March 20, 2009
Suppose you fall into a coma
Suppose you fall into a coma. You wake up in 15 years, with your memory and cognitive abilities intact. You hug your loved ones, you brush your teeth and then ... what would be the first thing you would like to know about the world?
March 20, 2009 in The Future | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 11, 2008
A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century
JUNE 2, 2018: Summer movie audiences are entranced and titillated by Lars von Trier's Asking for It, an erotic thriller starring Christian Bale and Scarlett Johansson, set on the 110th floor of the World Trade Center on the morning of 9/11...
AUG. 13, 2025: A surprising announcement comes from Johns Hopkins University: As it turns out, smoking cigarettes is kind of good for you…
JUNE 15, 2027: A startling revelation comes in the form of Obama's postpresidential autobiography, Cutting Backdoor: He admits that the decision to keep troops in Iraq was forced upon him by the Bilderberg Group, a secret society of world leaders who control the global economy. The book explains how Bilderberg's leadership concluded that the U.S. would not be prepared for a post-oil society for at least forty years; the only solution was to establish an American presence in the Middle East that provided unlimited access to petroleum, thereby staving off worldwide economic collapse. Three months after the book's release, Obama disappears in a mysterious boating mishap…
NOV. 2, 2040: Dana Dukakis (D-New Jersey) becomes the first open hermaphrodite to win a gubernatorial election…
MAY 22, 2050: The darkest day in world history -- nuclear suitcase bombs are simultaneously detonated in Jerusalem, LAX airport, Moscow, Paris, Tokyo, and (somewhat oddly) Bangor, Maine, killing 370,000 people. Unable to effectively communicate diplomacy and confused by the terrorism's utter randomness, the entire planet adopts a policy of cultural isolationism and lukewarm war…
- - - - - - - -
Much more at Chuck Klosterman’s A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century
(Photo above from Worth 1000)
A Huge Depository of Visions About The Future Here
October 11, 2008 in The Future | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 11, 2008
The Future: A Retrospective
In May 2007 I found a book in a used bookstore called Future Stuff, by Malcolm Abrams and Harriet Bernstein. It was published in 1989, and it described about 250 consumer products that:
...should be in your supermarket, hardware store, pharmacy, department store, or otherwise available by the year 2000.
It was based on interviews with the people who were working on these products. It made concrete predictions, with dates and estimated prices. The predictions were more or less wrong
Essay about the future (YouTube)
A Huge Depository of Visions About The Future Here
February 11, 2008 in The Future | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 10, 2007
When they said “Repent” I wonder what they meant
Extinction timeline from 1950-2050 (pdf)
Grow-a-brain gets LOLinated! (Idea from Verbatim)
A Huge Depository of Visions About The Future Here
November 10, 2007 in The Future | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
September 27, 2007
Countdown to Doom
Countdown timer to science fictional future events by Monochrom
Alan Weisman's new book The World Without Us. What would happen if our species are suddenly disappear. The slideshow 15,000 year tour of Manhattan. (From Phil Gyford)
The 1989 Oxford English Dictionary defines a time capsule as "a container used to store for posterity a selection of objects thought to be representative of life at a particular time." The International Time Capsule Society is an organization established in 1990 to promote the careful study of time capsules. Read about the 9 most wanted time capsules
A Huge Depository of Visions About The Future Here
September 27, 2007 in The Future | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
June 16, 2007
Experience is the new reality
"Man is God. He is everywhere, he is anybody, he knows everything. This is the Prometeus new world. All started with the Media Revolution, with Internet, at the end of the last century. Everything related to the old media vanished: Gutenberg, the copyright, the radio, the television, the publicity. The old world reacts: more restrictions for the copyright, new laws against non authorized copies. Napster, the music peer to peer company is sued…" (Voice: Philip K. Dick Avatar. Continues here)
Also: Arthur C. Clarke’s predictions for the 21st Century
/// A Huge Depository of Visions About The Future
June 16, 2007 in The Future | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 23, 2007
Victorian Visions of the Year 2000
Predictions of the Year 2000 from The Ladies Home Journal of December 1900
Also, Postcards Show the Year 2000 (circa 1900) at Paleo-Future
What will you do when it all comes down? World without Oil - The Game
Shape of the future by SF author Charles Stross. (From Gravity Lens)
/// Fark it /// A Huge Depository of Visions About The Future
May 23, 2007 in The Future | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 09, 2007
Retro Future
Retro Future. (From Cruel)
The Long Now Foundation's podcast: Seminars About Long Term Thinking
Innovation timeline 1900-2050 (pdf)
What will the earth look like in 2025? Seven Revolutions
What will be the biggest breakthrough of the next 50 years? Brilliant Minds on the Next 50 Years
Re-post: 20 Ways the World Could End
(No time to post tonight. Sorry)
/// Reddit it /// Add it to your del.icio.us A Huge Depository of Visions About The Future
March 9, 2007 in The Future | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
October 12, 2006
The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a fad
“Safaris in Vietnam, for the tourist who really wants to get away from it all”, Newsweek, predicting popular holidays for the late 1960s. 86 More Bad Predictions about the Future
What would happen if humans disappeared from Earth today? Light pollution would be the first to go, followed by fields, buildings and cities
Founds Artifacts from the future
Robert Seidel’s first music video, Futures
Repost: 2056 issue of The Onion
Future Mail lets you send messages to yourself and have them delivered on any date and time you choose. Also, Future Me
/// Add it to your del.icio.us /// A Huge Depository of Visions About The Future
October 12, 2006 in The Future | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 07, 2006
Welcome, Human # 6,500,000,000
$100 laptop, one of the 10 Things That Will Change The Way We Live
Repair Culture. An Indian mobile phone repair stall in Karol Bagh Market, in Delhi. Among the lessons learnt: The developing world is using high tech, and it’s not using it in the same ways we do
Zero Day. Animated film centering around the struggles of a few humans on a planet that has been over-run by an alien force
Earn money selling what you say with free Ether Phone Number
6.5 billion humans, Feb, 22, 2006
Multi-Touch Interaction Research. While touch sensing is commonplace for single points of contact, multi-touch sensing enables a user to interact with a system with more than one finger at a time, as in chording and bi-manual operations
More Visions About The Future Here
March 7, 2006 in The Future | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 04, 2005
Last day on Earth
International Time Capsule Society
Wishful Thinking - January 10, 2009
Imagine waking up to the last day on Earth. What's the worst that could happen in just 24 hours? (From ”Farpas e bitaites”)
A Future Timeline of Humanity and the Universe, starting at 2010, ending at 10100
The Flash Epic 2014 has an updated, alternate version Epic 2015
365 tomorrows. One new piece of short speculative fiction each day for one year
The Vertical Farm - The future of farming
Btw, somebody left a very long comment in Arabic at the bottom of an old post, with the request that I forward it to Queen Ranya of Jordan. Anybody cares to translate it into English?
More Visions About The Future Here
August 4, 2005 in The Future | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 01, 2005
The Future is in Flux
In the year 2111 industrial disease will destroy 99% of the world population. The survivors will create a walled city and share a perfect life together. But this perfect life needs a perfect revolution
The Amish in the Year 2100 A.D.
The 11 Billion Dollar Bottle of Wine - The Possibilities of Interstellar Trade
Fuel-less Gravity Powered Flight
The mission of Seven Generations Ahead is to build communities that care for the environment, meet the basic human needs of all, and provide safe and healthy lives for future generations
The Shadow Robot Company offers the world’s most advanced Dexterous Hand
(Photo above from Sisu blog). More Visions About The Future Here
June 1, 2005 in The Future | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 02, 2004
This is the End-of-the-world as we know it
Brian Sack’s How Past Girlfriends Could Have Changed History. (Quote: “The fact that Burger King is running commercials urging citizens to vote is indicative of just how awful things have become in this election”)
Bill Joy’s seminal Wired-essay from 4 years ago, Why the future doesn't need us: "Our most powerful 21st-century technologies - robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech - are threatening to make humans an endangered species."
Visionary Designs in Transportation Engineering
Planet of Slums: Sometime in the next year, the urban population of the earth will outnumber the rural. Today there are 386 cities in the world with populations over one million. By 2015 there will be at least 550
The Face of Tomorrow is a concept for a series of photographs that addresses the effects of globalization on identity
Today’s “Blog Of The Day”, is Danny Yee’s “Pathologically Polymathic”, a Robot-Wisdom-feel-a-like. If you wish to have your blog considered as “Blog Of The Day”, or if you know of a blog that should get same recognition, please email me at realhanan (at) yahoo (dot) com, or post a comment at the bottom of this post.
Photograph above from The Archie Chronicles. More Visions About The Future Here
November 2, 2004 in The Future | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack
June 13, 2004
The Year After Armageddon
It’s time for me to get personal. I am going to start getting deeper here into some of the things that had a lasting influence on my life.
The first item is the book Long Voyage Back. I’ve read this scary book at least half a dozen times, and I’d like to recommend it to anybody who cares. It is a realistic story of a group of survivors in the afternmath of a nuclear war.
The book is an easy read and not necessarily high-brow, but the details of it are so gripping that you know that this is how the world is going to end, not with fire but with ice .
I had the honor of meeting the author of this book, Luke Rhinehart, and spent a weekend at his house in upstate New York in 1990. Rhinehart’s most famous book is the funny & disturbing, The Dice Man, which describes a fictional psychotherapist's account (also named Luke Rhinehart) of his descent into mayhem. The Dice Man developed a unique cult following for over 30 years, mostly outside the US. Imagine gambling with your life so that your every decision is made by the random roll of a dice. That was the premise behind the book. Many people from the anarchistic 70’s on and even today have been Playing the Dice; There were Dice-communes, movies, a whole sub-culture of Dice people.
If you’ve never heard of them, I highly recommend both books. Here’s a long Interview with Luke Rhinehart. Here’s an inside joke that he would appreciate - Rhinehart’s tombstone .
More Visions about The Future Here
June 13, 2004 in The Future | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack
April 16, 2004
How will we work & play?
View the trailer for The Day After Tomorrow, Roland Emmerich’s new action big movie.
“Future Packaging & Preservation” right here in Covina are manufacturers of high-quality Preservation Time Capsules… (As usual, from “Information Junk”)
Can We Imagine the Far Future--Year 3000? . Can our minds even project that far? How will we work, play, propagate, communicate, worship, wonder? What forms of bodies will we have? What will our cities look like? How many nations will there be? How long will we live? What technologies will be available to us? What about family, business, government, education? How deep into space will humans have ventured? How many people will live on Earth? How strange will it be? (From “Santiago Theory”)
More Links about the Future Here
April 16, 2004 in The Future | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
