Our Solar System is Boring

I am really sick of all these talks about going to back to the moon, or even to Mars.

Our solar system is boring.  It isn’t worth the time, effort, and incredible cost to bother exploring.

Every president and candidate has a “return to the moon by” plan.  They have a “moon base” plan.  And of course, they never come to fruition.  Why?  Because nobody cares.  When faced with funding a few hundred billion dollars into NASA to make it happen, suddenly the resolve to conquer the final frontier disappears, and rightfully so.

I constantly read all of these news stories about how China is going to get into space while we sit on our laurels.  Well, guys, guess what?  We went to the moon in 1969.  That’s 40 years ago.  In perspective, it was fewer than 60 years before 1969 that we invented the airplane.  The prestige associated with China’s space program is equivalent to the prestige of a country other than the United States flying its first airplane in 1969, and it’s even less so when you acknowledge the fact that nearly all of the tech that China is using is borrowed or stolen from Russia and the U.S.  The only thing China’s space accomplishments prove is that their government is willing to let its peasants starve to put men in orbit.  Ours is not.

The concept of space competition with China is a joke.  Even if they do build a moon “base”, which I find incredibly unlikely, so what?  It’s a false competition, because we won a long, long time ago.  The competition is over.

So, disregard competition with China as a motive; it’s nonsense.

So what about moving into the solar system to protect the species in the event of a catastrophe?

Even if we could create a totally self-sustaining colony on the Moon – and that’s a very huge if – why would we?  If we had that technology (and more importantly the desire to do it), we could create self-sustaining colonies on ocean floor.  A colony on the ocean floor would survive a land-mass catastrophe such as rising sea levels, a world-scale volcanic eruption, or a big asteroid just as easily as a moon base, so if you’re concerned that we’re vulnerable to space bombardments by confinement to one planet, the bottom of the ocean is probably a pretty safe place in that regard.  Naturally, if one of these so-called Apollo asteroids (whose size is about a quarter of the planet Earth) collides with us the entire planet will be obliterated and no one will survive, but a moon colony would have a pretty good chance of being screwed by that level of event too – after all, that’s how we believe the moon was formed to begin with!

Okay, what about Mars (or the moons of the gas giants?)  Marginally better, but still ultimately useless.  In about a billion years the sun is going to start its red giant phase and once it does, Earth, the moon, and Mars are all going to be consumed by the sun.  The moons of Jupiter or Saturn may survive, but once the red giant phase is over, we’ll enter a white dwarf phase.  These gas giant moons are so far away from the sun that if our sun were a white dwarf, these moons would get so little sun light that they would be even more ridiculously cold.

In theory we might be able to camp it out, but the moon, Mars, and the gas giant moons all are just as vulnerable to asteroid bombardment or other geophysical catastrophe as Earth is, so you’re not really buying yourself anything.

So let’s admit that exploring our solar system is not going to buy us any time when it comes to species survival – at the very best it will delay the inevitable.

So what about exploration for the sake of exploration?

Well, the only two planetary bodies that humans could really set foot upon are Mars and the Moon, and possibly some of the moons of Jupiter.  Venus and Mercury are both far too hot and most others are far too cold.  Both of these bodies are completely boring.

The moon is a big ball of grey rock and dust.  It might have some polar ice.  It might have some hydrocarbons.  It might have some interesting minerals.  But since the moon and the Earth were made from the same parts, there’s nothing on the moon that isn’t also on the Earth, but getting to and from the moon is astronomically and prohibitively expensive.

What about Mars?  Well, take the cost of putting a man on the moon, and then multiply that by 100, and you have the cost that it would take to get a crew to Mars.  And once they’re on Mars, they’ll discover that Mars is a big ball of red rock and dust.  It does have some polar ice and even some permafrost.  It has some geological features which would make amazing cover pictures for National Geographic.  It has evidence of liquid water at some point in its distant past, which means if we spent a few decades painstakingly digging up long-burried rocks in what look like ancient stream beds, we might find evidence of ancient microbes.  We might even find some frozen in buried ice.  The world rejoices – we’re not alone!

Of couse, it will be virtually impossible to prove that we didn’t experience cross-polination at some point, so proving another spontaneous biogensis would be really tough unless the microbe’s biology was so different than earth biology that it would be more likely than cross-polination, but again, you can’t prove it.  The conditions on Earth were so different in the distant past when this type of bio-exchange would have needed to happen in order for anything to survive on Mars once it got there.  We can’t be positive that a totally different type of biology didn’t evolve on Earth in the distant past but became extinct.

But here’s the thing.  Even if we did find life on Mars, it’s frankly not that interesting.  There are very few people who would be interested in exploring space for exploration’s sake that actually believe that life on Earth is something special and will not appear elsewhere in the universe under the same conditions.  I suppose there are some who would be anxious to prove it so they could, in their minds, drive a dagger through the heart of the religious who claim that God created life on Earth (and presumably nowhere else, although I don’t believe any religious texts actually spell that out one way or the other).

But by 2100, it’s highly likely that we will have created a spontaneous biogensis event in laboratory conditions.  We understand a great deal about organic chemistry and we have a pretty good technical understanding of how life began and thus we have a pretty good understanding of how to make it begin again.  It is also likely that we will have created a type of biology that is completely different than ours (for example, replacing carbon with silicon).  If we accomplish that feat, then without actually discovering life on another planet in our own solar system, we will have essentially proven that life does exist elsewhere in the universe.  How, you may ask?  Well, simple, really.

If we can demonstrate that as long as certain conditions are true (e.g., a primordial soup with sufficient chemical composition and sufficient energy from the sun or some chemical source) organic life will begin to evolve, then all we need to do is apply a little bit of probability to the size of the universe and we’ve proven it.  Even if one out of a trillion stars have planets and only one out of a trillion of those planets is like Earth then there are still billions and billions of Earths out there; the chances that life began on only of them, particularly when we demonstrate that life can be started anywhere at any time with the right recipe, is very near zero.

It’s unlikely that we can discover anything about Mars by sending humans that we can’t discover by sending robots, which are getting more and more sophisticated every time we send some.  By 2100 we’ll probably have exploration robots with projected mission lifespans of 50 or 100 years and with ranges in the hundreds or thousands of miles.  Why do we need to send a man to Mars?

What about terraforming?  Making some of the other planets habitable for humans, so that we have room for our growing population?

Well, even if you could terraform Mars, it wouldn’t do you any good.  It will always be unfit for human habitation because it lacks a magnetic field, which on Earth protects us against most of the radiation that is bombarding everything in the universe all the time.  It lacks a magnetic field because its core is probably cold (which is why its volcanoes are all dormant).  Even thickening the atmosphere significantly would not protect you.

And Venus is an incredibly daunting task.  If we could somehow sequester its carbon atmosphere into a solid, or dissolve it into an ocean (which it does not have), you are left with the same problem.  Venus does not have a strong enough magnetic field to protect any residents from space radiation.  And then there’s the whole retrograde rotation (which means the sun rises in the west).  And its year is longer than its day, so poses a significant problem.

But really, it’s the magnetic field problem that makes it pointless.  We will never be able to live on any of these extraterrestial bodies until we advance medical science enough that cancer is about as serious of an illness as chicken pox, because anyone who lives on these planets will be getting cancer pretty much all the time.  You’d be sick from radiation poisoning 24×7 unless we lived in giant lead domes, which negates the value of terraforming since we’d be living in closed biospheres.

Oh, and also, it would take thousands of years and more wealth than has ever existed on Earth throughout all of civilization.

Basically, our solar system is a big, giant waste of time.  If Einstein is correct then it means we can’t ever travel faster than light under any circumstances, which makes it impossible to ever leave the solar system, which means space in its entirety is a big fat joke.

Unless we find a way to circumvent Einsteinian physics which would enable a massful body to accelerate past the speed of light, we will never get off of Earth in any meaningful way.  If we want to spend money doing anything, we should be spending money looking into that.  The problem is that the scientific community regards faster than light travel to be in the same category as perpetual motion machines – impossible under the laws of the universe – so anyone who researches it is immediately viewed as a crackpot and it’s pretty hard to get funding.  Plus, our understanding of “weird” physics (e.g., all of this crazy partical stuff they’re doing at the LHC) is still pretty limited.  It’s not as though we are aware of conditions that would make faster-than-light travel possible and we simply don’t know how to create those conditions – we have no idea what, if any, mechanism would exist that would allow that to happen.

So, we’ll just have to wait.  We’ll either stumble across faster-than-light travel (or be told how to do it by alien visitors), or we’ll die on this rock when some unavoidable natural catastrophe destroys it and us with it.

In the meantime, let’s stop hearing plans for a moonbase by everybody and their brother.  It’s never going to happen, and if it did, it would be a giant waste of money.

Online Piracy is An Example of the Future

One of the reasons that bills like SOPA and PIPA are getting so much protest is because everybody in the technology world, as well as every human being with a little bit of foresight, understands something that apparently our politicians don’t:

Content piracy cannot be stopped.

Any time I would talk about ridiculous concepts like “copy protection” to people, such as extremely primitive mechanisms on DVDs for example, I would just tell them, “If it can be played, it can be copied.”

Take for example our good friend Netflix.  Combine that with a DirectX scraping application like FRAPS and you can simply record the Netflix stream while you watch it.  So even though Netflix doesn’t offer direct download links for the movies (instead forcing you to stream them), anyone who is mildly tech savvy can download it themselves by recording it as they watch it.

Technically, doing so probably violates the Netflix terms of use, thereby making me in some kind of breach of contract and therefore liable to someone for some money somewhere.

Point being that the law that tells me not to do it is already on the books, but it’s basically impossible to enforce.  SOPA would be impossible to enforce, too.

Or, it would cost more money to enforce than the entertainment industry would possibly lose.

But, enough of that.  Back to the subject matter at hand.

The reason online piracy is a glimpse of the future is because it introduces a new concept that has never existed before in the history of humankind.

The MPAA and the RIA and any other entity that owns this mystical thing called a copyright will tell you that a DVD or a CD with their content on it has some value.  In fact, they’ll even tell you exactly what that value is on the court papers when they sue you for owning it without paying for it.  A movie or an album they claim has value the same way a loaf of bread has value or that a cup of Starbucks has value or an amusement park ticket has value.

The problem with content like movies and music is that it violates the basic principle of worth.  Something only has worth if it cost something to produce.  And by something, we mean materials combined with human effort.  And really, since materials are extricated from the planet Earth, refined, synthesized, and produced through the labors of human beings, we can really get away comfortably with saying that something only has worth if it cost human time to produce.

Somebody had to spend a portion of their short lives to grow that wheat, to mill that flour, to bake it into a loaf of bread, to drive it from the factory to the supermarket, to put it on a shelf, to ring it up for you at the register.  Human effort is involved in every part of the process.  Thanks to the assistance of machines in these processes, the amount of effort per loaf of bread is relatively small.

Obviously, movies and music have big human cost associated with them.  Ever count the number of names in the credits for a recent Hollywood Blockbuster, not to mention all of the innumerable consumption used in the production of the film.  Somebody had to put together that catered lunch for the cast and crew every day on set.  It would be ludicrous to deny the worth of a Hollywood film.  In fact we have a pretty good grip on what they cost.  Studios are not shy about publicizing the budgets of their films, which are nowadays often in the hundreds of millions.  After all, if a movie cost $100m to make, it’s gotta be a high quality one, right?

The big difference between movies and loaves of bread is at the same time painfully obvious and easy to miss.  The cost for producing a million loaves of bread is significantly higher than producing a single loaf of bread, but the cost for producing a single copy of the movie is exactly the same as producing a million copies.  Well, okay, you need to put the movie somewhere (on bytes on a drive, for example) and those drives to have costs, but you get the idea – it’s a neglible increase, perhaps one penny per copy.

An easy corrolary to understand would be to imagine that we could bake one single loaf of bread and then duplicate it as many times as we want for effectively zero cost.  If the economics of movies applied to bread, nobody would ever starve on the planet Earth.

Such a technology would surely be considered a great miracle, but it would piss off (and unemploy) a whole lot of people – basically everybody in the bread business.  They’d have to go get another job, God forbid.  Chances are the wheat farmers, the flour millers, the bread bakers, the bread-truck drivers and the stockboys would fight this hypothetical bread-cloning technology for their own sakes despite the fact that it would be incredibly valuable to humankind.

Do you think they would be successful in their bid to prevent people from duplicating bread, particularly if the bread-duplicating process didn’t require any special equipment other than the standard appliances that people already had in their homes and that all it took was a little bit of know-how?  Of course not.  The government could make it illegal to duplicate loaves of bread until they’re red in the face but people would still do it.  Would the government really start rounding up the people that did?  All they need to do is say to a jury, “but I was hungry.”  Case dismissed.

You may argue that such a defense would fall on deaf ears to the jury if the prosecution could demonstrate that the defendant had the monetary means to buy an actual legitimate loaf of bread, but that argument is patently ridiculous isn’t it?  You can get something for free but if you can afford it you must instead buy it.  Really?

We as humans, whether we are consciously aware of it or not, place much higher value on things that we believe required more human labor.  For example, when asked, virtually everyone will tell you that a coffee table made by hand without power tools is worth significantly more than a coffee table tacked together from pre-fabricated machined parts somewhere in China, even if the end result is virtually indistinguishable.  We are fundamentally aware that human effort must be rewarded with money commensurate with the time and effort spent.

It’s very easy to think about an electronic copy of a movie that you download from the internet as not worth any money because it cost nothing to produce your copy.  In turn, you could produce 10 copies, one for each of your friends, at zero cost or effort to you.  Therefore it has no value.

The MPAA takes a different stance: every copy is worth the $100m that it cost the studio to create it in the first place, and that they are doing you a huge service by selling you a copy for the low low price of $19.95 on Blu-ray DVD combo pack.

Those in favor of bills like SOPA can make a pretty compelling argument.  If online “piracy” (e.g., copying) of content like movies that cost millions upon millions to produce is left unchecked, then sooner or later nobody will ever buy movies.  They’ll just download them for free instead.  If not enough people actually transfer wealth to the producers of these movies they won’t be able to afford to make them anymore.  Since we all like being entertained and we’d sure like movies to keep being made, that’s considered a horrifying outcome by most people.

The thought doesn’t cross anyone’s mind that if movies can’t recover $100m in expenses because of piracy, perhaps the cost of producing a movie should be decreased.  Hollywood films are not a small undertaking by any means, but $100m (and up!) is a lot of money.  Rather than simply accept that online piracy is going to cut a certain portion of their potential revenue, they want to stop online piracy.

We’ve already established that online piracy is unstoppable, though.  Online piracy is this generation’s war on drugs.  Making weed illegal hasn’t eliminated weed.  It just makes criminals out of otherwise good people and overcrowds our prisons and costs our government billions of dollars.

So where does the future come in to this discussion?

Well, simple.  It won’t be long before large segments of our economy are in the same situation that movies are in today.  My hypothetical bread duplication machine is not some super high-tech sci-fi fantasy.  It’s on the way!

Our entire economic system is predicated on the simple idea that time is equal to money – in other words, worth is derived from human effort which must be rewarded with some other variety of worth.  The farmer trades his farm labor for the tailor’s habberdashery who trades his habberdashery for the carpenter’s construction efforts and so on.  We abstract all of this into money and from this we’ve built an economic system that has remained more or less unchanged since the dawn of time.

Movies and music don’t fit into this system because an infinite number of copies can be created with zero human effort and zero human time.

One day in the not-too-distant future, an effectively infinite number of loaves of bread will be created with zero human effort and zero human time, because we will have automated the entire process from the farm to the stocking of the supermarket shelves with robotics and computers.  This will mean that bread has essentially zero value because it has essentially zero cost.

When this transition first begins, many people will become very wealthy without doing much of any actual work because they will own large tracts of land.  They will then invest in robotics to farm it, robotics to mill it, robotics to bake it, and robotics to distribute it.  They will argue that they still have a right to charge money for bread to recover their investment in the technology that made it possible (and a handy profit margin built in).  Meanwhile all the actual human beings who were involved in these types of jobs will be permanently unemployed until they change careers.  For many that will not be an option.

We’ll enter a period where our entire economy is controlled by “robo-barons” – men, women, and corporations who have managed to use robotics to automate huge areas of the economy that are currently occupied by humans.  They will drastically reduce operating costs by firing all the humans and at the same time they’ll still charge the same amount for a good or service that it used to cost, even when dozens or hundreds or thousands of human beings were spending 40 hours a week of their lives to produce it.  Meanwhile all of those humans are unemployed, their jobs taken by robots.

If this sounds shitty to you it’s because it is.  Fortunately it won’t and can’t last for very long.  Perhaps 20 to 50 years at most – possibly even less.  Why?  Because we will be entering a radical new economic reality where time does not equal money, where worth is not derived from human effort.  Entire supply chains will be robot driven.

Think about the costs of building a house, for example.  The average cost to build a 3,000 sq.ft home in the US is about $220,000 – including all materials and labor and a profit margin for the contractor.  If we imagine a world where the labor portion is replaced by partially or fully autonomous carpenter bots who can build a home according to computerized blueprints, we cut that cost almost in half because the labor cost is reduced to essentially zero.  Obviously robots have an upfront and an upkeep cost so they aren’t fully free, but where you would need to pay a skilled craftsman at least $20 an hour, the upkeep cost of a typical carpenter robot will be only a tiny fraction of that, perhaps $1 an hour or less.

But why should the materials cost anything?  In a world where we have robots that can assemble a house from blueprints, are we really going to send tough, rugged lumberjacks into the forests to fell our trees?  Are we really going to have human beings feeding timber into a saw mill?  The entire lumber supply chain can very easily be roboticized, and it won’t be long before every materials industry related to home construction is entirely automated, from earth materials extraction to synthesis to production to shipping to shelving.

Such a world is analagous to the world of movies and music today.  The upfront cost associated with building the robots that can perform the labor of baking a loaf of bread will be in the billions.  But once the robots exist, once that tech is there, the cost of replicationg that bread thousands to millions of times is zero.  One day, every commodity will be like music and movies today.

In such an economy, who gets to keep the money?  The guy who owns the robots?  The overseer who sets them to task?  The company who made the robots?  If any of those is the answer then we’ll have a very strange world indeed.  We won’t be talking about the 1% vs. the 99%, we’ll be talking about the 0.0001% and the 99.999% because for the vast majority of humans, the jobs we could do are done by robots and we’re simply, purely, plainly too stupid to do any of the remaining jobs, which will involve things like designing more robots.  We’d see 50, 60, maybe even 70% chronic unemployment.

And why shouldn’t we?  If someone doesn’t need to work to bake me a loaf of bread why shouldn’t I get it for free?

You may have heard the expression that it’s unfair for government to tax us and redistribute wealth because they’re effectively “robbing Peter so they can pay Paul.”

What if Peter is a robot?

One day – possibly in our lifetimes – working will be an entirely optional endeavor reserved for people who want to be able to afford luxuries.  The majority of the human population will not need to work in the sense that we understand work today.  We will not be trading our own labor for others’ labor so that we can eat and sleep with a roof under our heads.  Our robot slaves will take care of all of that for us. 

So, back to SOPA – pay attention to the total blunderous handling of movie and music “pirating” legislation today.  If it seems ridiculous and inept, it’s because it is.  But this is just foreshadowing, folks.  The transition away from a worth-based economy is going to be wrought with monumental, incredible blunders.  The problem is that governments are run by old people who spend more time looking behind them and preserving the institutions that they know instead of looking to invent new ones – yes, even your precious so-called progressives.  How old is Nancy Pelosi?  Is she 70 yet?

Transitioning from a worth-based capitalist society where everything must have value into one where nothing really has value is going to be very tricky indeed.  We’re going to see a lot foolishness in the coming years as the politicians are completely unable to stop the changes that technology imposes on us, despite their best efforts to try.  SOPA is just the first in what is going to be a long line of misguided bills that do attempt to control technological advances by forcing them to conform to existing, obsolete constructions instead of letting the technology dictate the law.

Lawmakers need to find a way to keep Hollywood in business while at the same time acknowledging that digital copies produced by the millions have no intrinsic value because they require no human effort to mass produce.  We haven’t seen a good solution because this is actually a very, very hard problem.  Because I’m a Republican, my answer is this: lawmakers don’t need to keep Hollywood in business.  Hollywood has to keep Hollywood in business.  The answer is not to turn off half of the internet or throw anyone who downloads a copy of their moves in jail or fine them into oblivion.

It’s a shame nobody smart works in Hollywoord or they’d probably have solved this a long time.  They don’t have brains.  Instead what they have is lawyers, and that’s how SOPA was born.

Happy Thursday.

RE: Twenty Predictions for 2100

I picked up this article from the BBC in which user-submitted predictions for 2100 were commented upon by two fellows.  I get a kick out of this kind of thing so I thought I would add some commentary here.  In general I feel as though the commentators are too optimistic about the likelihoods of many of these.

Oceans will be extensively farmed and not just for fish (Jim 300)

This is such a vague statement that its certainty is almost guaranteed.  I think we will find ways to extract value out of the seawater itself (e.g., organic compounds that have use as fertilizer or animal feed).  But I think the most likely new use of the sea will be floating plantations.  One of the biggest challenges of the next century is going to be feeding the growing population.  70% of Earth’s surface is ocean.  If we could build expansive buoyant platforms – artificial islands, if you will – and layer them with enough soil to grow crops – we’d be in business in a major way.  First, the ocean is flat, so one major problem is solved.  Next, the ocean is made of water.  Salty water, yes, but we’ve had desalinization plants for years, and such a plant would be a staple of any floating farm.  Desalinization requires electricity, but solar and wind installations, both of which are unsightly eyesores on land where people live but completely harmless when off-shore, could easily be used.  Third, particularly if we’ve found a way to derive a form of fertilizer from ocean water or the ocean floor, all of the nutrients are there too.  The biggest problem you’d have with such a construct is preventing a storm from destroying your platform, but we build oil rigs in the middle of the Caribbean.  Surely we could solve this problem creatively.

I believe China will pioneer this tech because they’ll need to first.  The U.S. and other nations will start building these installations eventually too, particularly when the large aquifers that water the farms in the Midwest start to dry up.

We will have the ability to communicate through thought transmission (Dev 2)

I think this is certain, but the question about how commonplace it will be is more interesting.  It raises incredible privacy concerns.  If we have the ability to communicate by wearing a special helmet that can read our thoughts, how will we appropriately control which thoughts are transmitted?  More importantly, do you want your local police station to have the ability to forcibly strap one of these things to your head so they can read what’s going in your mind while they’re interrogating you?

This is a very tricky technology because its usefulness is mitigated by privacy concerns.  A certain segment of the population – and one much larger than you might think – will simply refuse to ever use one of these devices.  It could get bad.  What if your unwillingness to communicate via thoughts becomes culturally construed as an indicator that you have something to hide?

Still, it will probably happen and become ubiquitous.

I believe the application of this technology will be to enable hands free control of computers, including, for example, writing this blog.  (Writing is not really the same as communication).  Mostly, it will be used for video gaming.  I believe you’ll see helmets which use lasers to beam images directly on to your retinas so that you have 100% immersive sight and noise cancelling headphones to create 100% immersive hearing, and a brain-to-computer interface to allow your thoughts to control the game.

We will be able to control the weather (mariebee_)

Total rubbish.  This prediction stems from the ridiculous notion held by most global warming nutjobs today that human beings can influence the Earth’s climate in a meaningful way.  The oceans, decaying plant matter, and volcanoes contribute enormously more CO2 into our environment than all of human production combined (several orders of magnitude more, in fact – about 100 times!)

We may be able to influence the weather in certain ways, but of even that much I am skeptical.  What mechanisms could we possibly use to make it sunny instead of rainy?  Do you envision a giant fan that we point at the rain clouds to move them over the ocean or something?

Even if we could “control” the weather, we wouldn’t.  Look at how hopping mad these climate change buffoons get at the notion that we may be increasing global temperatures by a couple of degrees C.  Look at the idiot politicians’ responses to these climate change buffoons.  We’re busy spending billions of dollars and billions of minutes yammering on about global warming which we aren’t even sure that a) we’re causing b) can stop and c) will negatively impact the planet in a meaningful way.

In a hypothetical year 2100 where we have the technology to control rainfall, everybody would be terrified to either make it rain or not because the sheer number of variables affected by the weather in terms of overall climate, ecosystems, seasons, and so on creates a system so complex that even the hypothetical computers of tomorrow won’t be able to churn through them all and determine how safe or unsafe turning rain into sunshine would be – not because we lack the CPU cycles but simply because some human being would have to design a simulation that takes all these things into account.

And then, even if we did have such a thorough understanding of climate and weather that the scientists who study this could assure us that it’s perfectly safe to manipulate stormclouds (and be correct!), enough of the population simply would not believe them and protest the idea of controlling the weather.

And then, even if we did have the green light and the tech to do this, who gets to decide where it rains and where it snows and where it’s sunny?  What happens when the farmers start fighting with the resort hotel owners who start fighting with the stadiums who start fighting with municipalities who don’t want to buy salt to clear the roads who start fighting with airlines who want clear skies to fly in…

Total rubbish.  We may someday learn how to control precipitation, but we won’t ever actually do it on a large scale.  China might.  But we won’t.

Antarctica will be “open for business” (Dev 2)

Incredibly vague and probably also wrong.  The truth is there’s very little of interest in Antarctica and we’ll likely be done with petroleum by 2100 (or be using so little that existing reserves meet world demand).  As one of the commentators mentioned, we’d be far more likely to use the vast areas of inner Asia (Siberia) and the tundras of Canada for human population centers than we would the Antarctic.  The only value that continent has is natural resources and it’s unlikely that it will ever be economically viable to acquire them.

One single worldwide currency (from Kennys_Heroes)

Wrong.  We saw the circus that the single currency in Europe has caused with countries like Greece and Ireland in financial ruins and an inability to correct their markets.  Most people do not understand how national currencies work, but here’s the brief version:

A government controls the money supply by taking money in and out of circulation (printing and destroying, respectively).  When there is a lot of money in circulation, then banks, which borrow money from its government, will not pay a high interest rate on the money because the supply is high.  When there isn’t a lot of money in circulation, then banks will pay a high interest rate because the demand is high.  Supply and demand.  So when a national interest rate is, for example, 5%, what that means is that if a private bank borrows 100 units of currency from that nation’s central bank, it has to pay 5 units of currency back to the bank every year until it pays those 100 units back.  Since private banks have to make a profit, they loan those 100 units to a private citizen for say 8% interest.  The private citizen pays the bank 8 units of currency per year.  The bank gives 5 of those to the government and keeps 3 for itself and therefore has revenue.

The question then becomes why does a national bank (in the U.S.’s case, this is called the Federal Reserve) raise and lower interest rates?  When the economy is strong and unemployment is low, putting more money out for private banks to loan to private citizens encourages economic growth.  A business needs funds to get started, so most small businesses start with a small business loan of some kind, which they get from a private bank.  When the economy is weak, it is more appropriate to reign in the amount of money available for loaning because another word for loan is “debt.”  In a bad economic situation, making loans easy and cheap encourages people to take on debt which they may not be able to repay.  For example in a boom economy a small business such as a restaurant has a much greater chance of success (and therefore repayment of the loan debt) than in a stagnant economy of a recession, for the simple fact that during boom times people have money to spend on dining out and in a recession they do not.

The reason that a single worldwide currency would therefore be a terrible idea and will not happen is the same reason why the single Euro currency has been a disaster for Greece, Ireland, and Spain – their governments and their economies are vastly different.  When Ireland switched from the Punt to the Euro, the interest rate on money, which is set in Brussels, became cheaper, because the interest rate on the Punt was higher than the Euro.  It was higher on the Punt because Ireland’s economy at the time called for a higher interest rate.  Now that Euros were cheap, the Irish borrowed, and their real estate market – one of the primary reasons for people to borrow money (mortgages) – exploded.  The reason for this is that the interest rate on your mortgage determines your buying power.  You may be able to afford, say, a $300k home with a 5% interest rate.  But you may be able to afford a $400k home with a 3% interest rate.  When national interest rates are low (and stay low), houses begin to go up in value.  When the rates are high, houses begin to go down in value.

The problem with real estate going up in value based on an interest rate is the fact that actual value of the property is not commensurate with the market value.  A 3,000 square foot house may cost about $200,000 in materials and labor to build, but it could be on the market for $500, $600, even $700,000 if interest rates are nice and low.  If I buy a house for $600,000 with a nice low 3% interest, what happens when the Federal Reserve ups the interest rate to 4%?  A 4% mortgage for that amount costs more per month than a 3% one does, and now there’s fewer people who actually earn enough money to actually afford that monthly mortgage payment, so now my pool of potential buyers gets smaller.  What happens if I lose my job and I have to sell my house because I can’t afford it, but interest rates have gone up and nobody can afford to pay what I paid for it?  The answer is I take a huge loss.  Possibly such a huge loss that I don’t have the money to cover it.  The end result is a foreclosure.  The private bank that owns my loan has now just lost a lot of money, and this creates a huge ripple effect across every segment of the economy.

This scenario happened to some degree or another almost everywhere (at least in the Western world) between 2007-2008.  We’re now in an economic recession because of it, which will last until prices begin to stabalize themselves.  The U.S. can do anything it wants with its reserves in the meanwhile, adjusting it appropriately in an effort to fix this problem.

But if the entire world were pegged to one currency (which was administered using a reserve system as nearly every modern country does today), we’d end up with national economies getting devastated by the effects of cheap money and like Greece and Ireland have absolutely no recourse.

Thus, it will never happen.

We will all be wired to computers to make our brains work faster (Dev 2)

It is estimated that the human brain is equivalent to a computer that performs one quadrillion flops per second.  In comparison, your desktop PC does perhaps 100 billion, and your smart phone does much less.  Computers are not as fast as our brains.  They may seem so since obviously we cannot perform a quadrillion mathematical operations per second, but considering all of the things the brain does at the rate at which it does it is the key.  Even something as basic as our vision – how we combine two unique inputs (one from each eye) and process it into a single image in real time (the eye can see approximately 30 “frames” per second – an image flickering faster than that appears to be a still image to us) is incredibly costly in terms of computer FLOPS but we do it seemingly effortlessly on top of all the other things our brain is doing, like telling our hearts to beat.

Even still, computers will probably be objectively faster than human brains by 2100.  That said, it’s unlikely that a computer can do anything to make our brains “faster” per se.  We are limited by hardware the same way your desktop PC is limited to 100 gigaflops today.  What computers can do is augment our brains such that we do not need to remember as much.  That’s already true today.  The only limiting factor is our interfaces.  When you want to know which year Isaac Newton is born you need to get onto a computer or your phone and clumsily type in a search query in Google or browse to Wikipedia or whatever.  It will probably take minutes to come up with an answer.  I believe we will use brain interfaces to replace clumsy typing and browsing websites with our eyes, and in that sense, we will appear to be “smarter” and “faster” because we are asking our computer questions and our very fast computer is giving us answers very fast.

If we have a brain-computer interface it will almost certainly be one-way.  I think it’s very likely that smart phones will evolve into a true personal computer that you essentially wear at all times which acts as your assistant – you ask it something by thinking it and it uses natural language processing tools to interpret what you mean and then find an answer for you, and then speaks the answer to you, possibly through a tiny earpiece that would be inaudible to anyone except you.  Game shows like Jeopardy! will be obsolete and considered hopelessly stupid because humans will not be expected to know things.  Our children will not be asked to learn things and memorize them as part of their education.  Instead it will focus entirely on critical thinking and interpreting, because everybody will have a smart phone/personal computer on them at all times which has always-on internet access which can answer any question you have about any objective fact instantly.  They will also not be expected to know how to do long division, except perhaps taught as a lesson in how to apply a mathematical algorithm (e.g., follow these steps).

Nanorobots will flow around our body fixing cells, and will be able to record our memories (Alister Brown)

I believe nanorobots will extend our lifespans incredibly, and possibly indefinitely.  They will almost certainly be able to cure all forms of cancer.  Whether they exist as actual mechanical devices or are actually engineered viruses is debatable, but one way or another, we will have engineered things floating around our body repairing it for us.  It’s easy to imagine, for example, creating an artificial blastocyst (the cells which create bone) which works faster and could greatly increase the recovery time for a broken bone.  We will almost certainly have a device which is capable of clearing plaque from arteries, greatly reducing heart attacks and strokes.  We will almost certainly have a device which floats around our body and selectively simply kills fat cells so that no matter how badly we eat, we don’t get fat.  Many of these technologies are likely to occur much sooner than 2100 because there’s an incredible monetary incentive to the company who patents that tech first.  They could charge $100,000 for a cure for obesity and every woman in the western world would pay it, and almost every man.  Every year our knowledge of our own bodies and how they work increases hugely, so this is highly likely.

As far as lifespan goes, aging is really nothing more than built up corruption of our DNA.  Old people have liverspots on their hands because those areas of the skin have damaged DNA which cause them to be brown spots instead of good, healthy skin.  It isn’t hard to imagine engineering a customized virus whose job is to replace the corrupted DNA in a liverspot with your undamaged DNA.  It’s also possible that we could invent a robot who floats around your blood stream, latches on to a cell, removes the existing damaged DNA and replaces it with a copy of your actual, uncorrupted DNA without damaging or destroying the cell.

The big issue is your brain.  Neurons are notoriously hard to fix, but it’s not inconceivable.  Full-body DNA replacement technology might not make it by 2100, but probably by 2200 and almost certainly by 2300.  That’s if we haven’t found a way to create artificial bodies by then.

We will have sussed nuclear fusion (Kennys_Heroes)

Sussed must be some kind of weird British slang, which I assume to mean solved or invented.  Yes, this is almost guaranteed.  Not much to say.

There will only be three languages in the world – English, Spanish and Mandarin (Bill Walker)

The “experts” seemed to think that this is likely but I strongly disagree.  Cultures are in love with their own languages.  Can you really envision France making its national language Spanish or English?  There’s a very strong chance that everyone in the world will speak two of those three languages (which means everyone would be able to each other in at least one common language), but the idea that France will give up French or that Japan will give up Japanese is absurd.  They will continue to exist.  It is almost certain that most of the tiny regional dialects will virtually disappear, but as long as language is such a huge aspect of our culture, it’s here to stay.

Eighty per cent of the world will have gay marriage (Paul)

If we’re still talking about gay marriage in 2100 then we deserve to go extinct as a civilization.  I’m sure to modern gays it’s a big deal but in the large scale (such as most of the rest of these questions) it’s a trifling irrelevant thing.  A much better prediction would be phrased like this:

Moral authority based on religion will be rare or extinct.

People will not use any holy book to dictate what is culturally acceptable on a large scale.

California will lead the break-up of the US (Dev 2)

Pat Buchanan predicted that by 2040 the U.S. will be four or five small countries (northeast, southeast, midwest, southwest, northwest).

I believe this is a ridiculous notion and it highlights the general misunderstanding of what the United States actually is.  If California were to secede from the United States it would rapidly devolve even further into unsustainable debt because all of the functions that the federal government performs would fall upon the state (e.g., defense).

If the U.S. were really so divided that there were states that were contemplating secession, we would simply adjust our federal laws to return more authority on certain issues to individual states and shrink the federal government – in other words, a major tenent of the Republican Party’s platform.  I believe mostly everyone in the country would rather we go in that direction than dissolve the union, and I think the large majority of Californians today and in 2100 will realize that they would be better off as part of the nation than on their own, even if they have to share it with those loathsome Texans.

I believe this question is motivated by the impending Euro failure and a general desire among Europeans to see the U.S. “fail” in a similiar way by devolving into a multi-nation second Europe.  It is inconceivable to many of them that such a culturally diverse population could exist together under one single federal sovereign state, particularly when they have proven so totally inept at replicating the United States in Europe.

Space elevators will make space travel cheap and easy (Ahdok)

As much as I would love to see this happen, I think it won’t.  A space elevator is an incredibly daunting engineering feat that makes the Apollo program look like a Boy Scout boxcar derby.  The problem is that it’s hard to monetize a space elevator sufficiently to cover the cost and risk.  Even though satelite launches are a business, it isn’t a big enough business.  A space elevator would almost certainly need government involvement and considering how America has treated NASA since 1969 it’s incredibly unlikely that we’d see taxpayer commitment.  Opponents would call it Jack’s Magic Beanstalk and that would be the end of that.

I don’t like being down on space exploration because space exploration is fun, but let’s face it – unless we either prove Einstein wrong or we find a way to circumvent the laws of our four dimensional visible universe, space just isn’t that interesting.  It might be fun to build a space elevator to make a mission to Mars for example economically possible, but we’re limited to our solar system at best, and our solar system is boring.  Neither Mars nor Venus are habitable even if we terraform them due to systemic unsolvable problems with them.  Mars has no magnetic field and we can’t turn one on because it’s core is and therefore not moving.  The motion of our molten core is what gives Earth its field.  Unless we found a way to melt the interior or Mars we’d be out of luck there, and the energy requirements (and engineering capabilities) are far beyond what we’ll be able to do by 2100.  Venus’s year is longer than its day and also lacks a magnetic field.  Every other rocky body like the gas giant moons are just too cold and too far from the sun to be useful to us.

Unless we come up with light speed travel before 2100 this won’t happen, and if we do, it’s unlikely that we’d need a space elevator to get into orbit.

Women will be routinely impregnated by artificial insemination rather than by a man (krozier 93)

Too vague.  What does routinely mean?  The majority?  In what country?  This may become true in places like Sweden or Iceland where every man has Herpes and women, even married women, won’t have sex without a condom on, but the chances of this being true on a large scale are slim to none.  There are some aspects of human behavior that “advance” with an evolving civilization but screwing isn’t one of them.  A great number of both men and women would insist on doing it the natural way for reasons that don’t change every century.  It’s deep seated instinctual biomechanics and those trump cultural practices every single time.

There will be museums for almost every aspect of nature, as so much of the world’s natural habitat will have been destroyed (LowMaintenanceLifestyles)

This is a stupid one because it’s already true.  I love indoor rainforests.  If I were a billionaire I’d have a private one in my backyard.  I think a better phrasing would be:

“Most people will only be able to see forests in specially designed museum buildings.”

That I could definitely see, with “most” being a percentage of the population.  I still think 2100 is premature and I also think that whoever wrote this has no concept at all of how gigantic the planet Earth actually is.  If we crammed every person on the planet into the state of Texas, everybody would have 5,000 square feet of personal space available to them.  And Texas is what, 0.1% of the land surface area of Earth and 0.001% of the total square area?  When you also consider that urbanization is going to increase and cities all around the world are going to just grow up as much as out due to better steel and better skyscraper architecture, I think the overall land area that is still “wild” is not going to decrease nearly as rapidly as you might think.

Deserts will become tropical forests (jim300)

Again this is incredibly vague but I assume this means the Sahara will stop taking up a gigantic portion of Africa.  The problem with this is that there’s a finite amount of rainfall that will exist on the planet, that we can’t really increase.  Even if we assume that by 2100 we’ll be able to control the weather sufficiently to artificially reverse desertification, if we made it rain a lot in the Sahara we’d see rain decrease somwhere else and a new desert would spring up elsewhere.  The other question one needs to ask is even if we could “use” the world’s deserts for something, would we?  Deserts are notorious for being large stretches of land that nobody gives a shit about.  If I created a private company that had tech which could turn large stretches of the Sahara into a lush flood-of-the-Nile-esque tropical paradise and I tried to start selling real estate out there, would anyone actually buy it?  No, they wouldn’t.

I might see Australia doing something about the Outback or China doing something about the Gobi – and by something I mean finding a way to grow crops there using massive irrigation schemes, but I doubt the effort would be worth the cost.  As for the Sahara, unless Mother Nature decides to turn it from a desert back to something else, it will stay a desert.  Nobody – and when I say nobody I mean the part of civilization which will advance enough to invent such geo-forming technology – cares enough about Africa to fix the Sahara in 2000, and I highly doubt that anyone will care enough about Africa in 2100 either.  A more interesting prediction would be that Africa actually becomes a civilized, useful place.  I’m not holding my breath.  That’s not a prediction I would make.

Marriage will be replaced by an annual contract (holierthanthou)

Unlikely.  What is more likely is that the ridiculous, antiquated divorce laws will have changed such that conditions like that the man who divorces his wife is not financially obligated to “keep her in the manner to which she has become accustomed”  are no longer part of it.  A huge driving force behind this is going to actually be gay marriage.  Gay marriage is going to frequently result in gay divorce and we’re going to find that all of the divorce laws in which the woman/mother gets everything and the man basically gets fucked are going to be really hard to apply to same sex couples and divorce laws in general are going to be affected for the better.

But marriage has been a concept in human culture for thousands of years and it will be a concept in human culture for thousands of years more, mostly because women like it.  Women invented the phrase “happily ever after” and are psychologically compelled to demand long term commitment because raising a baby is a long term commitment.  You will find it very hard to convince a woman that a good definition of marriage is an annual contract.  If she wants to have a baby, she’s going to want an 18 year contract because she wants help raising that baby, and she’s right.

I think more likely, people will only get married because they want to raise children together – gay and straight alike.  In 2100, it will be rare to find a couple who is married and neither has nor wants children.

Sovereign nation states will cease to exist and there will be one world government (krozier93)

This is almost guaranteed never to happen.  The only impetus I could foresee that would make this happen is first contact with an alien species, and that contact would have to be hostile.  If we were attacked by aliens and managed to survive, we would only have done so by uniting as a species and presumably our losses would be catastrophically large such that the world population would end up being much smaller and therefore easier to convince.

Come to think of it, this could also come to pass if sometime in the next 100 years some natural disaster devastates the world population and necessitates global cooperation.

But even if we were to create some kind of governing body with actual authority (which could represent us as a species in some kind of galactic federation), there’s almost a 100% certainty that it would function much like the U.S. government does today – a federation of soverign states with a central government that has very limited power.  That power would probably be a joint military tasked with defending Earth from possible hostile aliens (rather than national militaries pointing rockets at each other).  Many of the social concerns that national governments deal with today would probably remain soverign issues that invidiual states still control (e.g., marriage age, abortion rights, gay marriage rights, etc.)

War by the West will be fought totally be remote control (LowMaintenanceLifestyles)

The experts found this to be unlikely but I find it to be almost a certainty.  By 2100, technology like the predator drone will be so sophisticated that if you are on the U.S. government’s hit list you’ll probably be dead as fast as it takes for us to find you and dispatch a predator.  The tech will probably be sophisticated enough so that if we were to have deposed Saddam in 2100 instead of 2003, we would have simply blackened the sky with highly sophisticated (and possibly even autonomous) predator drones that would be authorized to seek and destroy any Iraqi citizen carrying a firearm larger than a pistol.  And by then we’ll probably have ground based humanoid robots that we can remote control.  Couple that with brain-computer interactive devices and the soldiers could control robot bodies that are on the ground in Baghdad from the safety of a command bunker 3,000 miles away.

Why would anyone risk their actual body when we could deploy a robot body instead?

Britain will have had a revolution (holierthanthou)

What kind of revolution?  Even the breakup of the USSR is hard to call a revolution.  It is unlikely that any major western country will see a radical shift in its politics, but if it does, it will almost certainly be a repeat of 1930′s Germany.  I would not be surprised if more than one western country succumbs to a fascist dictator.  However, I think this is unlikely because the advances in technology mostly in the areas of entertainment and industry will enable huge swaths of the population to not work, not starve, and still stay entertained.  Contented populations are far less likely to revolt than uncontented ones, and it’s hard to foresee what could cause such unrest in a western country that it would abandon its democracy in favor of a (seemingly benevolent) dictator.  We could see a system bordering on a centrally planned communism emerge in a lot of countries once the robots do all our work for us – which could easily happen by 2100 – but I doubt those would emerge as a result of revolution.  It would happen gradually.

Next time: my own predictions for 2100.