While I’m unlikely to see the world in 100 years (unless the whole North Korean clone-storage chop-and-shop thing works out) I’ve been thinking about how our lives might appear to our great-grandchildren. We tend to regard the world a century ago as appallingly naïve, even primitive. The same perspective should be expected of our descendants, looking back at us. Assuming that technology and social progress continues at the same rate in the future, what aspects of today might seem weird to human beings a century from now? My suggestions:
- Human translators
- “To understand someone of a different language, you needed a third person? They didn’t have software for that?”
- The concept of “being offline”
- Animals being grown for food
- “They nurtured and hunted dirty animals only to eat them? That’s disgusting! Why couldn’t they consume vat-grown meat like us?”
- Squandering fossil fuels
- “Let me get this straight. We knew that oil and gas took millions of years to form from biological matter placed under very particular geological conditions.”
“Yep”
“And we knew that we had used over half of it by 2000, most in the eighty years prior to that.”
“Yep”
“And we not only kept using it, but increased our consumption?” - Treatment of primates, elephants and cetaceans as non-persons
* - “We used to kill them? But dolphins name themselves! They have their own language! They use tools!”
- That anyone ever denied global warming
- Blood transfusions and organ transplants
- “To make people better, they put parts of dead people in them? That’s gross! Why couldn’t they grow nice clean fresh organs like we do?”
- People being against gay marriage
- Just as people who are against female suffrage or miscegenation seem weird now.
What do you think will be considered strange in a century? Feel free to leave your suggestions in the comments!
*Note that “person” does not equate to “human” or confer “human rights”. Chimpanzees won’t vote. “Personhood” is a legal framework: corporations are persons, for example.
(Photograph of the bonnet of a 1937 Buick Century used in the banner image by Tristan Savatier).