Future Guessing!

Since we read a book about what the future was supposed to be like, I figured that I would try my hand at it for this post. I’ll make a few guesses about what will happen with technology over the next forty to fifty years. In all likelihood this will turn out quite wrong. I will be happy in being wrong here only so long as I am not wrong about one thing. We will make progress.

Awful pun to enhance the post.

Genetics:

We all know much more about genetics than our grandparents do. If you take a high school biology course you should have some introduction into the structure of DNA. Maybe you even learned about some processes that DNA is involved in. Through more extensive analysis over the years we have been able to determine that certain problems are found on individual chromosomes. The more accurately we pinpoint genetic problems the more likely we’ll be able to solve them. Imagine being able to eliminate problems from the vain such as color-blindness or baldness to the more severe problems of spinal muscular atrophy or muscular dystrophy. Plastic surgery could become gene therapy.

Space:

I love space, and I desperately hope that within my lifetime commercial and affordable space flights will be available to us. I would love to go to Mars, and then a couple of years later return. I don’t think we’ll get much further than that in my lifetime though. We have only just reached an area beyond our solar system with Voyager 1. In a few short years the power will be completely shut off and it will be dead weight in space. For those of you wondering it reached beyond the solar system this year and has been headed in that direction since 1977. A manned flight that far out would not be a good idea with current technologies. Our bodies are made to stay here on Earth or in roughly 1 g of gravitational pull. Our senses get thrown off when we go into space. Muscles atrophy, and the body generally behaves chaotically. We would need spaceships that give us 1 g to keep us from these problems. I believe this will be the next step after commercial flights in space. Making vehicles more suitable for transport while increasing safety is the natural progression.

This is a SpaceX Merlin Engine. 

Cities:

Methods of transport will change. People won’t use as many full size cars, and eventually cars will become a much smaller percent of the commuting population. People will choose trains, bicycles, and small electric vehicles much more. This will hopefully bring down the current massive amounts of pollution that are occurring in all of the world’s major cities. Having a system of transport underground is a good way to reduce the throes of winter that affect people from walking to work. We may end up building layers on top of each other, causing a landscape that would be rather more expensive. Maintaining the structures would be a difficult task, so I think if this were to happen it would be on a smaller scale. Areas between buildings may get the covering treatment before streets do.

Science has a long way to go in the next century, and it has a good chance of causing our species to make some great leaps. I could be totally off on this whole thing though. Perhaps we don’t send people into space. Perhaps our cities get worse. Perhaps we prevent genetic research for fear that we are tampering with the work of God. Surely that would be much more depressing than a few accidental deaths on the way to a much improved society. Obviously nobody wants to glorify the mishaps, but avoiding progress altogether would be a much greater shame. Hopefully fifty years from now I will read this with a satisfied grin as I sip orange juice on a spaceship.