Omega Point: 2100?

[Maximum7]

I’m starting to truly believe that by the year 2100 A.D. (if humanity survives; which it will, just not on Earth) EVERYTHING currently depicted in sci fi today will have been realized. So much of the classic sci fi stuff is in the development phases now and every year is like 100 years in terms of technological progress. By 2100, everything will be done with the possible exception of extreme megastructures like the Dyson sphere or Matrioksha Brain. Not because they can’t be done; just that they are too imcovienient and not worth building.

By 2100, we will teleport from place to place, move faster than light, BAN extreme genetic engineering and time travel (which will be possible), colonize the galaxy and perhaps a couple others, shapeshift into customized bodies, have access to all the worlds knowledge by thinking (brain implant), live in a post-scarcity society and invent weapons that can cause massive destruction on a planetary scale. We will also be aware of other universes and perhaps some explorers will travel to them. We will create our own stars, move planets around, reverse entropy and create baby universes (but that will likely be regulated). It may seem like a stretch but every year our progress accelerates faster and faster. I think 2100 will be unimaginable.

But that leaves the question. What will be considered sci-fi in this time? Does anybody have any ideas. I think sci fi will still exist because humans will never stop wondering What If? and I think science is bottomless so their will always be more to uncover. Humans will always crave entertainment and movies and books will always exist. Sci-fi could vanish and we might watch Star Trek or Star Wars as classic contemporary pieces but I have to think their will be things on the table that are written about that cannot be done like sci fi always shows. What could those things be? I’m trying to think about this stuff because I always like to wonder about the futures future.

[Elheru Aran]

....okay.

If you'd just left your third sentence out, and like the whole second paragraph, you'd have had a pretty sensible post about what SF might look like in the future.

I was gonna write a longer post, but honestly? Most of this comes down to basic physics, like time travel and FTL almost certainly aren't going to happen barring some serious changes in the rules. Many other issues are going to come down to society, politics, and economics-- without some fundamental changes across the world, many things won't happen. And some of the things you postulate, even with ideal conditions on the world, just cannot happen in that short of a timespan. A couple of the things you talk about-- genetic engineering and brain implants-- are actually likely, but they won't be available across the board to everybody, or even a majority of the population.

Now as to SF: I think they'll still come up with stuff that's not possible for their current science to achieve. There'll always be stuff that'll be impossible.

[Lord Revan]

....okay.

If you'd just left your third sentence out, and like the whole second paragraph, you'd have had a pretty sensible post about what SF might look like in the future.

I was gonna write a longer post, but honestly? Most of this comes down to basic physics, like time travel and FTL almost certainly aren't going to happen barring some serious changes in the rules. Many other issues are going to come down to society, politics, and economics-- without some fundamental changes across the world, many things won't happen. And some of the things you postulate, even with ideal conditions on the world, just cannot happen in that short of a timespan. A couple of the things you talk about-- genetic engineering and brain implants-- are actually likely, but they won't be available across the board to everybody, or even a majority of the population.

Now as to SF: I think they'll still come up with stuff that's not possible for their current science to achieve. There'll always be stuff that'll be impossible.

Even if we ignore the "impossible under current laws of physics" you want to be really careful when comes to prediction something from scifi ends up happening in real life since even mid 20th century scifi (or simply predictions on how future would look like) had a lot of things that never happened and some things they didn't predict at all. For example the orginal Cyberpunk 2020 game had cell phones as essentially luxury products in 2020 (at least in the edition I have) and there was no sight of smartphones, yet now in the real 2019 smartphones are so commonplace that it's more of luxury to not have (to need) one.

[Elheru Aran]

....okay.

If you'd just left your third sentence out, and like the whole second paragraph, you'd have had a pretty sensible post about what SF might look like in the future.

I was gonna write a longer post, but honestly? Most of this comes down to basic physics, like time travel and FTL almost certainly aren't going to happen barring some serious changes in the rules. Many other issues are going to come down to society, politics, and economics-- without some fundamental changes across the world, many things won't happen. And some of the things you postulate, even with ideal conditions on the world, just cannot happen in that short of a timespan. A couple of the things you talk about-- genetic engineering and brain implants-- are actually likely, but they won't be available across the board to everybody, or even a majority of the population.

Now as to SF: I think they'll still come up with stuff that's not possible for their current science to achieve. There'll always be stuff that'll be impossible.

Even if we ignore the "impossible under current laws of physics" you want to be really careful when comes to prediction something from scifi ends up happening in real life since even mid 20th century scifi (or simply predictions on how future would look like) had a lot of things that never happened and some things they didn't predict at all. For example the orginal Cyberpunk 2020 game had cell phones as essentially luxury products in 2020 (at least in the edition I have) and there was no sight of smartphones, yet now in the real 2019 smartphones are so commonplace that it's more of luxury to not have (to need) one.

Cell phones and indeed a lot of modern innovations aren't the result of advancing technology so far as they're the result of a global economy. I grant you there's certainly been a lot of technological advances, but the real change that I think a lot of writers didn't really envision was the movement of actual *manufacture* outside of the West, and the technologization thereof. Without the cheap labor of various Asian countries, primarily China but also India, Taiwan, Korea, et al. to a lesser extent, AND how automated a lot of processes became, we wouldn't have a smartphone in every hand. Compare it to how even a merely decent computer could cost thousands of dollars in the early nineties, to where you can get a pretty okay machine for a few hundred now. That's not (entirely) a technological thing, that's an economic thing-- manufacture of the things became far cheaper and quicker and easier.

To look at a different product: take dress shirts. Living here in the 1950s or so, you would have been hard pressed to find one for sale that wasn't made in the United States. Perhaps some higher end shirts from Europe or England. Twenty years or so later, you start seeing versions of them made in Asia, probably from cheap material; the good shirts are still made domestically. But twenty years after -that-, in the nineties? Only a very few are still made in the US, sold at better quality department stores. By the 2010s, they're almost universally made overseas; if you want a shirt made in the US, you have to either commission it from someone or pay an unrealistic amount of money. That's the kind of economic shift that a lot of people simply wouldn't have envisioned happening, and that's lacking from a lot of period SF. Similar reason to why people wrote about calculations being done by slide rule in the future, or keying in logarithmic tables manually-- they simply couldn't imagine the massive leaps that technology makes when it becomes cheaper to manufacture.

I suspect the next step in manufacture/economics is something along the lines of a replicator, only in the form of a 3D printer. Once a printer is invented that can do multiple materials at once, or build more technical items, AND become affordable enough that most people can have one, then you'll see a big jump in people printing their own stuff. Couple this with speedy delivery via drone/robot, self-driving vehicles and so forth...

[Lord Revan]

....okay.

If you'd just left your third sentence out, and like the whole second paragraph, you'd have had a pretty sensible post about what SF might look like in the future.

I was gonna write a longer post, but honestly? Most of this comes down to basic physics, like time travel and FTL almost certainly aren't going to happen barring some serious changes in the rules. Many other issues are going to come down to society, politics, and economics-- without some fundamental changes across the world, many things won't happen. And some of the things you postulate, even with ideal conditions on the world, just cannot happen in that short of a timespan. A couple of the things you talk about-- genetic engineering and brain implants-- are actually likely, but they won't be available across the board to everybody, or even a majority of the population.

Now as to SF: I think they'll still come up with stuff that's not possible for their current science to achieve. There'll always be stuff that'll be impossible.

Even if we ignore the "impossible under current laws of physics" you want to be really careful when comes to prediction something from scifi ends up happening in real life since even mid 20th century scifi (or simply predictions on how future would look like) had a lot of things that never happened and some things they didn't predict at all. For example the orginal Cyberpunk 2020 game had cell phones as essentially luxury products in 2020 (at least in the edition I have) and there was no sight of smartphones, yet now in the real 2019 smartphones are so commonplace that it's more of luxury to not have (to need) one.

Cell phones and indeed a lot of modern innovations aren't the result of advancing technology so far as they're the result of a global economy. I grant you there's certainly been a lot of technological advances, but the real change that I think a lot of writers didn't really envision was the movement of actual *manufacture* outside of the West, and the technologization thereof. Without the cheap labor of various Asian countries, primarily China but also India, Taiwan, Korea, et al. to a lesser extent, AND how automated a lot of processes became, we wouldn't have a smartphone in every hand. Compare it to how even a merely decent computer could cost thousands of dollars in the early nineties, to where you can get a pretty okay machine for a few hundred now. That's not (entirely) a technological thing, that's an economic thing-- manufacture of the things became far cheaper and quicker and easier.

To look at a different product: take dress shirts. Living here in the 1950s or so, you would have been hard pressed to find one for sale that wasn't made in the United States. Perhaps some higher end shirts from Europe or England. Twenty years or so later, you start seeing versions of them made in Asia, probably from cheap material; the good shirts are still made domestically. But twenty years after -that-, in the nineties? Only a very few are still made in the US, sold at better quality department stores. By the 2010s, they're almost universally made overseas; if you want a shirt made in the US, you have to either commission it from someone or pay an unrealistic amount of money. That's the kind of economic shift that a lot of people simply wouldn't have envisioned happening, and that's lacking from a lot of period SF. Similar reason to why people wrote about calculations being done by slide rule in the future, or keying in logarithmic tables manually-- they simply couldn't imagine the massive leaps that technology makes when it becomes cheaper to manufacture.

I suspect the next step in manufacture/economics is something along the lines of a replicator, only in the form of a 3D printer. Once a printer is invented that can do multiple materials at once, or build more technical items, AND become affordable enough that most people can have one, then you'll see a big jump in people printing their own stuff. Couple this with speedy delivery via drone/robot, self-driving vehicles and so forth...

My point is that one should be extremly careful on predictions of technology progress in the future as seemingly minor things can have major impact on how things progress, as we're ultimately products of our time and as such we highly likely to be stuck in the mentality of this era or go totally against it, while a realistic future mentality would be somewhere between those 2 extremes (just exactly where between those 2 is the issue that makes the predictions so hard).