Today I entertained myself for a while by trying to imagine what life might be like 150 years from now. Why 150? No particular reason – except that by then I will be safely dead and you won’t be able to tell me how right or wrong I was.
These aren’t predictions. I wouldn’t be so presumptuous. But nor are they pure fantasy. They are, I suppose, a slightly rose-tinted view of where current trends – or backlashes against them – may take us.
Communities
People will devolve into smaller, self-governing communities, partly as a backlash against over-intrusive central government, but mostly because globalisation will prove to be too vulnerable to the vagaries of war, weather and turbulent economics. Jobs, food, and the administration of justice will become local affairs. Most people will walk to work, or will work from home. There will be a rise in “intentional communities” – like-minded people choosing to live in close proximity to each other, enabling them to pool resources such as arable land, farm machinery and vehicles.
Pasttimes
With the focus moving back to small communities, there will be a reaction against rampant consumerism. People will want to become creators rather than consumers, replacing retail therapy with the sense of satisfaction that comes from making something pleasing. There will be an upswing of interest in the old-fashioned skills of weaving, sewing, woodwork and other activities that result in a useful end product. Leisure time will be spent in knitting circles rather than shopping malls. People will chop wood rather than go to the gym.
Consumer goods
Items such as computers, washing machines and refrigerators will still be in demand, but customers will require that manufacturers produce goods that last. Most domestic technology will have stabilised, with the emphasis shifting from from innovation to quality. To offset the reduction in demand once artificially generated by built-in obsolescence, manufacturers will diversify into providing cost-efficient repair services in the home. Conspicuous consumption will fall drastically out of fashion, being regarded as vulgar and misguided. Goods will be admired for their durability and practicality rather than their newness or flashiness.
The internet, telecommunications and Facebook (or whatever replaces Facebook)
Data transfer – whether of web pages or human voices – will be available, wirelessly, everywhere, and the boundaries between the two will vanish. When you see on Facebook that it is somebody’s birthday, you will have the option to instantly call them up with a single click. A mini-hologram of them will appear in front of you (think Princess Leia’s recorded message in Star Wars), either in person or, of course, their voicemail.
Transport
With businesses becoming local, and telecommunications become almost indistinguishable from real life, the need for transport will decline significantly. The entire TSA will be disbanded (okay, I’m dreaming now). Travel will become mostly a leisure activity, with long annual vacations to explore interesting places. As such, there will be no particular hurry, and the journey will become as important as the destination. There will be a revival of surface travel, particularly by ship and train.
Finance
Many communities will start to barter, exchanging goods and services for other goods and services. As is already happening in several transition towns, local currencies may be created to facilitate this process. “Credit” will once again mean running a tab at the local pub or bar, rather than wielding a piece of plastic. Money will be seen as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself.
Food
There will be a reaction against over-processed foods and agri-business, as part of the “small is beautiful” philosophy and an increasing understanding of the mind-body connection. The current upwards trend in farmers’ markets will continue, until every community has at least a weekly market where people come to buy, sell and exchange locally-grown food. Along with the renaissance of domestic handicrafts, there will also be a renewed interest in cooking, baking and preserving. The “slow food” movement will come to predominate. With an increase in home-grown food and a decrease in low-nutrition fast food, obesity will decline and human health will once again improve.
There we go. I appreciate that it begs an awful lot of questions (global population being foremost) but this is a blog, not a book, so it isn’t meant to be comprehensive. I wanted this to be a short and sweet vision of the future – which, come to think of it, doesn’t look so different from a cleaned-up version of the past, with added technology.
Other Stuff:
The wind has died. RIP. It will be back in a few days. For now, the ocean is quiet. The dorados have been frisky today. Whenever I stop rowing for a meal break, they turn figures of eight beneath my boat, creating ripples as they break the surface. I can feel them banging against the hull, as if giving me a nudge to say, “get a move on”.
Quote for the day – two for the price of one today:
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” (Alan Kay)
“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” (Eleanor Roosevelt)
Photo: one of my fish-tastic friends
Sponsored Miles: Chris Vincent, Annabel Arndt, Robert O’Connor, Bonnie Sterngold, Tom Grimmett, Kevin Seid (Everpaddle), Ben Covington and an anonymous donor – all of these receive our thanks today for their spport.
—
Local Primary School is 150 on 10/09/2011
should be fun.
I love your future-view, Roz. I hope it comes to be and that we’re wise enough to start moving in that direction. My own not-as-rosy prediction includes a global-scale catastrophe or virus happening eventually that will knock down the world population and force people to move toward creating useful things and turning their backs on the crazy consumerism. Sometimes I scare myself by thinking about how much of the U.S. economy and the dissemination of information (news/weather) is reliant on the advertising industry, pushing us to purchase stuff we don’t need.
I’m going to go practice chopping wood now. I quit the gym to save money for our smallholding purchase.
Best,
Joan
Joan, I agree that the house of cards (population) will collapse and everything that Roz mentions will happen out of necessity, the tipping points are set like mouse traps ready to snap, and a butterfly wing is all it will take to set the cascade into motion. It could start with human fears and emotions in context with Wall Street or empty grocery store shelves, or it could be disease, or another skirmish over oil or water, or it could be something yet-un-imagined. Metaphorically, always wear sneakers …
On a more positive note, I believe that transition towns and slow living will prepare us physically and mentally for living locally in smaller community groups … my fear is that “we” may be preparing and heading in a sustainable direction, but there are others (like the proverbial grasshopper) who will not be ready for “winter” and come knocking on our door in need. I will post the proverb separately.
150 years is what…about 7-8 generations? I frequently wonder about the change my kids will see. Oil as a fuel source will likely have disappeared…it may force a geographic contraction…travel will likely be a great deal slower. Horses and sails…unemployment lines will be gone…life will be an all hands effort again.
simply and concisely said … “life will be an all hands effort again.”
Ok, I’ll bite. Having written 5 books set in the twenty-second century, let me give you my view of the (partially distopian) future…
The year is 2182. Global Warning has left the planet’s weather systems a real mess. Spring and Fall are so violent in the United States, that going above ground is genuinely hazardous to your health. The Greenland ice has melted, sending England and Northern Europe into a permanent winter. Big cities, like London and Berlin, have domes over them like Lunar cities to stay warm. Science is slowly reversing Global Warming, but it’s not an easy task, and people worry that their efforts may backfire and result in “Global Cooling” and a planetary Ice Age. Meantime, technology has allowed people to live in huge “Subscrapers”, buildings with hundreds of floors bored deep underground. As a result, people are now packed into the cities, leaving the former “suburbs” to be used as parks and playgrounds for the super rich, who can afford the expense and upkeep. Air travel is gone, partially due to the weather, but mainly due to the advent of a network of supersonic subway maglev trains that crisscross the globe. Travel from downtown New York City to downtown San Francisco in a half hour!
Farms are completely gone in the Western World. Instead, drums of raw chemicals are delivered to each Subscraper by means of those underground maglev trains, and “Food Processors” in each home manufacture food to order using those chemicals and “recipe” cards that are expensive (at least the good food is expensive) and expire after a month or so, requiring people to re-purchase.
People have full multimedia telephones installed in their heads, wired directly to their brain, and powered by their bodies. Apple employees will never leave prototype devices behind in the bar again!
The government has eliminated physical money, in an attempt to prevent people from avoiding taxes and making anonymous (and therefore criminal) purchases. Every transaction is done electronically, and tracked. A biometric scan of your right hand is the only credit card you’ll ever need.
War is still fought, but it’s changed. There are no more tanks, planes,
or battleships. Instead, covert Black Ops agents are sent
behind enemy lines to assassinate and sabotage. And always the specter
of some desperate nation starting an old-fashioned shooting war.
There’s more, of course, but I’m afraid if you hear it, you might want to stay out there in the open ocean, and never come home.
Ah, well. Keep on rowing, Roz, and we’ll leave the light on for you.
— Tom
Roz, Indeed your vision for the future is nearly, as you stated, a reincarnation of the past with the technology added. I myself grew up in a world not too far from your vision. Population is the problem with the view you present. In the small community where I grew up it was the larger than average families that would have diluted the available land and thus the ability to support all the new families, so the kids mostly moved to the cities to get jobs rather than staying home to live as their parents did.
Unless we do some rather dramatic thing in the next couple of decades, global population may turn out to be a painfully self correcting problem. I believe the “Green Revolution” of the 1960’s and the birth of the modern ag methods we decry today prevented that correction half a century ago.Roz, I love the way your blogs bring creative thought to mind and force me to think out my own latent ideas.
Keep Rowing Roz.
Stan
I feel guilty for not leaving you with a more positive impression of the future, so here’s something. Power is so cheap and plentiful in the year 2182 that the following is a common saying (although some claim it originally had a different meaning and intent):
“Any problem is easily solved if you throw enough energy at it.”
Hi Roz,
It seems nice, but I’m a city boy and I love large cities. In my ideal future the planet’s population is less than a couple billion and almost every one lives in very large cities. The rest of the world is relegated to necessary crop cultivation and vast, vast wilderness tracts. The average person lives in a Japanese sized apartment but with large communal quarters for their apartement building. The cities maintain large and small park systems. Farmers commute to the fields by high speed rail and nature lovers take longer rail trips out to remote camp sites to hike, hunt, and fish. Real “back to nature types” can live way out in the wilderness tracts. But they have to sign on as park rangers and agree to live really low tech – like Native Americans 200 years ago. Lengthy sabbaticals are OK.
Ahhh, crystal ball time, to see 150 years into the future I must rub the ball 12 times counter clock wise. rub rub rub, a vision appears, nuclear fusion, world peace, machines that replicate materiel, ( star trek), no intergalactic travel, that pesky Einstein, moon colonies, mars colonies, mega cities, replenished forest, CO2 levels back down due to nuclear fusion, genetic manipulation to rid disease and still no flying cars.
This discussion reminds me of Aesop’s fable:
The Ant and The Grasshopper
Prepare for the future.
One summer’s day a Grasshopper was hopping about, chirping and singing to its heart’s content. An Ant passed by, bearing an ear of corn he was taking to the nest.”
Why not come and chat with me,” said the Grasshopper, “instead of toiling in that way?”
“I am helping to lay up food for the winter,” said the Ant, “and recommend you do the same.”
“Why bother about winter?” said the Grasshopper; “we have plenty of food now.”
The Ant went on its way. When winter came the Grasshopper had no food and found itself dying of hunger, while it saw the ants distributing corn and grain from the stores they had collected in the summer.
http://tomsdomain.com/aesop/id25.htm
Row wearing sneakers, Roz!
[“Wearing sneakers” is my metaphor for “be prepared”]
You can hear a bit of (or buy) the song written by Martin Carthy from the fable here: http://www.tunewiki.com/lyrics/martin-carthy/the-ant-and-the-grasshopper-s3333467.aspx
It came to mind immediately when you mentioned it, Doug. Wish there was a way to send it to Roz, but I guess you’ll have to wait a bit, love!
Sorry to be so frivolous and tangential but I think I may be too old to dream about a transformed future. And I did find the recording I knew and loved best of the song–it is by Roy Bailey and Leon Rosselson–here:
http://new.music.yahoo.com/leon-rosselson-and-roy-bailey/tracks/ant-and-the-grasshopper–175716953
”20 years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the things you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sail. EXPLORE. DREAM. DISCOVER.”~Mark TwainThat stated, what is holding us back?
This is an oft used quote and bares repeating…
and is very aptly applied to Roz’s quests… (catch water with your oars in Roz’s case. Winds and currents can help too).
We are the creators of our lives. Let’s go create
something sustainable, responsible and peaceful.
I wish you all happiness, wellness and peace.
One day, one step, one oar stroke at a time…
John in Juneau….
I think you left out that history books will talk about individuals took a stand against serious waste. Some kid will have to do a research paper on Roz Savage, who rowed the ocean to alert people to the dangers of plastic. He or she may get in trouble from pirating an earlier paper from the internet; and rest assured, said “paper” will never be printed on what we now know as paper.
I watched a television talk show a few years ago, one of the guests was Isaac Asimov, and I remember someone saying that in far less than 150 years, 30-50 I think, we would either have a one world government or 100,000 tribes. I immediately said, “I’d rather have the 100,000 tribes!” Seriously I think there are many other options between those two extremes but I have always been a decentralist.
The most effective “government” is self-government. Of course there must be levels of government above that. But I believe the more central the government the more vulnerable, the more corruptible, and the less responsive it will be. I do believe in federalism, but in the USA we’ve long ignored the idea of “delegated powers” and the 10th amendment.
Too many people value their own freedom but are suspicious of what others might do with theirs. Freedom is risky, and should be. Many people will gladly exchange liberty for security, especially the liberty of others, but many will also give up their own.
There must be an overriding concern before individual liberty is sacrificed to the common good. The idea of a constitutional republic, as opposed to a pure democracy (where 51% rules) is to secure the rights and liberties of the minority as well as the majority.
I like much of what Roz sees in the future. I hope it materializes. I think it will in some places but perhaps not in others. The great thing about liberty is that I can make my life reflect what I value to the degree I am willing to work to make it happen (without waiting for 150 years.) The scary thing about liberty is that other people can live their lives according to what they value. Still I think it’s the best option.
Anyway, my two pence for being part of the group 🙂
It seems to me that our individual outlooks into the future will consider what we have experienced from each individual’s ancestry or location of the roots of their family tree, as a generation.
My therory is that decendants from colder climates will more likely stave off hunger by preparing for possible long hard seasons that they foresee lie ahead.
Decendants of warmer more tropical climates will take a more relaxed stance and have a more “I will deal with it when it gets here” attitude.
A key point in my unproved theory (from the seat of a kayak) is that burning up the unused, expiring stores at the end of the season was wasteful although celebratory.
On the other hand, tropical guests needed less storage (and up until modern times, refridgeration) and parties were more like impromtu gatherings…
It would be nice to be a group of people that had balance in our reactions… Not too secure that it becomes wasteful and not so bold as to react to disaster with steadfast, unplanned ignorance.
In the wake of the recent storms on the east coast, are you and your loved ones prepared for a natural event (three to five days of no power) Please also include a communication plan with someone out of state as landline systems will be down and you will want to tell people that you are ok and where you are.
I am glad that once again, this blog has weathered another storm of global magnatude and none were lost to it. Grace and peace to you all in the aftermath. And double kudos to Laurey in Asheville who can weather two storms simultaneously!
Oh, Roz, there is this guy that invented hand held refrigerator that can be placed on a camp stove for twenty minutes and cool objects to near freezing for 24 hours. He developed it for bringing and storing vaccines to impoverished countries. And plans sell production models at $30. It is as big as your all purpose bucket, slightly smaller… I think future ocean rowers may be less sober:)
Adam Grosser: A new vision for refrigeration
http://youtu.be/HSdXqmnNCp0
Row for the shore girl! We will wave, holler, splash and dance until you are firmly strolling around again. Happy Full Moon Sunset Saturday!
~Jay
Anyway, my two pence for being part of the group 🙂
It seems to me that our individual outlooks into the future will consider what we have experienced from each individual’s ancestry or location of the roots of their family tree, as a generation.
My therory is that decendants from colder climates will more likely stave off hunger by preparing for possible long hard seasons that they foresee lie ahead.
Decendants of warmer more tropical climates will take a more relaxed stance and have a more “I will deal with it when it gets here” attitude.
A key point in my unproved theory (from the seat of a kayak) is that burning up the unused, expiring stores at the end of the season was wasteful although celebratory.
On the other hand, tropical guests needed less storage (and up until modern times, refridgeration) and parties were more like impromtu gatherings…
It would be nice to be a group of people that had balance in our reactions… Not too secure that it becomes wasteful and not so bold as to react to disaster with steadfast, unplanned ignorance.
In the wake of the recent storms on the east coast, are you and your loved ones prepared for a natural event (three to five days of no power) Please also include a communication plan with someone out of state as landline systems will be down and you will want to tell people that you are ok and where you are.
I am glad that once again, this blog has weathered another storm of global magnatude and none were lost to it. Grace and peace to you all in the aftermath. And double kudos to Laurey in Asheville who can weather two storms simultaneously!
Oh, Roz, there is this guy that invented hand held refrigerator that can be placed on a camp stove for twenty minutes and cool objects to near freezing for 24 hours. He developed it for bringing and storing vaccines to impoverished countries. And plans sell production models at $30. It is as big as your all purpose bucket, slightly smaller… I think future ocean rowers may be less sober:)
Adam Grosser: A new vision for refrigeration
http://youtu.be/HSdXqmnNCp0
Row for the shore girl! We will wave, holler, splash and dance until you are firmly strolling around again. Happy Full Moon Sunset Saturday!
~Jay
Perhaps you have drifted closer to Sri Lanka. You are sounding more like Sir Arthur Clarke.
Barry O must be reading your blog. Surface transportation was a priority in in this evenings 300 billion dollar Jobs plan presented to Congress.
Your future finance facilities should include a Bitcoin account. Donations via Bitcoins have low overhead and can be anonymous.
Row Blog Row
and philosophize on Fridays.
It takes six generations of Monarch Butterflies to go from Big Sur to Mexico… and they come back to the same tree….
Row for generations Roz!
I am hanging out with Julie West at Socal’s Tavern in Sacramento and she just donated ten miles…. it was not the easiest thing to do… but if a girl could row across three oceans… I can help out Julie in the donation!!!
Row Roz Row!
http://www.outside-365.blogspot.com
free information for the everyday adventurer… and a big ole THANK YOU for supporting Roz
Just Sayin~
Jay Gosuico, Jay Go, Sacramento, CA
Roz, it is interesting that you chose 150 as a good number…. do you know of the historical importance of 150 in ancient wars?
It is the traditional number of men in a Company.
It is known that the largest amount of men to be lead by one person is 150. (Pre-facebook:) Modern day considers this number magical.
The 300 Spartans staved off the invasion the Persian Army. They did so with such tactical precision that the Persian Army was left in ruins. They used two companies of men 150 on each front. Using deception and counterintelligence, they changed the tides of history with the same defiance that you now show.
~Just sayin…
~Jay
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_(military_unit)
Row Roz Row!