The Year 2512

It is of course hard to predict 500 years out. Hell, it's hard to predict 20 years out. Did anyone really see the world of today even 20 years ago?

But I'll take my own fanciful stab.

I don't foresee either an energy or a climate crisis. There is a hard limit on how expensive energy gets because at some point you can turn totally renewable energy into a fuel of some sort, ideally taking CO2 out of the atmosphere to do it. It's not cost effective now because energy is so cheap. But like I said: there's a limit to how expensive it can get.

The bigger problem (IMHO) is going to be certain elements and metals that aren't so easily replaced. I agree with the author that getting certain elements from space is going to be economically tricky (rather than technologically tricky) compared to how cheap it is to pull stuff out of the ground.

You can recycle iron to a degree but a certain amount is lost through corrosion/rust. Rare earth elements are harder to replace.

I do foresee there being a lot less of us and that is probably going to be a traumatic change.

Sadly I don't foresee a huge presence in space. The energy costs, particularly when you look at even the most optimistic models of interstellar travel in particular, are just too extreme even with perfect mass-to-energy conversion.

Change like evolution is often perceived to be smooth but it's not. Our world like life itself is shaped by key, often small, events. Europe in 1914 was a powderkeg in 1914 but one man's death triggered a sequence of events that resulted in World War One, the armistice for which sowed the seeds for World War Two. One could argue that if the Archduke had lived something else would've triggered the war and you may well be right. Still how different might the world be if, say, JFK was killed by a chance bullet in World War Two?

As far as longevity goes, that's a tough one. I expect there'll be a certain class of people who live much better and longer than others but then again the history of the world thus far is those kinds of technological advancements always trickle down eventually. Living forever? I have my doubts.

Artificial intelligence as always is the sleeping giant of the future. I believe that to be inevitable and the effects could be profound to put it mildly.

I too believe the nation states of today mostly won't exist in 500 years.

Highly doubt any of the countries that exist today will exist 500 years from now. Honestly I highly doubt most of them will exist 50 years from now. Most developed countries are headed for their day of reckoning as the bills for their welfare states come due. Combined with the fact that every developed country has a negative birthrate due to these policies delaying adulthood many countries will collapse from just demographic changes in the next 50 years.

How do people still believe in run away global warming? There's been absolutely ZERO warming for the lat 16 years, the Earth warmed for 15 years before that, then cooled for 40 years before that. Cloud formation, the major environment influencer of global climate, now seems to stem from cosmic rays.

I do believe space travel, specifically mining, will become much more prevalent. This will eliminate any resource problems. As for energy advances in solar technology and nuclear (fusion or fission) should drastically lower the cost of energy by an order of magnitude from today's prices.

With all the talk of engineered intelligence and huge biotech advancements, I think there will be a massive space expansion, and I'm surprised to see it doubted.

First off, a human settlement on Mars, while technologically challenging, would need a relatively small initial population to get started sustainably (say, 2000 people). All of the advancements in food and energy production mentioned in the article could be used to provide for a colony there.

The OP talks about genetically engineered animals for food production, but they could also be engineered to better work and thrive in space-based industries; collecting raw materials, zero-gravity manufacturing, energy collecting, etc. Sophisticated, autonomous machines could do all that as well, so that actual humans have very little need to spend much time out in space, other than traveling between planets and settlements. Or perhaps all travel is virtual, using telepresence to see the solar system.

Machines built in space don't have the costs to get up there in the first place, other than the initial factories and material harvesting equipment.

Great thought-exercise, though. I love thinking about this stuff, and I think our generation has to start anticipating these changes. Some other commenters pointed out this all may happen far sooner than 500 years, so we just might need to be ready.

I'm glad he didn't take the doom and gloom approach. We do keep seeing the bad side (overpopulation, disease, environmental degradation, wars etc) but slowly and surely the opposite has been happening. Prosperity has been improving things for (virtually) everyone, not just a few westerners. And people do strange things once prosperous - they protect the environment, have more greenery (compare richer versus poorer neighbourhoods), buy organic, electric cars, contribute to charity etc. The question is can we continue to improve prosperity, and there is no reason to believe it won't keep happening. Matt Ridley of "The Rational Optimist" has a lot of material to substantiate that.

Here is a quick TED talk and a transcript of the opening to get you going.

http://www.ted.com/talks/matt_ridley_when_ideas_have_sex.htm...

"When I was a student here in Oxford in the 1970s, the future of the world was bleak. The population explosion was unstoppable. Global famine was inevitable. A cancer epidemic caused by chemicals in the environment was going to shorten our lives. The acid rain was falling on the forests. The desert was advancing by a mile or two a year. The oil was running out, and a nuclear winter would finish us off. None of those things happened, (Laughter) and astonishingly, if you look at what actually happened in my lifetime, the average per-capita income of the average person on the planet, in real terms, adjusted for inflation, has tripled. Lifespan is up by 30 percent in my lifetime. Child mortality is down by two-thirds. Per-capita food production is up by a third. And all this at a time when the population has doubled."

I enjoyed this article and I agree with most of the prediction on this timescale. I'm surprised, though, that he didn't mention one issue in particular: the continued development of human-computer interaction and its impact on the world's socioeconomic makeup.

Over the past 20-30 years, computers have completely changed the way people interact with the world. Most highly-educated people's lives center around their iPhones, laptops, iPads, etc. As time goes on, automation will likely continue to advance. As computers surpass humans in efficiency for more and more jobs, what role will the uneducated play? Clearly, wealth will continue to concentrate in the hands of fewer and fewer highly educated individuals. Will the rich exploit the poor, or will the need for consumers cause the wealthy to redistribute wealth just so that people have money to buy their goods? Will ordinary people end up like the passengers of the spaceship in WALL-E? Let's go a step further: if the so-called singularity occurs, what is the need for people in general?