On his web log , Stross has been posting some surprisingly comprehensive predictions for what the year 2032 and 2092 will await like . In the first post,“World building 301,”he look mostly at the technological progress he remember are likely to occur in climate sciences , energy , transport , medication , and blank space locomotion , and also make his predictions for the state of the population and our food for thought supply . So , will we be on Mars by 2032 ? Stross articulate perchance , but probably not :
Space : Is a red herring in the light term . China will have a distance place and perhaps a sword lily on the moon . The USA will continue to send out increasingly sophisticated robot probes and might still be operate a blank station . They might even have planted a flag on the synodic month ( again ) and have programme to go to Mars . ( On the down side : a major political or fiscal crisis might be enough to do unto NASA what the prostration of the USSR did to the Soviet space substructure . ) There will probably be continued commercial development in low earth orbit , including an orbiting hotel ( for the plutocrats to play bunga - bunga games ) . And Elon Musk might still be in clientele and going balls - out for Mars . But by 2032 I do n’t expect there to be any major breakthroughs .
And if his thesis on biography in 2032 were n’t enough , Stross extend his predictions all the path out to 2092 , and what he envisions is n’t pretty : a chicane up surround and aggregate extinction of animal mintage , with orotund clod of the earth uninhabitable to human beings .
In“World building 302,”Stross get into more of the societal face of his eventually crumbling future , putting particular emphasis on the issue of sprightliness - extension and regenerative treatments of human civilization . There ’s a really entrancing scrap where he speculates on the opening that improved understand of our brains and subsequent medical advantage might pass to more cognitively flexible middle - elderly and old adults , resulting in less bigotry even as our universe grows Old . Good stuff .
And , although he does n’t have as firm anticipation for the future of our sexual lives , he does consider the subject :
speak of supranormal intimate stimulus , Peter Watts has speculatedthat just asPhotoshop retouching has buy our thought of beautysufficiently skillful VR or teledildonics may pop the question us sexual experiences via machine that are so much better than someone - to - person real world sex that , well , nobody wants to make the nasty any more . I ’m not sure it ’s go to go that far , any more than pervasive access to porn on the internet has debauched and subvert our entire society in the past ten or so , but some subcultures / gender are unlikely to be mainstreamed because they are frankly harmful to third parties . It is interesting to excogitate that teledildonics or VR may not only offer a distracting supernormal sexual stimulus to us , but be tailored to channel individuals with paedophile , necrophile , or other societally unacceptable desire into a non - harmful direction . Or at least in a direction that does n’t harm human beings .
It ’s deserving buckling down and reading both piece in their entirety , even if Stross ’s ultimate horizon of the future tense is fabulously dreadful .
World building 301andWorld building 302[Charlie ’s Diary viaMetafilter ]
Charles StrossFuturismTechnology
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