Woah, Nelly. This is why I love SciFi. Because it''s practitioners ask questions like "Realistically. What do we think the world will look like in 500 years." Not 5 minutes, 500 years.
Misses some naturals of Nature. Like if CO2 goes up, vegetation could very well be rampant. A total multilayer jungle that we'd have to live in. Bonus is temperatures are moderated underneath something like that. Doesn't consider the warming oceans either. As a food source or as a climate generator. So if the planet evolves to protect it's ecosystem, it would be a jungle world, along with new species, with lots of rain and lots of fish. And seriously large untraversable desert areas around the equator.
The danger is something like ocean plankton responding to the changes in ocean and atmosphere. If it grew out of control, it could end all life as we know it. Conversely, the release of methane substrates below the warming oceans, could kill off all plankton and most other living species, leaving a dead planet. Time will tell.
Or is it, increased CO2 resulting in rising acid levels in mostly coastal waters killing all marine life.
500 years is far enough out our short term thinking no longer works. I personally think we can have a good shot at predicting 30 years because it's a number comparable with the human lifespan. If we can't personally remember 30 years ago, it's part of our immediate cultural heritage. Which makes 30 years in the future understandable. If there weren't any black swan events in or huge cultural shifts in the last 30 years, it's a fairly safe bet there won't be in the next either. But in even 50 years that's harder to say. By the time we get to 500, we should expect equivalent changes in thinking or game changing technology to that between 1500 and now.
Forgot the acidity issue, definitely that. Throw in the rampant technology accelerating at impossible rates, and I'm not sure even short term futures can be predicted. Technology is no longer linear, at least in the viewpoint of computers. There would of course be difficulty and risk in selecting a path at an accelerated rate.
+Thomas Barnett Thing is 1983 is 30 years ago. In 1983 I was reading Omni and just beginning to get into computers, That's also pretty much the age of the IBM PC. I think you can make a case that pretty much everything since then has just been filling in the gaps of stuff that was fairly easy to predict. I think there was vastly more qualitative change between 1953 and 1983 than between 1983 and now.
However, big data and our ability to create it, forget it, analyse it and search it is a change. And it has unforeseen consequences in strange places like genome sequencing.
My background is engineering, and I also see computational breakthroughs in physics and chemistry that transcend human ability to comprehend applications. I'm also seeing the really radical breakthroughs sequestered away from public scrutiny. Science becomes magic.
500 years is far enough out our short term thinking no longer works. I personally think we can have a good shot at predicting 30 years because it's a number comparable with the human lifespan. If we can't personally remember 30 years ago, it's part of our immediate cultural heritage. Which makes 30 years in the future understandable. If there weren't any black swan events in or huge cultural shifts in the last 30 years, it's a fairly safe bet there won't be in the next either. But in even 50 years that's harder to say. By the time we get to 500, we should expect equivalent changes in thinking or game changing technology to that between 1500 and now.
However, big data and our ability to create it, forget it, analyse it and search it is a change. And it has unforeseen consequences in strange places like genome sequencing.