What do you think the state of humankind will be in 50 years? nt

It only goes downhill from here.

I truly feel I have already seen the best of America

I'll be dead. No doubt.

With lose nukes all over the world and terrorists smart enough to use them. I'd say 50-50 we're all dead.

Now, the optimist in me thinks - something big will happen that draws the world together and we'll go back to the normal mini-wars and such for a longer period of time.

I believe in KISS, works for me. If I watched more teevee of a certain genre I might have a better grasp of 'might be' but, I don't and after all art imitates life. I'm too old now to spend the rest of the years trying to catch up on nuclear proliferation and such.

Here you have your knows enough to care, not enough to know how to help change things - your average dumb ass American. :(

Will be interesting to read the comments of those who have more knowledge about this and are better able to express themselves. Thanks in advance for sharing.

Ah ha - a few others who can't sleep ;)

Then your knowledge of the genre is mostly informed by the very worst of it..

As SF author Ted Sturgeon once remarked "Ninety percent of everything is crud.".

Of course Ted was a flaming optimist, the real proportion of crud is much closer to 99%.

We live in a science fictional world today, tomorrow it will be only more so.

He has tried to get me to watch a few of his fav's but, I'm the one in charge of reality in this family and need to make everyone happy, provide advice, etc. You know - the mundane.

We've been apart for 3 years since I moved here from NJ. He and his family moved last month and I'll discuss this with him with an open mind. Thank you for your post. I have a hearing problem since mid 20's so it takes a lot of energy for me to hear things. As for reading, I simply don't have the time but, I will try to spend maybe less time on DU and reading CC bullshit on MSNBC. There ya go - found moments.

Thank you for your post.

more than adequate...

Famines reduced to zero...

War eliminated as un affordable waste...

Advanced education systems achieving vastly improved information transfer and retention...

Hands on experiences adds to the ed program...way beyond current levels...

Poly cultural awareness events

Happiness Level way up....

Grouchy Level, Anger level, Cynic Level....all minimized to inconsequential

Space Cities reach Statehood, Nation Status

Vanguard astroid veering system deployed

CO2 levels at 350 and dropping

Michigan wins Rose Bowl 3x in a row

that is all....

From my up coming book yet to find a publisher...

Opi

For not falling into the same M$M CRAP we are being fed.

Preferably solar, wind, geothermal as well as fusion. Clean air and water, population stabilized worldwide.

Information exchange at a level we can't conceive of now. Technology we have only begun to imagine.

There will be problems, the planet will still probably be significantly warmer, but overall I am still optimistic.

would be too bleak and evil to contemplate.
I have had no reason to change my mind except to come to believe that it will be much worse than I imagined and much sooner than I thought.
I have always thought people in general were stupid and thoughtlessly cruel, and have always been amazed at how much I have underestimated those qualities.

mark

racists, homophobes, anti-Semites, and misogynists. Those never seem to abate.

"The Last Voyage of Dr. Ain." If you haven't read that particular apocalypse, do yourself that favor. A short work by the inimitable James Tiptree, Jr.

Note the extreme relevance of the cheap availability of the human genome.

http://mindstalk.net/vinge/vinge-sing.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

A technological singularity is a hypothetical event occurring when technological progress becomes so rapid that it makes the future after the singularity qualitatively different and harder to predict. Many of the most recognized writers on the singularity, such as Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil, define the concept in terms of the technological creation of superintelligence, and allege that a post-singularity world would be unpredictable to humans due to an inability of human beings to imagine the intentions or capabilities of superintelligent entities.<1><2><3> Some writers use "the singularity" in a broader way to refer to any radical changes in our society brought about by new technologies such as molecular nanotechnology,<4><5><6> although Vinge and other prominent writers specifically state that without superintelligence, such changes would not qualify as a true singularity.<1> Many writers also tie the singularity to observations of exponential growth in various technologies (with Moore's Law being the most prominent example), using such observations as a basis for predicting that the singularity is likely to happen sometime within the 21st century.<5><7>

Vernor Vinge proposed that the creation of superhuman intelligence would represent a breakdown in the ability of humans to model the future thereafter. He was the first to use the term "singularity" for this notion, in a 1983 article, and a later 1993 article entitled "The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era" was widely disseminated on the World Wide Web and helped to popularize the idea.<8> Vinge also compared the event of a technological singularity to the breakdown of the predictive ability of physics at the space-time singularity beyond the event horizon of a black hole.<9>

A technological singularity includes the concept of an intelligence explosion, a term coined in 1965 by I. J. Good.<10> Although technological progress has been accelerating, it has been limited by the basic intelligence of the human brain, which has not, according to Paul R. Ehrlich, changed significantly for millennia.<11> However with the increasing power of computers and other technologies, it might eventually be possible to build a machine that is more intelligent than humanity.<12> If superhuman intelligences were invented, either through the amplification of human intelligence or artificial intelligence, it would bring to bear greater problem-solving and inventive skills than humans, then it could design a yet more capable machine, or re-write its source code to become more intelligent. This more capable machine then could design a machine of even greater capability. These iterations could accelerate, leading to recursive self improvement, potentially allowing enormous qualitative change before any upper limits imposed by the laws of physics or theoretical computation set in.<13><14><15>

Much more at the link..