html
======
rogerbinns
I'm glad he didn't take the doom and gloom approach. We do keep seeing the bad
side (overpopulation, disease, environmental degradation, wars etc) but slowly
and surely the opposite has been happening. Prosperity has been improving
things for (virtually) everyone, not just a few westerners. And people do
strange things once prosperous - they protect the environment, have more
greenery (compare richer versus poorer neighbourhoods), buy organic, electric
cars, contribute to charity etc. The question is can we continue to improve
prosperity, and there is no reason to believe it won't keep happening. Matt
Ridley of "The Rational Optimist" has a lot of material to substantiate that.

Here is a quick TED talk and a transcript of the opening to get you going.

[http://www.ted.com/talks/matt_ridley_when_ideas_have_sex.htm...](http://www.ted.com/talks/matt_ridley_when_ideas_have_sex.html)

"When I was a student here in Oxford in the 1970s, the future of the world was
bleak. The population explosion was unstoppable. Global famine was inevitable.
A cancer epidemic caused by chemicals in the environment was going to shorten
our lives. The acid rain was falling on the forests. The desert was advancing
by a mile or two a year. The oil was running out, and a nuclear winter would
finish us off. None of those things happened, (Laughter) and astonishingly, if
you look at what actually happened in my lifetime, the average per-capita
income of the average person on the planet, in real terms, adjusted for
inflation, has tripled. Lifespan is up by 30 percent in my lifetime. Child
mortality is down by two-thirds. Per-capita food production is up by a third.
And all this at a time when the population has doubled."

------
cletus
It is of course hard to predict 500 years out. Hell, it's hard to predict 20
years out. Did anyone really see the world of today even 20 years ago?

But I'll take my own fanciful stab.

I don't foresee either an energy or a climate crisis. There is a hard limit on
how expensive energy gets because at some point you can turn totally renewable
energy into a fuel of some sort, ideally taking CO2 out of the atmosphere to
do it. It's not cost effective now because energy is so cheap. But like I
said: there's a limit to how expensive it can get.

The bigger problem (IMHO) is going to be certain elements and metals that
aren't so easily replaced. I agree with the author that getting certain
elements from space is going to be economically tricky (rather than
technologically tricky) compared to how cheap it is to pull stuff out of the
ground.

You can recycle iron to a degree but a certain amount is lost through
corrosion/rust. Rare earth elements are harder to replace.

I do foresee there being a lot less of us and that is probably going to be a
traumatic change.

Sadly I don't foresee a huge presence in space. The energy costs, particularly
when you look at even the most optimistic models of interstellar travel in
particular, are just too extreme even with perfect mass-to-energy conversion.

Change like evolution is often perceived to be smooth but it's not. Our world
like life itself is shaped by key, often small, events. Europe in 1914 was a
powderkeg in 1914 but one man's death triggered a sequence of events that
resulted in World War One, the armistice for which sowed the seeds for World
War Two. One could argue that if the Archduke had lived something else
would've triggered the war and you may well be right. Still how different
might the world be if, say, JFK was killed by a chance bullet in World War
Two?

As far as longevity goes, that's a tough one. I expect there'll be a certain
class of people who live much better and longer than others but then again the
history of the world thus far is those kinds of technological advancements
always trickle down eventually. Living forever? I have my doubts.

Artificial intelligence as always is the sleeping giant of the future. I
believe that to be inevitable and the effects could be profound to put it
mildly.

I too believe the nation states of today mostly won't exist in 500 years.

~~~
MrScruff
_The bigger problem (IMHO) is going to be certain elements and metals that
aren't so easily replaced. I agree with the author that getting certain
elements from space is going to be economically tricky (rather than
technologically tricky) compared to how cheap it is to pull stuff out of the
ground._

I'm not convinced that 'economically tricky' will mean anything in 500 years.
Assuming that we have essentially unlimited free energy, and AI capable of
autonomously handling things like building, manufacturing and farming (which
doesn't necessarily require strong AI), the cost of everything will ultimately
head towards zero, surely?

~~~
cletus
"Free energy" is a misnomer. There is the cost of fuel and the cost of what
produces the energy (capital, maintenance, land, labour, etc costs).

The attraction of fusion is "free energy" in that hydrogen is plentiful (even
deuterium is plentiful, tritium less so). Helium is not unlimited at least
here on Earth and we're busy pissing away our supply on party balloons thanks
to a US government decision to sell its strategic reserve in the 90s.

But a fusion plant is expensive. It costs money for the raw materials and the
labour to build and maintain it such that the energy it produces--if it ever
becomes economically viable, which is far from certain--will not be "free".

Computing power might be cheap but it's not free. An AI/robot won't be "free"
in the same sense either. They'll cost money to build. Those resources will
cost money.

Also, not all energy is the same. Plants that power the electrical grid are
one thing. The energy required to hurtle a large metal object into space is
something else. Fusion might work quite well for infrastructure but will it be
made to work where we currently use kerosene and oxygen? That vehicle too
costs money.

~~~
MrScruff
Sure, I get all that. But we're talking about 500 years hence. I just don't
believe that the costs you're listing should be relevant in that time frame.
If you have AI that is 500 years more advanced, you're effectively removing
human involvement in things like mining raw materials, maintaining and
building plants. No singularity required.

The cost of mining raw materials goes to zero if we can build a machine that
can build other machines that can autonomously space mine.

The cost of producing energy goes to zero if we can build machines that can
build and maintain energy plants.

I would be surprised if much of this hadn't occurred within 200 years, let
alone 500.

~~~
barrkel
I agree with you, and that's how I see it working too. And the capitalist
system won't work in that setup; it would naturally lead to a single person at
the apex owning all the capital (self-reproducing capital => whoever has the
best growth function dominates in inverse exponential time), and all the rest
of us either being servants or information workers (since everything physical
can trivially be done by machines).

Add in strong AI, and you remove the need for information workers; we'd all be
servants in the employ of a single CEO at the apex; or servants to other
servants; or prostitutes, or some other power relation not reproducible from
machines because of wanting the authenticity of a person. I don't see such a
state as stable (certainly not in a democracy), and if it existed tomorrow,
there would be a revolution. But of course the transition will be gradual, so
there won't be a revolution; but something post-capitalist, post-scarcity,
will need to emerge to stop blood flowing.

------
aresant
That's what I call fun Saturday reading . . .

"GM mangroves that can grow in salinated intertidal zones and synthesize
gasoline, shipping it out via their root networks, is one option."

That one sentence overloaded my system with a visual day-dream about the
potential for our future - the way it's written evokes that famous Bladerunner
line:

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the
shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser
gate. . ."

A few dozen words in both quotes that evoke such richness. Beautiful work.

~~~
to3m
As a later comment points out, in a manner as arresting as the vision it
criticises, roots are how plants get their inputs. The soil feeds the plants!
- not the other way around.

But, maybe in 500 years they'll have fixed this.

~~~
InclinedPlane
This is factually inaccurate. Plants are not built out of soil, they are built
out of _air_ and water, the contribution from the soil is comparatively minor.
Especially if symbiotic mycorrhiza are in play in which case only a tiny
handful of minerals and phosphorous is pulled from the ground. The great bulk
of the mass of a tree is cellulose and lignin, and that comes straight out of
photosynthesis and from atmospheric CO2 and ground water.

------
ChuckMcM
Definitely a fun read, lots of things to nod and shake your head at. For
example if we've mastered the fusion power generation process then rather than
carbon remediation we may find we have to burn things occasionally to boost
atmospheric CO2, the reasoning goes that we've basically converted all of the
arable surface area to 'farm' land, we have converted all of our industrial
and motive mechanisms (cars/trucks/trains) to electricity, we use the Fischer-
Tropch process to create jet fuel which can take CO2 out of the air, so not
only are anthropogenic sources of CO2 but natural sources (forest fires) are
removed from the system. If we are pulling energy geothermally out of volcanic
hot spots that will leave their tops just frozen enough to not erupt (another
giant source of atmospheric CO2).

It is really really hard to predict past a point where the energy problem
becomes 'solved.'

I also expect that all of our computing / electronics devices will be
essentially 3D printed out of carbon in various forms (tubes, balls, graphene)
providing the various roles of switch, conductor, gate, and substrate. Those
will be connected by a mesh of networking that is a couple of gigabits
wireless and perhaps a terabit when hard connected. The low marginal cost of
bandwidth will make it pretty much non-blocking bandwidth everywhere.

I expect we'll be eating a manufactured food product that is tasty and
nutritious and the domestication of livestock and the use of any other living
organism (including plants) will be considered 'quaint'. No one will have to
go hungry because the combination of low cost energy and the ability to
assemble food will allow for free 'food' (although not designer, "high end"
food).

I think the more interesting question though comes from biology, which is to
say if we have completely decoded cellular biology then there won't be any
excuse for being sick or not 'healthy' (and by that I mean optimal function of
all organs including the brain). At some point during the development of that
capability the aspects of ones genetics which determines sexual orientation
will be completely mapped out and understood and there will be a big debate
about what we do about that, do we 'cure' homosexuality, do we offer to make
everyone 'omnisexual' etc. There will be huge and heated debates about what is
and what isn't normal.

------
reasonattlm
The point of the technological singularity insofar as it interacts with
reasonable prediction of the future is that reasonable predictions tell you
that it is next to impossible to make any sort of reasonable
cultural/climate/landmass/population/other soft prediction much past this
century.

Hard takeoff scenarios seem to be unlikely (no self-improving AI going from
human project to godlike status in a couple of hours while rolling its own
molecular nanotechnology foundation). The reasons for this are the same
reasons that make rapid global takeover of the internet by a viral monoculture
unlikely today: results take effort, some results are opposed, some results
are intrinsically hard, no breakthrough happens in a vacuum.

But: by 2040 it will be possible to emulate human brains the hard way. By all
means tell me that every human culture will refrain from taking full advantage
of all that can follow from that over the decades that follow. The economic
benefits of human and built-from human intelligences instantiated to order are
incredible. The possibilities spiraling out from that are so much greater than
everything that has come before that it becomes very, very hard to say what
comes next.

You could see a world in which there are trillions of entities of human and
greater intelligence by 2100. With their own cultures, so much greater and
broader and more varied than ours as to make us the first snowflake in the
blizzard. They may or may not have access to molecular nanotechnology and as
much of the solar system as they care to begin making over by then. What will
they build? How can you say? Culture determines creation.

Equally, you might not see that world. But it looks most plausible to me that
software life will erupt from our culture in much the same way as we erupted
from Greek tribes thousands of years ago - but much more rapidly. If you can
show me you can sensibly predict the details of today's world by an
examination of the Mediterranean Bronze Age, then I might be more inclined to
think it possible to talk about what lies on the other side of emulated human
intelligence.

~~~
airlocksoftware
Charles Stross is not unaware of this; he's written multiple novels on the
topic of the singularity including "Accelerando" and "Rapture of the Nerds". I
recommend either of them if you're interested in the subject

This blog post is simply a different approach to the topic. Basically, what
would happen if the singularity never happens and it's just us humans trying
to solve the problems on our planet.

------
rndmize
Five hundred years out is an awfully far distance into the future. I could see
most of this happening in 200 years, or probably less.

One of the problems with making predictions like this is that technology
begins to compound and affect itself in weird ways - a book I have discusses
how once you have proper mind-machine interfaces and can copy a person at
will, one of the most efficient ways to travel becomes transmitting yourself
at light-speed and getting a new body once your persona has been downloaded at
your destination, rather than traveling in a physical body. This is something
I had never considered before encountering it in that book, as much as it is a
logical step from cybernetic brains and being able to back yourself up.

Similarly, racism, sexism and language issues being to disappear as you
approach a higher level of computer integration. Racism and sexism become
quaint ideas when most people can change to a body of the opposite sex
whenever they want, and skin color becomes a matter of aesthetic choice. You
might end up with wholly different types of racism (or perhaps species-ism)
due to deliberate genetic changes to adapt to different environments resulting
in wildly different types of humans, or due to experiments to bring certain
species to human levels of intelligence (apes, dolphins, octopi?)

I find it interesting that he would have geopolitical boundaries exist at all.
The idea of nations may well be an outdated one a couple hundred years hence.
As we continue to improve our abilities to manufacture and grow things on ever
smaller and more controlled scales, there may come a point where we no longer
need massive structures of human organization like nations, corporations, etc.
On the flip side, these things could become more ingrained and efficient such
that we approach hive-like efficiency/societal structure (group minds etc.)

I suppose I find most of these speculations rather tame. I think that things
will change a lot faster, and in a lot bigger ways, than described here.

~~~
rhizome
"Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future." \--Niels Bohr

~~~
dualogy
Well... I predicted this exact quote to show up in this thread within its
first hour -- seems like got the hang of it, then!

~~~
rhizome
Looks like a variant of Muphry's Law got you there.

------
depoll
"The half-life of a public corporation today is about 30 years: ten half-lives
out — 300 years hence — we may expect only one in a million to survive."

Am I the only one who read this and went "Wait, 10 half-lives... that's
1/(2^10)... that would mean about 1 in 1,000 survive -- not 1 in 1,000,000."?

~~~
maxerickson
He acknowledges the mistake in the comments.

~~~
depoll
Ah -- didn't see that. Wasn't so much a criticism (it doesn't take away from
the article at all) as it was an observation that something really trivial
stuck in my head ;)

------
abecedarius
Seems inconsistent to bring up nanotech, etc., yet keep climate hell as a
fixed background. Of course attempted fixes will run into issues, small or
catastrophic, but they're bound to exist.

~~~
curiousdannii
I think climate change is inevitable. Whether from human causes or from the
natural climate cycles we must assume that the sea levels will change, even if
only temporarily from a historical perspective. Even if the sea levels only
rise 1 metre for 5 years, that is still a _big_ refugee problem.

What is worrying is that those most likely to be affected by rising sea levels
are in general those least able to cope with it. We must assume that there
will be hundreds of millions of refugees, from Bangladesh, from the tiny
Pacific Islands, or even from New Orleans and Venice. Will humanity let them
die? If not then those of us living in higher elevations must start planning
now for how we will accommodate them.

~~~
abecedarius
I agree that climate hell appears to have already started. But 500 years is a
_while_ , and I'd expect attempts to roll it back starting by 400 years before
that time. (Assuming with the author that tech civ continues, etc.) The most
plausible reasons against would be conflict or a dominant power that prefers
the warmer globe.

~~~
hollerith
>a dominant power that prefers the warmer globe

The Arctic League!

------
hdivider
I think one of the only things we can be reasonably certain about is energy.
Many or even most of the changes Charlie listed would require changing much of
the technology deployed on our planet (except of course those changes that are
more or less inevitable, like rising sea levels). Changing any of the hardware
in our world on a large scale requires massive amounts of energy, and energy
follows rules that don't change at all over a 500 year timescale.

Fusion seems to be inevitable. I can't say I agree with people who say it'll
never be competitive with other energy sources. All that has to be done is to
solve the engineering hurdles required to make fusion scalable, and perhaps to
add the capability to use fusion reactions that make use of a greater variety
of elements. (And yes, those are huge challenges, but we're talking 500 years
of advanced engineering operating on something that already works in a simple
prototype system.) Once that has been achieved, fusion power can outperform
>any< other terrestrial energy source (except perhaps fission), as a matter of
physics. I imagine the economics of that will fall into place once that
massive supply of energy is made potentially accessible, since there will
undoubtedly be demand for titanic amounts of cheap and reliable energy.

------
JVIDEL
OP makes a number of mistakes about the past.

For starters it wasn't Portuguese _conquistadores_ who descended on South
America 500 years ago but the Spanish. The Portuguese had more important
operations in Asia at the time. It wasn't until the 17th that the Portuguese
really started to exploit part of what today is known as Brazil, _part_
because a chunk of Brazil used to be part of the Spanish Empire, not the
Portuguese.

Of course we are not going back to hunter-gatherers, that's stupid on the face
of it. Even after a massive collapse the first thing survivors will do is try
to salvage whatever machinery they can find and start anew, first with crops
and eventually industry. The "dark ages" weren't really dark, the north of the
Roman Empire had always been underdeveloped which is why after the fall it
continued to be a number of backwater kingdoms while Venice remained as a
center of scientific and cultural development.

Also I don't get why OP comes with all these amazing sometimes insane
technologies but rules out any attempts at geoengineering which rely on
technology which we already have (but we don't deploy because the costs are
still too high and the political motivation too low to support it).

And his understanding of the roots of racism is egregious, he completely
ignores the vast political and economical reasons for recent and still
enduring racism in many parts of the world. For example the Rwandan genocide
background lies on which tribe had the upper hand during the colonial age and
was thus wealthier and more powerful. It had next to nothing to do with
religion or patriarchy.

~~~
Gravityloss
One problem with geoengineering is that it doesn't neatly negate effects of
increased CO2 - it's hard to predict exactly what will happen. If we triple
CO2 and install space glasses that refract sunlight so that it misses the
earth, what will happen? Maybe the refraction and CO2's radiative forcing will
cancel itself at some latitudes on some days. But in many other places and
climate conditions, they won't.

For relative climate stability, by far the technically simplest and most
straightforward way would be just to stop burning coal and stop projects like
tar sands and oil shale.

------
mukaiji
I think it's a bit off on the predictions relating to energy. The best way to
explain why is to borrow from Vinod Khosla's theory of energy black swans, and
assume that the forms of energy we know and make use of today are going to be
replaced by forms of energy we either don't know of or haven't yet managed to
master.

500 years is simply a long, long, long time from now in terms of human
progress. I think the energy description provided here might possibly fit a
model of our energy mix 100 years from now. However, it's very unlikely to be
the one we follow 500 years from now, simply because the basis for energy-
related discoveries dictates that every few decades an entirely new form of
energy is discovered and gets subsequently iterated upon until economically
viable. It simply isn't factually reasonable to assume that we have already
discovered all possible forms of energy production.

By the way, i did energy-related research which is why i wanted to point this
out. Regardless of these flaws, I thoroughly enjoyed reading that essay.

tl;dr: energy-predictions 500 years out are not reasonable because of Vinod
Khosla's theory of energy black swans.

------
pourush
I'll write this before I read the article:

Assumptions: I think a lot of what we "know" is going to be wrong. It's just a
thing which seems likely to me. Not in a "things fall up now" sort of way,
though a little of that, since the laws of physics have been revised quite a
bit, and I don't see that trend stopping. But more in a "We were pretty much
crazy to think these things" way. You know about alchemy's position
politically today, and how some of the church's actions were perceived? Some
things which we consider important today are going to be treated like that.

History: We'll be better at this. Assuming historians haven't mysteriously
vanished as a profession, I think we're going to know more about history in
the future, and knowing more about the present in the future. As a collective,
I mean, not every individual.

Screwing the world up: Will happen a lot less. We gained raw power in the last
500 years, we're going to learn wisdom now. Or die. That's a possibility, its
been discussed. But I'm assuming we survive.

Culture: Will have finally recovered from British expansionism. There will be
lots of strong local cultures again.

Government: Will be competent. And not vitriolic. I'm predicting a break from
history again.

Population: Will be ignored. Won't be a problem.

Tech: People will get what they want here. Even if what they want is something
they've never heard about. And if they don't want it, that will stop it. We
got the atom bomb because we wanted to kill people. That will happen less. No
flying cars, but maybe hover-boards. Lots of the stuff that we usually
relegate to philosophy, or say that is impossible to know, and won't affect
anything even if we know it will be known and become part of science. And
we'll be better, way way way better, at biology and ecology.

Intelligent Aliens: Will be found, will be relevant to some people's careers,
but won't be all that important. Not the main driver of events.

Planet: Will be better, much better. Things will turn around here. People will
care about it. The majority doesn't really care about it now, except in a kind
of abstract way as it relates to government. But they will care about it
later.

Intelligent Aliens: Will be found within a hundred years, won't be important
until at least 200 years in.

~~~
lmm
>History: We'll be better at this. Assuming historians haven't mysteriously
vanished as a profession, I think we're going to know more about history in
the future, and knowing more about the present in the future. As a collective,
I mean, not every individual.

Pretty much a given.

>Screwing the world up: Will happen a lot less. We gained raw power in the
last 500 years, we're going to learn wisdom now. Or die. That's a possibility,
its been discussed. But I'm assuming we survive.

Not entirely convinced. Keeping the world a place humans can live in, sure,
but maybe people will just get more comfortable with accelerating change. My
perception is it's the older generation that cares more about preserving the
environment, both natural and artificial. When you can synthesize any kind of
organism you like, who cares if a bunch of existing species go extinct?

>Culture: Will have finally recovered from British expansionism. There will be
lots of strong local cultures again.

Unlikely in this age of instant communication. I think we might see lots of
subcultures, but globally distributed, in a way that's already happening to
some extent with the likes of, well, HN.

------
startupfounder
"I'm also going to ignore space colonization, because I want to focus on this
planet."

Europe changed when explorers "discovered" the new world. Saying you are only
going to focus on "this planet" is like saying I am only going to focus on the
"old world" when talking about earth 500 years ago.

In my mind the rest of the article is pointless because the author is using
the old world way of thinking about this planet.

The fact is the exploration of space is very similar as what happened 520
years ago. What happens when the price of getting to orbit drops significantly
because of reusable rockets? Already there are companies that are planning on
mining astroids. Saying that this is not going to effect earth in a major way
is not really looking at where earth will be in 2512.

Space exploration is going to define the next 500 years of humanity and of
this planet just as exploration of the new world defined the last 500 years.

~~~
thenomad
The author of the original article, Charles Stross, wrote a lengthy piece on
space colonization a while back, explaining why he believes it's implausible,
which may be why he's not examining it in more detail here:

[http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
static/2007/06/the_high...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html)

------
jhuckestein
This all makes sense, if you think of the future as a linear progression.
Technology however, progresses exponentially (I don't want explicitly invoke
Kurzweil here because his theories have their own faults, but the exponential
part he gets right). That means 500 years from now, we will probably have
solved the problem of survival. We will probably be much more intelligent, not
have to work, almost certainly beexploring space etc.

There's almost no way to try to predict what life will be like in 500 years
(try the predictions people had 500 years ago!). When I think about this, the
most interesting questions are philosophical. If ou didn't have to die and
could simulate whatever pleasure you desire whenever you want to, what will
the point of living be? What will the definition of a human, a life and
consciousness be if you can simulate/augment it using computers?

------
dave1010uk
I think it's quite likely that within a couple of hundred years there will
have been multiple changes that are completely beyond our current compression,
that we couldn't even begin to speculate on. Nevertheless, I'll add my
speculation to this rather interesting discussion:

The ease and volume of communication is bound to increase. Perhaps we
communicate through technological telepathy, with anyone we want to. We share
thoughts and senses with groups of people and solve problems by adding more
brain power. The Mythical Man Month is no longer mythical. Learning and "news"
become instant. Communication is probably faster than the speed of light.

Physical objects are only slightly constrained to their form and location.
They can be transformed and moved almost as easily as energy can. Having
something only requires thought and currency.

------
noiv
Reads like a fair extrapolation of the past 500 years. Although, assuming
everybody adapted to climate change, the unknown unknowns are possibly
underestimated. With 2000 gt more CO2 this is a completely different planet
and there might be no technical solutions to the full spectrum of rising
social tenses, when a billion people _and_ their jobs are forced to move,
because of rising sea level or too much or too less rain. To develop
sophisticated solutions like synthetic biology you need places where weather
is of no concern and only a few places will remain when temperatures rise by 4
and more centigrades.

So in short C. Stross painted a rosy future where technology - like in the
past - solves everything. But he overlooked game changers like the permafrost
bomb, a burning Amazon rain-forest and all upcoming social implications.

I'll give an example: In 2010 the jet streams stucked over South Russia and
Pakistan and brought heat over Russian fields and devastating floods in
Pakistan. As a result food prizes exploded, Russia stopped exports leading to
food riots in the Arabian world and finally sparked revolutions.

Sure, there is no proof of one event based on the other. Anyway, there is no
science available to estimate social consequences of climate change, but does
that mean it will have none? Just think of the secured gas transports in NYC
after Sandy. How many days longer with limited supply and it would gone worse?
Now, answer one question: Which technology stops gas riots?

Eventually the author is not wrong with his vision of 2512, but what scares me
are the next 50 years with an unleashed economy going frenzy over excluded
environmental costs.

------
paulsutter
Why would we have massive climate change if we have nanotechnology (either wet
or full on drexlerian)? The author seems to have completely missed the mark.
The only interesting conclusion (massive climate change) is contradicted by
his own assumptions.

This is a pessimistic, probabilistic, poorly thought-through vision of the
future. The Elon Musks of the world will steer things in a different
direction.

------
teebs
I enjoyed this article and I agree with most of the prediction on this
timescale. I'm surprised, though, that he didn't mention one issue in
particular: the continued development of human-computer interaction and its
impact on the world's socioeconomic makeup.

Over the past 20-30 years, computers have completely changed the way people
interact with the world. Most highly-educated people's lives center around
their iPhones, laptops, iPads, etc. As time goes on, automation will likely
continue to advance. As computers surpass humans in efficiency for more and
more jobs, what role will the uneducated play? Clearly, wealth will continue
to concentrate in the hands of fewer and fewer highly educated individuals.
Will the rich exploit the poor, or will the need for consumers cause the
wealthy to redistribute wealth just so that people have money to buy their
goods? Will ordinary people end up like the passengers of the spaceship in
WALL-E? Let's go a step further: if the so-called singularity occurs, what is
the need for people in general?

------
InclinedPlane
Assuming that there is no great WWIII or equivalent cataclysmic event the
world of 2512 is beyond our faintest imaginings and would likely be
frightening to us.

I don't speak about nanotechnology or even brain-uploading and synthetic
sentience, I speak about rather more mundane trends that are almost certain to
continue.

For example, manufacturing. Today manufacturing is still rather similar in
nature to the way it was in the 17th century, we just have a whole crap-ton
more of it and it's easier to ship manufactured goods around the globe. But I
believe we are reaching an inflection point on manufacturing. We will soon
reach a point where manufacturing becomes entirely automated for huge classes
of devices. All you'll need to do is upload a set of files to a server
somewhere and press a button and then a factory will produce whatever it is
you've designed, on very short notice and in arbitrary volumes. This alone is
a transformative technology, but let's take it a step further, toward fully
automated creation of machine tools and to factories themselves. The idea of
an assembly line as this huge, fixed entity is due to the nature of our
manufacturing technology, but it's possible that manufacturing facilities will
themselves become disposable (likely recyclable) and transient. Manufacturing
won't be something that people consume, it will be something that people do.
More so, the ability of a small amount of capital machinery to boot-strap into
the manufacturing capabilities of a developed nation will rapidly eliminate
almost all remaining undeveloped parts of the globe. Imagine what happens when
you can ship a few containers of equipment to, say, antarctica and start
building out factories, tractors, automobiles, houses, etc, etc. with only an
input of crude raw materials.

How this will transform the world is beyond me, but it will certainly change
our perception of wealth and scarcity and the people living in a world with
this technology will be as unfamiliar to people of today as people of today
would be to stone age tribes. And this technology is not a 500 year
technology, it'll likely arrive in the next hundred years at most.

Let's talk about drugs and surgery and self. Modern medicine is at best a
century old, and in some ways perhaps even less. There will come a time,
certainly within the next 500 years, when medical technology in the realm of
mood alteration, behavior alteration, and cosmetic surgery are at a level
which we would describe from the perspective of today as nearly perfectly
effective. Imagine what happens when people can change their personalities and
their mental capabilities at whim? If you find you're depressed you can fix
that, effectively and permanently. If you have a mental illness such as, say,
schizophrenia or pedophilia then you can fix that too. And if you are
dissatisfied with your mood or your personality you can change that too. Do
you want to be an alpha personality? Do you want to be a thrill-seeker? Do you
want to be bubbly and happy all the time? Easy peasy. Do you dislike the way
your face or body looks or works? You can change that too. You can have a
stunningly attractive and physically fit body with ease, and you can look like
a movie star.

To say that this will change society is a gross understatement. In many ways I
think this will be a bigger challenge to the world than any other
technological or environmental challenge. To be honest I think it will be a
larger challenge for our species than even trying to co-exist with
thermonuclear weapons.

As for space, I think it will affect our future a great deal but perhaps not
as much as these other things. One thing a lot of people get wrong about space
is imagining that it's hard. It's not, we've just been doing it very, very
badly. For the same exact amount of money the world has spent on space so far
we could have easily built orbital cities and moon bases housing hundreds. Not
with revolutionary technology, not with some alternate and hugely more cost
effective programs, but merely with applying proven and existing systems and
technologies in a sensible way instead of the haphazard way we have done so
the last 4 decades or so. For example, for the same cost as the Shuttle
program we could have continued launching Saturn Vs (at least 150 of them)
which would have allowed us to easily put living quarters for hundreds of
astronauts in Earth orbit and to build out moon bases (or Mars bases, frankly)
quite easily. There are two other important factors people miss. First, once
you have a substantial off-Earth industry then it's no longer reliant on the
cost of launch from Earth's surface. You only have to launch the equipment for
an automated space mining operation once, afterward you only need to keep it
operational. The potential return in terms of mass launched from Earth vs.
resources returned to Earth or to Earth orbit could be a great many orders of
magnitude (millions or billions), much like it is for mining equipment here on
Earth. Second, the world of the future will be unimaginably wealthier than we
are. The parts of the world which are today developed will be even wealthier
in the future, and much of the developing world will have developed within the
next 100 and certainly 500 years. Even without factoring in technological and
industrial advances which could make orbital launch cheaper (incidentally,
things which are already running at a rampant pace of advancement even today)
the simple factor of having a much, much larger total economy will mean that
the amount of resources for space exploration will be larger than today by a
factor of tens to hundreds. The idea that this doesn't translate into a
substantial permanent off-Earth human population is, to me, patently
ridiculous.

Overall, the idea of trying to predict the world of 500 to even the tiniest
degree is probably a losing prospect, but it should be an interesting ride
regardless.

~~~
InclinedPlane
I hate replying to myself but I think this point is worth following up on
re:space. Consider that by current estimates the global economy will be at a
level of around a quadrillion dollars per year within the next 100 to 150
years. Now, let's say that developed countries put a priority of space science
exploration and manned spaceflight at around 1 part per thousand of GDP, which
is fairly close to what the G8 nations spend today. Assuming that the future
world retains such a priority it would mean spending of a trillion dollars a
year just a century or so out. Now think about that over centuries, hundreds
of trillions of dollars of investment into space. I think that means that at a
minimum you'll have self-sufficient off-Earth colonies with populations of
millions. And that's without assuming breakthrough technologies.

------
guscost
Hard to miss the alarmist undertone here. He seems much more confident about
the effects of climate change (or is that global warming?) than the effects of
politics and technology. Compare:

"Sea levels will have risen by at least one, and possibly more than ten metres
worldwide."

"Fission: will be in widespread safe use or completely taboo."

------
cyanbane
The author continues to compare now to 500 years ago, while I think a lot of
his prognostications might right on target I think that these advances will
come much quicker than 500 years. If we took the _magnitude of advances_ for
humanity from 1512-2012, and we applied those magnitudes today that it would
happen in the next 100 years (5:1). I do like his non doom-and-gloom approach
(disclaimer aside). I agree with some of the other comments that if you ask
any human at anytime if the world is in _its worst state in history_ , the
answer will be yes and I think the author understands this isn't always the
case. Great read.

------
geori
I highly recommend reading through Charlie's Comments. They're just as good as
the article and touch on everything from building construction to Scottish
Independence to creating an atmosphere in the Vales Marineris rift valley on
Mars.

------
stretchwithme
I sort of think we'll figure out how to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
Richard Branson has offered a $25 million prize for it.
<http://www.virgin.com/subsites/virginearth/> The world uses 85 million
barrels a day and its currently $85 a barrel. That's $7.2 billion dollars
spent on oil per day. And $2.6 trillion a year.

$25 million is less than 1/100,000 of what we spend on oil per year. If every
American chipped in 8 cents, we could double the incentive.

Sounds like a kickstarted project I could get behind.

------
cwe
With all the talk of engineered intelligence and huge biotech advancements, I
think there will be a massive space expansion, and I'm surprised to see it
doubted.

First off, a human settlement on Mars, while technologically challenging,
would need a relatively small initial population to get started sustainably
(say, 2000 people). All of the advancements in food and energy production
mentioned in the article could be used to provide for a colony there.

The OP talks about genetically engineered animals for food production, but
they could also be engineered to better work and thrive in space-based
industries; collecting raw materials, zero-gravity manufacturing, energy
collecting, etc. Sophisticated, autonomous machines could do all that as well,
so that actual humans have very little need to spend much time out in space,
other than traveling between planets and settlements. Or perhaps all travel is
virtual, using telepresence to see the solar system.

Machines built in space don't have the costs to get up there in the first
place, other than the initial factories and material harvesting equipment.

Great thought-exercise, though. I love thinking about this stuff, and I think
our generation has to start anticipating these changes. Some other commenters
pointed out this all may happen far sooner than 500 years, so we just might
need to be ready.

------
curt
Highly doubt any of the countries that exist today will exist 500 years from
now. Honestly I highly doubt most of them will exist 50 years from now. Most
developed countries are headed for their day of reckoning as the bills for
their welfare states come due. Combined with the fact that every developed
country has a negative birthrate due to these policies delaying adulthood many
countries will collapse from just demographic changes in the next 50 years.

How do people still believe in run away global warming? There's been
absolutely ZERO warming for the lat 16 years, the Earth warmed for 15 years
before that, then cooled for 40 years before that. Cloud formation, the major
environment influencer of global climate, now seems to stem from cosmic rays.

I do believe space travel, specifically mining, will become much more
prevalent. This will eliminate any resource problems. As for energy advances
in solar technology and nuclear (fusion or fission) should drastically lower
the cost of energy by an order of magnitude from today's prices.

~~~
etfb
Global warming hasn't stopped. Any easy-to-find _factual_ article refutes that
particular canard quite easily. Here's one:
[http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-stopped-
in-19...](http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-stopped-
in-1998-intermediate.htm)

------
gus_massa
> modified ribosomes that can assemble polypeptides using non-standard
> aminoacids (presumably coded for using four-base codons)

This prediction is a little too much. Theoretically it is possible to use a
four-base codons, but I'm almost sure that it is extremely difficult to make
all the changes in every part of the process. For example, to change the
number of bases in a codon, you must change the number of bases in the
reciprocal part of the tRNA. But the shape of the tRNA depends on the length,
and it seems to be very difficult to change this without breaking the other
functions.

It's much easier just to change the meaning of some codons (there are 64, and
only 20 codified aminoacid + a termination mark), and even the mitochondrias
and some estrange living organism have small changes in the genetic code.

------
guard-of-terra
Is solar shade so much hardrer to launch than retooling all the biology to
live at 45C and still dealing with the world that sucks? Launching a large
slightly opaque mirror to shade select aread of Earth does not seem impossible
to me.

It seems he bet everything on climate being out of control.

~~~
wtracy
Simple answer: Tragedy of the commons.

If your nation consists of 1/6th of the world's population, you bear 1/6th the
burden of the global warming triggered by your fossil fuel use, but get 100%
of the energy output from your fossil fuel use. Conversely, if you
unilaterally decide to build a giant shade for the earth, you foot 100% of the
bill yet only receive 1/6th of the overall benefits.

~~~
guard-of-terra
You can usually arrange in at least one ally (and now you're 2/6) and then tax
other powers for premium features of the solar shade if they want them (that
is, climate control).

------
edanm
Since I started reading Yudkowsky/LessWrong heavily, I tend to have 2 strong
predictions about the future:

1\. AI will be invented sometime, and this will be a radical game-changer. In
that everything after it will be hard/impossible to predict today.

2\. We will eventually conquer death. Hopefully soon.

The second belief I find to be very, very strange for most people I talk to
about this - people really can't imagine it, and most don't want to imagine
it.

By the way, the other major prediction I have about the future - we will all
be vegeterians, and future generations will look at us as barbarians for
eating animals. I'm not a vegeterian, but I believe that this is inevitable,
as soon as we have the technology to make animal-like foods without killing
animals, both in terms of health and taste.

------
alanctgardner2
Not to be the PC crowd here, but the author is a little bit flippant about
modern history. The Holocaust didn't just 'suck', nor did the Battle of the
Somme. Furthermore, in his brusque dismissal of contemporary Middle Eastern
culture as primitive, he misses out on the fact that Islamic extremism is a
very modern issue ( < 40 years old ), and definitely does not define the
region as a whole.

It's fine and well to speculate wildly about technological advances, but the
future of the human race is ultimately about humans. If you're going to ignore
the human aspect, do it completely. Don't trivialize millions of deaths in the
race to talk about how cool nuclear fusion will be.

~~~
barry-cotter
Charlie's extended family is a great deal smaller than it would otherwise have
been due to the Holocaust. He's aware it did more than suck but that's not the
point of the article.

As far as contemporary Middle Eastern culture goes _I_ don't see how a leftist
would look positively on it even if everywhere was as secular as the most
secular part thereof, Tunisia.

------
6ren
Moore's Law: 2^(500/1.5) = 2e+100 (assuming no limits!)

Adam Smith: division of labour (specialisation) creates wealth. It is limited
by the extent of the market. Therefore, economic forces favour larger
populations. If you have separate classes of people, forming separate markets,
they are smaller and therefore _less well served_. Hence, the elite are
materially far better off by participating in larger markets. Consider: can a
million dollars buy you a better smart phone?

Of course, people want to feel superior. The above reasoning can also be
applied here: <http://partiallyclips.com/2003/09/25/dome-house/>

------
cpeterso
When I read science fiction about people living hundreds of years from now, I
wonder what science fiction _they_ read. The characters in Star Trek, for
instance, conveniently read Shakespeare and watch mid-20th century film and
TV.

------
robomartin
Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition

~~~
tjic
Great book!

------
tjmc
Great article and discussion. I'll add 2 predictions.

Assuming we've mastered genetic engineering, adding the ability to live and
breath underwater will be tempting. This would be the catalyst for significant
speciation as an additional 70% of the earth's surface becomes habitable.

As a secondary consequence of this, Europa could become habitable. Vast
amounts of water, radiation protection from its icy crust and warmth due to
the extreme tidal stresses of Jupiter all combine to make it far more
desirable than lifeless, atmosphere deficient rocks like Mars.

------
pdubs
Since this is really just educated fiction, if you like this you'd probably
enjoy most of the stuff written by Alastair Reynolds. Not "hard" scifi
exactly, but maybe "firm".

------
lsc
comment 13:

"In the future your major political affiliation will not be the nation state
or even the corporation. It will be your IT infrastructure provider IE Apple,
Google, Microsoft or their 2512 counterparts."

would be an absolutely /awesome/ sci-fi novel.

Of course, for it to be realistic, consumer needs would have to grow
dramatically faster than moore's law. As it is now, it's too easy to start a
new consumer IT provider business, the infrastructure is too cheap. I spend
rather more compute resources per customer, dramatically more than google, and
I've got two thousand customers, me being some nobody kid.

If current trends continue (e.g. consumer demand for compute power trails
moore's law by quite a lot) the per-customer cost of providing IT
infrastructure will be so low that those providers will not be able to demand
much by way of payment, otherwise some kid like me will show up and do it
cheaper. If you notice... most of the online consumer infrastructure
providers, right now, are not in a position to charge their customers anything
at all.

------
tokenadult
It was kind of Charlie Stross, a participant here on HN

<http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=cstross>

to take time out from writing his latest novel to post the interesting blog
post shared here. Thanks too to the HN participants who shared the link and
have commented already while I was coming back from work. I especially like
about this post that Stross looked back at Earth 500 years ago to show readers
what time scale he is talking about, and that he was boldly definite about
technological and social changes.

I will be boldly definite in disagreeing in part with one of Stross's
conclusions in this interesting post. Stross writes, "I'm going to assume that
we are sufficiently short-sighted and stupid that we keep burning fossil
fuels. We're going to add at least 1000 GT of fossil carbon to the atmosphere,
and while I don't expect us to binge all the way through the remaining 4000 GT
of accessible reserves, we may get through another 1000 GT." I fully agree
with this premise. There are no effective incentives in place today, nor any
likely in the next few decades, to prevent further consumption of fossil
hydrocarbon fuels, and that will surely result in a substantial increase in
atmospheric conentration in CO2.

Stross's next step in prediction is, "So the climate is going to be rather ...
different." That's a safe prediction any time, because over 500 year time
scales, we have often observed climate change in historic times. Over longer
time scales, but since Homo sapiens populated much of the earth, rock art in
the Sahara Desert shows that the Sahara was once much less arid than it is
now, and cave art in Europe shows that the climate of Europe was once much
more frigid than it is now.

Stross goes on to write, "Sea levels will have risen by at least one, and
possibly more than ten metres worldwide."

An interesting series of online maps shows projections of flooded land based
on various degrees of sea level rise for places of interest such as New York
City,

<http://geology.com/sea-level-rise/new-york.shtml>

San Francisco,

<http://geology.com/sea-level-rise/san-francisco.shtml>

the Netherlands and England,

<http://geology.com/sea-level-rise/netherlands.shtml>

and Chesapeake Bay.

<http://geology.com/sea-level-rise/washington.shtml>

In all cases, the maps default to showing seven meters of sea level rise and
do not project any civil engineering projects to protect existing
infrastructure.

Having read Matt Ridley's blog post "Go Dutch"

<http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/go-dutch.aspx>

back when it was published, I wonder if the most dire predictions about the
Netherlands are true, or if the Netherlands, the land of polders,

<http://static.nai.nl/polders/e/index.html>

can continue to be "living proof to climate pessimists that dwelling below sea
level is no problem if you are prosperous."

Stross writes, "Large chunks of sub-Saharan Africa, China, India, Brazil, and
the US midwest and south are going to be uninhabitably hot."

I live in the United States Midwest, and my mother grew up in a hotter part of
the United States Midwest during the Dust Bowl era. Most of her family is
still near the family farm on the windswept Great Plains. I don't expect any
part of the earth to become uninhabitably hot. We have, according to the best
developed models of influences on world climate, a sure prospect of a
generally warmer Earth, warming currently lethally cold areas into areas that
will be habitable. My experience living in subtropical east Asia suggests that
we will have more warming of cold areas than turning hot areas into unbearably
hot areas from global warming.

Stross continues, "London, New York, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Mumbai — they're all
going to be submerged, or protected by heroic water defenses" and my
prediction is that New York, at least, will be fully protected by civil
engineering projects. New York City is sufficiently prosperous to attract some
of the world's brightest minds to live there (I know some young people who
have moved there recently) and the current city administration actively
encourages making New York City a technology hub. New York will thrive,
whatever the climate.

[http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2012/11/new-york-
can-...](http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2012/11/new-york-can-be-a-
vibrant-venice-as-sea-level-now-rises-say-engineers/)

Stross wraps up this prediction by mentioning, "Venice and New Orleans (both
of which will be long-since lost)." Venice and New Orleans have been in long-
term decline for quite a while, from bad governance, and will surely suffer
further relative decline, regardless of sea levels. There will still be a
great port at the mouth of the Mississippi-Missouri river system, and it will
be a thriving and cosmopolitan city, but it may well be in a different place
along the river delta from the current location of New Orleans. Venice may
basically vanish.

There is much more interesting content in Stross's post, but allow me to
explain why I think the high end of global warming predictions (and thus the
high end of sea level rise predictions) is unlikely. We already have a known
model for induced global cooling from the "natural experiment" of volcanos
erupting and ejecting much dust high into the atmosphere. If the climate
change we now experience produces more pain than gain (where I live, at 800
feet above sea level in a continental dry, cold winter climate zone, global
warming has so far mostly produced gain), then there will be political and
economic incentives to sequester greenhouse gases, or directly shade the Earth
with high-altitude dust, or to do whatever else science discovers to slow and
perhaps eventually reverse global warming. Over a 500-year time span, I would
expect enough of an increase in understanding of climate models to bring about
a world climate that is more moderate in more places than today's. Thanks for
the chance to think about the far future.

~~~
tjic
> It was kind of Charlie Stross to take time out from writing his latest novel
> to post the interesting blog post shared here.

I think it's an interesting topic, so I'm glad that it got posted, but let's
not get TOO fawning - since when is it "kind" to submit a link to your own
blog? Stross wants readership and book buyers - posting a link here makes as
much sense for him as it does for any other entrepreneur with a product to
sell.

~~~
teraflop
cstross didn't start this thread, actually, although he has posted his own
blog posts on other occasions.

------
javajosh
There's an interesting meta-consideration here, and that is how humanity
_wants_ things to be in 500 years. It's almost like Stross is considering the
weight of action as something that we can't choose. But really, I think our
collective choices can make a world of difference.

If we _choose_ to protect biodiversity today, if we _choose_ to keep our
climate optimal for naturally evolved life, then our future in 500 years can
be a lot better than anything Stross has described.

For example, I think we will indeed have AI, but it will turn out that AI,
like a human baby, has to be _raised_ by parents. The process of "programming"
an AI is just like the process of "programming" a person - it's messy, and it
takes a lot of personal effort and fortitude.

I also think it is likely that the rules of our universe allow only _one_
successful colonization attempt per home planet, or perhaps home system. This
limits the spread of any Life to linear (rather than geometric), and it also
means that the odds of life meeting each other on the same planet are
extremely small. (It goes without saying that there is Life in a lot of
places, but that it rarely succeeds in the singular effort of colonizing
another system).

More and more of our productive efforts will be created and consumed in
virtual environments. But that doesn't meant that the physical will be
ignored. "Slow space" is important, and beautiful in it's own way, and we
evolved with it. We're not going to leave it behind.

Social constructs will become self-aware, and driven by ever greater
understanding of ourselves and our relationship to the world. We will truly
_choose_ our beliefs, and aggregate (virtually and physically) with others of
the same belief. Indeed, I can imagine a world government who's primary
purpose is not adjudicating national disputes, but rather protecting the
rights of new adults to choose what they believe, and to live their lives
wherever those beliefs are most closely held.

The US and all nations will evolve according to what they really are: explicit
belief systems that exploit energy/food/material resources in order to
protect/promote their belief system. We will probably see a spectrum of US-
like nations, that differ only on second-order considerations. Basically, what
we have today, only more explicit and with far more porous borders.

It seems very unlikely that the majority will actually modify their bodies
with computer interface technology. The inherent risks are far too high when a
device doesn't have a physical off switch. Consider the nightmare scenario
where a hacker hacks into your visual cortex, and Rick rolls you. this is far
worse than blindness - it could drive you insane (really).

------
chacham15
This article reminds me of another article about what science fiction writers
thought the year 2012 would be like (how we would have burned through all out
fossil fuels, etc). Just goes to show how little we can actually predict the
future,

------
teeja
I'm going with Walter Miller's 'Leibowitz' future. The technology to do much
else will be lost as a result of economic disasters and unending upwelling of
ignorance. (Cf 2012 election) Global warming and searise and the resulting
turmoil will hugely reduce the human population. No money, no interest in
industry.

Lots of deserts, lots of monasteries (in cool caves and huge underground
'Topeka' labyrinths). The 10,000-year clock will be found and melted down to
make weapons. As always (especially today) the educated will be suspicious and
forced into hiding. Resurgence of manual encipherment. Tourism to the
mysterious ruins of the past a major industry. All slowly being buried by dirt
falling from the sky. -30-

------
melling
I don't really see the point of speculating about 500 years out. Wouldn't it
be a lot more useful to figure out how to increase the rate of innovation and
discovery now?

For example, if innovation happened in flight and most people could fly at
hypersonic speed within 10 years, the world becomes even smaller. Cure most
cancers within 10 years instead of 50 and maybe the "next Steve Jobs" will get
another 2-3 decades.

There are lots of big problems that would could solve decades sooner if we
could find better ways to innovate now.

------
rms
I predict global scale climate engineering rather than our current coasts
under water.

------
bejar37
Acc &?@

