Next Era?
Hawkeye
Join Date: 2002-10-31 Member: 1855Members
Join Date: 2002-10-31 Member: 1855Members
in Discussions
<div class="IPBDescription">Age of mankind's development</div> You know how we had stone age, bronze age, Rennaissance age, mechanical age, communication age (now)?
I ask you, what is next? Sort of makes you wonder, doesn't it? Each age was a world of difference from the ones before it. Imagine what a change bronze age from stone age? Days of roman conquerering and brilliant architecture.
Rennaissance age was a change in the mindsets of everyone. The arts suddenly became important as well as enlightenment.
Mechanical age, people such as Ben Franklin made some of the inventions we still use today including electricity.
Finally, communication age is bringing the entire world together destroying the need for separate languages and separate currencies. At this rate, by the end of the communication age, the entire world will be unified.
So I ask you, what will be the next age? What sorts of things will need changing, and are we already moving towards this age?
Something as simple as the invention of the teleporter could be the start of the new age. Being able to make space travel possible by 'teleporting' to new planets. Just one thought. Tell me yours.
I ask you, what is next? Sort of makes you wonder, doesn't it? Each age was a world of difference from the ones before it. Imagine what a change bronze age from stone age? Days of roman conquerering and brilliant architecture.
Rennaissance age was a change in the mindsets of everyone. The arts suddenly became important as well as enlightenment.
Mechanical age, people such as Ben Franklin made some of the inventions we still use today including electricity.
Finally, communication age is bringing the entire world together destroying the need for separate languages and separate currencies. At this rate, by the end of the communication age, the entire world will be unified.
So I ask you, what will be the next age? What sorts of things will need changing, and are we already moving towards this age?
Something as simple as the invention of the teleporter could be the start of the new age. Being able to make space travel possible by 'teleporting' to new planets. Just one thought. Tell me yours.
Comments
Them future people won't understand how we could live with looking at a flat box instead of feeding our brain fake information, or how we could endure waiting for our food to boil in H<span style='font-size:6pt;line-height:100%'>2</span>O instead of instantly broiling it with an infrared beam(or something).
Or how we could live in the air from the factories that put cars together, rather than having nanopaste dissolving steel and making a car just like that *snaps fingers*.
Humanities' advancements have always come from when there was a time of war. The big steps in technology can almost always be tracked with the begining of a war and the end. Usually, when something military is made, it eventually filters down to the civilian level for everyone to use. Cars were made of steel and tough metals to protect the driver. Now, they are made of light weight materials that are stronger than still but many times lighter and protect almost as well. The only downside is that they are only useable once, steel cars could survive the wreck and drive off to the side of the road. When cars collide now, it's lucky if the engine can get it to move a few feet.
What will we be seeing in the future though? Computers will be more common place, and easier to use and understand. We may see possible colonization of the moon in the next hundred years, the sending of manned missions to Mars and possible robotic harvesting of space debry and objects such as asteroids. Cars with smart computers that detect changes in the road and the driver, adjusting themselves to keep the occupants and other motorists safe, regardless of the driver's commands. Smarter energy use, we may still use oil and some other fossil fuels, but we will have learned ways where what we use gallons for, we use cups for in the future. As for military, everything gearing towards convincing the enemy not to fight, demoralizing them and minimizing casualties. The possibilites are endless, and the rate at which they can change is almost as endless. We'll just have to wait and see.
During WW1 the biggest development was the machine gun, that allowed a few men to kill hundreds in a shorter amount of time than before, provided they had enough ammunition. WW2, the biggest was the atom bomb, allowing the crew of an aircraft to destroy an entire city with a single bomb, and with the Cold War came the capabilty to send the whole world back into the darkages pretty much.
Right now is the information age. millions (maybe billions?) have access to all the information they could ever want at incredible speeds, thanks to developments like the internet, mobile phone technology etc etc.
The next age? personally i dont think there will be one, well not one like most of you have said. The problem is the balance of power.
After the end of the Cold War and the break up of the Soviet Union, the US was left as the only super power, hence its grown fat and can now be regarded as a hyper power IMO. No one can withstand them if they put their full force into something, wether it be finiacal, political or military(ial? <!--emo&:p--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/tounge.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tounge.gif' /><!--endemo-->). This has the given the US a feeling of safety, a feeling that was destroyed after 9/11. Al-Queada woke the giant. By kicking him in the nuts.
So now we have a very dangerous situation. Since the terrorist attacks, the US has gone offensive, and is striding around the world like a gunslinger, hand already reaching to his holster. But to be honest, who could really blame them for wanting to protect their way of life?
The problem with this is that their enemy is too small to be caught, so in an attempt to catch them they're hitting anything or anyone that may or may not have links to the culprits in the hope they catch them in the cross fire. At some point they're gonna hit someone who decides to hit back, but due to the US' might, it wont achive much aside from the US really putting the boot in. Things will then really escalate and could very well end up with WW3.
So my personal opinion is that unless we straighten our selves and achive unity thoughout the world in the next hundred years or so, there isnt going to be any more human race to speak of. If we do unite? well who knows, moving out into the solar system would probably play a major role I would think.
note: all above opinons/rants/ramblings and midless drivel are all purely my own observations and feelings backed up by nothing but my own speculation and should not be quoted back to me with the intention of proving me wrong and showing how much cleverer (<!--emo&???--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/confused.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='confused.gif' /><!--endemo-->) than me you are, because, well, i'll just accept it <!--emo&:p--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/tounge.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tounge.gif' /><!--endemo-->
Let's have a look at an extended version of the ordering of eras Hawk supplied in his first post:
The stone age, the metal ages / the antique era, the Dark Ages, the Rennaissance, the era of Industrialization, the Information age.
Imagine standing at, say, the beginning of the Industrialization: Watts just perfected the steam engine, factories start replacing manufacturers, the urbanization - and the connected class struggle - begins. From this point of view, could you have forseen the next era to be marked by communication and services? No, you, like the science fiction authors of the Industrialization, take for example H.G.Wells, would've taken the main influences of your time and extrapolated them into bigger frames. Cities would've turned into sprawls, the land would've been abandoned, everyone would be working and living in giant factory complexes, the wealth of the world would've accumulated in less hands than a human has fingers, and so on (for an extended case study, read Wells 'Sleeper', which describes just one such scenario). You wouldn't even consider the idea of what electronic calculators could do to society because you would've barely gotten over the advent of electrical <i>light</i>.
Our view of both past and future is inseperable from the present, which is itself a highly subjective issue. The people of the Dark Ages didn't view their past in Stone Age and Antique, they didn't imagine something like the Renaissance as their future, and they sure as hell didn't call their age 'dark'.
We're standing at what comes after the end of the Industrialization. The more appropriate question isn't what the era after this one is going to be called, it's what nametag <i>this</i> age will wear.
Reformation of what? Our very society. We still carry traces of feodalism in our social mechanisms and the current model of free economy is not sustainable. I'd like to see the whole western hemisphere transform into something more sustainable and altruistic.
The communists tried to force the society to reform, but despite some brilliant, revolutionary ideas, they failed. What that shows is that the age of revolutions is past. Forced, dramatic changes create more problems than they solve. What is needed is some common ground for us all.
To be completely honest, I want the consumer-driven capitalist economy to fail miserably and collapse in its own impossibility. Not everyone in the world can be rich or even well off. It's someone sitting in a gutter in New Delhi that gives us the possibility to walk around with full bellies. And an economic system that gives wealth to others by skinning others is not a system at all - it's a fraud perpetrated by those stuck in feodal concepts and fantasies. We are fed hopes and dreams of being rich, famous, beautiful and popular. These fantasies and the failure to fulfill them are constantly causing irrepairable damage to both the adult and the minor population. According to a survey by a researcher in the University of Helsinki over 70% of girls aged 9 to 11 do not like what they see when they look in a mirror. Girls of that age shouldn't even be thinking about things like that. They are children, not models in need of surgical alteration. Boys, on the other hand, strenghten their self-image and remove their insecurities by physically intimidating or hurting others, making themselves feel better and more sure about themselves in the process. This is not progress, it's retardation.
While the above text may seem a tad extreme, I assure you, I would do anything for things to be otherwise. If the society wouldn't be as competitive and predatory as it is now, a friend of mine's father wouldn't probably have needed to scatter her ashes in the sea last saturday (yes, **** you people who alter forever the course of a life by doing wrong to a person too young to understand what goes on). I would only want to live to see an age where everyone has a basic value that no-one can take away by classifying them into some degrading, scorned sub-groups like 'unemployed', 'homeless' or 'in a dead end career'.
My life seems to be going down the drain, and I wouldn't be surprised if I found myself sitting on the sidewalk a few years from now. Maybe I think these thoughts about equality just to comfort myself by thinking that maybe when I have finally spent all my options and don't know where to sleep, I will still be considered human, not a human speed bump.
Want to make things better? Just teach your future kids not to pay attention to what others say about their appearance, and the next time you see a guy not that well off, give him a sandwich or $5. Who knows when he last had a meal? Maybe the experience will carry a lesson.
So now we have a very dangerous situation. Since the terrorist attacks, the US has gone offensive, and is striding around the world like a gunslinger, hand already reaching to his holster. But to be honest, who could really blame them for wanting to protect their way of life?
The problem with this is that their enemy is too small to be caught, so in an attempt to catch them they're hitting anything or anyone that may or may not have links to the culprits in the hope they catch them in the cross fire. At some point they're gonna hit someone who decides to hit back, but due to the US' might, it wont achive much aside from the US really putting the boot in. Things will then really escalate and could very well end up with WW3.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Yeah, it looks like it's going that way, too.
How can you <i>not</i> step on a house when your boot is 100 miles long? You can't. Just pray that you kill them in the process; otherwise you'll have a whole hell of a lot of little people trying to kill you. <!--emo&:p--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/tounge.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tounge.gif' /><!--endemo--> (Think 0/0 LA marines at 1/4 their size VS a onos)
Everything seems to start and end with religion. The unification of the world would be impossible without the total annihilation of religion. If we saw the end of religion as the next age, things could get pretty cool in the way of scientific advancements and stuff. Then again, the end of religion would most likely involve the extermination of the human race, which is of course the most likely age to come next. The Nuclear Aftermath Age.
Heh, I got a laugh out of that, maybe it was just me though...
I'll just have to throw myself against this particular memes throat once more.
People, no matter how cool and rebel it may seem to say so, religions are <i>not</i> the source of all evil. Religion - in the sense of a shared system of faiths - appears to be a human key urge. In other words, it's here to stay, and it is as inherently good or evil as the people bringing it forth.
Take the various Christian faiths: They were justification to monstrosities as gruesome as the Crusades, and inspired people as holy as Mother Theresa and Martin Luther King. Representatives of them burned more priceless cultural treasures than anybody else - and created some of the greatest pinnacles of art (ever been to Rome?). Even today, they're simultaneously used as a tool of segregation and hatred, and communication and love.
We'd best come to accept this duality.
In terms of the question of humanitys future, this means that religion will never be solely an obstacle, nor a guide. Assuming a 'faithless era' appears to be as far-fetched as a 'greedless', a 'loveless', or a 'sexless' one.
i say these things will created the digital age, an age of enlightenment behind a wall of technolegy and pollution...
hay,... this got me thinking... were we really ment to survive in the world? (i sense a new thread coming on...)
The major move has everything to do with energy. Humanity is being forced RIGHT NOW to end use of oil. With oil production peaking, oil will become very uneconomical over the next 20 years. Focus Fusion, however, will bring cheap, efficient, non-polluting energy to our doorstep.
So, humanity, over the next 10 years, will basically overhaul the entire world's energy grids into self sufficient Focus Fusion powered ones. Oil will slowly but surely begin to fade away.
The main problem right now is that oil production is beginning to peak NOW, meaning we have a limited timeframe (2-5 years??) before oil based economies begin to crash, but Focus Fusion is still in the testing phase.
Now, if I were an individual with a few thousand dollars to spend, I would very wisely invest in the company that's working on Focus Fusion technology, because in about 7 years or so, when these reactors hit the market, your money's going to come back to you 15-20 times over very quickly.
So, first oil to focus fusion, so a decentralization of energy, and a miniturization of newer technology, as well as the beginnings of space colonization, probably all within the next 50 years.
everything age: where generally everything advances at the same rate (no new major discovories),
environment age: as people have said before, we look at energy sources, global warming etc.
or the super technology age: an obvious age, everything cheaper, faster, easier to produce etc, every "westernised" country is very well off, the third-world is about the same.
Advances will be made within this technology over the next 5-10 years, bringing it into our everyday lifes, if we are to belive recent studies and the increasing availability of study on this subject. <!--emo&:)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif' /><!--endemo-->
Today's microtechnology is at 0.xx micrometers, the jump to 0,000x isn't that far, is it?
All roughly:
Stone Age - 10000 years
Metal Ages - 3000 years
Dark Ages - 1000 years
Renaissance - 350 years
Industrialization - 150 years
Communication Age - still counting
If this trend holds, we're "due" in about 50 years, and again 20 years after that. <!--emo&:0--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/wow.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='wow.gif' /><!--endemo-->
Fusion power, nanotech, integration of mind and computer, who knows. Probably something we can't even imagine yet.
So they find the corresponding gene, and make a cell have an abundance of that gene, or whatever activates it, and then clone the cell a whole lot. What you get is essentially a psionic organ that anyone can use just by thinking, after having an operation to put it in their body, etc.
The result is that people walk around talking soundlessly to each other, and never lifting a finger to pick things up. And the people with strength of will dominate, since they can <i>will</i> things more strongly.
But they are never unopposed rulers, since two persons working together are almost always stronger than one.