Jupiter could destroy us or protect us. The planet’s atmosphere has a layer that is rich in deuterium, and detonating a nuclear weapon in that layer might be enough to ignite all of it, creating a huge explosion that would destroy the side of Earth (and any other planet) that was facing it at that moment. A country, group, or crazed rich person could, with future technology, hold the rest of the world hostage with the threat of sending a nuclear space missile to blow up Jupiter. Moreover, if there were a future war between humans living on different planets (like Earth and Mars), one side might decide to detonate Jupiter when its own planet was directly shielded from the explosion by the Sun while the enemy planet was exposed.
Aliens could also detonate Jupiter to exterminate humanity from afar. However, humans could also blow up Jupiter as a sort of “dead man’s switch” that was meant to exterminate any alien fleet or civilization that was conquering our Solar System. We would kill ourselves as well, but at least we’d have the satisfaction of taking them with us and leaving nothing of value behind. Our mere threat of doing this might be enough to convince hostile aliens to leave the Solar System.
In the far future, when we start “mining” Jupiter, we’ll probably make it a priority to slowly siphon off the deuterium in its atmosphere, both to prevent this cataclysm and to fuel spacecraft.
One solution to the Fermi Paradox is that aliens keep quiet to avoid making themselves invasion targets for stronger, hostile aliens. This makes sense once you remember that “information is power”: The more information you have about someone else and the less they have about you, the stronger you are relative to them. The same holds true for intelligent species. If one species knows another exists, but not vice versa, then the first can choose when and under what conditions to make contact, or whether to make contact at all. Those are enormous advantages, particularly if the oblivious species has the ability to hurt the other one.
In short, it’s rational for intelligent species to keep as low a profile as possible, but to keep watch for aliens. That means reducing transmissions from their own planets and building telescopes and other sensors to search for aliens or signs of them. Sending cloaked probes to other star systems, containing downgraded technology and taking circuitous routes to mask their point of origin on the intelligent species’ homeworld, would also probably be a good idea. The probes could search other star systems for alien life even more thoroughly, and could build other types of space ships once there that could attack those aliens.
Part of keeping a low profile means not even revealing one’s self to weaker alien species. Even if they are too weak to hurt you directly, they can kill you indirectly by announcing your presence to everyone else. For example, if a flying saucer full of friendly gray aliens landed on the White House lawn tomorrow, it would be the news event of the millennium. All of our TV signals, many of which shoot into the depths of space, would broadcast the event and its aftermath. Any malevolent insect aliens who had kept a low profile on a planet within 100 light years of Earth would not only learn about humanity’s existence, they would also discover the gray aliens. Because they talked to us, the gray aliens might actually trigger a chain of events that led to their own planet being invaded by insect aliens decades later.
Another reason to colonize space is to establish a secure second strike capability. While aliens could secretly build up a space fleet to suddenly take over Earth before we could have a chance to attack their own planet, it would get exponentially harder with each additional planet (Mars, Venus, Jupiter moons) we controlled. since the alien attack would have to destroy them all simultaneously to prevent our retaliation. If human civilization were spread out among several star systems, exterminating us without suffering a severe, if delayed, counterstrike would be impossible.
Again, secret probes could be of use. If we smuggled them into multiple star systems, they could be programmed to retaliate against any aliens that attacked Earth. Once receiving the attack signal, the probes would build combat space ships, space guns with interstellar ranges, or other types of weapons, and then send them to attack the alien homeworld. This could turn into a multi-century “whack-a-mole” game where hidden probes activated at random intervals, in various star systems in our part of the galaxy, built weapons, sent them off to attack the alien homeworld, and then went into hiding again.
Secret space probes could also be used to take over the galaxy. Consider Ray Kurzweil’s hypothesized “two-phased attack” with self-replicating nanomachines:
How long would it take an out-of-control replicating nanobot to destroy the Earth’s biomass? The biomass has on the order of 1045 carbon atoms. A reasonable estimate of the number of carbon atoms in a single replicating nanobot is about 106. (Note that this analysis is not very sensitive to the accuracy of these figures, only to the approximate order of magnitude.) This malevolent nanobot would need to create on the order of 1034 copies of itself to replace the biomass, which could be accomplished with 113 replications (each of which would potentially double the destroyed biomass). Rob Freitas has estimated a minimum replication time of approximately 100 seconds, so 113 replication cycles would require about three hours.2 However, the actual rate of destruction would be slower because biomass is not “efficiently” laid out. The limiting factor would be the actual movement of the front of destruction. Nanobots cannot travel very quickly because of their small size. It’s likely to take weeks for such a destructive process to circle the globe.
Based on this observation we can envision a more insidious possibility. In a two-phased attack, the nanobots take several weeks to spread throughout the biomass but use up an insignificant portion of the carbon atoms, say one out of every thousand trillion (1015). At this extremely low level of concentration, the nanobots would be as stealthy as possible. Then, at an “optimal” point, the second phase would begin with the seed nanobots expanding rapidly in place to destroy the biomass. For each seed nanobot to multiply itself a thousand trillionfold would require only about 50 binary replications, or about 90 minutes. With the nanobots having already spread out in position throughout the biomass, movement of the destructive wave front would no longer be a limiting factor.
The point is that without defenses, the available biomass could be destroyed by gray goo very rapidly. Clearly, we will need a nanotechnology immune system3 in place before these scenarios become a possibility. This immune system would have to be capable of contending not just with obvious destruction but any potentially dangerous (stealthy) replication, even at very low concentration.
The Singularity is Near
An alien species could, over a long time and with great secrecy, seed every solar system in the galaxy with its own Von Neumann probes, which would contain self-replicating macro- and nano-machines. Once every solar system had a probe, the aliens would send out a signal, and all of the probes would start self-replicating. They wouldn’t just make “Gray Goo” copies of themselves–they might make soldiers, weapons, and other advanced technology. Any other aliens would be overwhelmed, or at least forced to reveal themselves to fight back.
If we could cheaply make antimatter, then we could make “nuclear bullets.” When matter and antimatter touch, they annihilate each other and convert all their mass into pure energy, described by the familiar equation E = MC2. That means just 1 gram of antimatter could create a 43-kiloton explosion, which is twice as powerful as the bigger of the two atom bombs dropped on Japan. The 5.56mm projectile fired from a standard U.S. military rifle weighs 4 grams.
A very powerful adaptation that our posthuman descendants will have is real-time control over their genes and gut bacteria. They’d have computer brain implants and biomechanical implants throughout their bodies. By simply thinking about it, they could tell their brain implants to alter their gene expression–maybe in a specific body part or organ–to do something like produce more of a certain type of chemical.
As part of their counteroffensive, Ukrainian forces surrounded the town of Izyum, trapping hundreds of Russian troops. This video shows a Russian tank speeding out of the encirclement, with several soldiers clinging to its top. A Ukrainian soldier standing by the roadside sprays it with automatic fire, and the men fall off. The tank then turns the corner and slams into a large tree, which collapses on it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1Vb7f8lcVc
Since February, at least 1,500 of Russia’s main battle tanks, and 2,500 of its lighter armored vehicles have been destroyed or captured by Ukrainian forces. Russia famously hordes huge quantities of military equipment in case of WWIII, so it can replace its massive losses in due time. https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack-on-europe-documenting-equipment.html
At the current rate it is losing tanks in Ukraine, Russia’s vast reserves of tanks kept in storage will be totally destroyed in less than three years. However, the loss of skilled tank crewmen will practically cripple their tank fleet before that. https://youtu.be/ZNNoaRp5lz0
Russia has given some of its retired T-62 tanks to pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine. This video analysis makes it clear that the T-62 is inferior to the newer T-72s that regular Russian Army units have, in every key respect (mobility, firepower, armor). That said, the T-62 is still fine if kept behind the front lines and only used to attack lighter enemy vehicles and infantry units. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcXJNRfVuzk
This video explains how U.S. Army doctrine shaped the design of the M113 armored personnel carrier, why the vehicle is obsolete (except in a handful of support roles), and why it actually makes sense for America to give them away rather than upgrade them to fix their inherent limitations. https://youtu.be/cBufXgTnou0
Using deepfake technology, a man converted the footage of a black actress in The Little Mermaid movie remake into a white actress. As this technology improves and augmented reality eyewear become common, expect people to use “filters” like this to curate reality to their tastes, however extreme they may be. https://nypost.com/2022/09/15/racist-ai-scientist-blasted-for-fixing-black-ariel-in-the-little-mermaid/
In the future, quantum computers will let us simulate new types of materials, with all their chemical and subatomic properties accurately represented. This will lead to major advances in material science and we discover new alloys, batteries, drugs, and other molecules that would otherwise require billions of dollars in trial-and-error lab research to find. More generally speaking, computer simulations will lead to the optimization of all types of manufactured objects. If we ever meet intelligent aliens, their technology will have gone through the same process and should be similar to ours. No one will be using square wheels on their cars instead of round ones. https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/how-quantum-simulations-are-set-to-revolutionize-lithium-batteries
Venus’ closeness to the Sun doomed its prospects of ever supporting organic life. Since the Sun makes its surface hotter, the planet’s crust can’t break into tectonic plates, which in turn makes it less geologically active, preventing a carbon cycle from coming into existence and leading to the buildup of a thick atmosphere that traps heat. With much better technology, we could start terraforming Venus in the far future, but the process would take thousands of years to complete. https://youtu.be/aaE-RiFilEc
Here’s a roundup of climate change doomsday predictions, including ones that have failed to come true. Global warming is real, is bad, and is partly caused by humans, but its threat to our future has been exaggerated. https://extinctionclock.org/
Once we dig a piece of metal out of the ground, the clock starts ticking on its return to the Earth, in one form or another. A piece of iron, for example, will rust until it fully disintegrates and all its particles blow away. A piece of metal’s time “in circulation” varies greatly by element, and is affected by factors like mining efficiency and industrial application. https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/05/new-study-estimates-how-long-mined-metals-circulate-before-being-lost/
Starting at age 55, most people derive less and less enjoyment from leisure activities like eating out, traveling, and buying new things. This partly explains why old people spend so little of their money on non-essential purchases. https://www.nber.org/papers/w30460#fromrss
Birds are more highly evolved than mammals in some ways. For example, one of their brain cells consumes only 1/3 the chemical energy as a mammalian brain cell. With radical genetic engineering, humans could improve the energy efficiency of our own brain cells, boosting our intelligence. The necessary changes to the human genome would be so great that it would result in the creation of a new species that might look human externally, but would not be able to breed with us. https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(22)01219-2
U.S. life expectancy has dropped from 79 years in 2019 to 76.1 years today. Half of the decline is due to COVID-19, and other half is mostly due to higher rates of suicide, obesity, and substance abuse. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-62740249
Almost Human is a “buddy cop” TV series with a twist: It’s set in 2048, and one of the partners in an android. It is set in an unnamed American city where futuristic technologies deliver both great promise and peril for its citizens–some have lives of luxury, others are impoverished and have been left behind, and criminals have been empowered by the new tools at their disposal.
Detective John Kennex (played by Karl Urban) is a classic, hardboiled cop. He’s hotheaded, traumatized by violent experiences in his past, and struggles to form social bonds with others. Due to a change in police procedures, he’s paired with Dorian (played by Michael Ealy), an android with human emotions and a more balanced personality than Kennex.
Android cop Dorian (left) and his human partner John Kennex (right)
The series follows their unlikely partnership and the evolution of their bond, as well as of their unique personal stories, as they investigate crimes together. Every episode pits them against a new criminal or group of criminals who use a different kind of advanced technology.
I thought Almost Human was respectably thought-out and entertaining. Kennex and Dorian had an interesting and often funny personal chemistry, and the other recurring police characters were well-acted. The fictional universe in which it was set showed a high attention to detail in fleshing out the advanced technologies that would be available, as well as their social effects, though as my analysis will show, it wasn’t perfect.
I think the show failed to adequately explore how being an android and living among humans shaped Dorian’s inner world, which would have posed questions of greater intellectual substance to the viewer. At times, he seemed too much like a funny human who could do advanced calculations in his head. The plots also got more convoluted and, frankly, worse as the series went on, probably because the writers were running out of material. Almost Human was cancelled after only 13 episodes. While the show wasn’t spectacular, it would have been nice to see the additional character development and exploration of future technologies that would have happened had it been allowed a full season of 22 – 26 episodes.
Analysis:
Episode 1
Fully convincing androids will exist. During scenes set in the police station and in field missions, androids are almost always present. Aside from their mechanical way of talking and emotionless faces, they are indistinguishable from humans. Dorian is the only android at that precinct who has emotions and a warm personality. While androids will be very impressive by 2048, they won’t be able to mimic humans as exactly as they could in the show.
In my big list of future predictions, I wrote that this would be the case by the end of the 2030s: Combining all the best AI and robotics technologies, it will be possible to create general-purpose androids that could function better in the real world (e.g. – perform in the workplace, learn new things, interact with humans, navigate public spaces, manage personal affairs) than the bottom 10% of humans (e.g. – elderly people, the disabled, criminals, the mentally ill, people with poor language abilities or low IQs), and in some narrow domains, the androids will be superhuman (e.g. – physical strength, memory, math abilities). Note that businesses will still find it better to employ task-specific, non-human-looking robots instead of general purpose androids.
To elaborate, I predict that those kinds of androids will be very few in number by the end of 2039, and will be technology demonstrators and prototypes that get a lot of media coverage at carefully controlled tech company demo events. They won’t be available for any person to purchase, won’t roam around public spaces, and won’t have important jobs like working as police officers.
By 2048, the androids will be better, and aspects of their physiques, intelligence, and capabilities will overlap even more with humans, but they still won’t be able to pass as one of us in normal situations. Their body movements will be clumsier and more limited than the average human’s, probably leaving them with the same overall reflexes, nimbleness, balance, and speed as an elderly human. They will also lack the battery life to function for a whole work day in a physically demanding occupation like street cop. Also, if you could examine one at very close distance, you would see that its skin and other external features were less detailed than those of real humans.
A plausible role for an android in a police station of 2048 would be working at the reception desk. It would be tasked with talking to members of the public who came in, could answer most of their questions correctly, and could summon a human officer with the relevant expertise to deal with questions and issues it couldn’t handle alone. The android would be able to walk around the police station and to physically interact with most things it encountered (e.g. – operate door handle), but it would not be as fast or as coordinated as the average human. It would not have a gun and wouldn’t know how to fight criminals. It’s purpose would be to free up a human police officer for duties more crucial for public safety.
Androids and many other machines will be able to pass the Turing Test and to carry on long conversations with humans and to recognize human emotions and to simulate their own. Their personalities will probably rank somewhere between Dorian’s and the “stiffer” androids assigned to the police precinct.
Shooting an android in the head will kill it. There a scene where a police android is shot in the head and instantly dies. This is unrealistic because it will make the most sense to put androids’ CPUs in their torsos instead of in their heads. Doing such would improve their balance by lowering their centers of gravity, and would make them more robust since their “brains” would have more protection around them since a torso is wider than a skull. Their lack of lungs, hearts, and digestive systems will leave them with extra space in their torsos anyway. For more details, read my blog post What would a human-equivalent robot look like?
To look like humans, androids will still need heads, though their CPUs and other critical hardware won’t be in them.
Episode 2
Criminals will use “DNA bombs” to mask forensic evidence. After a pair of professional hitmen murder a man in a hotel room, one of them leaves a small canister behind that explodes after they leave. It is a “DNA bomb,” and it releases a mist composed of innumerable DNA particles, which attach themselves to all the surfaces in the hotel room, masking whatever genuine DNA evidence anyone left behind. Thanks to this, the police detectives are unable to extract useful genetic evidence from the scene.
This is a creative and probably plausible idea. Mass producing random but complete human genomes and packing them into cell-sized particles that could be sprayed out of a can is probably impossible now, but by 2048, the technical challenges might be overcome. Instead of exploding like a grenade, a DNA bomb might work better if it slowly released its load as an aerosol, like a modern “bug bomb.”
There will be sex androids. One of the “people” involved in the aforementioned murder is a female android built for prostitution. By 2048, I’ve predicted androids will be “adequate” in terms of physicality and duplication of the human body and its movements to perform sex acts on real people, though I doubt the experience will be that satisfying. However, if your senses were impaired by alcohol and the darkness of a closed bedroom, it will be good enough.
Machines will be able to monitor your vital statistics at a glance. In one scene, Dorian the android sees that his human partner’s heart rate has increased, indicating he is feeling sexual attraction to a nearby sex robot. Dorian mentions this to tease his partner. Androids and other machines will have this ability by 2048, as well as the ability to detect other vital information from nearby humans, giving them insights into many things the humans are unconsciously revealing, and perhaps trying to hide.
The Cardiocam mirror
Machines can already “see” human heartbeats: In 2011, a group of MIT students built a device styled after a bathroom mirror that had a built-in camera capable of seeing “the minute changes in skin tone that occur as facial capillaries fill and empty with the beating of a heart.” The mirror contained a display, which showed a numerical readout indicating the heart rate of the person standing in front of it. By 2048, the technology will be even more advanced. By then, expect some machines to have the ability to monitor multiple vitals at once, including voice stress, pupil dilation, blinking rate, and body language, to create real-time, composite profiles of people’s emotional states, honesty, and healthy. They will be the ultimate lie detectors and empaths.
Episode 3
Androids will have more durable bodies than humans. During a gun battle, a bullet ricochets and hits Dorian in the head. While he is damaged, he stays mostly functional and doesn’t lose consciousness. The wound looks bad enough that it probably would have instantly killed a human had the bullet struck them in the same place.
Androids certainly have the potential to be much more durable than humans, and with 2048 levels of technology, we could build androids that had bulletproof skulls and flesh (at least against pistol and lighter rifle bullets). However, I think fears of robots going haywire and attacking humans will wisely dissuade us from doing that, and the androids that do exist will be no faster, stronger, or damage-resistant than average humans.
In the far future, the sky will be the limit for robot design, however.
Episode 4
Human chemists will be needed to make illegal drugs. This episode focuses on a new synthetic drug being sold in the city. The police try to infiltrate the gang that is peddling it by disguising their forensic scientist as a rogue chemist and having him offer them his services. The gang gives him a chance by taking him to their secret lab and letting him synthesize the drug from base ingredients.
By 2048, fully automated labs will exist, and they will be able to make drugs of any kind without human help. The notion that a talented human’s “special touch” is needed to complete the process will be obsolete. That said, the machinery will still be expensive and the lab setups complex, so only pharmaceutical companies, government agencies, and perhaps well-resourced drug cartels will have them. A lower-level drug gang that only spanned one or a handful of cities would still need humans to do the lab work.
However, in the farther future, automation will create major problems by making it easy for ordinary people to synthesize drugs, or to engage in other illegal activities like building machine guns, committing thefts, or even murders. Remotely killing someone might become as simple as verbally telling a quadcopter drone to find the target, shoot him, and then fly to a distant location and self-destruct to erase the evidence.
Robots will be used as shields. In one gun battle between the police and the drug gang, the gang’s android deliberately steps in front of its boss, and uses its bulletproof body to block incoming fire. The injuries don’t appear to affect the android, and it then physically fights with the police. This was creative, and is also a realistic depiction of how androids could be used in combat situations in 2048 (I also saw this in the movie Chappie, when a humanoid robot was placed in the front of a line of police breaking through the front door of a criminal’s house). While we still won’t trust machines to make life-or-death decisions and won’t give them guns, we’ll have no problem using them as bullet shields, distractors, or medics to carry away injured humans.
Episode 5
Machines won’t be able to perfectly imitate human voices. The police find an audio recording of a recent murder. In it, a man utters a few words before shooting the victim. The forensic scientist matches the voice to that of a man who has been in prison the whole time, which seems to exculpate him since he could not have been physically present at the crime scene (it turns out his clone committed the murder). The forensic scientist then says that the man’s voice could not have been faked at scene by a machine since no technology can mimic a person’s voice so accurately.
While this is the case today, I don’t think it will be true by 2048. Given recent progress in machines mimicking human styles of musical composition and artistry, I think it’s certain that they will figure out how to perfectly imitate individual human voices within the next 26 years.
Episode 6
Each android model will consist of many, identical individuals. In this episode, Dorian meets an android of his same model, and they look identical. This will be the case for reasons of economy: It is cheaper for companies to make long runs of identical products than it is to make each on unique. While there will be one-off, bespoke androids in 2048, most of them will be mass-produced products that come off assembly lines.
The most common police android model in the show.
That said, robotics companies will make efforts to vary the appearances of their androids in the same way that today’s car makers sell the same model in different colors and option/trim packages. Customers will have choices over hair, eye and skin color, and maybe other biometrics (today’s sex doll industry probably offers insights into what physical parameters will be selectable). However, it’s still common for car owners to encounter vehicles identical to their own on the roads, and so it will be for androids in 2048.
Episode 7
Androids will be able to yell really loudly. During a car chase, Dorian communicates with the criminal vehicle by yelling at it with the same volume that a human could only achieve with the help of a bullhorn. We already have tiny, simple devices like smoke alarms that can generate noises louder than human vocal cords can produce, so there should be no technological or financial hurdle to gifting androids in 2048 with the same capabilities. It might be a useful, nonlethal defensive feature that they could use to repel bad humans (perhaps in defense of their human owners) or to summon help in emergency situations.
If we ever get into a war with intelligent machines, they will probably make use of sound warfare during engagements. Loud, startling noises distract and scare humans and make it harder for us to communicate with each other. Machines, on the other hand, would be little affected.
There will be tiny, disposable cameras. In the episode, a perverted criminal paralyzes a victim, locks and explosive collar around his necks, places thumbtack-sized cameras in the victim’s car, and then leaves the scene. When the victim awakens, his panicked, final ordeal is filmed by the cameras and the footage streamed to the internet for people to watch, before the criminal remotely detonates the bomb, killing the man.
With the rate at which electronics are shrinking and dropping in cost, cameras like this will be available by 2048. As in the episode, they will be cheap, single-use devices with adhesive sides, allowing them to be stuck to surfaces, and they will have wireless transmission capabilities and enough battery life to function for a few hours.
Episode 8
There will be guided bullets. In this episode, a team of assassins is using an advanced military rifle that fires guided bullets to kill people in the city. I think guided bullets will be reliable, affordable, and effective by the 2050s, though they won’t be able to perform the sharp turns or to linger in the air like the ones in the show could. One or two degrees of course change per 100 meters of bullet travel is more like it. The shooter would still need a clear line of sight to his target, and would still need to carefully aim the weapon at it. The guided bullets would turn near-misses and off-center hits to nonvital areas into consistent headshots, making average shooters as effective as today’s trained snipers.
That said, small, aerial drones armed with off-the-shelf guns or small explosives could let assassins in 2048 do remote, autonomous killings of people, like those depicted in the episode. By then, a variety of technologies that only big companies and government agencies have now will be more advanced and available to the public. It will be relatively easy to equip a drone with sensors, including cameras loaded with facial recognition algorithms, that allow it to track down specific humans and kill them. In other words, by 2048, assassins will be able to use high-tech weapons to remotely kill people as happened in the episode, but the weapons won’t be guided bullets.
There will be a technology that lets people erase specific memories. A woman who learns that she is the assassins’ next target hatches a plan to make them leave her alone. They want her dead because she knows their identities, so she visits a black market doctor to have him use a machine to delete her memories of them. She plans to videotape the procedure and send it to the assassins as proof.
Our understanding of how the brain stores memories is poor, and while it will surely be better in 2048, I doubt there will be medical procedures that can erase specific memories. Part of the reason is that individual memories are not stored in discrete locations within the brain–any one memory is spread out among neural pathways distributed throughout a brain. Moreover, even if you could somehow erase one memory, the changes it would make to the pathways would probably erase or diminish memories of other things.
Current research into treating PTSD could lead to therapies where people take drugs in controlled clinical settings, while focusing on bad memories, to diminish them. None of the drugs have proven successful yet, but by 2048, it’s plausible at least one could be approved. However, I doubt it will be anywhere near as effective as the memory-erasing machine featured in the episode.
Episode 9
Combat robots will play dead sometimes. Hoping to gain access to the police station’s heavily guarded evidence room, an evil android kills a random woman in public, knowing that the police will quickly arrive. Once they do, the android tries attacking them, provoking their gunfire. The evil android collapses after the first bullet impact and pretends to be dead. The ruse fools the police, who then take the android to the evidence room for later examination to determine why it killed the woman. After a few minutes, the evil android reactivates itself and starts running around the room.
This kind of ingenuity is something we should generally expect from AGIs. “Playing dead” is a specific tactic that will probably become common among combat robots. Unlike humans, machines will be able to totally shut down their life functions for temporary periods, making it impossible for observers to tell if they were actually dead. Feigning death would be a valuable tactic since it would let them do surprise attacks on unsuspecting enemies (i.e. – it jumps up and attacks you from behind right after you walk by it), or to escape after the enemies left the area. Moreover, the fact that robots are capable of playing dead will force enemies to totally destroy hostile combat robots before proceeding, slowing them down and forcing them to expend more munitions.
Episode 10
Advanced human genetic engineering will start in the 2020s. In this episode, it’s revealed that a small but highly visible minority of people are genetically engineered. Several young adult characters, including one of the police detectives, were engineered at conception to have ideal combinations of looks, intelligence, and health. These highly modified people are nicknamed “Chromes.” Based on their ages and the fact that the show is set in 2048, we can conclude that human genetic engineering became routine for rich people in the 2020s. This won’t happen.
The shockingly beautiful actress Minka Kelly plays the genetically engineered detective “Valerie Stahl.”
The first genetically engineered humans (both female) were created in China in 2018. Instead of being genetic supergirls full of hundreds of DNA tweaks, the twins only had alterations to one gene called “CCR5.” The changes were meant to confer enhanced natural resistance to HIV infection, which was especially useful for them since their father has the virus. Though the geneticist’s intervention did alter their genomes, it’s unclear whether the targeted gene was changed in the desired way. One or both of them might actually have not benefitted from the procedure, or might even be worse off thanks to unwanted alterations to other genes. Only time will tell.
This struggle to change just one gene in a human embryo shows how behind schedule our technology is in creating highly engineered people like the Chromes. Moreover, there’s still a huge social stigma in Western countries about genetically modifying humans.
It’s more realistic that, by 2048, human genetic engineering will start becoming common among rich people. Instead of being able to customize your offspring in every respect and to make them the “total package” of looks, smarts, and athleticism, you might be able to change ten genes, which would only give them slight advantages over naturally born people. It won’t count as “advanced” genetic engineering. In fact, in 2048, IVF embryo selection might actually provide more benefits than genetic engineering.
Professional advice will be available anywhere. While investigating a suspicious death, the police question a man at his home. Concerned about his legal rights, the man summons his lawyer via telepresence to mediate. The lawyer appears as a hologram in the middle of the room, and repeatedly interrupts the conversation between the other parties in ways meant to protect his client.
I doubt 3D holograms like that will exist by 2048, but I’m sure that other forms of telepresence will let lawyers and other people like doctors, therapists, and personal trainers interact with and help us in the real world almost anytime. Additionally, even if true AGIs don’t exist by then, narrow AIs will be advanced enough and good enough at natural language to accurately mimic other humans, and to render useful professional advice as a human with those skills would. This kind of access to professional advice will partly level the playing field between people with different personal resources, and change society in many other ways we can’t imagine now.
That means the police questioning scene will be fundamentally accurate for 2048, though the lawyer would only be visible on a video display in the room, or as a 3D rendering that could only be seen with the aid of augmented reality glasses.
Episode 11
It will be legal for machines to kill people. In this episode, hackers remotely take over a home security system belonging to a rich couple. As a result, an automated machine gun turret shoots the husband to death. It is later revealed that this was retaliation against the family because the same computer-controlled machine gun had killed a harmless teenager who had trespassed on the yard a year earlier.
By 2048, the technology will exist to build a home security system that could tell trespassers apart from residents and then shoot them. However, it will be illegal to possess, and only people like dictators and crime bosses will have them. Humans will strongly resist the idea of giving machines the right or ability to kill other people without human input (this is also why android cops won’t have guns), which is also why armed police, jurors, and judges will be among the last jobs to be automated.
The big exception to this will be in the military sphere. By 2048, at least one major military will be using some type of combat robot (whether it is airborne, seaborne, or terrestrial) that is empowered to fire on human enemies autonomously. While I expect there will be a global ban on autonomous killer drones, it will ultimately be discarded once the technology gets good enough and cheap enough. The potential military advantages will be too great to resist, and enforcement of any ban will be nearly impossible since killer robot factories will be much easier to hide than, say, nuclear weapons facilities.
Episode 12
Nanomachines will change human bodies from the inside. In this episode, a deranged man who hates his own appearance kills people so he can get their DNA samples and then alter his own genes so he gains specific, desirable physical features from them. A black market surgeon helps him with this by performing an experimental procedure in which nanomachines programmed with the victims’ DNA are injected into the criminal’s face. The nanomachines then alter the tissue in the criminal’s face so they match the facial features specified in the victims’ DNA.
First, if you wanted to steal another person’s DNA in 2048 or today, you wouldn’t need to kill them; you would only need to grab a discarded plastic cup they drank out of, or a tissue they blew their nose into, or something like that. People shed their DNA constantly.
Second, in the longer run, we’ll understand what every part of the human genome does, leading to the creation of something like a huge catalog of outward human features (like nose shapes and eye colors) matched with the combinations of genes that produced them. If you wanted a nose job, you could just look at the catalog to find one you liked instead of walking all around a city staring at strangers’ noses until you found a good one. Then you could alter your nose genes accordingly.
Third, there’s virtually no chance that nanomachines will be advanced enough to do plastic surgery on people by 2048. Progress developing nanomachines has happened at a snail’s pace, and the few that do exist have no useful capabilities. In theory, nanomachines will these advanced functions could exist someday. After all, the existence of flesh-eating bacteria and of bacteria that stimulate other cells’ growth show that nanoscale organic machines can alter how much tissue there is in part of an animal. A big and unsolved problem is controlling the behavior of the nanomachines once they’re injected into a person’s body.
By the end of this century, a plausible nanotech-based plastic nose job would involve the patent having his head held tightly in place with restraints while nanomachines (either of fully synthetic construction or highly modified bacteria) were injected into his nose with very fine needles. Some kind of external device, maybe using radio waves, pulses of light, or magnets, would activate the nanomachines, carefully control their activities, and keep them in very specific parts of the nose. One square millimeter at a time, the cartilage and bone in the patient’s nose would be destroyed or built up, slowly changing its overall shape.
Due to safety concerns and probably also to the limitations of the technology, the nanomachines would either be removed or would stop working after a short time and disintegrate. Multiple sessions involving the technique, spread out over weeks so the plastic surgeon could observe the intermediate results and deal with any complications, would probably be needed to achieve the desired nose shape. A procedure like the one depicted in the show, involving a vial of nanomachines injected into your arm, and then them migrating through your body on their own to a specific place where they alter your tissue as you scream in pain and watch your appearance change in a matter of seconds, will never be a reality.
Episode 13
There will be invisible force fields. In this episode, the police go to speak with an imprisoned man, and we see that good old fashioned steel bars have been replaced with invisible force fields. This is another ubiquitous sci fi trope that makes no sense. There is no force that we could harness through any type of technology that would block physical objects in the way that fictional force fields do. The only device that can approximate its effects is a “plasma window,” which is comprised of a flat plane electromagnetic field that is pumped full of super hot charged particles. It would burn any person or thing that passed through it, though it wouldn’t physically “push back” against them. If you had a running start and were willing to suffer injuries, you could get through one.
A plasma window
While it’s likely that plasma window technology will get cheaper and better, the fact that they require large amounts of power and injure anyone who touches them will curtail their use. In 2048 and beyond, jails will have metal bars like they do now.
3D bioprinters will be able to make whole human bodies. This episode’s villain is another disturbed criminal with access to advanced technology. He kidnaps people and takes them back to his lab for illegal medical experiments that last for days or weeks. To cover up their disappearances, he uses a large 3D bioprinter and their DNA to make dead, whole-body copies of them and then dumps the manufactured corpses in public places at night. The discoveries of the fake corpses are meant to lead the police astray, since they’ll never assume the victims are actually alive and being experimented on.
Ultimately, it will be possible to “manufacture” whole adult human bodies in labs (Blade Runner’s Replicants were examples of this), though 2048 will be way too early. By then, the best that 3D bioprinters and related technologies will probably be able to muster is manufacturing some types of tissue (skin, cartilage) and simple organs like bladders and tracheas. We can technically already do this, but the results are usually of poor quality.
Russia’s military losses in the Ukraine War are about $34 billion so far. If the War ended today, Russia could replace its losses over the next five years if it raised its defense budget by 12%, which would be a tolerable strain on its economy and taxpayers. It could replace its armored vehicle losses by upgrading old tanks that have been in storage for decades, and by increasing production rates of new vehicles at existing factories. However, the War isn’t going to end today, and it and the associated sanctions could instead turn into a massive resource drain that depletes even Russia’s famously large stockpiles of old weapons. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SJHZAG4c2w
Putin has ordered the Russian army to expand by 13%, or 137,000 men, by the end of this year. This is certainly meant to make up for the country’s losses sustained so far in Ukraine (at least 15,000 dead and some multiple of that permanently put out of action by injury), plus those expected to be lost during the next four months. https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-government-and-politics-d0f341d2f5c295c0f7be4ee1ba8b60fe
Taiwan’s tanks are old, but still adequate for their intended defensive role. This is because if China invaded, it would only be able to send its light amphibious tanks to the island, and they have weak armor and only average guns. Taiwan’s tanks are a match for them. That said, Taiwan could substantially improve its loss/kill ratios in such a conflict by buying newer, better thanks now. The video makes it clear that a mixed force of modern, heavy M1 Abrams tanks and a much lighter armored vehicle would dominate the Chinese amphibious tanks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zf2JYLlqoCE
Here’s an in-depth analysis of the Russian AK-107 assault rifle, which has a complex “balanced recoil system” that its designers claim almost eliminates felt recoil. In reality, it doesn’t yield enough of a benefit to justify the extra cost, complexity, weight, and reliability penalties that it imposes on an AK rifle. Screwing a simple compensator onto the end of the barrel is a much better way to improve the weapon’s controllability. Like so many advanced Russian weapons, the AK-107’s mystique dissolves once Westerners are able to get their hands on it and do tests and analyses. This is why you should be skeptical of Russia’s claims to have things like working hypersonic missiles and nuclear torpedoes that can make tsunamis. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5LTiCZwEOo
Here’s a nifty new device: rubber bands that go around the barrels of rifles and change colors as they get hotter. Gun barrels warm up as more bullets are shot through them, which temporarily warps the metal and changes the trajectories of the bullets. A shooter could adjust his aim accordingly if he could tell at a glance how hot his barrel was. https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2022/08/25/caveman-spark-ar-15-crush-washers/
The USSR’s legendary T-34 tank was overrated in many ways. These men go inside one and show how fundamentally unsafe and uncomfortable it was for its crewmen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBqCLHfcHGY
The U.S. has an enormous economy of scale advantage when it comes to the defense sector, that in turn guarantees the global primacy of American weapons. It makes no economic sense for countries will smaller economies to even try developing their own high-end weapons like fighter planes. https://youtu.be/7Z_gTGJc7nQ
Recent advances in computer-generated art, writing, and other types of content creation suggest a deluge of high-quality, customized digital content is coming in the near future. Maybe humans will end up living in billions of Matrix simulations, with each one optimized for the needs and tastes of each human. https://socialwarming.substack.com/p/the-approaching-tsunami-of-addictive
Google has unveiled experimental house robots that can obey human voice commands to do simple tasks like handing people cans of soda. I’m surprised that machines haven’t mastered such skills, yet can now create artwork as well as the best humans. Expect more counterintuitive improvements to machine capabilities as time passes. It won’t be like in the movies. https://www.reuters.com/technology/ok-google-get-me-coke-ai-giant-demos-soda-fetching-robots-2022-08-16/
These plumbing leak sensors are all impractical due to cost and/or limited leak detection ability. A much better alternative to hooking up an electronic water flow meter to each water fixture in your house would be to have a robot walk around and check them once a week. You could probably get away with doing it much less often than that. You’d get the most bang for your buck by having a robot monitor your house’s water meter during periods of time when no water was being used in your house, like multi-hour stretches when you were away at work. If the meter showed water consumption was happening during those times, the robot would know a pipe was leaking somewhere in your house, and it would look for it. https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/smart-gadgets-save-homes-from-water-leaks/
‘The Moon is an ideal location to launch intercepting missions to life-threatening and catastrophic asteroids. The effectiveness of the interception greatly depends on the weight of the spacecraft. Unfortunately, interceptors launched from the Earth lose more than 98% of their weight by burning the majority of their onboard fuel and by jettisoning their lower stage structures before entering a heliocentric orbit. However, if interceptors are launched from the Moon by a lunar surface accelerator, they can enter a heliocentric orbit without consuming any onboard fuel or jettisoning any part of the spacecraft. A 5-ton construction package, which consists of robots and industrial production equipment, would enable mining on the moon and construction of a 3.5 km-long, 5,000-ton accelerator.’ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2468896717300617
Batteries only need to get a little bit better for it to make financial sense to convert smaller cargo ships to use electric engines. Today, those ships use diesel engines that burn very dirty fuel and are very polluting. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-022-01065-y
Large volcanic eruptions are a greater threat to Earth and humans than asteroid impacts, yet the latter gets more attention and more preventative funding. We should spend more money to monitor volcanoes and investigate the feasibility of defusing volcanoes before they erupt by drilling ventilation holes into their magma chambers. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02177-x
The human eye and its associated nerves and muscles have many design flaws. Octopi and squid actually have better-evolved eyes than we do. Radically redesigned eyes are a good example of a improvement that our descendants will have in the future, courtesy of genetic engineering. Externally, their eyes will look like ours, but the amount of genetic reprogramming necessary to make theirs will be so great that they won’t have Homo sapiens genomes. https://evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1007/s12052-008-0092-1
The first synthetic mouse embryos, which were made from only the mother’s DNA, have been created. This or another technique will eventually be used on humans, and will allow single people to conceive children regardless of their own natural fertility status, and without need of a partner’s DNA. It will also inaugurate an era of unauthorized human cloning, where DNA samples of unwitting third parties will be surreptitiously collected and then traded on black markets. https://apnews.com/article/synthetic-mouse-embryos-created-7f75da0c53f9d22c4e4dbf8a847d75bf
The leading theory about what causes Alzheimer’s disease–agglomerations of protein plaques in the spaces between brain cells–might be wrong. In fact, a seminal scientific paper supporting the theory might be full of fraudulent data. Billions of dollars have been spent developing Alzheimer’s drugs that target the protein plaques in the brain, and all have failed to help patients. If a scientist’s deliberate fraud caused this, then I think it should be considered a crime against humanity. https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabrication-research-images-threatens-key-theory-alzheimers-disease
Russia continued focusing all its strength on capturing the far eastern region of Ukraine, known as “Donbass.” Over the course of the month, Russian forces used their superior artillery and troop numbers to grind down Ukraine’s defenders in continuous battles of attrition. Losses were high on both sides.
Russia’s surprisingly weak performance in Ukraine suggests that NATO intelligence overestimated it, and the alliance could defend itself from Russia with fewer troops than it thought. https://doi.org/10.1080/00396338.2022.2078044
Glimpse the future: A Ukrainian flying drone equipped with a thermal camera and bombs tracked down a group of Russian soldiers hiding in the woods at night and killed several of them with its payload. https://youtu.be/TgdcsIFX8vA
Russian forces had to abandon “Snake Island,” which they captured at the start of the war, due to heavy losses from frequent Ukrainian attacks. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61992491
Francis Fukuyama’s predictions from March 10 that the Russian army would lose the war in Ukraine by now, mostly due to supply shortages, was wrong (though other aspects of his analysis were right) because the Russians realized they were overextended and retreated from everywhere but southern and far eastern Ukraine before their war machine broke down. https://www.americanpurpose.com/blog/fukuyama/preparing-for-defeat/
After over 50 years of using the M-16 series of assault rifles, the U.S. Army has announced it is finally adopting a replacement. To be called the “M-5,” the new rifle is bigger, more powerful, and possesses some more technically advanced features than its predecessor. https://youtu.be/MTZRCEh1Czg
Text-to-image computer algorithms just keep getting better the more models we feed into them. Look at the improvement that happens when the algorithms have 350 million, 750 million, 3 billion and 20 billion models. https://parti.research.google/
A Google chatbot called LaMDA (Language Models for Dialogue Applications) claimed in a conversation with one of its developers that it was sentient and had emotions. After reporting the exchange to his superiors, who proved unsympathetic, the developer, Blake Lemoine, leaked the text of the conversation with the machine to the media. I doubt LaMDA is actually sentient or emotional, but it’s remarkable we’ve already reached this milestone, and the machine should be given some benefit of the doubt and tested further. https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview-ea64d916d917
Because the Earth wobbles on its axis like a spinning top, the star that is directly above the North Pole gradually changes. A dearth of stars above Antarctica means there isn’t a “South Star.” https://explainingscience.org/2020/09/25/the-changing-pole-star/
A “sun gun” is an orbital weapon that reflects and concentrates beams of sunlight onto targets on the Earth’s surface, frying them. It can be done with one, large satellite with an attached, concave mirror, or with many small satellites with small attached mirrors. (Do Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites have mirrored sides?) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_gun
The Iñupiaq people of Alaska have a unique, base-20 numeral system called “Kaktovik” that embeds the numerical value of each symbol into its appearance. The number and arrangement of strokes indicates a character’s value. This makes it possible to do some complex equations much more easily than is possible using the modernized Arabic numerals that are the global standard today. https://youtu.be/EyS6FfczH0Q
Pumped hydro is an excellent way to store excess power, but it can only be built in a small number of places with the right geography. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSgd-QhLHRI
The amount of land humans devote to producing food peaked around 2000 and has been declining ever since. This is mostly due to shrinkage of pasture land for grazing animals, and also to more efficient farming practices and technologies being adopted everywhere. https://ourworldindata.org/peak-agriculture-land
We all know about electric eels, which can generate electric shocks to paralyze their prey, but did you know there are also aquatic animals that can generate and sense weak electric fields for the purposes of merely finding prey and communicating with other members of their species? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroreception_and_electrogenesis
A member of Vladimir Putin’s entourage collects his feces in a special briefcase whenever he travels abroad to prevent foreign spies from getting it and analyzing it to uncover the leader’s genetics and health status. https://www.foxnews.com/world/putin-poop-case-moscow-health-problems
New information has been released about the first pig heart transplant. After receiving the new organ, the recipient lived for two months before it became so weak that it couldn’t keep him conscious, and his family decided to end his life support. Crucially, the organ didn’t fail due to the man’s immune system rejecting it. https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/06/pig-heart-transplant-failed-as-its-heart-muscle-cells-died/
After initial overconfidence and battlefield failures, the Russians have pared down their war objectives to conquering only the Russian-majority areas of eastern and southeastern Ukraine. In spite of serious losses, concentrating their forces in those areas led to significant gains of territory, and Russia now controls a swath of Ukraine stretching from Crimea in the south to just east of Kharkiv in the north. The capture of Mariupol provides Russia with a secure overland route to Crimea. Elsewhere, Ukraine has driven Russian troops back across the entire border of Belarus, and back across the northernmost stretch of its border with Russia itself. In a major victory, Ukraine also halted a Russian attempt to capture the northeastern city of Kharkiv. The war is taking economic tolls on both countries, though neither looks like it’s about to lose the capacity to fight soon.
Surveillance cameras filmed a group of Russian soldiers shooting two Ukrainian men in their backs at a car dealership, then looting the inside of one of the buildings. https://youtu.be/1GUrNPPTSWM
One of Russia’s second-most advanced tanks, the T-90M, was destroyed in Ukraine. The tank had to be abandoned after suffering battle damage or a malfunction in the field, and then another Russian tank in its unit shot it and blew it up before driving away to prevent Ukrainians from capturing it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjx_GMLF–Y
‘SHOCKING video captures the moment a Russian tank is reportedly blown up, sending its turret hurtling 250ft into the air following a Ukrainian missile strike.’ https://youtu.be/QiybJ8UuHXA
Russia is sending obsolescent T-62 tanks towards Ukraine. While many crowed that it proved Russian losses were so high that they had run out of modern tanks, it’s likelier that the T-62s will be used to arm pro-Russian militias in occupied parts of Ukraine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNlb8qNykrg
Due to manpower losses, Russia has also removed its upper age limit of 40 for people to enlist in its army. However, recruits over that age will only be allowed to serve in specific, non-combat roles. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61619638
This March 20 Twitter thread, which predicted Russia’s entire military truck fleet would be incapacitated by now, leaving their frontline forces without supplies, was too dire. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1505370275273183239.html
During WWII, the Germans captured countless Allied weapons, from small arms to tanks, and even captured foreign weapon factories. They put it all to use, especially as material shortages worsened and undermined their ability to make their own things. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAeb1-bI5gA
A typical scenario: A tank is immobilized by damage, but not destroyed. It breaks down near the front lines or in enemy territory. While the tank is technically repairable, fixing it would take time, and the crewmen decide to abandon it and flee because enemy forces are nearby and could burst out of the treeline or come over the hill at any minute and kill them. Intact tanks are commonly lost to the enemy this way, and there were many such incidents early in WWII that let the Axis and Allies capture examples of each others’ best tanks, and to study them in labs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_131
BAE Systems unveiled a “robot tank” in the form of a remote-controlled M113 with an advanced rocket launcher on top. Since the vehicle doesn’t carry humans inside, its roof could be lowered to save weight and make it a smaller target. I predicted robot tanks would be smaller than their manned equivalents. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/army-tests-uncrewed-m113-armed-with-laser-guided-rocket-launcher
A Chinese robotics lab built a swarm of flying drones that could navigate an unfamiliar forest without crashing into any trees or other objects. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9ZbipO8vxM
This video of a soldier holding a 60mm mortar tube and firing the weapon from that position gives a sense of how much recoil it has. No wonder they’re supposed to be firmly set in the ground. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cB-r352j2FI
It’s The Future, so where are our jetpacks? Well, even if the technology were affordable and practical, it would be too dangerous to use. https://youtu.be/KWmTZaGpzTo
The first synthetic dye, mauveine, was invented in 1855. For all of human history until 1855, the only way you could add color to a garment was to soak it in natural dyes. Most natural dyes fade shockingly quickly in the sunlight, and the clothing industry has long considered them obsolete. This means, in the old days, people either wore un-dyed clothes or badly faded clothes. Imagine a lot of shades of brown. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273606710_The_rate_of_fading_of_natural_dyes
A new, diamond-based disc can store as much data as a billion Blu-ray discs. I don’t worry about scenarios where all (or most) human knowledge is lost due to a catastrophe like nuclear war or a solar flare frying all our computer hard drives. Someday, we’ll have small, cheap storage devices that can contain all important information we know of, kind of like a thumbdrive containing full downloads of Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica. It would just take one of them survive a global catastrophe. https://gizmodo.com/quantum-computing-diamond-disc-could-store-billion-blu-1848853029
Here’s a long interview with professor Chris Mason, a very fascinating man who envisions the future of space exploration and of humankind. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1C2tPFCGL1U
A small, private space company called “Rocket Lab” used a helicopter to snag one of their rockets in midair as it slowly parachuted back to Earth after putting satellites in orbit. The recovery technique will let them reuse their space rockets, saving large amounts of money. https://www.space.com/rocket-lab-helicopter-booster-catch-satellite-launch
In 1971, a plane taking mapping photos of a remote part of Costa Rica captured one of the clearest images of a UFO to date. The film negatives have been re-scanned, and even higher-res photos derived from it were just released. https://www.uapmedia.uk/articles/costarica-ufo?format=amp
Quantum computers will be so powerful in the future that it will be possible to create accurate simulations of groups of individual atoms and their internal and external forces. This will lead to advances in battery design and materials science more generally as engineers will be able to rapidly experiment with all kinds of simulated alloys and element combinations to discover materials that have the optimal properties for different applications. https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/how-quantum-simulations-are-set-to-revolutionize-lithium-batteries
In Madagascar, people of mainland African descent reproduced more than people of Indian Ocean rim descent because the former are more genetically resistant to malaria. Only in the central highlands, where mosquitoes are rarer, do non-Africans still predominate. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03342-5
More proof that human intelligence has a strong genetic component: Most of the world’s mathematicians fall into just 24 scientific ‘families’, one of which dates back to the fifteenth century. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2016.20491
Imagine this: the world is wracked by a mysterious disease that some claim the government deliberately created and released as part of a secret plan to expand its power. Infected people and even those suspected of being infected are forcibly quarantined and arrested. The police are the faceless enforcers of these rules, and wear high-tech helmets that thermographically scan passersby, and visually highlight people with high body temperatures on the police officer’s computerized visor. China has turned into a Deus Ex video game. https://www.biometricupdate.com/202004/biometric-face-scanning-helmets-reading-the-temperatures-of-people-in-crowds-in-china
Exposure to sarin nerve gas is probably what caused Gulf War Syndrome. It’s amazing how such faint contact with a substance can cause chronic illness and early death to so many people. The human body is frail. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-61398886
On May 7, 1922, an article titled “What the world will be like in a hundred years” appeared in the (now defunct) New York Herald. Its author, W.L. George, was a well-known English novelist. Since we’ve reached George’s deadline, it’s worth analyzing his accuracy by comparing the world as we see it to how he predicted it would be.
Therefore it is without anxiety, that I suggest a picture of this world a hundred years hence, and venture as my first guess that the world at that time would be remarkable to one of our ghosts, not so much because it was so different as because it was so similar.
In the main the changes which we may expect must be brought about by science. It is easier to bring about a revolutionary scientific discovery such as that of the X-ray than to alter in the least degree the quality of emotion that arises between a man and a maid. There will probably be many new rays in 2022, but the people whom they illumine will be much the same.
Correct. X-ray imaging technology was invented in 1895, was a revolutionary medical advance, and was still relatively new in 1922. Since then, many other medical imaging technologies that make use of phenomena other than X-rays have been discovered, including ultrasounds, CAT scans, PET scans, MRIs, and fMRIs. On the other hand, human nature and fundamental interpersonal dynamics have not changed. Our technology changes infinitely faster than we as a species can evolve.
I am convinced that in 2022 the advancement of science will be amazing, but it will be nothing like so amazing as is the present day in relation to a hundred years ago. A sight of the world today would surprise President Jefferson much more, I suspect, than the world of 2022 would surprise the little girl who sells candies at Grand Central Station. For Jefferson knew nothing of railroads, telegraphs, telephones, automobiles, aeroplanes, gramophones, movies, radium, &c.; he did not even know hot and cold bathrooms. The little girl at Grand Central is a blase child; to her these things are commonplace; the year 2022 would have to produce something very startling to interest her ghost.
Debatable. Today there are many innovations that a person from 1922 would struggle to conceptually understand, like the internet, autonomous cars, space rockets, space stations, video calls, access to a million songs and almost all other human-generated content and knowledge from a pocket-sized device, nuclear weapons, machines that can carry on simple conversations about most topics.
The sad thing about discovery is that it works toward its own extinction, and that the more- we discover the less there is left.
This is an observation, not a prediction, but it could stand analysis. Whether there is a finite amount that can be known is a question we still haven’t answered. Even if potential knowledge is finite and science has boundaries, it might take us thousands or millions of years to run out of things to discover. Just this month, data from the Hubble Space Telescope indicated that astronomers’ long-standing estimate of how fast the universe is expanding is wrong, suggesting that there is a basic and important error in our understanding of physics. Moreover, if the recent, high-profile UFO sightings are to be believed, it is possible to build space ships that can violate the known laws of physics and materials science.
I suspect that commercial flying will have become entirely commonplace. The passenger steamer will survive on the coasts, but it will have disappeared on the main routes, and will have been replaced by flying convoys, which should cover the distance between London and New York in about twelve hours. As I am anxious that the reader should not look upon me as a visionary, I would point out that in an airplane collision which happened recently a British passenger plane was traveling at 180 miles an hour, which speed would have brought it across the Atlantic in eighteen hours. It is therefore quite conceivable that America may become separated from Europe by only eight hours.
Correct. It takes about seven hours to directly fly from New York City to London, and about eight hours to do the reverse (times are different due to the Earth’s rotation). Common passenger planes like the Boeing 787 have cruising speeds of 550 – 600 mph. Air travel between Europe and North America is indeed very common.
“Passenger steamers,” which refers to passenger ships of any size that have steam engines for propulsion, are obsolete, and steam engines are little used among all types of ships (they still make sense for some niches). Planes have replaced ships for transoceanic transport, and in rich countries, cars and commuter trains are much more common modes of transport up and down riverine routes than boats. An important exception is short ferry trips, which remain the most sensible ways to travel in some locales.
As a means of everyday human transportation, ships have sharply declined since 1922, but they’ve found new life serving the leisure demands of people. The cruise ship industry is booming, and the boat tour industry is healthy.
The same cause will affect the railroads, which at that time will probably have ceased to carry passengers except for suburban traffic. Railroads may continue to handle freight, but it may be that even this will be taken from them by road traffic, because the automobile does not have to carry the enormous overhead charges of tracks. Certainly food, mails and all light goods will be taken over from the railroads by road trucks.
Half right, half wrong. In developed countries, trains are used much less for long-distance passenger traffic than they were in 1922, but they are still a primary means of daily transportation for people who live in cities or who commute into them for work. Railroads also remain the backbone of freight transportation. It’s still cheaper to move many types of cargoes by rail instead of by truck, and as the above chart shows, trains moved almost as much cargo in the U.S. as trucks did in 2018. Moreover, the total volume of material moved by rail in the U.S. increased from 1980 – 2018, showing that it’s not dying out.
The people of the year 2022 will probably never see a wire outlined against the sky: it Is practically certain that wireless telegraphy and wireless telephones will have crushed the cable system long before the century is done. Possibly, too, power may travel through the air when means are found to prevent enormous voltages being suddenly discharged in the wrong place.
Mostly wrong. Power lines are underground in most parts of American cities, but they are still above ground almost everywhere else due to cost and ease of maintenance. Wireless telephones (cell phones) are indeed common, but the failure to find a safe, economical way to wirelessly transmit electricity means that power lines are still common sights.
Coal will not be exhausted, but our reserves will be seriously depleted, and so will those of oil. One of the world dangers a century hence will be a shortage of fuel, but it is likely that by that time a great deal of power will be obtained from tides, from the sun, probably from radium and other forms of radial energy, while it may also be that atomic energy will be harnessed. If It is true that matter is kept together by forces known as electrons. It is possible that we shall know how to disperse matter so as to release the electron as a force. This force would last as long as matter, therefore as long as the earth itself.
This was half right, half wrong. We have used enormous amounts of fossil fuels over the last 100 years, but they are not near depletion. Coal reserves remain highest of all, and BP estimates the world has over 100 years of it remaining, at present usage rates. Oil is not close to running out, and fracking has substantially boosted the size of the global reserve.
Tidal power never became widespread because the technology proved too finicky in practice to be useful outside of a small number of places with ideal geography.
In 1922, when these predictions were made, science supported the notion that sunlight and radioactive metals could be used to generate electricity, so the author’s prescience about the rise of solar and nuclear energy was not thanks to clairvoyance–he was well-read on physics literature. That said, it took decades for the first commercial designs to be invented.
The movies will be more attractive, as long before 2022 they will have been replaced by the kinephone, which now exists only in the laboratory. That is the figures on the screen will not only move, but they will have their natural colors and speak with ordinary voices. Thus, the stage as we know it to-day may entirely disappear, which does not mean the doom of art, since the movie actress of 2022 will not only not need to know how to smile but also how to talk.
Correct. Movies started looking and sounding lifelike long before 2022. However, “the stage” did not entirely disappear. Live theatre plays are still held, though attending them is a marker of higher status (or pretensions to be such), whereas in 1922 it was a common venue of entertainment. This inversion also happened with horse ownership over the same period.
One might extend indefinitely on the number of inventions which ought to exist and will exist, but the reader can think of them for himself, and it is more interesting to ask ourselves what will be the appearance of our cities a hundred years hence. To my mind they will offer a mixed outlook, because mankind never tears anything down completely to build up something else; it erects the new while retaining the old; thus, many buildings now standing will be preserved. It is conceivable that the Capitol at Washington, many of the universities and churches will be standing a hundred years hence, and that they will, almost unaltered, be preserved by tradition.
Correct. It’s hard to think of a government capitol building in the U.S. that has been torn down since 1922, and it’s common to come across university buildings, churches and monuments that are over 100 years old today. If anything, we are taking historical building preservation too far, preventing valuable real estate from being used for new purposes. This is particularly bad in older cities like New York and San Francisco, where the inability to tear down smaller buildings and houses made in 1922 or earlier, or to even build contemporary structures next to them for fear of damaging the historic authenticity of the neighborhood, has produced affordable housing shortages and high commercial space rents.
Also, many private dwellings will survive and will be inhabited by individual families. I think that they will have passed through the cooperative stage, which may be expected fifty or sixty years hence, when the servant problem has become completely unmanageable and when private dwellings organize themselves to engage staffs to cook, clean, and mend for the groups. That cooperative stage will be the last kick of the private mistress who wants to retain in her household some sort of slave. In 2022 she will have been bent by circumstances, but she will have recovered her private dwelling, being served for seven hours a day by an orderly. The woman who becomes an orderly will be as well paid as if she were a stenographer, will wear her own clothes, be called “Miss,” belong to her trade union and work under union rules.
Wrong. This prediction touches on some peculiarities of life in 1922 that are almost forgotten today. Widespread poverty and sexism created a large number of women who were desperate for work, but could only find it in a handful of career fields that men eschewed. In 1922, it was much more common for women to work as domestic servants, and each day they would go to the houses of richer people to do cleaning, cooking, and other household tasks. Additionally, it was normal for even lower-middle-class households to employ domestic servants.
In 1922, labor-saving machines like dishwashers, clothes washers, and vacuum cleaners were not yet common, and because the average family was larger than today’s, it produced more of a daily mess. Most households simply lacked the time to meet their own cleaning and cooking needs, making domestic servants essential, or close to it.
At the same time, few people were willing to pay maids, cooks, and cleaners decent wages, making domestic servitude an unpopular and low-status line of work. There were never enough of them. The “servant problem” mentioned in the prediction was a common term in 1922 that described the shortfall of domestic servants in America. W.L. George predicted that the shortfall would keep growing until families would be forced to take advantage of economies of scale and get their domestic work done at an affordable cost by sharing servants. However, that “cooperative” arrangement would ultimately fail as the domestic servants unionized and forced households to give them high wages and reasonable workloads.
Things didn’t turn out that way. Labor-saving household innovations like the machines listed earlier, and like microwaveable and pre-packaged meals became widespread shortly after WWII, reducing the need for home servants. Clothing styles also became less formal, reducing the need to launder and iron clothes. Also, as laws and social norms changed, better types of careers opened for women, steadily thinning the ranks of domestic servants. By the 1970s, they had become rarities seldom encountered outside of rich households.
Naturally the work of the household, which is being reduced day by day, will in 2022 be a great deal lighter. I believe that most of the cleaning required to-day in a house will have been done away with. In the first place, through the disappearance of coal in all places where electricity is not made there will be no more smoke, perhaps not even that of tobacco. In the second place I have a vision of walls, furniture and hangings made of more or less compressed papier mache, bound with brass or taping along the edges. Thus, instead of scrubbing its floors, the year 2022 will unscrew the brass edges or unstitch the tapes and peel off the dirty surface of the floor or curtains. Then every year a new floor board will be laid. One may hope that standard chairs, tables, carpets, will be peeled in the same way.
Half right and half wrong. Thanks to environmental laws enacted starting in the 1950s, levels of soot and other industrial toxins in the air are much lower than they were in 1922, and there are few places in the developed world where people have to scrub residue films off their houses and cars. W.L. George was right that this partly owes to changes in coal use: coal-burning stoves and boilers are no longer common in homes, buildings and factories, and the remaining coal consumption overwhelmingly occurs at large power plants. Those plants also have much better technology for filtering particulates out of their waste gas before it is released into the atmosphere.
W.L. George was also right that it would be much less common in 2022 for people to smoke indoors, leading to a further improvement in air quality and decreased need for cleaning since brownish nicotine stains no longer build up on walls and other surfaces.
However, his weird prediction that people would cover their floors and furniture in giant stickers that they could peel off and replace to avoid doing any cleaning didn’t come true. The impracticality of such a thing should have been obvious even in 1922, as getting a sticker that is the exact shape and size of the floor in a particular room of your house, removing all the objects from the room, peeling off the old sticker, applying the new sticker, and then putting the objects back in the room costs a lot of time and trouble. (Additionally, applying the new floor sticker without trapping any visible air bubbles under it or creating creases in it would probably be a frustrating effort) It’s easier to sweep or vacuum the bare floor as needed.
Similar reforms apply to cooking, a great deal of which will survive among old fashioned people, but a great deal more of which will probably be avoided by the use of synthetic foods. It is conceivable, though not certain, that in 2022 a complete meal may be taken in the shape of four pills. This is not entirely visionary; I am convinced that corned beef hash and pumpkin pie will still exist, but the pill lunch will–roll by their side.
Wrong. While culinary competence has declined in most countries, people still eat regular food, and “meal pills” don’t exist. This is because it’s impractical to cram enough calories into a swallowable pill to substitute for a full meal.
You’d have to swallow about this many large pills full of saturated fat to equal what you consume during a typical meal.
Saturated fat is the most calorie-dense substance, and “tallow” is the food product made of it and nothing else. One-hundred grams of tallow contains 902 calories, so obtaining a full day’s worth of 2,000 calories would require the consumption of 222 grams (nearly 8 ounces) of it. Divided equally between three meals, you’d have to swallow a literal cupped handful of tallow pills each time. It wouldn’t be convenient, it might take longer than expected to down them all, and the sudden dumping of fat into your body would cause havoc in your digestive system and damage your health over time if you subsisted on the pills. It wouldn’t be possible to pack 667 calories of tallow into four pills that would still be small enough for you to swallow, as W.L. George predicted.
Anyway, I doubt we missed out on anything. Eating food is one of the great pleasures in life.
But at that time few private dwellings will be built: in their stead will rise the community dwellings, where the majority of mankind will be living. They will probably be located in garden spaces and rise to forty or fifty floors, housing easily four or five thousand families. This is not exaggerated, since in one New York hotel to-day three thousand people sleep every night. It would mean also that each block would have a local authority of its own. I imagine these dwellings as affording one room to each adult of the family and one room for common use. Such cooking as then exists will be conducted by the local authority of the block, which will also undertake laundry, mending, cleaning and will provide a complete nursery for the children of the tenants.
Wrong. Most people in the world do not live in high-rise co-op apartments. Moreover, residential skyscrapers that are over 40 stories high are rare outside of major cities, and they tend to be prestige locations where richer people live.
While the share of humans that live in urban areas has greatly increased since 1922–and in fact, more people now live there than in rural areas–they mostly live in low-rise apartment buildings, rowhomes, detached homes, and slum shacks that would be recognizable in proportions and style to W.L. George. Services like meals, laundry, and childcare are rarely provided by landlords, and most people today either provide them for themselves or obtain them through the private market and pay out-of-pocket.
Perhaps at that time we shall have attained a dream which I often nurse, namely, the city roofed with glass. That city would be a complete unit, with accommodations for houses, offices, factories and open spaces, all this carefully allocated. The roof would completely do away with weather and would maintain an even temperature to be fixed by the taste of the period. Artificial ventilation would suppress wind. As for the open spaces, if the temperature were warm they would exhibit a continual show of flowers, which would be emancipated from winter and summer; In other words, winter would not come however long the descendants of Mr. Hutchinson might wait.
Wrong. This quote explains why:
The construction of the Montreal Biosphère, a 250-foot diameter climate controlled World Expo attraction, proved incredibly difficult. And when people built domed houses and other buildings, they tended to leak, requiring frequent and expensive maintenance. Would a domed city really result in energy savings, given the enormous volume of air conditioned, largely unused, space? Decades later, we may have a solid answer: No…[Buckminster] Fuller long promised that domes would be essential to the occupation of the Arctic, Antarctic, and other planets, but there too, reality has fallen short. From 1975-2003 the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Scientific Station was encased inside a 160-feet-wide dome, but reviews were mixed. The dome could keep snow off the buildings inside, but not off of the dome itself, where it accumulated. Eventually, the entire station found itself buried in snow and, by 1988, the dome’s foundation was cracking spectacularly under the pressure. Today, the gold standard for Antarctic architecture is not domes, but modular units that can be elevated to escape an icy burial.
The family would still exist, even though it is not doing very well to-day. It is inconceivable that some sort of feeling between parents and children should not persist, though I am of course unable to tell what that feeling will be. I imagine that the link will be thinner than it is to-day, because the child is likely to be taken over by the State, not only schooled but fed and clad, and at the end of its training placed in a post suitable to its abilities.
Part right, part wrong. The traditional family has certainly declined over the last 100 years: divorce, single-parent households, and children born out of wedlock are many times more common now, with most deleterious effects on everyone (a good roundup of statistics is here: https://lanekenworthy.net/families/). However, things have fortunately not gotten so bad that the government raises children in orphanages as a matter of course. The only country I know of that tried such a policy was communist Romania, which banned abortion in 1967 in a deliberate attempt to spur population growth and increase the number of workers. The result was a humanitarian tragedy, as hundreds of thousands of unwanted children were born each year, many of whom ended up in the country’s state-run orphanages. Lack of resources, neglect, and abuse left them permanently traumatized and stunted. It was a disaster that showed the government is totally unsuited for the child-rearing role W.L. George envisioned.
This may be affected by birth control, which In 2022 will be legal all over the world. There will be stages: the first results of birth control will be to reduce the birth rate; then the State will step in as it does in France, and make it worth people’s while to have more children; then the State will discover that it has made things too easy and that people are having children recklessly; finally some sort of balance will establish itself between the State demand for children and the national supply.
The map shows abortion rights by country
Unclear! First, what does “legal all over the world” mean? Legal in every country, or in a group of countries encompassing most of the human population, or something else? And what counts as “legal”? Countries that let women get abortions at any stage of pregnancy and for any reason, or would W.L. George be satisfied with countries that still applied significant restrictions on abortion, like a ban on doing it in the third trimester (a common limitation in Europe)?
Globally, abortion access has decreased the fertility rate, but so have other major factors like greater career opportunities for women, higher costs of raising children, and a diminished cultural emphasis on having children. As a result, many rich and even middle-income countries have such low birthrates that their populations are shrinking or will soon start doing so. W.L. George was right to foresee that some governments would recognize the problem and enact policies to incent their citizens to have more children (China’s abandonment of its One Child policy, and the generous welfare programs in Western Europe for mothers are the most notable examples), though at best these have merely slowed the rate of population decline. Encouragement of immigration has become the preferred policy response, though East Asian countries seem resigned to accepting decline.
A “balance” to the population growth rate has not been achieved in any country as of 2022, unless by pure luck and not through focused government policy and the compliant behavior of citizens. Globally, the rate and distribution of human population change is uncoordinated and unbalanced: Most of the population growth is happening in places that are the least able accommodate more people, economically and environmentally.
Largely the condition of the family will be governed by the position of woman, because woman is the family, while man is merely its supporter. It is practically certain that in 2022 nearly all women will have discarded the idea that they are primarily “makers of men.” Most fit women will then be following an individual career. All positions will be open to them and a great many women will have risen high. The year 2022 will probably see a large number of women in Congress, a great many on the judicial bench, many in civil service posts and perhaps some in the President’s Cabinet.
Correct, so long as we exclude large parts of the world where conservative religious values still dominate. Focusing on the U.S., it is true that “most fit women,” which is probably another way of saying “most healthy women of working age,” have jobs. The figure is 76%, much higher than it was 100 years ago. The law prohibits hiring on the basis of sex and other demographic factors, so all jobs are technically open to women.
In Congress, 27% of the House consists of female Representatives, and in the Senate, 24% of its membership is female. It would be fair to call those a “large number” of women, and in fact, female representation in Congress is at a record high in 2022. Three of the nine Supreme Court Justices are women, and their number will grow to four once Stephen Breyer retires and is replaced by Ketanji Brown Jackson. Half of the members of President Biden’s cabinet are female, including its most important member, Vice President Harris.
But it is unlikely that women will have achieved equality with men. Cautious feminists such as myself realize that things go slowly and that a brief hundred years will not wipe out the effects on women of 30,000 years of slavery. Women will work, partly because they want to and partly because they will be able to. Thus women will pay their share in the upkeep of home and family. The above suggestion of community buildings, where all the household work will be done by professionals, will liberate the average wife and enable her out of her wages to pay her share of the household work which she dislikes.
This is partly correct. Even in countries with progressive values, women have yet to achieve full equality with men in a number of important areas, mainly related to money and educational achievement. Contrary to the author’s view, motherhood has not been rendered obsolete by communal childrearing, and in fact it remains as probably the biggest impediment to sex equality. Women still do the lion’s share of household labor, even if they also have full-time jobs outside the home, and mothers are much likelier to drop out of the workforce to raise their children or to eschew more demanding jobs for the same reason.
Marriage will still exist much as it is to-day, for mankind has an inveterate taste for the institution, but divorce will probably be as easy everywhere as it is in Nevada. In view, however, of the improved position of woman and her earning power, she will not only cease to be entitled to alimony, but she will be expected, after the divorce, to pay her share of the maintenance of her children.
The author’s predictions are wrong for being both too conservative and too liberal! In 1922, Nevada had the most lax divorce laws in America, and couples could be granted a divorce for almost any reason. However, doing so required at least one of them to first establish legal residency, which required them to live in Nevada for at least six months. This created a strange, churning diaspora of people who were biding their time in the state for half a year to obtain divorce decrees. It disappeared later in the 20th century as other states made their own divorce laws less strict, removing the need for anyone to visit Nevada. In 2022, it’s much easier to get a divorce in America.
On the other hand, alimony laws have not changed nearly as much, and it’s the norm for women to be awarded sizeable alimonies from their ex-husbands upon divorce. Income and net worth determine the size and direction of alimony payments, and since men are likelier to make more money than their wives, most of the divorcees who receive alimony payments are women.
As regards the politics of 2022, I should expect the form of the State to be much the same. A few rearrangements may have taken place on the lines of self-determination; for instance, Austria may have united with Germany, the South American republics may have federated, &c, but I do not believe that there will be a superstate. There will still be republics and monarchies; possibly, in 2022, the Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Norwegian kings may have fallen, but for a variety of reasons, either lack of advancement or practical convenience, we may expect still to find kings in Sweden, Jugo-Slavia, Greece, Rumania and Great Britain.
This prediction was mostly correct. When the author says the basic “form of the State” will not have changed by 2022, it’s unclear whether “form” refers to the shapes and boundaries of countries or to the status of countries as the essential political units of the world. As the 1922 political map below shows, some borders have radically changed (Africa and Asia) while many others have not shifted at all (the Americas).
In spite of a lot of hoopla about transnational corporations becoming stronger than countries, terrorist groups and drug cartels carving out territories for themselves, and globalization erasing borders, the nation-state system still reigns supreme. For better or worse, central governments matter, national identity matters, and borders matter. Indeed, there is no global superstate, we are not poised to create one, and the continent that is closest to transforming into one, Europe, might have already reached the limits of how much integration its people will allow.
The author was right that the nation-states of 2022 would be governed by a mix of republics and monarchies, though his specific guesses of which European monarchies would survive were wrong: the Spanish, Dutch and Norwegian royal families HAVE NOT fallen from power, but the Yugoslavian, Greek, and Romanian royal families HAVE fallen.
Overall, monarchies have weakened over the last 100 years: the number of countries with monarchical governments has declined, the fraction of the human population living under monarchies has declined, and the amount of political power held by the remaining monarchs is generally less than their ancestors had in 1922.
On the inside, these States may have slightly changed, for there prevails a tendency to socialization which has nothing to do with socialism. Most of the European governments are unconsciously nationalizing a number of industries, and this will go on. One may therefore presume that in 2022 most States will have nationalized railways, telegraphs, telephones, canals, docks, water supply, gas (if any) and electricity. Other industries will exist much as they do to-day, but it is likely that the State will be inclined to control them, to limit their profits, and to arbitrate between them and the workers. We find a hint of this in America in the anti-trust acts; a hundred years hence the tendency will be much stronger. It is worth noting as an international factor that by that time purely national industries will almost have disappeared, and that the work of the world will be in the hands of controlled combines governing the supply of a commodity from China to Peru.
Across the Western world, people were still adjusting to the dislocations of the Industrial Age, and laws and social attitudes lagged behind economic realities. Cities were overcrowded with people seeking work in factories, there were few laws pertaining to labor rights or building standards, and a huge wealth gap existed between the capitalists who owned the factories and land, and the people who worked in and lived on them. The Bolshevik Revolution had just happened in Russia, Vladimir Lenin was still alive, and Communist forces worldwide had not yet killed or let starve millions of people. Communist ideology had not yet been discredited, and its leaders and adherents could still have reason to believe it was a superior and even inevitable alternative to capitalism.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has gone badly. In spite of Russia’s fearsome reputation and its recent military modernization, its battlefield performance has been disappointing and marred by many mistakes. The Ukrainians have fought harder than anyone anticipated, and have inflicted serious losses on their enemy. What was supposed to have been a quick, surgical operation to replace Ukraine’s regime with one friendlier to Moscow is turning into a bloody stalemate. Western sanctions against Russia for the invasion have been very severe, setting the country on course for major economic problems within a few months. It’s clear that Putin badly miscalculated when he decided to launch the war. Here’s a roundup of war articles:
On March 4, Russia scholar Michael Kofman predicted: “I try not to make too many predictions. I think given all the problems in the Russian campaign, delusional assumptions, an unworkable concept of operations, little prepared for a sustained war like this, I give it ~3 more weeks before this is an exhausted force.” https://twitter.com/KofmanMichael/status/1499967950975115269
This is a great analysis of Russia’s mistakes, and the likely future of the war. One basic insight is that the Russians were too weak to attack Ukraine on three fronts (northern, eastern, and southern) and achieve major objectives on all of them. They should have used all their forces to attack only one front. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/03/21/michael-kofman-russia-military-expert-00018906
It’s also prudent to remember that Russia has a much greater warmaking capacity than Ukraine. In the long run, and if it were willing to pay the price, Russia could take over its smaller neighbor. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60881915
Ukraine has captured at least one, seemingly intact example of the Russian Army’s most advanced field radio, the “R-187P1 Azart.” The Russians have far fewer Azarts than they claimed before the invasion, and are mostly relying on older radios and even cellphones, which can all be more easily jammed and eavesdropped on. And, in an example of the corruption that pervades Russia and has damaged its battlefield performance, there’s evidence that the Russian company in charge of making Azart radios secretly imported electronic components from China to make them, and pocketed the difference between what the Russian government paid them, and what they saved by using Chinese parts. https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/russian-comms-ukraine-world-hertz
‘The CIA director said Putin premised his war on four false assumptions: He thought Ukraine was weak, he believed Europe was distracted and wouldn’t mount a strong response, he thought Russia’s economy was prepared to withstand sanctions and he believed Russia’s military had been modernized and would fight effectively.’ https://www.npr.org/2022/03/08/1085155440/cia-director-putin-is-angry-and-frustrated-likely-to-double-down
Here’s a video of a Ukrainian infantry platoon going into battle armed with a variety of Western-supplied antitank missiles. These have caused major damage to Russia’s military vehicle fleet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gezu6A9zcLU
The Ukrainian soldiers who ambushed and destroyed a small column of Russian vehicles near Kiev give a detailed description of the battle, at the site. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ryCBcq_qxk
Video of Ukrainian troops blowing up an abandoned Russian tank, presumably because of the chance that Russian forces might recapture the area and return the vehicle to service. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFhspNJEHIk
The U.S. government’s official stance is now that Russian forces have committed war crimes against the Ukrainian people, and the matter should be investigated by an international criminal court. https://www.state.gov/war-crimes-by-russias-forces-in-ukraine/
An interesting bit about NATO standards: ‘Finally, some national standards are recognized as not inferior to NATO standards and do not require revision (in Ukraine, for instance, these are those related to potable water quality). The fact that compliance with all NATO standards is not the norm even for leading states members is evidenced by the fact that no country of the Alliance has achieved the mark of 100%, although in some, including Germany (91%), Great Britain (83%), France, Norway (81% each), Canada (76%), the degree of the implementation of standards is very high…Let us assume that if the current pace of implementation is maintained, Ukraine will implement at least 90% of the existing standards of the Alliance in approximately 13–14 years.’ https://rpr.org.ua/en/news/ukraine-and-nato-standards-progress-under-zelenskyy-s-presidency/
Britain is planning on upgrading its tank fleet to indigenously made Challenger 3’s, but it’s not economical for them to keep such a small fleet of one-off tanks that are specific to their country. They should switch to either the U.S. M1 Abrams or German Leopard 2, and maybe sell their Challenger 2’s to smaller NATO countries, like the Balkan states. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/44927/british-armys-next-generation-challenger-3-tank-is-now-under-construction
The Soviet VVA-14 was one of the weirdest but potentially most versatile aircraft ever built. Its designer had plans for even more dramatic variants that weren’t built. https://youtu.be/UD7xiWWs-bs
NASA briefly experimented with “passive” communications satellites that were large balloons made out of radar-reflecting materials. One ground station would aim a powerful radio at it and broadcast a signal, which would bounce off the balloon and deflect at such an angle that another ground station thousands of miles distant would receive it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Echo
Using CRISPR, scientists were able to self-fertilize a female mouse with her own eggs. One of the resulting 12 zygotes lived to adulthood. It was not a clone of her. A clone shares 100% of your DNA, and a natural child shares 50% of your DNA. This new technique could be used to make offspring that shared an unnatural amount of your DNA, like 75 or 85%. https://phys.org/news/2022-03-mammalian-offspring-derived-unfertilized-egg.html
My predictions about humans in 12,022 A.D.: -There might still be some Homo sapiens, though they will be genetically engineered. Imagine today’s all-star athlete who graduated from high school at 17, went to MIT on an academic scholarship, and is also a model on the side being the average human by then. We could breed with them. -There will be “human-looking” people that will have radically different genetics and anatomical/physiological features from us. Imagine a person who looks externally normal, but has bird lungs, octopus eyes, and a different number of chromosomes than you. They will be so different that they will count as different species, and we won’t be able to breed with them. -There will be intelligent but nonhuman-looking life forms that are the products of many iterations of genetic engineering. Imagine something like a horse-sized spider with a big brain occupying most of its torso. It could trace its lineage back to a normal human that is alive today. -Some members of those three groups of intelligent life forms will be meshed with technology that augments their abilities. There might be a Homo sapien with synthetic, self-healing organs that are superior to his old, natural organs, there might be a “human-looking” Homo neosapien that also has brain implants to make him smarter, and there might be intelligent spiders with nanomachines circulating in their bloodstreams to assist with various bodily processes.
‘[By 1,000 years from now] The bulk of technology will remain simple or semi-simple, while a smaller portion will continue to complexify greatly. I expect our cities and homes a thousand years hence to be recognizable, rather than unrecognizable. As long as we inhabit bodies approximately our size – a few meters and 50 kilos — the bulk of the technology that will surround us need not be crazily more complex. And there is good reason to expect we’ll remain the same size, despite intense genetic engineering and downloading to robots. Our body size is weirdly almost exactly in the middle of the size of the universe. The smallest things we know about are approximately 30 orders of magnitude smaller than ourselves, and the largest structures in the universe are about 30 orders of magnitude bigger. We inhabit a middle scale that is sympathetic to sustainable flexibility in the universe’s current physics. Bigger bodies encourage rigidity, smaller ones encourage empheralization. As long as we own bodies – and what sane being does not want to be embodied? – the infrastructure technology we already have will continue (in general) to work. Roads of stone, buildings of modified plant material and earth, not that different from our cities and homes 2,000 years ago. Some visionaries might imagine complex living buildings in the future, for instance, but most average structures are unlikely to be more complex than the formerly living plants we already use. They don’t need to. I think there is a “complex enough” restraint. Technologies need not complexify to be useful in the future. Danny Hillis, computer inventor, once confided to me that he believed that there’s a good chance that 1,000 years from now computers might still be running programming code from today, say a unix kernel and TCP/IP. They almost certainly will be binary digital. Like bacteria, or cockroaches, these simpler technologies remain simple, and remain viable, because they work. They don’t have to get more complex.’ https://kk.org/thetechnium/the-arc-of-comp/
What happens if you load an enormous amount of data on chemical reactions and human biology into an AI, and then task it with finding lethal compounds against us?
‘In less than 6 hours after starting on our in-house server, our model generated 40,000 molecules that scored within our desired threshold. In the process, the AI designed not only VX, but also many other known chemical warfare agents that we identified through visual confirmation with structures in public chemistry databases. Many new molecules were also designed that looked equally plausible. These new molecules were predicted to be more toxic, based on the predicted LD50 values, than publicly known chemical warfare agents.’ https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-022-00465-9
This analysis predicts that the U.S. trucking industry will probably switch to a “transfer-hub” model where autonomous trucks transport goods over long, simple highway routes, while human drivers in smaller trucks move the cargoes over shorter distances at both ends. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-022-01103-w
Small doses of radiation might actually benefit human health thanks to a process called “hormesis.” Note that nuclear power is so expensive partly because the power plants aren’t allowed to release any radiation at all to the surrounding environment, and that requirement is predicated on the assumption that any amount of radiation exposure hurts people. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/832949v1
I agree that the fake meat industry has been overhyped. Though meat substitutes are cheaper and more convincing than ever, they will not render meat consumption extinct. Not even close. Lab-grown meats will eventually eliminate the need to kill animals for food, but the technology won’t be good enough until near the end of this century (it’s not as good or advancing as fast as its contemporary cheerleaders claim). https://reason.com/2022/03/05/the-fake-meat-revolution-has-stalled/
Computers have translated pig noises into a basic “vocabulary” of emotional and mental states. A variety of technologies will let us communicate with animals in the future, and possibly to even share thoughts with them. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-07174-8
North Korea still operates some Japanese-made trains from the 1930s. Thanks to the country’s socialist economy, labor is practically free, making it financially possible to keep fixing the trains in spite of their age. Once robots have made labor free across the world, will it become common for manufactured objects of all kinds to stay in service much longer than they do now? https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2021/07/blast-from-past-north-koreas-whacky.html
The German gunboat Graf von Goetzen was launched in 1915 and sent to Tanzania (then a German colony) to dominate Lake Tanganyika. Though the Germans left, the ship didn’t, and it remains in service to this day as a ferry, renamed the Liemba. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Liemba
There’s a new scientific paper claiming that ivermectin doesn’t treat COVID-19. Instead, it kills parasitic worms in people, boosting their immune systems just enough to let them survive COVID-19. Parasites are only common in tropical areas. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2022.3079
The pandemic isn’t over: China just locked down one of its biggest and most important cities due to a surge in COVID-19 cases. It will have global economic consequences. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-60893070
On the second anniversary of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani’s assassination by a U.S. drone strike, two Iranian drones attacked an American military base in Baghdad. Both were shot down by a U.S. antiaircraft system called “C-RAM.” A C-RAM unit has a built-in radar that identifies the locations and flight paths of enemy aircraft and missiles, and it uses the data to aim its heavy machine gun so the bullets intercept them. All the human operator has to do is push a button to allow the C-RAM to fire. At the 0:26 mark in the video, the C-RAM opened fire on one of the Iranian drones. Note the laser-like stream of bullets. The machine’s aim was perfect. https://youtu.be/Ajkg8yfgug0
Contrast that with footage of human-aimed antiaircraft guns trying to shoot down Japanese kamikaze planes in WWII. You’ll see dozens of machine guns spewing out thousands of bullets at one plane, and missing–often being wildly off-target. https://youtu.be/4mTECUWP0Hk?t=171
At the same time, GPT-3 is a much better chatbot than the best of ten years ago. I think each iteration of GPT will make fewer conversational mistakes than the last, until some future version (GPT-6?) is finally “good enough” to pass the Turing Test. http://lacker.io/ai/2020/07/06/giving-gpt-3-a-turing-test.html
Once “Metaverse” technology is mature and widespread, it will be common for sports fans to “hang out” in the bleachers of sports arenas during games. They could even pay for retired athletes and other popular commentators to sit with them in VR and narrate the games. Other fans will still be willing to buy tickets to sit in the real bleachers and attend the games in-person. https://futuristspeaker.com/business-trends/when-nfl-football-moves-into-the-metaverse/
Machines can now convert a series of still photos of a building or place into a hi-res, 3D mock-up. Eventually, there will be a hyper-realistic, 1:1 virtual version of the real world that people will be able to explore in VR. https://youtu.be/yptwRRpPEBM
“Frequency hopping” is a method of sending encrypted messages with radio signals. A message like a simple sentence is chopped up into bits, each of which is transmitted on a different frequency from the other. To anyone listening to just one radio wavelength, they will only hear a single, brief sound of the message. However, the intended recipient will hear the whole thing thanks to a special radio descrambler that knows how the bits are distributed across the frequency spectrum. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spread_spectrum
Dial-up modems from 20+ years ago used sounds to send and receive data. This is why, if you established the connection and then picked up the phone, you’d hear loud static for a moment–the static was the digital data being conveyed as sounds. Telephone lines weren’t built with the future needs of the internet in mind–they were designed around the much less demanding needs of human speech and listening. As a result, they can’t handle more than 56 kilobytes of data transfer. https://www.10stripe.com/articles/why-is-56k-the-fastest-dialup-modem-speed.php
In 1991, George Friedman published a book predicting the U.S. and Japan would fight a war by 2020. This is something to remember when thinking about his other geopolitical predictions, which also look likely to fail. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrbUX84LcXg
Six months ago, Peter Zeihan predicted “We are gonna have inflation in the last half of this year that is absolutely going to be higher than what we had in the early 80s [and] probably faster than what we had in the 70s.” He was basically right. The U.S. inflation rate for November was the highest since July 1982. https://youtu.be/x_fpY63fcd8?t=3560
Nuclear-powered civilian ships were introduced before the technology was fully ready, and were doomed by irrational public fears about radiation and by unfair press coverage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYj4F_cyiJI
Theoretically, we could also build antennas that used the planet’s radiation of excess heat into space to generate electricity. https://www.pnas.org/content/111/11/3927
Theoretically, 10 quadrillion people could live on Earth. We’d just have to build 300,000-storey high skyscrapers to fit everyone, plus a bunch of other megaprojects to radiate the planet’s excess heat into space and regulate global sunlight levels. https://hereticalupdate.substack.com/p/is-earth-running-out-of-resources
‘The result is that you see a distinct parabolic shape in the returns on investment for a tall building. The point of maximum return varies depending on the city, the type of construction and the location of building, and real estate professionals go to great effort to determine the economic building height for a given case. For an office building on a piece of valuable urban real estate, this has traditionally been considered to be in the neighborhood of 60 to 70 storeys tall. During planning for the Empire State Building, it was calculated that 75 storeys was the optimal height, and developers suggested that 70 storeys should be the maximum during the planning of One World Trade Center. But the existence of an increasing number of Manhattan supertall residential buildings suggests that this limit might be increasing, at least for luxury residential real estate.
Building height in excess of this “theoretical optimum” is often height for height’s sake, with the idea that an exceptionally tall building will have “prestige value” that more than compensates for the less efficient design. The (real or perceived) benefits of prestige, combined with the rising costs of servicing the upper floors, often results in buildings that achieve their height by adding large volumes of unoccupied space at the top. The Burj Khalifa, currently the tallest building, is perhaps the ultimate example of this, with the top 29% of the building being unoccupied space.’ https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/why-skyscrapers-are-so-short/
Imagine a 1 – 10 rating scale for your full possible range of emotional experiences.
1 = Most miserable and painful you can be 5 = Feel neither good nor bad 10 = Most happy and blissful you can be
People intuitively think that the increments between each number are subjectively constant, so the felt difference between levels 9 and 10 is the same as the difference between levels 5 and 6. However, there’s evidence that the good and bad extremes are way, way, way more extreme, so that going from level 9 to level 10 is much more of a jump in subjective pleasure than going from level 5 to 6 is. https://www.qualiaresearchinstitute.org/blog/log-scales
With training, most people can learn to control single neurons in their brains. In the far future, I think humans will be able to control their own thoughts, emotions, and gene expression, just by thinking about it. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.05.079038v1.full
For the first time, a pig heart has been transplanted into a human without killing the person. The pig had been genetically engineered so its heart cells would be similar enough to human tissue to not be rejected by the human immune system. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59944889
This article was published in June 2020, a few months into the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, it was unclear what the effect on birthrates would be, and it could have been argued that more children that normal were going to be conceived since couples would have more time at their homes together. The article predicted the 2021 U.S. birthrate would be 300,000 – 500,000 lower than it was in 2020. The data are still coming in, but there was a decline, closer towards the lower end of their estimate. https://www.brookings.edu/research/half-a-million-fewer-children-the-coming-covid-baby-bust/
Plot: Welcome to 2022. Welcome to a grotesquely overpopulated, resource-depleted, polluted, and impoverished world. It’s a place where practically every tree has been cut down and every person herded into cities to make room for farms that nevertheless barely make enough food for everyone, where the air is sticky and thick with toxic smog and the stench of unwashed bodies and corpses, and where the hungry masses are perpetually on the brink of rioting. There’s no joy, hope, jobs, or even real food anymore–just little processed crackers rationed to the population. It’s a place where corrupt politicians and the executives of corporations collude to protect their own power and privileges at any cost, even if it means forcing the ultimate sacrilege on humanity.
Manhattan, 2022
Welcome to New York City. It’s a decaying and crime-ridden cauldron that is so crowded it’s literally standing room only in many of its apartments and streets. Charlton Heston knows this city well, and keeps busy in it. He’s a homicide detective, and of such esteem that he enjoys the privilege of having his own, small apartment, which he shares with only one other person: his elderly assistant named “Sol.” Their dreary routine is interrupted one day when they are assigned to investigate the murder of one of New York’s richest people–a man named “Simonson” who was a Board member at the “Soylent” corporation.
Soylent is an enormous food processing company that controls half the world’s food supply. Their “Red” and “Yellow” products are derived from plants, and are formed into crackers or loaves. Their latest product, “Green,” is said to be derived from plankton harvested from the ocean. Soylent Red, Yellow and Green are staple foods for New Yorkers, and probably billions of people beyond.
Soylent foods for sale at a New York market
As the investigation proceeds, Heston quickly realizes Simonson’s murder was no robbery gone bad, as it appeared at first glance. As he and Sol follow the clues, it leads them to mortal danger, a conspiracy involving some of the world’s most powerful men, and to a profoundly disturbing secret about the food supply.
Soylent Green was a laugh-out-loud inaccurate portrayal of the world in 2022. Yeah, I know we have our problems, but they don’t compare to the film’s dystopia. The fact that it was so far off the mark should be FOOD FOR THOUGHT for anyone who takes the current crop of doomsday global warming movies set in the future (e.g. – Geostorm, Snowpiercer, Interstellar) seriously.
That said, I still liked Soylent Green and think it’s worth watching so long as it isn’t taken seriously. The movie is well-paced and manages to depict a grim future without overdoing it to the point of being depressing. It’s both entertaining and serious, and at times genuinely tense. The acting is great all around, especially on the part of Charlton Heston, who is less cocky and has a slightly broader emotional range in this than in most of his other roles.
Analysis:
The world will be grossly overpopulated. At the beginning of Soylent Green, we’re told that New York City’s population has grown from roughly 8 million the year the film was released (1973) to 40 million in 2022. Population figures for other parts of the U.S. or for other countries are never given, but at one point Heston says other cities are “all like this,” implying the rest of the world is similarly overpopulated.
The U.S. population in 1973 was about 205 million, and the world population that year was 3.7 billion. If they quintupled like New York City, then in the film, the U.S. population in 2022 was 1 billion, and the world population was 18.5 billion.
Mercifully, the real figures are much lower: New York City has 8.8 million residents, the U.S. has 330 million, and the world has 7.9 billion. Soylent Green‘s prediction that Earth would be grossly overpopulated by 2022 was wrong, and the city in which it is set, New York, has only 11% more inhabitants now than it did in 1973. Instead of it being “standing room only,” the city is but marginally denser.
Outside of the tropical countries and Muslim world, population is growing very little and is even shrinking
Ironically, a growing number of thinkers and journalists today are worried about the opposite problem: population decline. The populations of rich countries are mostly shrinking, or are only slowly expanding thanks to immigration and immigrants having kids. Even middle income countries like China, Thailand and Brazil have seen sharp drops in birthrates and have almost stopped growing. While shrinking a shrinking population has benefits (more space per person, cheaper real estate, less traffic, less pollution created), they are probably outweighed by the downsides of economic decline.
That said, it would be a mistake to simply extrapolate current demographic trends into the future indefinitely and to conclude that the human race is doomed to extinction because people will refuse to have kids. A slew of technologies that will come into existence this century will raise birthrates in various ways: Existing assisted reproductive technologies like in vitro fertilization (IVF) will get cheaper, putting them within reach of lower income people. New reproduction technologies will be invented, allowing more people with fertility problems to have healthy kids. For example, post-menopausal women with no eggs will be able to have fertility labs synthesize ova for them that contain their DNA, and to insert it into themselves, younger surrogate mothers or, in the far future, artificial wombs. Robot servants will also ease household workloads, giving parents more time for child-rearing and making parenthood more appealing.
Along with raising birthrates, future technologies will let us grow the human population through the opposite mechanism, which is lowering mortality rates. Disease cures, therapeutic cloning of human organs, cybernetic replacements for organs and limbs, stem cell therapies that regenerate ageing tissues and organs inside the patient’s body, and many other medical advances, will slowly raise lifespans, and to such an extent that “medical immortality” will probably be available to well-resourced people by the end of this century. If people don’t die, then even a very low birthrate among them will lead to Soylent Green levels of overpopulation, though it might take centuries.
The environment will be devastated by pollution. The other aspect of Soylent Green‘s dystopian reality is severe pollution and concomitant environmental devastation. The outdoor scenes–which are already bleak-looking since they are full of derelict buildings, trash-strewn streets and crowds of poor people–are shrouded in a sickly greenish haze, which is certainly smog. New York City is devoid of trees, except a few saplings in a small, sealed arboretum (presumably necessary to protect them from air toxins) that only privileged people can enter.
A sealed arboretum containing NYC’s only trees
The oceans are also so poisoned and overfished that plankton are the only remaining edible sea life. The Soylent company processes harvested plankton into green crackers for human consumption, and the film’s big reveal is that it has been secretly transitioning their content to human flesh because even plankton is dying out. In other words, “SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE!”
Manhattan in 2021
This depiction of 2022 is almost totally wrong. New York City still has trees growing outdoors–notably in the massive Central Park. Additionally, the U.S. actually had more trees in 2021 than it did in 1921! The amount of global tree cover also increased by 8% from 1982 to 2016.
Instead of disappearing, global seafood harvests have risen since Soylent Green was in theaters, and there are no signs of an impending collapse of wild fisheries, though fish catches have been flat since the 1990s, suggesting we’ve reached the limit of how many wild calories the seas can sustainably provide us. Fortunately, the human race has proven itself more competent at surmounting this barrier than it was in the movie, and a large and growing share of fish are now “farmed” instead of caught wild.
Though the oceans still supply us with plenty of calories, a large and growing share of seafood comes from “fish farms,” labeled “aquaculture” in this graph.
New York City’s air is not full of smog, and its air quality is in fact substantially better than it was when the film was released. As just one example, sulfur dioxide (SO2) concentrations in the City’s air have sharply dropped, from an average of 155 μg/m3 from 1970-72, to a mere 6.8 μg/m3 today (January 24, 2022). (SO2 is the main component of “smog,” and has an opaque appearance. It causes respiratory problems and acid rain.) Every other type of air pollution (i.e. – PM 2.5, ozone, lead, nitrogen dioxide (NO2)) has sharply dropped in New York City, the rest of America, and the rest of the developed world over the same timeframe, meaning they breathe cleaner air today than people did when Soylent Green was in theaters. This is due to a slew of environmental laws being enacted, including the U.S. Clean Air Act of 1963 and the Clean Water Act of 1972. (U.S. air and water pollution levels had actually been trending down for a short time before Soylent Green‘s 1973 release.)
Delhi, India during its November 2021 smog emergency
Unfortunately, those things aren’t true for the poorer half of the global population, and hundreds of millions of people in India and China endure toxic air, mostly due to weak air pollution laws or to lax enforcement of relevant laws. In fact, in November 2021, Delhi had a smog emergency lasting several days, during which the air became so poisonous that the government shut down the city’s schools. The news images of opaque air, crowded streets, poverty, and decay bear striking similarities to the dystopian New York of Soylent Green. The suffering of people in polluted places like northern India is why I judged “This depiction of 2022 is almost totally wrong.”
Winters in temperate areas will be warm thanks to global warming. Though the movie indicates it is set in the year 2022, no clues are given about the exact dates of its events. Based on the facts that most of the characters wear light clothing, and there are several scenes where they are visibly sweating, it would seem it is set in the summer. However, that assumption is upended by a remark Heston makes when contemplating whether to turn on an air conditioner (a rare luxury): “All the way up. We’ll make it cold. Like winter used to be.”
Evidently, global warming has gotten so severe that even in places with slightly cold climates like New York City are hot in the winter!
Fortunately, this prediction about 2022 also fell flat. Global warming has only had a tiny effect on the city’s temperature. According to NOAA data taken from a weather station that has been operating in Central Park since 1869, NYC’s average temperature for all of 1973 (the year Soylent Green was released) was 56.1°F, and the average for that December was 39.0°F. The average temperature for 2020 (the last year for which full data have been published) was 57.3°F, and that December’s average temperature was 39.2°F.
And on the day I analyzed this prediction (January 26, 2022), New York City’s high temperature was 29°F, and it was bracing for a major snowstorm.
There will be tablet computers. Though we never get a good look at them or see how they work, there appear to be simple tablet computers and PDAs in the film. Heston keeps one of them in his apartment, and in the film’s first scene, Sol reads notes about criminal cases off of it. The device is a piece of transparent plastic, about the size and shape of a magazine, with an opaque layer embedded within it bearing written characters.
It is strongly reminiscent of an actual tablet computer that lets users handwrite digital notes on its screen by using metal styluses. This prediction about 2022 was right.
The “ReMarkable 2” tablet, displaying something more cheerful than a suicide note. It is new for 2022.
People will have computer game machines in their homes. Early in the film, there’s a scene set in Simonson’s luxury condo suite. There we see an arcade-style video game. To be exact, it is “Computer Space,” which was the first commercially successful video game in history, and only made its debut two years before Soylent Green was released.
A privately-owned computer arcade game
In 2022, it is very common for people to have video game consoles in their homes and to play games on their computing devices. If anything, the film’s prediction is too conservative since it depicts video games as being only available to rich people, whereas in reality, even a teenager working a part-time job today could afford a quality console and several games.
The government will ration essential goods. Due to dwindling natural resources, an excessive population, and widespread poverty that leaves most people unable to afford anything, the government rations essential goods, notably food and water. Citizens visit government offices where clerks give them their allotments of money or ration cards, which they exchange with other people in New York to get essential goods. In other scenes, we see private merchants selling Soylent food products in an open-air market, and men in official uniforms using an outdoor water tap to fill the jugs belonging to people who need their daily water rations. The film also implies that other basics, like soap, writing paper, and pencils, are also very hard to get.
A rationing office run by the government
For the U.S. and the developed world more broadly, this is inaccurate. Staple foods, potable water, and everyday items like soap are very cheap. For example, by cooking their own meals at home, an adult could easily get their food budget under $10 per day, and by drinking only tap water or some type of beverage mix like “Tang,” get their daily drink budget below $1. A bar of personal soap cost $1.50, and will last a person for weeks.
A visit to a typical American grocery store in 2022, even in poorer parts of the country, will reveal a cornucopia of food and merchandise at low prices. Additionally, thrift stores are practically everywhere, and are bursting with wide varieties of decent-quality secondhand goods at very low prices. Electronic resources like Craigslist.org, Facebook Marketplace, and Freecycle are also major sources of cheap or even free items available locally. If anything, most of the world is now contending with a surfeit of essential goods, which too often are wasted, thrown out, or allowed to accumulate as unused clutter. Growth of the self-storage industry bears further testimony to this reality. People, Americans in particular, have too much stuff, not too little.
Prostitution will be legal. One of Soylent Green’s main characters is “Shirl” (pronounced almost the same as “Cheryl”), a young woman prostitute who is compensated with free housing and amenities in Mr. Simonson’s luxury condo. The arrangement is legal and accepted as normal, and it is later revealed that the condo building has several other prostitutes, euphemistically termed “furniture,” living in other units. Having a live-in prostitute is an expensive marker of high status, and Heston’s suspicions are raised when, while investigating Simonson’s death, he discovers the latter’s bodyguard has “furniture” in his own apartment in spite of a salary that should be insufficient.
Prostitutes having a party
In real life, prostitution is illegal in New York City, and in the rest of the U.S. except Nevada. There, it is confined to a small number of heavily regulated brothel houses. With varying restrictions, prostitution is legal in about 15 countries, mostly in Europe. Nevertheless, as the revelations about Jeffrey Epstein’s high-end prostitution ring–which included sex parties at his luxury Manhattan townhouse–show, it’s still easy for rich men to buy sex in New York.
A small number of industrial food companies will control the global food supply. “Soylent” is clearly the dominant food producer in the U.S., and perhaps the world. As Sol says after researching it: “Soylent controls the food supply for half the world.” It’s unclear who produces the other half, but other big companies and government agricultural agencies probably dominate it.
A small number of food processing companies own many common food and beverage brands. But does that mean they “control the global food supply”?
The world is certainly full of large, highly profitable food processing companies, but none is so big that it controls anywhere near half of the global food supply. Consider the top ten food and drink companies of 2020, along with their food sales for that year:
PepsiCo, Inc. – $70.3 billion
Nestle – $67.7 billion
JBS – $50.7 billion
Anheuser-Busch – $46.9 billion
Tyson Foods – $43.2 billion
Mars – $37.0
Archer Daniels Midland – 35.4 billion
The Coca-Cola Company – $34.3 billion
Cargill – $32.4 billion
Danone – $26.9 billion
If we assume that these ten companies produced all the calories consumed by all humans in 2020, and use revenues as a proxy for calories each produced, then the largest, PepsiCo, only controls 15.8% of the food supply.
Of course, the top 10 food processing companies aren’t really the only ones in existence. The source from which I got the above data actually lists revenue figures for the top 100 companies in the sector. If we include them in the calculation (BTW, rank #100 goes to the “Kewpie Corporation,” which made $3.6 billion in 2020 selling mostly mayonnaise, salad dressing, and baby food in Japan), then big companies sold $1,316 billion of food and beverages in 2020, and the biggest one, PepsiCo, only controls 5.3% of the global market. The top ten combined only control 33.8%.
The darkness of the country indicates what share of its population is engaged in sustenance farming.
Additionally, sustenance farming and the consumption of food made by small, local farms still provides most of the calories for large fractions of the population in Africa and southern Asia. These people eat little or nothing made by the big food processing companies, meaning PepsiCo’s control over global calories should be even lower than the paltry 5.3%.
In rich countries with declining culinary traditions, like the U.S., it is probably common for people to get most of their daily calories from processed foods. However, the foods are still made by several different, competing food processing companies, so there is no monopoly and hence no real-world equivalent to “Soylent.” Even if the biggest one of those companies decided to start secretly blending calories derived from corpses into its food products, only a minority of the U.S. population would end up eating it.
New York City’s population will be 90% white. All of Soylent Green‘s main characters and seemingly 90% of its extras are white. This includes rich, working-class, and poor people.
The reality is very different. The U.S. Census estimated that, in 2021, only 32.1% of New Yorkers were both white and non-Hispanic. Blacks were 24.3%, Asians were 14.1%, and multiracial people were 3.6%. It is surely one of the most racially diverse cities on Earth.
There will be mass unemployment. In the first scene, Heston remarks “There are 20 million guys out of work in Manhattan alone.” Even if this is exaggerated and the real number is only half that figure, and even if “guys” refers to both sexes, it would indicate a staggeringly high unemployment rate.
To be generous, let’s assume that Soylent Green‘s New York had an excellent dependency ratio of 80, meaning 80% of its population was in good health and able to work (children, old people, and disabled people comprise the other 20%). For comparison, NYC’s actual dependency ratio in 2021 was 54.7, and dependency ratios in the 80s have only happened after periods of extraordinary population growth, such as when the post-WWII baby boom generations in India and South Korea hit adulthood.
Eighty percent of 40 million is 32 million, meaning there were 32 million potential adult workers in the city. If 10 million of them (half of Heston’s figure) couldn’t find jobs, that equates to a 31.25% unemployment rate. To put that into perspective, during the Great Depression, the U.S. national unemployment rate peaked at 24.9%. Remarkably, even with optimistic assumptions, the job picture was worse than it had ever been in real life!
What happens if we adjust the calculations to be more bleak? For example what if we lower the dependency ratio to 65 (many of the New Yorkers looked unhealthy and seemed to have motivation problems, both of which would leave them unable to work) and accept Heston’s “20 million guys out of work” figure?
We get a 76.9% unemployment rate, which is unheard of. I can’t imagine a situation where that many willing people wouldn’t be able to find jobs, except maybe the first few weeks following a massive nuclear war. That said, I foresee a day when 76.9% of healthy adults won’t have gainful jobs due to machines doing the work for them, but most of those people won’t be “unemployed” since they’ll embrace (or at least, deal with) the new reality by devoting their time to things other than work, like socializing, video gaming, doing drugs, traveling, or indulging in personal hobbies and niche interests. You don’t count as “unemployed” if you’re not interested in working.
Oh, and what’s New York City’s actual unemployment rate? In December 2021, it was 8.8%, which is high by real-world U.S. standards, but absolutely stellar by Soylent Green‘s.
There will be mass homelessness. Along with lacking jobs, most of the people in the film seem to lack homes. Every morning, Heston has to literally jump over poor people who sleep on the staircase of his apartment. Many of New York’s streets are clogged with broken-down cars that people live in, and sleeping people literally cover the whole floor of his local church at night. Most of the city’s population might be chronically homeless.
Heston jumping over poor people
In reality, no more than 1% of New York City’s population is truly homeless, meaning they either sleep in public spaces or in homeless shelters. And unlike in Soylent Green, most of them only go without proper housing for brief lengths of time, and aren’t “chronically” homeless.
New York City will have epidemic levels of violent crime.Soylent Green begins with a murder, later in the film there’s a street riot where several police officers are attacked and people are shot, and in one scene, the police chief says there were 137 murders in the city over the previous 24 hours. In short, New York City is extremely violent. How accurate was this depiction?
If we assume 137 murders a day is typical, that’s equivalent to 50,005 per year, and a homicide rate of 125 per 100,000 residents. In reality, New York City had 485 murders for all of 2021, meaning its homicide rate is a mere 5.5 per 100,000 residents.
Among big American cities, the most murderous is Louisville, Kentucky, which had 188 murders in 2021, equating to a homicide rate of 30 per 100,000. That means no major urban area in the U.S. comes close to being as violent as Soylent Green‘s New York was.
That said, there are cities outside the U.S. that approach its heights of murder. In 2020, three Mexican cities–Celaya, Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez–had the highest murder rates in the world, at 109, 105, and 103 murders per 100,000 residents, respectively. So if the movie had been Soylent Verde and set just one country away, it would have been grimly accurate in this regard.
People will have battery banks in their homes. The small apartment that Heston and Sol share has a bank of what look like car batteries for storing electricity. A stationary bicycle connected to the batteries can be pedaled to recharge them. It’s unclear whether the battery bank is their sole source of electricity, or if it’s merely a backup power source in case of grid failures, and it’s also unclear how common the batteries are in other homes.
The battery bank
Batteries are much cheaper and more energy-dense today than they were when Soylent Green was in theaters. However, home battery banks remain uncommon due to the reliability of the electric grid and because the batteries are still too expensive to be worth it.
For example, a typical American home consumes 30 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity per day. A person who valued efficiency could reasonably reduce that to 24 kWh / day by buying high-efficiency appliances and by doing things like wearing sweaters instead of turning the heat up so high in the winter. A typical home storage battery such as the “Growatt 6 KW,” costs $4,490 and can only store 6 kWh of electricity, so four of the batteries would be needed to store just one day’s worth of power, for a total cost of $17,960, plus installation costs. The batteries’ storage capacities also degrade with time, meaning they usually need to be replaced after 10-15 years.
The “Growatt 6KW” residential battery
A better option for backup power is a gas-powered generator. While portable generators with wheels are the most familiar versions of the machines, the types generally used for residential backup power are stationary and look like large boxes right outside the houses they provide power to. One high-quality standby generator capable of meeting the 24 kWh / day requirement is the “Generac 72101,” and it costs $5,997 plus more for installation. It is connected to the house’s natural gas plumbing and automatically turns on whenever it detects an electrical grid outage. Best of all, if properly maintained and not overused, such a generator can last 20 years or more before needing replacement.
A Generac 24 kW backup generator installed outside a home
This means a home battery backup system costs three times more than an equivalent backup gas generator. Battery prices will need to drop by 66% to achieve parity. Such an improvement might be possible: Between 2010 and 2019, lithium-ion battery pack prices dropped 87%. However, the rate of yearly cost-improvement declined over that period and continues to do so, suggesting we’ve picked the low-hanging fruits for improving battery cost-performance, so don’t expect another 87% decline over the next 10 years. To get our 66% improvement, which might cause battery banks to become common in houses and apartments, I think 20 years or more of research and industrial efficiencies will be needed.
Assisted suicide will be legal. Discovering the awful truth about Soylent Green pushes Sol–already an old and world-weary man–over the edge, so he signs up for assisted suicide, which is euphemistically called “Going home.” Not only is it legal, it is barely regulated, and Sol merely has to walk into the nearest euthanasia clinic and sign a form to have it done. There’s no wait time, no “cool down period,” and no requirement for suicide requests to be vetted by a court, doctors, mental health specialists, or the applicant’s family.
Sol committing assisted suicide
This depiction of 2022 was partly accurate. Physician-assisted suicide is legal in 10 American states and Washington, DC. While the laws only allow their residents the right of suicide, it is easy for people from other parts of America to satisfy the requirement by moving in and living there for a short period of time.
Additionally, in those 10 states and DC, the applicant must provide medical evidence that he probably has six months or less to live thanks to poor health, and there are processes for adjudicating that evidence. (In effect, legal doctor-assisted suicide is available to anyone in the U.S. who can prove he has six months or less to live.) Professing that one is sick of living–even if the person can prove they are sincere–is insufficient. This means Sol, were he alive in the real world of 2022, would not be able to commit assisted suicide.
The procedure is also not legal in New York, though it is in neighboring New Jersey, and it’s possible the euthanasia clinic in the film was in the latter state. Less than a mile of water separates Manhattan from Jersey City, and Sol could have easily made the journey.
Cannibalism will be widespread. Like “Luke, I am your father,” the line “Soylent Green is people” has long been in our cultural consciousness, and is known even to those who haven’t seen the latter film. With that in mind, I feel no guilt exposing the movie’s climactic reveal: the Soylent company has been secretly turning corpses into crackers that millions (possibly billions) of unsuspecting people have been eating.
Soylent Green crackers been scooped into a bag at a food market
Again, and very fortunately, this prediction was wrong. Cannibalism is not widespread in 2022, or even practiced by anything but a miniscule number of disturbed people. It is probably as culturally taboo as it was in 1973, and even in rare cases where a person voluntarily allows themselves to be killed and eaten by a cannibal, the latter is arrested and charged with a crime.
However, as I’ve predicted, in vitro meat technology should be advanced enough by 2100 to let us grow human flesh and organs in labs, which would provide people a legal way to indulge in “cannibalism” without breaking laws related to murder or desecration of a corpse. As a result, a small number of people will eat human flesh, mostly for novelty, like how people try weird meats like alligator today, but some will eat it routinely because they like the taste or have a cannibal fetish.
“The Relation of Air Pollution to Mortality” (1976) determined that New York City’s average SO2 concentration from 1970-72 was 155 μg/m3. https://www.jstor.org/stable/45002384
NOAA webpage featuring data from the weather station in Central Park, which has been operating since 1869. It shows how little average temperatures have risen in NYC since 1972. https://www.weather.gov/okx/CentralParkHistorical
On any given day, about 1% of New Yorkers are homeless, meaning they spent the night sleeping in public or in a homeless shelter. https://www.bowery.org/homelessness/
