What About 2100?

One popular anecdote recounts how 100 years ago, just before the start of the 20th century, everything that can be invented has been invented. Similarly, in 1912 the magazine The Independent predicted that discovery and invention was at an end: “The Earth is nearly conquered now.… There are not likely to be any other great chemical or physical discoveries which will much affect the conditions of humanity.” After nearly a century of ever-accelerating and breathtaking change, we know this obituary to have been premature, if not completely absurd. We also know that while predicting the future is easy, predicting the future accurately is close to impossible. As recently as 1982, Omni magazine predicted that by the year 2000 more than 1,000 people would be living and working on the Moon, that Earth-orbiting solar generators would be supplying much of the world's energy needs, and that manned expeditions to Mars would be routine.

Although space futurism once a popular staple of both science fiction and serious forecasts—has been tempered in recent decades, many futurists still see this high frontier as critical to the human future. Here are a few of the concepts, some involving space and some more land-bound, that current futurists are talking about for the 21st century:

Terraforming: In a scenario, Venus—covered in sulfuric acid and poisonous carbon dioxide—would be bombarded by bacteria that would slowly transform the atmosphere and create oxygen. Cooling and “the Big Rain” would follow, and hardy Earthlings could in time colonize the overheated planet. Recently, Mars has become the favorite candidate for terraforming, since it appears to have abundant supplies of ice and possibly even water. In the words of speculative novelist Arthur C. Clarke, the red planet “could be another garden of Eden.”

Space Mining: In modern popular culture, asteroids are usually seen hurtling toward Earth, threatening complete destruction. But many futurists believe that the next century will see us traveling to asteroids to extract metals such as platinum, nickel, and gold. Mine workers and families would live in huge artificial colonies built in space, complete with farms and towns and “natural” landscapes. Some futurists even envision creating these colonies in hollowed-out asteroids—somewhat like the mining towns of the old West, where people lived literally on top of the ore and then abandoned the town when the resources were exhausted.

Harvesting Icebergs: In his book The Next 500 Years, futurist Adrian Berry predicts that massive icebergs will be captured from the Antarctic and towed to California, where they could supply much of the freshwater needs of the city of Los Angeles.

Artificial Intelligence: Experts in robotics and computer technology are constantly expanding the possibilities for creating “intelligent” machines. Robotics expert suggests that it will be possible in the future to transfer a human personality into a robot. Some futurists even speculate that it will be possible to transfer a complete human mind from one body to another, allowing humans to achieve a kind of immortality.

USB Missile Launcher

The USB missile launcher is a small gadget that is growing in popularity. Today there are many different kinds of USB missile launchers to fit every “need”. The one we have been testing is the one on the picture. This launcher has a mounted camera for some extra fun.This one comes with a mounted web cam and a CD with software to control it. You just plug the USB cable and no batteries are needed. When it is plugged you can navigate the missile launcher with your keyboard or mouse. When you have located your target you press the fire button and this will trigger a sound effect of a missile that fires and off it goes. It comes with 3 darts (missiles) that are created in harmless soft foam to avoid injuries. It shoots away with more power than you would think. This USB missile launcher is lots of fun and is great for a break in your work as a stress reliever. The best part about it is that if you have a working internet connection you can share it and allow friends to remote control it on messenger or directly.

Dark Visions

The world of future prediction has not been without its share of dire forecasts, and these have come with increasing frequency as the 20th century has worn on. The techno-utopian novels from the late 19th and early 20th centuries were replaced by what some scholars have called a “fiction of paranoia.” Some early landmarks of this genre are Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), and Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953). In Huxley's best-selling book, society has evolved into a regimented World State where all aspects of human discourse are tightly controlled and individuality has been eradicated. Orwell's novel paints an even more sinister picture, with the governmental entity known as Big Brother monitoring each person's every move. Although the year 1984 did not prove Orwell's predictions literally correct, there was considerable debate at the time about just how far off the mark the British author actually had been.

Works such as Nineteen Eighty-four and Brave New World cannot be understood without viewing them in the larger context of the rise of totalitarianism and Communism in Europe during this period. The fears that these political philosophies inspired created a darker mood among those who wrote about the future, a pessimism that has lingered even with the collapse of Communism in Europe and Russia in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Many of today's most well-known future predictions come from television and motion pictures rather than from books. Hit movies such as Mad Max (1979) and its sequel The Road Warrior (1981), Blade Runner (1982), The Terminator (1984), Brazil (1985), and 12 Monkeys (1995) describe a grim future filled with crime, chaos, pollution, and death. In The Terminator, the human race is nearly destroyed when powerful computers, “hooked into everything,” become intelligent and turn on their creators. In these visions, technology is no longer the savior of humanity—it is its greatest threat.

Robo-Future

For most of the 20th century, a single “creature” has figured prominently in the ongoing tale of the future: the robot. Sometimes humanoid, sometimes charming, sometimes menacing, always tireless and intelligent, the robot is often the mechanical reflection of human desires, including the unending quest to be liberated from exhausting and demeaning labor. The word robot, which comes from the Slavic word for “work,” was first used by Czech playwright Karel Capek in his expressionistic play R.U.R. (1921; translated 1923). R.U.R., which stands for Rossum's Universal Robots, is about an army of human-shaped, soulless robots that today might be called clones or androids. In the vision of the mad scientist Rossum, the robots will solve humanity's problems: “There will be no poverty. All work will be done by living machines. Everyone will live to perfect himself.” The robots eventually acquire all of the knowledge and innate viciousness of their masters, take over the world, and eradicate humanity. The reality, of course, is that robots are far from taking over the tasks of the world's low-skilled labor. In a best-selling 1982 book, Megatrends, forecaster John Naisbitt predicted that a veritable army of robots would replace low-skilled American workers by 2000—something that obviously has not happened. Although the widespread deployment of industrial robots has radically altered the factory floor in some industries, such as automobile manufacturing, these machines have yet to emerge as a replacement for human workers in most areas of the economy, especially in the booming service industries. There is, however, a technology that has emerged as the central tool in almost every profession and work environment today: computers. And unlike robots, which were common in speculative fiction and serious future forecasting for decades, the computer arrived with sudden, unanticipated impact and has tremendous, still-unknown consequences. Many predictions that were made in the past about computers, furthermore, have proved staggeringly inaccurate. The first computers, such as the 1946 ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer), filled entire rooms, and futurists simply extrapolated upward in size. Engineer Howard Aiken, who helped develop some of the first computing devices in the 1940s, saw no need for mass production of computers, stating the United States would require only four or five electronic digital computers for all of the nation's computing needs. In 1948 Thomas Watson, president of International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), made a now-famous comment, reportedly claiming that there was a total world market for “maybe five” computers. Almost no one envisioned the miniaturization of computer circuitry, made possible by the 1948 invention of the transistor. Even after its invention, the market for computers was not anticipated. In 1956, when there were about 1,000 computers in existence, Although science-fiction writers occasionally equipped their heroes with handy devices that somehow combined the capabilities of calculators, radios, telephones, typewriters, and other available technologies, no one really predicted the emergence and extraordinarily rapid development of the personal computer. Even when the possibility seemed more close at hand, there were skeptics within the scientific community.

Sony, Nintendo to Challenge Apple

Apple's iPhone marked its billionth download last week, less than a year after the service launched. And to gaming giants Sony and Nintendo, that means war. Rank the billion-plus iPhone and iPod Touch apps downloaded so far by category, and you'll be left with two clear conclusions: People love mobile games, and they're happy to pay for them. Almost a quarter of App Store downloads are games, which beats out the next highest ranked category, Entertainment, by a healthy 10%. It's enough to make you wonder why we're still stuck buying games for other mobile consoles in stores, a thought that apparently hasn't escaped the attention of Sony and Nintendo. Both console manufacturers are experimenting with download-only games. First out of the gate is Nintendo, whose latest DS redesign includes a "DSi Ware" store that offers exclusive games for download. Early offerings, too, are more reminiscent of the iPhone's bite-sized, pick-up-and-play games than the meatier offerings you'll find in retail boxes -- and like the iPhone, the DSi offers a broader range of multimedia functions than past Nintendo handhelds.
Not one to be left behind for long, Sony will test the online distribution waters when it offers the latest in one of its top PSP franchises, Patapon 2, as a download-only game next week. Although Patapon 2's release is being touted by Sony as a one-time trial of digital distributions, it's given yet more weight to rumors that we might soon see a redesigned PSP that'll ditch the platforms much-criticized UMD optical drive altogether in favor of digital-only game distribution. Persistent rumors indicate that Apple is looking at opening a new section of the App Store for higher-budget titles that could costs as much as $20, but until or unless that happens, it's still obvious the iPhone isn't going to make many gamers throw out their DSs. If anything, the added convenience of digital downloads on Sony and Nintendo's platforms -- which have user-bases several times the size of the iPhone -- ought to be giving Apple pause for thought.