The Next 5 Centuries

Basically this post is about predicting the circumstances that will happen in the next 5 centuries. You know, how many problems we'll face and we'll conquer. Something like that.

For now I'll just leave it as it is because I have to go shortly and I'll edit this page later.

Five centuries is a helluva long time to make even halfway-reasonable guesses about. No one could have guessed, let alone predicted, the world of today five centuries ago.

Science Marches On, new things are invented to solve problems and create new problems for which we must find solutions.

Even in the early twentieth century, guesses about the later twentieth century were off by huge margins - I've got an encyclopedia written in the 1940s that estimated we might make it to the moon around 1999 - and that was something they were pretty sure "we" (as a species) wanted to do.

So you're saying that it's an "anything can happen" scenario? Meh, in that case I should just leave it up to the imagination and keep history to a minimum, with only several references to it.

Just go mad, do what you want - on Doctor Who it's been revealed that at the very end of time humans are still running around with projectile firing weapons that look suspiciously like 1950s AK-47s and wearing clothes that look like they were purchased just down the road from where I currently live.

Star Trek TOS had, in a distant future setting, flip-style communicators that look bulky by the standards of the early twenty-first century.

I personally only stick with Not-too-distant-future settings where I find it easier to make educated guesses.

Back when mobile phones were crude, bulky and definitely limited and the "hand-held computer was the Apple Newton, I looked at both and thought "one day, both of those will be combined in the one device" - not a particularly brilliant "prediction" by any stretch of the imagination - and that's the reason why Gwion and others from his universe that wind up in the CDTs have a "Portable Office" (my term for such a mobile device that incorporated computer, phone, camera etc) while in other stories, written this century, the characters have "Smart Phones".

But looking at two useful portable devices and saying "people are going to want both but will want them combined in one convenient package" and having that "prediction" play out over the space of a couple of decades is completely different from looking at the world of today and trying to work out what it's going to be like in 500 years.

500 years ago was a time of wind-driven sailing ships and most of the world wasn't explored. They didn't know that lightning was a form of electricity or that diamond and coal are the same element. Communication was by face to face talking or written letter that took months to deliver to the Colonies. There were fewer known planets, family portraits were done by hand with paint.

The world of today is more alien to that than anything I've ever read in a science fiction novel is to us.

But don't let the impossibility of guessing stop you: write an engaging and interesting story and people will enjoy it and shouldn't pay too much attention to whether or not it sounds "advanced enough" for 500 years in the future.

I'll keep that in mind. The people in my story are generally technophobic and view scientists that try to improve tech as deviants because they're scared of what technology can do when it becomes advanced enough. Though, they still use a lot of the technology we use today, for practical purposes.

When Clarke and Gentry Lee co-wrote the first Rama sequel, an over-abundance of verbiage was given to explaining all the social and political upheavals that had occurred in the years between the departure of the first Raman vessel and the start of the story - solely to explain why technology hadn't progressed very far in all that time.

I don't suggest going to that extreme (it read like a socio-econo-political textbook on the collapse of civilisation and the development of shanty-towns and really could've been summed up in a couple of pages and a couple of off-hand quotes to the tune of "if it weren't for that goddamn collapse, we'd have decent machinery to do this shit!") but briefly mentioning that things had gone wrong in the past "and so this is how we roll to this day" would certainly work.

Going on Sarcasm Mode here, but since five centuries is a long time, who knows?

Aliens come to Earth. Cure/easier treatment for many major diseases, but new ones have emerged. By now every country has had a major leader of a non-origin diversity. Global warming has reached an all-time high. May or may not have had a third World War but at least had a second "official" Cold War involving multiple regions. May or may not have a robot uprising but technology has taken over the world in an alternate, near-dominative way. We reach Mars but have trouble building colony.

Back to Sincerity Mode: it would really be hard to write, maybe if you're writing on a particular topic, go with whatever history is relevant to your story and have characters mention it in passing. Could that work?

edited 20th Nov '15 7:28:22 AM by Coujagkin

Absolutely, thanks again guys.

Just starting to check my old posts again. Maybe I'll have to look into history, improvise, and read other sources.

edited 9th Dec '15 4:31:13 PM by Victor_Skye