Future city, here we come!: Brace yourselves.
Courtesy ILMO JOESixty “deep thinkers” from around the world have recently pooled their deep thoughts in a collection of essays titled “The Way We Will Be 50 Years From Today.”

Contributors include Vincent Cerf, “Father of the Internet,” Kim Dae-jung, former President of the Republic of Korea, Carol Bellamy, a former director of both UNICEF and Peace Corp, and Ray Kurzweil, futurist extraordinaire, to name just a few.

So you get all these smarty-pants in one book, and what do they predict? I don’t know—computers, and world populations, and blah, and blahbedeblah. I’ll tell you what they don’t predict: flying cars. Just swimming in IQ points, and no one is willing to stand up and say, “In five years we should, nay, must have some flying gol-darn cars!”

What can we expect from the next fifty years? Well, all kinds of stuff. Some highlights:

Eight billion nine hundred ninety nine million nine hundred ninety nine thousand nine hundred and ninety nine people and you.
The future is going to be a cozy place, so, you know, pack some sandals for the shower.

Fewer Pets
All manner of diseases, “from Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s to Schizophrenia,” will turn out to be caused by infectious agents taking advantage of genetic predispositions. Animals will often be the vectors for these agents, so… no more animals in the house, I guess. We’ll probably still have dogs, because we like them so much, though.

”The Blue Revolution”
Where we get our water from, and how, is going to be a big deal. A really big deal. You and your 8,999,999,999 friends are going to need water for your agriculture, industry, sanitation, and papier-mâché volcanoes, and getting your little lips and paws on it might be tricky.

Intergalactic Planetary
Another dimension, new galaxy! This is just my way of saying that we’ll probably have outposts starting up on Mars or Titan. One of the few predictions I’m into. Technology like the Large Hadron Collider could make light-speed travel a possibility, so the solar system, at least, should get some looking-at. “Interplanetary Internet” will be available, something I’m not super excited about. I mean, I guess it’s nice to know that a day on Enceladus can be wrapped up with some hilarious pictures of cats. You can email them to your space-coworkers.

Enjoy those cat pictures
Remember? You won’t have any real cats.

We will live longer
Bodacious medical advances—we’re talking nano here, folks—will allow us to enjoy our interplanetary cat pictures for decades upon decades. Yes!

We won’t live as long
We’re so fat and lazy, not even nano can help us.

Chinese will be the next global language
China is hot Schmidt these days, and getting hotter. Google “tonal language” and start sweating.

Computers will continue to be better at math than you, and will probably express their emotions a little better too.
Deal with it. Those guys are smart, and getting smarter.

That’s it. Well, that’s not totally it, but you get the idea: yawn. Way to go, geniuses. You just predicted a bunch of stuff that will probably happen. Or not—it’s all so dull that nobody will realize either way. “Hey… didn’t we used to have a cat? No? Oh, whatever.”

You want some predictions that you can really sink your teeth into? Come to Science Buzz. Check it out—here are some predictions I just came up with. No research or anything; it’s so easy even a non-genius can do it.

Flying cars
You heard it here first. Cheap, fun, and available this summer.

New swear words
Swearing, v3.0, is finally here. Threaten to punch someone in the gleb, tell them they can window your fab, or make it clear that they can scotch off—just don’t do it in front of your mom!

Electric broadswords
For every occasion.

More pets, new pets
Polish up your aquarium, because mollusks are goint to be huge.

See? Those are predictions that will sell! If you need any more, don’t hesitate to ask.

Tags : the future, predictions, technology

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So said Yogi Berra, and science is proving him right. It turns out that making accurate predictions entails more than taking current conditions and extrapolating them into the future. It’s a specialized sub-field of mathematics, with lots of rules to ensure that predictions have a reasonable chance of being accurate.

Scott Armstrong of the University of Pennsylvania and Kesten Green of Monash University, Australia, examined the forecasts recently made by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Armstrong and Green rated the methodology used by the panel against 89 principles of good forecasting derived from years of research. They found that the panel report breached 72 of those principles. They concluded that the forecasts the weather was likely to change in many negative ways were worthless.

Now, this doesn’t mean that the Earth isn’t getting warmer—that’s a well-established fact. But, most of the predictions we’ve heard of climate catastrophe due to this warming are based on bad math.

(Freeman Dyson, physics professor at Princeton, makes a similar point in this video. He argues there’s been too much focus on building computer models of climate, and not enough emphasis on collecting actual data to see if the models hold up.)

Tags : math, global warming, forecasting, climate change, predictions

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