• Question: What new device do you think will be invented in 100 years

    Asked by anon-39909 to Kristian, Joel, Tim, Zachary on 15 Nov 2013. This question was also asked by bellalscott.
    • Photo: Kristian Harder

      Kristian Harder answered on 15 Nov 2013:

      How much do things change in 100 years?

      – 50000 years ago, people were living in caves and hunting big animals.
      49900 years ago, things were pretty much exactly the same

      – 1000 years ago, knights were hopping around in Europe, building castles
      – 900 years ago, things were pretty much exactly the same, but the
      armour was a bit better and the castles a bit bigger

      – 100 years ago, people were mostly riding horses, most lamps ran on oil,
      roads were usually cobblestone, and there were lots of steam trains
      – today, we have hybrid cars, LED lighting, computers, multi-lane concrete
      motorways, massive airports, planes with almost 1000 seats, space
      stations and the Large Hadron Collider.

      As you see, progress has been made, but in addition to that
      progress has actually been accelerating *a lotMATOMO_URL In 100 years from now,
      life will probably a lot more different from today than today’s life is compared to 100 years ago, because the more technology we have, the
      more rapid our further progress becomes. This means it is almost impossible to tell how life will be in 100 years from now, because it will probably be different in ways that we cannot even imagine yet!

      So, after another 100 years of rapid progress, what will be left to be invented, to answer your question? I can only make a wild guess. Maybe in 100 years time we will begin to be able to transfer a human person into artificial hardware, have the consciousness run in some kind of a computer. I may be completely wrong about this, but it’s the best guess I can think of right now. 🙂

    • Photo: Zachary Williamson

      Zachary Williamson answered on 20 Nov 2013:

      It’s basically impossible to predict 100 years into the future. To illustrate this, here’s a magazine excerpt from 1900 trying to do just this:

      http://yorktownhistory.org/wp-content/archives/homepages/1900_predictions.htm

      I’ll stick my head out and make one prediction though: that the planet’s electricity will be generated almost entirely by fusion reactors and solar cells.

    • Photo: Tim Hollowood

      Tim Hollowood answered on 20 Nov 2013:

      Hi particle, people don’t realise how much science is full of surprises. You never know what will happen a few months in advance let alone 100 years. It’s likely that we will have some totally new materials with amazing properties. We will have solved the problem of energy (some kind of safe nuclear fusion). But I recon that we will have merged our minds somehow with computers. Maybe we will have a kind of wifi implanted into our bodies and we will be able to surf the web in our minds.
      But in the end probably your predictions are as good as mine….that’s what’s so good about science…the surprise!

Comments