The Year 3052: April 2015

Saturday, April 25, 2015

The Year 3052: Introduction

I did not recognize the landscape laid out before my eyes as I stood on the Catonsville highlands overlooking the City of Baltimore. A millennium of change had brought about the alteration of the outline and configuration of the Inner Harbor. The port was much deeper and extensive with sleek wind-driven cargo ships that slipped in and out of the docks. Gone was the Key Bridge that once framed the opening of the port. Gone were the ribbons of expressway that strapped the city and bound it in its history. My dream left a melancholy hole in my core as I realized that Mankind had indeed survived into the Year 3052.

When I awakened I lay still for a few minutes pondering the panorama that was now fading, its fine details blurring into the soft focus like a summer in the 1960s decade that remains more as an oral history of facts and fictions than as a real remembrance of things accomplished and lessons learned. I had that hollow empty sensation that comes when I think about the prospects of the one-way journey into a new land that immigrants made prior to the earliest days of the 20^th century when going back home was impractical if not impossible. One left, never to be seen or heard from again by they who remained, nor to see or hear them again either. It is the same with moving into the future. One becomes lost to the now present never to return.

My Sunday morning became filled with the conjuring of what the world would be like after a thousand years of change. I had to remind myself that I could not characterize the passage of time as ‘progress’ because that would be presumptive. More than likely there will have been cycles of progress and deterioration that resulted in a net improvement or net deterioration. There will have been changes to religion, social structure, race relations, medical practice, energy demands and supply, transportation, education, music, poetry and morals. Just what those changes would be certainly is a pure conjecture.

But nonetheless I postulated such developments using a few known initial parameters and propensities of the human animal. Some of those developments follow in the postings here.

3052: Education

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Off-the-Grid 3052

The future that accommodates 10 to 20 billion humans will necessarily be highly structured and orderly. The flow of daily life will not well handle exceptions. For instance, when there are hundreds of people ascending through the levels of a subway station on escalators there will be a low tolerance for anyone who stops walking when they reach a new level and step off. They will be pushed aside while the crowd continues along. A person moving in any sort of personal transportation will not be accepted if they travel too fast or too slow. The optimum speed will need to be maintained or the system will fail.

Even though the order will have to be maintained, there will be those people who inherently resist the conformance to the policies and rules of the society. As we do today, there will be the outliers who eschew the conveniences and conformity of the established order. They will seek to live off the grid so to speak in places beyond where the commanded order prevails.

These people will necessarily not be supported by the Establishment or any of the efforts that today allow people to live in the most out of the way places and be self-sustaining. None of the infrastructure will extend to where they dwell. Municipal water pipes will stop miles from their location. Electric and telecommunications lines will not serve their coordinates. Fortunately many of the urban systems will have adopted the sustainable practices of rooftop gardening, rain capture, wind and solar electric generation. That convergence of styles with the off-the-grid independent people will make the outlier societies far more possible. They will live in similar environments but far less dense and far less structured by rules that are essential to accommodate that structured society.

Fortunately for the independent minded people, the government of the urban areas will not give them a second thought until and unless their actions serve to negatively impact the order and supply of the urban areas. Such an intrusion might be the diverting of too much water or impounding it too long thereby denying the larger organized areas the water they need.

Even today, we have such water use conflicts where residents of Phoenix, AZ want "Eastern Yards" with grassy lawns and deciduous trees that require periodic inundating from an irrigation system. They must compete with the classy golf courses for that water while people with "western yards" say don't take my water and curtail my use.

In some regions, gas and oil drillers consume millions of gallons of water per well even during drought conditions that leave lakes and rivers nearly empty.

As of the 21st Century there are people who think of themselves as naturalists and survivalists. They want to grow their own food, build low-energy houses and live a simpler way of life. By 3052, their only remaining effort will be to live in less dense areas, since it will be their pioneering efforts that eventually become adopted by the larger civilization.

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Climate 3052

"Men come and men go, but the Earth abides." Ecclesiastes.

The climate of the Earth has been far warmer than it is now and it has been far colder too. In short, the Earth doesn't care about the average temperature of a day, a year, a decade, a century or even a millennium. When the Earth is colder sea level drops as ice builds up on northern and southern land masses. Sea level goes up as the Earth warms and land-bound ice melts and flows back into the sea. The Earth doesn't care what the sea level is or what land is exposed or submerged. This cycle has been going on for hundreds of millions of years. It is only now that humans reside on the present day coastlines and assign a monetary value to possessing a plot of that temporal real estate that there is any concern at all.

At the time of the 21st Century, sea level has been rising. A series of events and processes have been set in motion that will require a huge change in human behavior and attitudes in order to slow, stop and possibly reverse the observed changes in our climate.

"While Man may not be responsible for all climate change where the atmosphere is warmed by greenhouse gases that he discharges, he did do a lot to set it in motion. That activity has set up "feedback loops" that cascade the impacts. It is just like Man did not burn down the entire forest, but he did leave his camp fire unattended and started the conflagration."

Many theoretical but fully predictable mitigating factors could alter the steady effects of our contributions to atmospheric CO2 and Methane loading. Volcanoes are quite capable of expelling as much CO2 into the atmosphere as two decades of human fossil fuel burning. While that is a possibility so is the opposing effect posed by millions of tons of volcanic ash rising high into the atmosphere blocking the sun and cooling the planet for some period of time. Too warm or too cool will change the crop yields and oceanic life level that alter our protein sources. Ocean water too warm can breed algae blooms that toxify the water and deplete oxygen levels.

An asteroid could strike the Earth and measurably alter its survivability by humans other plant and animal species.

Any number of viruses could evolve into an extinction level event that more than decimates the human population. Our rampant use of antibiotics and other agricultural chemicals can breed plant and microbe species that are no longer controllable and diminish our comfortable world.

Too much rain or too little ruins arable land and reduces crop yields. When we are living at the margin between having just enough to eat and not having enough to eat, we are living at a place where the Principle of Imminent Collapse can manifest and bring about a New Equilibrium that doesn’t include all of us.

This vision of 3052 does not assume horrible events and actions that brings mankind to the brink of extinction. That said, the Principle of Imminent Collapse does only need a nudge to precipitate the cascading failures that are capable of creating an apocalypse.

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Finding Resources 3052

The Age of Finding Resources will have ended by 3052. No longer will factory fishing fleets be able to comb the seas and haul out the protein that they had done during the 20th and 21st Centuries. While some species of sea life will become extinct others will have populations whose size falls beneath the Viable Fishing Threshold and the taking of their meager numbers will stop. This stoppage will significantly impact Pacific Ocean populations particularly since they have been dependent on the taking from the sea for many decades even up to now. The increased human populations will demand more and more each year until the sea can no longer sustain their numbers.

There has been a paradigm of prospecting for minerals and fuels and devising methods of extracting what has been found buried under sometimes miles of rock strata. During each year that passes the easier deposits are found and mined leaving the deeper more expensive deposits in place. With each passing year, Engineers devise ever more elaborate and intensive means of getting to the resources and bringing them to market. Where once a tunnel was dug into a coal seam and the coal scraped out and rolled on rails to the tipple, now the practice of removing entire mountain tops to reveal the coal has been made feasible due to the relative costs of the other methods and the other sources of energy.

Even though there may be a century or two of coal still available for the finding and taking, there remains two variables in the formula that cannot be ignored. Coal is primarily Carbon compounds and Ash bound up in a clump that we burn. While we obtain the heat from the chemical reaction of the Carbon and Oxygen of the Atmosphere, the waste products of that reaction are CO2 and the Ash. That CO2 mixes in the upper atmosphere and hold the sun's heat there for increasingly longer times. The Ash contains all the other elements that do not burn in the furnaces. Some of those elements are heavy metals that all are toxic to humans and other animal life. Lead, mercury, arsenic, and radioactive elements like Uranium are all present in that Ash. We must contain that Ash and keep it out of our water supplies so that we do not poison ourselves.

Fortunately, geologists calculate that the feasible amount of coal and oil that we can find will last only a couple of centuries. This means that even if today we fail to curtail our burning of fossil fuels, there will be about 800 years of recovery time to for us to design a world that is compatible with the warmer climate, design methods of extracting the CO2 from the atmosphere and replace our energy production with sources that do not destroy our biosphere.

There is no reason to expect that the fossil fuel corporations will ever voluntarily alter their modus operandi to do anything differently until the supplies run out or become too expensive to extract and distribute. Therefore, the world will be plagued with a period of degradation before it reaches a place of sustainability. The energy providers will however begin to dabble in the so called "alternative energy" methods in order to be ready to switch over as the cost ratios change. Some of those ratio factors will be the force of public opinion and how fast the environment changes due in part to the impacts of their enterprise.

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Healthcare 3052

In the United States in the 21st Century, healthcare is a trillion dollar annual industry. Since everyone wants to be as healthy and comfortable as possible, hundreds of businesses have thrived deriving their portion of the amount of money spent.

Whole corporations are devoted to one cog in the medicine engine that cranks out dollars. Before and completely ancillary to actually treating a person who is sick or injured there is a myriad of business functions that add their part the ultimate bill that the patient is responsible for paying. He may be covered in part by some payment source, but he himself remains the primary responsible party for assuring payment is made.

Situated between the patient and the treatment is an insurance policy of one type or another. It may be a one of the dozens of private providers that each has a CEO who is paid a salary and benefits totaling in the millions of dollars each year. While some such CEOs are in the low-class compensations scale at $1 or 2 million others are in the $14 to 15 million bracket. Other forms of insurance are the publicly funded programs of Medicare and Medicaid. One specializes in persons over 65 and the other specializes in people with incomes below a certain threshold. In all three types of insurance, there are hundreds of permutations of what is covered, to what total amount, and under what circumstances the treatment will be paid.

In order for the eligibility to be determined, there are businesses that specialize in assuring that only eligible persons receive eligible services, drugs and treatments. Those businesses also have highly paid executives, and staff expenses that add to the total cost of treating the person who needs care.

Then at the other end of the treatment odyssey there are the businesses that serve to collect on the debts incurred by people who received treatment and did not pay, or whose insurance provided denied payment, etc.

Now within the treatment part of the healthcare system the Doctors all need a place to do their work, staffs to process the billions of bits of medical and billing data, and of course insurance with which to be protected if they make a mistake or just some unfortunate outcome results. Again the incremental costs are added to the total.

After the fact of medical treatment there is the possibility that a claim is made for malpractice or injury as the result of just about anything not being to the expectations of the patient. This adds a cost in lost time for the Professionals, It makes money for the lawyers who handle the claims and all together results in a far higher cost of medicine in the States than anywhere else in the world.

Lastly, every drug, every medical device, every service such as MRIs are priced at a market level. That is the price charged is based on what the market will pay, not on what the item costs. Therefore we get $800 bags of sterile salt water for IVs, $5 aspirins, etc. A prescription for a topical cream might cost the patient $200 per month, when it costs a fraction of that to manufacture.

In the European Union they have been using a system of medical service delivery where Doctors are salaried employees of the medical delivery program and no one is paid millions of dollars per year to oversee a medical corporation that adds more costs than value to the system.

In the year 3052, the cost of all the ancillary services for the much larger human population will have been removed from the system. When a person breaks his arm, an x-ray image will be made, a staff Doctor will set the bone and a technician will immobilize the limb or digit and send the patient on his way. There will be no need to determine who will pay, or if he deserves to have his bones set. It will just be done as a matter of course.

Far and away the largest portion of medical services are routine sniffles, sneezes, cuts and abrasions. Getting those items into the technician's hands will make it possible for the more serious and complex instances of massive trauma, genetic diseases, and repairs of deformations to be treated by a highly educated and experienced Doctor.

While humans will certainly still risk their life and limb on dangerous and adventurous pastimes, and need emergency repairs, the vast number of ailments will have been addressed with routine treatments.

Much of the environmental contamination that now lead to unusual combinations of symptoms that defy diagnosis will have been proven causative and will have been remediated in that 1,000 years of development. That which we can only today characterize as correlated causes and their alleged effects will be definitive as a cause and effect relationship. In that light we will be able to remove the causes and isolate them.

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Religion 3052

The militant religions are the ones who are still attempting to be the State and the Law of the Land. The clerics of those religions dictate the rules by which all devotees must adhere or be labeled heretics and blasphemers sometimes worthy of death. As with all religions there are the fundamentalists who imprint their own moralities and repressive nature on top of the written word and try to pass it off as the Truth.

The more mature religions are not as aggressive in trying to control everyone or prove that their beliefs are singular it their righteousness. The newer religions are more like adolescents who are vying for the dominant position and to be the Alpha-dogma.

Most violent conflicts are between the adolescents and when the mature religions need to fight back against the adolescents who are struggling for power. The mature religions are comfortable in their place in their world while the adolescents are still trying to establish their part of the world.

Another of the defining characteristics that separate the adolescents from the mature is that the adolescents rely upon ancient texts and dictates from an almighty deity to prescribe all behaviors and acts. The mature religions are far more introspect and spiritual in individual practice. Their deities do not punish everyone for the trespasses of the few.

As time goes by, the adolescent religions will by 1,000 years more mature and will certainly mellow as have the present day mature religions.

By the year 3052, most people will have abandoned organized statist religions in favor of their spiritual pursuits and have yielded to the community of purpose that will be required in order for the far larger population of people to exist.

Without land and water to fight for, societies will be able to concentrate on the aspects of life everyone has until now sought after. Without mineral and fossil fuel revenues to divvy or soulless corporate damage to ones homeland, there will be no money for guns to kill each other. There will be no jets or anti-aircraft missiles. Instead of pumping oil across the desert to deep-water ports, the pipes will carry water to the interior where 4th generation desalinization plants will make ample fresh water for local farming.

Religious conflict and the adherence to one sect or another will pale in light of everyone having sufficient essential resources. Waiting another 1,000 for a Messiah will get a bit old and many followers will drift away in the absence of any observable benefits.

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Family 3052

That which constitutes a family will certainly be different 1,000 years from now. The concept of children as a gift from God or the other god or the other god has been diminishing over the past century after receiving an unprecedented rise in the first place. This gift concept is also Western Romantic notion born of the idea that one must keep the babe no matter how difficult that might be. For a very short few decades, Americans were ready willing and able to fund the perpetual care of deformed infants and search for a cure to the ravages of such disease as polio, Muscular Dystrophy, Down Syndrome, Spina Bifida, Cystic Fibrosis and many other ailments. Some parents kept their guilt at home while others sequestered their defective children in rural homes for the infirm.

Internationally, male children are preferred as the eldest due to the need for that child to become the man who will eventually provide for the parents in their declining years. If you look at the World Fact Book that is compiled and published by the CIA, and add the abortion rates by country to the infanticide rates, you get a near constant. That is to say poor and developing countries are more apt to kill a child than abort a fetus. In more technologically advanced countries, defects can be easily determined before the birth. Gender can be determined early on. And in wealthy countries and countries where male children need to be first for economic reasons, female infanticide is far more common. This fact can be seen in the same tables when you look at the gender split at early ages.

Children have always been economic labor units around the world for at least the first two millennia of recorded human history. It was only in the 1920s that America banned child labor for children under 16 years. They stopped businesses from exploiting child labor but exempted the family farms where children were and remained a major source of cheap labor.

The whole system of family farming harkens back to pioneers who were a man and his wife who ventured west into the plains to carve out a home for themselves and raise a family. The family ostensibly was the future labor for plowing the fields, slopping the hogs, feeding the chickens, etc. As Farmer Brown aged he and his equally aging misses needed someone to take over all that hard fought labor and keep the farm in the family.

As the need to feed billions of people overtook the feeding of tens of thousands, the farms became more and more mechanized. Even the short lived attempts at local food had to give way to the massive factory farms. Family units for family businesses became a quaint aspect of the distant past.

The idea of passing a family business on to a next generation was already failing in the latter part of the 20th Century when the children could barely keep up the business activity to pay off the parents' debts. Annually, tens of thousands of family businesses are abandoned in favor of going one's own way. The days of Farmer Brown becoming Farmer Brown & Son was already mostly gone by the start of the 21st Century.

Through 1,000 years of nearly no one owning and operating a family business, the whole concept of a family unit evaporated. The idea of working harder and longer to reach a better economic level faded into the past as it became increasingly more difficult to accomplish.

Child labor was not required much in the same way the parents' labor was superfluous. Portable electronic devices maintained the attention of children as they grew. They ate when and what the messages said to eat. They wore the clothes that the suppliers made and made available to the public. With no need to pass along wealth, special information or heritage, the entire concept of the nuclear family became a thing of the past.

The vast majority of children are the mere results of the sex act for most of human history. In some cultures the birth of a child or two served to provide future economic security. With the lack for that need providing for children lost its special status and they were raised by the devices and messages drilled into their formative minds. A childhood came to be consisting of a period of sleep followed by a period of visual and auditory stimulation that involved hand-eye coordination at ever increasing rapidity. Between these two periods was the time to consume food.

The western romanticism of providing a good childhood became lost in the lack of need for anyone to plan to have children and attempt to raise them as being special to the parents and their siblings.

Marriage 3052

Love and marriage is primarily a 20th Century invention and primarily in the Western Civilizations. In the vast part of the world marriage is an arranged institution between families that subject the younger generation to the protocols that may lead back many generations and be prescribed in a book of law that dates back to antiquity.

All along there has been notions of young love that both result in family tragedies or the elopement and subsequent banishment and shunning. These stories are the rare examples of divergence from the pressures placed on the young to conform to the family requirements.

Marriage has historically been a matter of legal interpretations to determine who the inheritor of family and personal wealth is at the death of a spouse. Only the children of a duly documented union are able to inherit in most cases. Bastard children may be able to make a claim in some societies but they usually get short shrift in most.

Unions between spouses of widely varying family wealth may be entered into only after pre-nuptial agreements are firmly in place.

In instances of aristocratic matrimony family power may be the goal of the union where upon one monarch would not march on the kingdom of another because their children were married to each other. The marriage was supposed to ensure that peace prevailed.

The Church and big business Corporations prefer that the men of the congregation are duly married and ready to make parishioners and financial shackle that help endure obedience and conformance to the rules that are laid out to control the men. A businessman with a wife and 2 children, a mortgage, a car payment and doctor bills is far less mobile and able to switch employers. The same goes for a man who wishes to not be excommunicated and/or sent to hell by an angry deity for failure to remain loyal to the Church.

In most societies marriage conveys some rights and benefits that are unavailable to the single man or woman. Here in the USA, health insurance was for a long time exclusively available only by virtue of the employer paying the premium. This left women uncovered unless she was married to a man with coverage. The employment of women was considered extraneous, temporary and for the most part, part time. She did not meet the conditions the corporations wanted in recruiting and retaining male employees and managers.

Marriage was essential to a woman who wanted anything more than minimal rights. Hence, there was a time when a woman could not obtain credit in her own name. Although those days are gone in the USA, women around the world are still subjected to some of the cruelest conditions and punishments for the least infractions of local law.

As the centuries pass, the conditions that are present in this dark 21st Century, will brighten. Certainly a thousand years will soften the rules and conditions placed on women and the whole concept of marriage will become obsolete.

Without a means of accumulating massive wealth by an individual, there will be little to inherit or pass along to others of one's choice. Without the need for a woman to cleave to a man for very sustenance of her life there will be no need for a marriage contract. There may be a residual force of love between two people who wish to be together, but there is no assurance that it won't be between two men, two women, as well as between a man and a woman.

Living together and being close together may have as much cache as now being married does. With all individuals being equally able to have a dwelling, enough food, and medical care, many of the needs of marriage will not be present 1,000 years from now. Without inheritance and property ownership to consider, the need for documentation of a promise to keep to each other forsaking all others will fade into obscurity.

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Water 3052

Human societies cannot be sustained where there is insufficient water. In the age of plentiful water flowing freely in rivers and streams, people built their cities, farms and homes where the water was. Riverside towns and cities had plenty of water for every conceivable use. Farms were possible where the wells were not too deep and the water was clean.

The problem with an "inexhaustible resource" is that it is not truly inexhaustible and when it is thought about in those terms it becomes wasted and polluted with everyone's effluent. Cities and factories are situated on the basis of the availability of the essential resources present at the time. Los Angeles grew up using its local water availability until it grew too big. Now there are aqueducts, pumping stations and massive water-rights arguments extending into Colorado as to who gets the Colorado River water.

Throughout most of human history human waste disposal has been a matter of habit and convenience. People relieved themselves wherever they could. It might be in the woods, along a stream, while sitting on a fallen tree. Where populations grew more dense organized places of disposal were developed as were places on rural homesteads where farmers and livestock raisers knew of the necessity of proper handling of wastes and keeping it a respectable distance from the house.

The hole in the ground and privy shed became the accepted method of waste disposal. It was not so much disposal as it was storage while it turned into compost and was covered up and a new location selected. Even in urban places the outhouse was a fixture for many decades before the installation of water transport sewage systems. The relatively small populations and the readily available water and river outflow made that paradigm viable for a while.

Soon the raw effluent levels rose to the point where the next downstream town could not draw water for their domestic purposes without getting the pathogens and biologic materials in their municipal water systems. Something had to be done to minimize the sewage levels in the shared river water resource. That is when communities started building sewage treatment plant along the rivers and lakes where the sewage used to be allowed to flow freely into the water. We did not do that voluntarily. It required Federal and state laws enacted to force communities to charge themselves the costs of treating the wastewater before returning it to the shared waterway.

In those latter years of the 19th Century the water source was not so much limited and we could dump as much water down our drains as we pleased. Throughout most of the 20th Century water was liberally used to flush toilets, water lawns, wash cars and generally consume. Even as early as the beginning of the 21st Century battles over water rights sprung up in areas where the rain did not fall in sufficient quantity, Snow pack did not freeze in the mountains enough to keep the rivers flowing all summer. Long distance water transport systems were open troughs subject to high levels of evaporation. We build pipelines to transport gas and oil across the continent while ignoring the need for a better more balanced water distribution system.

In order to make it possible for the much larger populations to exist, the planners up through 3052 had to abandon the water transport of human wastes entirely. Aquifers needed to be highly protected from intentional and neglectful contamination.

Water disposal of any type of wastes needed to be completely prohibited because even though each polluter argued that his wastes did little or no discernible damage, all the polluters collectively did massive damage.

Therefore the human waste handling systems that exist in 3052 are completely dry transport. With the growing problem of chemical waste disposal, dwelling of the distant future will condense fresh water out of the humid air. Water for consumption and water for other purposes will be sourced by different means. The massively greater land coverage by structures will reduce the permeable area and afford communities to rooftop capture rain so that it does not contribute to greater flooding. Groundwater recharge from clean sources will help keep the supply of fresh water available at its maximum extent.

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3052: Housing

The construction of dwellings in the United States and the rest of the world have changed very little in the last hundred years or so. The methods and materials of choice have changed a little but the main technique remains what the industry calls “stick built.” Geographically, one style and technique may displace another such as replacing palm fronds and thatch with corrugated metal or fiberglass. This variation is not a significant change in building techniques.

The basic construction consists of clearing a plot of land, laying a foundation and a level floor, raising walls to form a box and topping it with a ceiling and roof. Everything else is aesthetics. Most variations are prescribed by the climate and the weather. Some variations are dictated by local customs.

In the USA we construct most of our houses from pine 2x4s, vinyl siding, and gypsum Sheetrock panels. We pitch the roof to shed the rain and shingle it with asphalt sheets to make it water proof. Our desire is to live in a structure that is separated from our nearest neighbors by at least 20 feet where ever possible. Every dwelling unit must have a water supply, a sewage outlet, and access to a public thoroughfare. It must have one type or other of a heating system in all occupy-able rooms. Beyond that, the criterion for occupancy is not statutory.

The location of the housing is more an indicator of quality than is the materials and craftsmanship of the construction. Whether basic services are available makes or breaks the location. The relatively inexpensive cost of energy has allowed us to put as many dwellings as we want anywhere we want to put them. We leave it up to the resident to supply his own form of transportation and choose how far he/she is willing to travel to buy food, see a doctor, pray, earn a salary or wage.

In this 3^rd millennium future, the complexity of energy production and distribution will require that we travel less in order to be more comfortable in our homes. Even in this early 21^st century world, we must choose between fueling a car and eating corn. We must choose between higher living costs and commuting longer distances. We must balance the virtues of a suburban life with a patch of grass out front and the proximity of groceries, schools, work sites and cultural venues. The cost of energy will drive the choices for how we build our houses and where we build them. It will drive how we heat and cool them and how we use water and dispose of wastes.

Before the Age of Affluence in America, people could not afford to heat their entire dwelling. They heated only the places where they were going to be. Curtains and doors isolated heated rooms from unheated ones and hallways. Four post beds with canopy tops and curtained sides were not merely a pretentious room decoration but a means to keep the sleepers warm on a frigid night in an unheated room.

Cheap natural gas and electricity made it possible to heat ones entire abode all day and all night without even the need to attend to a coal or log burning furnace in a basement dungeon. Cooling the dwelling became as simple as turning the thermostat wheel to the desired whole-house temperature. One could wander from room to room and back without experiencing the discomfort of a different temperature.

Before the Age of Affluence, houses were built without driveways and garages, or even off street parking pads in the front or sides. As this Age comes to a close, the luxuries of the past are becoming unattainable and unsustainable. The needs of the many, more so every year, are outweighing the wants of a few. When the resources that we have available are at a premium that word supposes that having more money to pay entitles the buyer to buy more. In the short term, that might continue to work, but as a long term strategy, it cannot. Revolutions take from those people who think they can buy more just because they have more to spend. But when ten people are hungry, one man cannot feed his corn to his cow to produce meat for steaks.

Housing cannot be considered in isolation to all the infrastructure that is required in order to support it. When any resource becomes scarce, decisions for who will get them must be made. If a community has only one fire truck and station, the house that is twenty miles away will burn to the ground before the firefighters get there. If there is a choice between the 20 mile call and a 5 mile call, the 5 mile call will get the service. At some point in time, the rural road may not ever see new asphalt again, merely because the needs of the higher density area roads get all the available funding and asphalt that there is to have.

In the 3^rd Millennium, houses will be factory built to high construction and energy use standards and placed in dense communities surrounding transit stations and be co-located with trip destinations to which people can walk. No longer will we build houses where heated air leaks through windows and doors, electrical fixtures and gaps in the siding. Workers will not be slogging through the rain and the mud to stick build the houses, but will be well trained factory workers in some country who build to exacting tolerances.

Lighting systems will be based on low voltage LED lighting and chemical reactions that are recharged by sunlight being directed on them during the day. Dwelling based electric generation will produce the precise voltages that each connected device needs for optimum operation without transformation losses like what happens with the billions of "wall warts" that electronic devices today require.

As always there will be a wide selection of housing types and locations, but the denser more resource efficient types will dominate the cityscapes of the world. Population growth has already made it essential in China that they build 4 NYC Equivalent cities EVERY YEAR to keep up with their population growth. An "NYC Equivalent" is a city the size of Manhattan. That size and construction schedule leaves little in the way of luxuries in the form of grassy back yards and wide open suburban landscapes.

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3052: Transportation

The largest part of the world's population simply walks everywhere they go. They do not travel far beyond the distance one can walk in half a day. In the developing parts of the world, trains that were introduced by the British and left over after the collapse of colonial rule carry millions of people in and around their provinces. The ubiquitous automobile has made its impact on every population on the planet. Each of these modes continues to evolve and expand. In countries where Brittan was not the colonial government, the leaders and planners of transportation have embraced high-speed rail systems to move great numbers of people very fast along the ground. China and Japan are just two of those powerhouse economies that have already seen the future and have moved to meet it.

Each of the three modes mentioned above represents a higher energy budget than the one before it. Conversely, each one represents a lessening of flexibility and convenience than the one before it.

At today’s level of intrusion of the automobile into daily life, we are experiencing difficulties in sustaining that level. Flat production levels for petroleum coupled with larger populations demanding fuel from the ground, makes the paradigm unstable. The amount of carbon emissions, sulfur and Nitric Oxide is making the planet less habitable each year. The planet itself cannot sustain a doubling of automobile usage without at least a halving of the emissions.

The typical automobile carrying one human to work each day devotes the energy needed to move 4000 pounds of glass, plastic and metal that commuting distance. A commuter train carrying 135 passengers per car devotes only 830 pounds of glass, plastic and metal to the same task. With standing room only capacity that number can drop to 650 pounds[1].

In our thousand year future, we will not be driving personal vehicles for the bulk of our transport needs. This is not to say automobiles will be extinct but they will be relegated to a secondary status.

The cost of moving around may indeed make moving around a nearly extinct aspect of daily life. That ability is a luxury of energy utilization that takes from someone else. The billions of more people on the planet will undoubtedly force a shift in behaviors. Leisure travel may still remain high but the lion's share of miles traveled is associated with employment.

In countries like Japan and China where there are great high-density cities, there are also highly crowded subway rail systems. Millions of people make their daily trips-to-work by public means merely because there is not enough space available to allocate to automobiles. At one point in the 1990s a square foot of Tokyo real estate ran upwards of $2,500. They needed to make the most of that square foot and built skyscraping offices and apartments that had as many floors as possible to distribute that cost.

The luxury of being allowed to drive a $60,000 vehicle into a city and park it all day will certainly fall out of favor as the cost of doing so rises and limits the practice. Meanwhile urban planners and environmental advocates will have rethought the practicality of accommodating that desire for luxury and will not have allocated as much of our common resources to the practice.

The flying car that was predicted back when automobiles were first produced and traffic resulted may see a short lived appearance in the future but fuel costs and overhead congestion are certainly to go up. Small passenger compartments will certainly be common on the public transit ways of this distant future if only because of the diversity of where people will come from and travel to. Much like the convenience that personal autos provided for door to door travel, so might the public systems deliver a person seamlessly to the floor of their office suite from their dwelling. Not only the trains go forward and back, but sideways and vertically to the final destination of the trip. This would be like convergence of the building elevator and the subway train.

In my dream of the far distant future, automated freight hauling trucks plied the highways following magnetic markers embedded in the pavement. They breezed along at an efficient speed of 35 MPH automatically maintaining large distances between small numbers of units or positioning themselves in platoons of 5 to 10 trucks to make use of the reduced drag in the longer group. No drivers were needed that would become fatigued and required sleep, food or rest stops. There was no hurried delivery in order to pickup a return load or to get back home before the end of the day.

Trucks were organized and directed from Global Positioning Satellite dispatch and tracking systems. A load was scheduled to arrive at a time and place that was systematically plotted for maximum lane availability, less personal and local travel and accounted for weather and road conditions.

The trucks plodded along using solar roof panels, computerized regenerative braking systems and stops where batteries could be switched out for minimal down time. These were the medium distance haul trucks since the long haul loads went by rails to their just-in-time delivery points at manufacturing plants and transfer depots for the "last mile" final delivery.

The few personal automobiles were the first-mile/last-mile segment of much longer travel. They kept to themselves out of the truck-haul lanes and drove much faster due to the anxiety and personal needs humans wanting to get there quickly.

[1] Derived from the seating capacity and vehicle weight of the two-level Kawasaki Rail Cars that are operated by the Maryland Area Rail Commuter (MARC) railroad.

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3052: Crime

It may take the larger part of the next 1,000 years to do so, but in that time society will have a far better attitude about what is a crime and what is not. Acts and event that are today a crime will be better thought of as "nobody's business" or as an unfortunate circumstance that deserves treatment and remedy rather than summary incarceration.

In very low density population areas, simple exile could suffice as punishment fitting a crime. However, in those days and regions, worshiping the wrong god or even the right god in the wrong way was a crime worthy of death. Worshiping no god at all was the worst.

In societies where there was limited resources to maintain a convicted felon in a cage, they developed the paradigm of extremity amputation as both a marker of ones status as a criminal and as a practical limiting of ones ability to be a recidivist.

A large portion of the laws of the land, any land, are formed and enforced to seat power in an elite group of people. All churches of the adolescent faiths exercise that power over the population. They determine what a crime is and what the punishment shall be many times in a completely arbitrary fashion. For instance the very same act by two people of widely different social levels will be treated differently. One might receive a fine while the other is incarcerated for a number of years.

During the run up to the 3rd Millennium, acts and event that are deemed crimes and worthy of punishment will be greatly reduced. While in some arcane times and locations, selling spray paint on a Sunday was a crime. It was deemed so because a competing paint seller did not want to remain open on his Sabbath. Even in the 21st Century many states prohibit the sale of alcohol on Sundays. It remains a crime.

As our attitudes evolve, the possession off drugs that some people use for recreational purposes will drop out of the list of substances that can get a person incarcerated for merely possession. There will be a two-fold reason behind this. First there will be no morality reason for curtailing their use and there will be no value in prosecuting and housing offenders. More specifically, no one will profit from the former crime either by being employed to apprehend, prosecute and incarcerate the possessor. Similarly, the price of purchase will be market driven rather than held artificially high such that someone benefits from the high price. Petty crimes will not be necessary when an addicting substance becomes an inexpensive product rather than a major revenue source for the manufacturers and distributers.

All drug use will be a public health matter rather than a judicial one. No one will have to steal or assault another to get the money to assuage their addiction. If they want treatment, they can get it. Otherwise they will be free to kill themselves with their addictions.

The vast majority of people do not steal because they have less than someone else. They steal when they do not have enough of food, shelter, comforts and in the case of addictions not enough of the addicting substance. Solving the resource allocation puzzle will reduce a significant amount of petty crime and simple assaults.

Alcohol doesn't cause people to exhibit bad behaviors rather it lowers ones self-control to release the angers and the antisocial attitudes that are already in the person and are being suppressed until the alcohol changes the game. Most antisocial behaviors are learned at an early age. Parents or the absence of parents shape how a child will develop. We create our own monsters by how we treat children. They endure mistreatment then pass it along to their own children. It is very difficult to break that chain of abuser-abuse without separating the children at a very early age from the abuse. The children must be relocated to a parental environment where abuse will not continue.

In those 1,000 years of change, we will (must) learn to identify the abuser environments early and break the cycle.

Partner abuse is also a crime. Striking a partner, a parent or a child is an assault that is a learned behavior. Psychological abuse is also learned. Misogynic behaviors are also learned either from parents, relatives and even other people in the neighborhood, including other children. Once the conditions that propagate abusive relationships are better understood and identified, the crime level associated with the behaviors will also be mitigated.

Much of the domestic violence that exists up through the 21st Century is associated with job stress, lack of sufficient incomes, and unrealistic expectations of what the partner is supposed to do. Some of those expectations are derived from religious texts that have been references over and over again. With those influences minimized, so will be the behavioral crimes of abuse and domestic violence. When a person who is today a vulnerable partner and has nowhere to go and no way to subsist, is able to get out and stay away on his or her own, then there will be far fewer intransigent circumstances.

Product advertising in the 21st Century is a process of isolating consumers, telling them that they are inadequate by showing to them people who are perfect, and creating in them an anxiety that they are missing out and will never catch up. They show a person wearing a $900 jacket, $300 footwear and how sexy they seem to the opposite sex. Those who can afford the products buy them. Those who cannot buy them steal them from someone who has or they buy cheap knockoff copies (actually two crimes in one). In that distant future, there will be no such expensive clothing and accessories therefore no need to mug someone and steal.

The sheer numbers of possible buyers will make the per unit profit rates much lower. For instance selling a single song file for 99ȼ to 1/10 of the US population today generates $31 million dollars FOR JUST ONE SONG. When the US population is 600 to 1000 million, the royalties would generate $60 to $100 million at the same ratios. Of course, this assumes that people will care to buy access to individual songs after the passage of 1,000 year from now.

Pirating music for one's private collection of music will certainly be non-existent in that far away day. The "must have" recordings like we have today will be so clique by then.

Driving while intoxicated will be impossible with automobiles that routinely navigate themselves. Manual driving will be monitored by internal control systems so as to take over when the inebriated driver makes moves that are contrary to acceptable parameters. No need for it to be a crime to drive intoxicated when you just won't be able to do it.

With the reduction of things that ARE crimes and the economic inequities that foster crimes of desperation, will come a lessening of the fears and hatreds of people who are not exactly like ourselves. Those divisional attitudes will lessen the personal violence that has been a hallmark up through this 21st Century. While it will take a very long time to reign in 300 million handguns of America, gun ownership in 3052 will be nearly non-existent.

Suspects of trivial crimes will not need to be subdued and brutalized. They won't feel it necessary to carry a gun to protect themselves from other petty crime, to commit a crime or attempt to not be arrested for a crime. Police will not need to shoot fleeing suspects when they already know exactly who they are and can pick them up at any later time.

The whole idea that one can steal a piece of art supposes that someone wants to buy it at a price that the thief, fence and other intermediaries need to make it worth the effort. The buying selling of art also supposes that someone later on will pay an even higher price the next time the art is offered at auction. At some point that entire concept breaks down.

The same goes for gems and jewelry. The only reason a man would spend $4,000 for an engagement ring is that the woman he want to marry has been taught the message that you get a big stone or the whole thing is off. She is taught to swoon over a bit of crystalline carbon. This is an advertising and gem industry coup to get people to spend great sums on object that will never return the purchase price, ever. In 3052, people will be wiser than today and not want such expensive frivolous trinkets and they just won't have the funds to spend on them. With few people wanting this jewelry there will be few people to steal from or steal for.

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3052: Food

It requires 10 pounds of grain to produce 1 pound of beef. The luxury of feeding corn, oats and barley to livestock will be obviated by the need to feed that 10 pounds to 20 humans instead of 8 ounce steaks to two. The more flavorful proteins in the form of beef, pork, chicken, eggs and other industry raised animal products are highly energy intensive.

Every stage in the conversion of plant nutrients to animal nutrients involves another quantity of external energy to be put into the system. Inefficient metabolic processes produce huge amounts of waste that also needs to be processed using even more external energy.

The billions of more human mouths to feed will demand the grains rather than the meat. We already see this dilemma in the desire to extract ethanol from corn to fuel our automobiles. We cannot grow enough corn to fuel both the vehicle and the driver.

The bounty from the sea we are discovering and harvesting is not inexhaustible nor is it exactly free for the taking. If we fish the national waters of a country that country expects to derive an income for that privilege. Where there is not functioning government to charge and collect the fees, lawlessness prevails. Fishing fleets plunder the waters of another land without regard to sustainability and villagers set out in small boats to confront the monster factory-fishing fleets. The thieves meet the pirates and create a whole new aspect of global food supply. In the centuries that pass between today and 3052, the issue of territorial fishing rights and piracy on the seas will also pass into insignificance when the fish themselves fail to populate the waters in sufficient numbers to make a fishing fleet usable at all.

In the world of the early 21^st century the generation of protein is a biological one where seeds are sown, watered, chemically treated then harvested. Humans either eat the crops themselves or intermediary animals consume the plants then we consume the animals. Both variations are energy intensive and subject to the whims of the weather, longer term climate and the cyclic emergence of insect raiders that devastate our food supply. Ultimately there are but a few essential proteins that we need for our lives that our bodies cannot make for themselves. In that distant time, we will cut to the chase and manufacture those essential proteins without the need for plant crops and animal intermediaries to make them for us.

Similarly, we will come to realize that locusts, beetles and other crop eating insects are themselves a source of protein. While some lesser developed societies readily eat insects, we eschew such practices in favor of poisoning them and our crops. Then we consume the poisoned crops. In our Third Millennium future, crops and insects will be harvested together and processed into the unidentifiable packaged stuff on the shelves of today.

Food will become an even more mechanized and industrial process that leaves out the aesthetics of taste and texture going only for the nutritional value. Even as those processes work, scientists have been able to coax beef muscle to grow in a Petri dish. Alas, meat without the cow. Maybe chicken without the hens. Bacon and ham without the pigs. The steady march of technological advancements will bring about the streamlining of food production in the world. Cutting out the inefficiencies of animal husbandry will be a necessary part of serving the tastes of the human palette.

Much of the processed food that is marketed in the 21st century is 50% or more sugar. Massive amounts of fats and other carbohydrates are the hallmark of the snacks we consume as though they were meals. During the run up to the 3rd Millennium, humans on a global scale will become heavier, less healthy, less active, and die at a younger age. This process will be fostered by the profits derived by the industries that produce the sugars, starches and fats that humans love to consume. Even though this degradation will be global and widespread, it will not be long lived.

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3052: Employment

In a thousand years the nature of commerce and trade will certainly make the transfer of currency obsolete. Even in the early years of the 21^st century, the age of highly-paid manual labor is coming to a close. That is not to say that all labor will cease, but its dominant place in the grand scheme of things will certainly be small by comparison to the population of the earth. Retail shopping is fast becoming a do-it-yourself activity with the buyer scanning the price codes herself and bagging the items in reusable containers. Soon the items will scan themselves much like how airports track and distribute bar-coded luggage through massive mazes of conveyor belts from plane to carousel. Internet-based shopping is already highly automated requiring only minimal human employment in order to get a product from a manufacturer to a customer.

Farming is the bellwether of employment decline. That which used to engage the labors of most of the population of the United States now accounts for less than 2% of it. And that 2% could even be less if there were no farm families clinging (for now) to the traditions and customs of their grand and great grand parents. A family farming unit will be ill-prepared to meet the needs of a billion or more Americans. More land will need to be placed under cultivation and the houses and barns will be quaint exhibits in a Farm Museum. Even as the mechanization of farming by agri-business continues to dominate the production of food, there has risen a movement to decentralize that production. Spaces in the sun everywhere will be tapped to produce chemical-free food that can be grown in ever smaller volumes of space. Yes, volumes, not areas. Conventional farming uses acreage as its measure. Future food production will necessarily go (grow) vertically.

The steel industry in the United States experienced a huge reduction in domestic employment as the mills and the finishing plants moved to other continents. That conversion did not create much of a net change in total employment, but there was a decline in the actual numbers of people needed as the modern furnaces use automation to do what mill workers used to do.

In the era of the American Civil War, tens of thousands of slaves and other low-skilled laborers walked the cotton furrows picking bolls by hand. The short harvest period made it essential that a sufficient number of people be available to get all the work done in time. Today one person driving a reaper can clear a field in a few hours, and a few dozen drivers can harvest all the cotton in eastern Arkansas within a few days.

Wheat and hay have a similar story. What remains is the temporal need for migrant labor to pick the fragile crops like strawberries and blueberries. An apple harvesting machine deploys a net under the tree, reaches out with a mechanical arm and hand, and swiftly shakes the tree with micro-movements that drops all the apples in under 30 seconds. No need for humans with ladders.

There will be precious little for 12 billion or more humans to do to engage in the then-to-now paradigm of exchanging ones muscle force for wages.

The Protestant Work Ethic that has been instilled as the driving force of successful families in the US for generations will come to an end as we move toward the next millennium and beyond. There will not be any need for all the people who are willing and able to work for a living. More people than not will "receive their daily bread" merely for the fact of their presence in the world. They will be assigned their dwelling and be provided their clothing and other common implements such as communications and entertainment devices. What they do all day will be up to themselves since the civilization won't have any other use for them than as consumers of goods and services. Without income from capital investments or physical labor, all the subscriptions that businesses rely upon in the 21st Century will become non-existent.

The paradigm of monetizing everything will become obsolete. The era of investors reaping profits will decline as the magnitude of investment for even simple enterprises will far surpass the ability of wealthy people to place their money in the business.

With few people actually working, there will be no working class tax base from which to draw funds. Corporations will have to suffice to use their corporate attitudes to do good for people with no other impetus than "the jobs needed to be done." There will be no source to pay them for doing what they do. No longer will it be possible for one person in the business to be paid $10mn per year every year.

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3052: Energy

The sun had been good to us. Helios provides our daily warmth, our seasonal food and all the stored carbon in deep in the earth that sustains our journey through the Cosmos. We are not unlike an interstellar craft floating toward some new home in the Galaxy. We have had our bags packed for us, and a few sandwiches to sustain us along the journey. We all have our ticket for passage and have boarded the transport. One can continue to depend on our supplies but eventually we have to start doing for ourselves. We will have to adapt to the changing conditions. The Greenland Vikings settled in a cold and inhospitable land, not unlike the land from which they sailed. But it was not the same land. They came with an understanding of how to survive in such a place, but continued to rely on the knowledge they arrived with. After consuming all their travel supplies, each year the food supply became less as compared to what their population needed. Instead of moving on or going back they stayed until extinction came.

We have been given a finite supply of fuel to keep us going. It is not wise to use it up. There are they among us who are satisfied that what we have will last long enough for us to discover the rest. They are like children looking for hidden eggs at Easter. Each year that passes brings a higher extraction cost that we choose to absorb like the frog in the pot of cold water who fails to jump out as the temperature slowly increases and he cooks. We continue to rely upon finding something of value rather than in producing it. We only take from the oceans and never give back anything but our excrement. The millennium to come will make that bounty from the sea a mere legend passed down generation to generation by grandparents who assert that "back when I was a child great factory fishing fleets combed the oceans to bring us our protein.” Man has grown up crying out to god to "give us this day our daily bread" in some vain attempt to be allowed to eat rather than producing the foods we need for ourselves.

It may not be in this 21st century that we are forced to switch to some other method of powering our civilization. But certainly what we have done in the last hundred years will not suffice through the next several hundred years. What we do today will impact the lives of our children’s children’s children. It is safe to say that coal, gas and oil will not last a thousand year hence. And even if it would, the negative impacts of the wastes will continue to accumulate to disastrous outcome. Barring a solar event that causes the sun to become a few degrees cooler wherein we would want all those greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, some change in our modus operandi must be made. “We do not inherit the Earth from our parents. We borrow it from our children.[1]”

Photovoltaic electric generation doesn’t add to the warming of the earth either by polluting gases or by releasing pent up heat that must be radiated in the atmosphere. Wind turbines and hydro-electric plants are the same. Along with a change over of generation techniques, we need to use much less energy per capita. In the 1970s, electric utilities created conservation plans to lower the per capita consumption of electricity because a 10% reduction of use cost far less than a 10% increase in capacity. The same formula applies to sewage treatment, gas heating fuel, and potable water.

Every dwelling in existence today will be long gone by 3052. Even our historically significant commercial and cultural structures will likewise be replaced. Better insulation will make the pPer square meter of heat loss area smaller. Tthe heat transfer will be significantly reduced making energy demands much lower. Better materials with lower heat transmission qualities will be developed to make dwellings and commercial space. Light to hold back the terrors of the night will be invented that consumes less energy than an incandescent bulb does today. Light Emitting Diodes pierce the darkness at a fraction of the energy of conventional 19th Century Incandescent bulbs. If we want 10 billion more illumination devices we will have to do even much better than the compact florescent bulbs we are just now beginning to use. Electricity may not even be converted for light any longer, nor vice versa. Chemical reactions also emit light that is not dependent upon a distant dynamo powered by water, nuclear steam, coal or even the wind and the sun itself.

Up to these first years of the 21st Century the production and distribution of electricity has been subject to the legacy of central generation and standard single voltage supply. Americans all live in houses where the appliances, motors and illumination devices all start out with a "house current" of 110-120 Volts AC. After connecting any device to the power, that device alters the voltage and current type to suit its particular design. Wireless phones make 5 VDC to charge its battery. Portable computers typically want 12 to 19.2 VDC for its operation. Motor driven appliances typically accept the house current as is and resistance heating devices do too.

Most Light Emitting Diodes individually need 3 to 5 VDC so they are arranged in such a way as to total up their needs to be the house current that is summarily supplied.

Even when a homeowner chooses to go "off the grid" with his own electric generation the system must be designed to operate the standard equipment at the standard voltage. However, if the house is built from the ground up as a self-contained energy producer/user, then the solar, wind, or small hydro-electric system can produce Direct Current at low voltages that new devices need.

In that time, 1,000 years from now, onsite solar and wind generation needs only produce DC at about 12 volts and be easily stored in what today are thought of as conventional batteries. Every sky-access surface will be active in producing photo-voltaic electricity. Hundreds of thousands of miniature wind vanes will continually product small contributions of power into the local use grid. Systems not yet thought of will add their part to the total generation demand. Even such devices as piezo-electric poles that silently sway in the wind or in a tidal pool will create electricity as they bend and reflex. All of these modes of generation are in existence in the present, but have not been widely implemented.

[1] Variously considered an Indian proverb, or attributed to Antoine de St. Exupery, Ralph Waldo Emerson or David Bower.

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3052: Population

3052: Population

Throughout human history, the biological imperative to reproduce ones genes in the bodies of children has been the norm. During the first decade of the 21st century in the US, the fertility rate has been 2.1 children per woman. The birth rate is 18.14/1000 population and the death rate is 8.27/1000 population. That leaves 9.87 more births than deaths. Just on current population growth, we would add about 3 million people per year. Over a thousand years, that could add 3 billion people to the USA alone.

The concept of individual liberties and freedoms of choice is not likely to stand in the face of the realities of population growth even at the lowest levels. Today we support motherhood and childhood of millions of low or no wage households. This condition exists due to the lack of education that is linked with a job that pays enough to support the family. It is the result of indiscriminant sexual activity that results in a child that cannot be supported by the mother alone when the father is absent for any number of reasons. It is also the result of families that started out financially stable and were marginalized by a shift in the labor market that made local employers relocate elsewhere or completely evaporate as when the house building market slows down and construction workers have nothing to build, or when the automotive industry over builds its inventory with models that are no longer suited to the cost of liquid fuel. Many of the reasons for society having to support mothers and children are out of the hands of the mothers and fathers themselves. Out of the hands that is unless you consider the freedom to have sex and pleasure without considering the ramifications to society. Rarely does one put those considerations on the checklist of what to do to get ready for a hot date.

Failing to curtail births will result in more people whose labors are not needed yet who will need food, shelter, medical care, and entertainment.

China has tried the authoritarian approach to population control. It is the one family-one child rule. It is difficult enough to get people to follow such a rule, and even more difficult to implement a remedy when the law is violated. Forced abortions and forced adoptions have split the country along moral lines. In the western provinces of China along the border with Pakistan, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan and Tajikistan there is an ethnic group of Muslims who live in the controlled territory of China but more closely align with the Muslims across the official and disputed territory Arunachal Pradesh to the base of the Himalayas. They seek separation from the godless Beijing government and alignment with the Islamic government partly citing the curbs on population growth which include abortions.

The next thousand years will certainly bring with it some widespread culling of the population of the earth by either natural biological, geologic/climatic, or man-made vectors. The more desirable approach is to allow the natural processes to do their job of controlling populations. Even though in the US we are faced with the retirement of the Baby Boom generation, those born in the years 1946 to 1964, and who started reaching 60 years of age in 2006, that too will pass. By 2030 the vanguard will be in excess of 85 or will be dead. By 2050, the last of the Baby Boomers will be 85+ or dead, too. After that the population will be on a downward trend and we will have to have learned a lesson about what to do to maintain a sustainable environment. There is however, a new generation spawned of the Baby Boom Generations which is nearly as large as the boomer cohort. They are not as wealthy, not as independent and not as prolific as have been their parents. Until now in 2008, we have not had to consider that part of the equation. We could just keep expanding.

3052 will see a huge population of humans each requiring his and her share of the planet's resources and energy production. We shall need to revise our strategies in order to continue on this planet. The per capita contribution of CO2 and material wastes must be significantly lowered in order to not destroy the biosphere that we rely upon.

Everything being connected to everything else demonstrates that we cannot do one thing badly without negatively impacting other aspects of our lives. For example, we will not be able to all have personal automobiles and drive anywhere and everywhere we want to indiscriminately. Our daily routines will necessarily require far less travel to accomplish. Housing densities will be far greater due to the lack of new land to dedicate to dwellings as well as the limits on available resources for travel. Three billion people in the US cannot be allowed to operate 1.5 billion automobiles even if we could devise a non-polluting motive energy source. Even the tires we burn up on the pavement contributes to environmental pollution. Just to park those automobiles would require over 10,700 square miles of spaces. Then there would need to be another 10,700 sqmi to park them at a destination.

Although residential and work densities will need to be far greater, we will have learned over the 1,000 years that there is an upside limit to how dense that number ought to be. Too great a density foments stresses and anxieties that are destructive to human societies.

Population size and overall growth is dependent upon to rates. One is the birth rate, the number of live births per 100,000 women. The other is the death rate measured in the life expectancy of males and females. Throughout the latter part of the 20th Century and into the 21st, is has been the lowering of the death rate not the birth rate that had most driven population size. With successive improvements in health care and the removal of hazards in the environment, people are living longer. Fully 20 to 25% of the world's population is composed of people who are 65 and older. Back in 1900 life expectancy was measured at 35 to 40 years of age. That 20% number represents 1.4 billion humans around the world.

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With relation to the Food 3052 chapter, the Millennials (those born in the years ranging from the early 1980s to the early 2000s) will be the first generation to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents. This change will be in part due to eating choices, the contamination of food and water by various industries, and the overall changes in the climate.

3052:Education

3052: Education

My real perch above the City of Baltimore exists at the highpoint of UMBC. From there I can see the Key Bridge and the treetops of scattered trees that appear to be a forest from that distance and elevation. The campus is laid out inside a perimeter roadway that confines most of the buildings and most of the several thousand parking spaces. In 3052 that campus will certainly be gone. Even if it remains a center of information, they will not be hosting 20-something students who drive their cars to the primarily commuter campus.

The need for higher education will be greatly diminished as canned information is available in your pocket. History will be ill relevant as formula becomes more basis of next steps. Even today, the history of 1972 is as ancient to students as WWI and WWII was to my generation. Many years after I last left the academic landscape, and I continue to learn, I find that much of what was taught as fact was more precisely defined as opinions and observations of the author(s) of the text books. In the 1970s for instance, we were never exposed to the pre-texts for war that governments used to either stay out of or dive heartily into armed conflict. If you look in the correct places you can find a reason to wage war on just about anyone. With the circa 2004, Bush Doctrine that asserts that America has the right kill anyone who appears to threaten our security, one can attack preemptively for the flimsiest of justifications. The only part of the history of war and conflict is the tabulations of carnage. Who did what and why, who was the aggressor and the victim all become muddied in the writing and rewriting of the chronicles.

Fact and figures seem to be the more important part of education. Computers can provide that function at a fraction of the cost of a formal higher education. Computers and information portals alleviate the need to read, write, or do arithmetic. And who ever needed that biology class, chemistry class or physics class anyway? Trigonometry and calculus are only useful if you plan to attend college. In the Third Millennium AD all that information will be firmly archived in massive data storage centers accessible by personal devices if and when the need arises.

There will still need to be a form of primary education. Children will still need to know that numbers, colors and letters exist and what they represent. We will need to teach them how to think not what to think. This will require a huge change in the education paradigm. A few children will need to be groomed as the thinkers and planners, inventors and builders of new things. The rest will need to be taught things that will keep them happy and ease their anxieties. In my high school days, a very few of us learned computer programming while the cool kids and athletes kicked and batted balls around and others cheered them on. Even that electronic pursuit has been reduced to formula and modules of APPs on wireless phones. Computer programs write the new codes that populate the world even today. In 3052, the breadth and depth of numerical processing will far exceed the knowledge base of all but the most highly involved computer scientists.

While the world has become more global, it turns out that there are a few billions more candidates for higher education than the USA has to offer. Our mere 300 million people is but a 5% share of the 6 billion people on the planet today[1]. In that distant future the population could be 100 to 120 billion. At a 1% annual population growth the Earth's population of humans will exceed 51 Billion by 2214 unless we or something curtails us first. , Iif we do not apply what we already know about human energy usage and waste disposal we won't be able to expand much beyond 10 to 12 Billion. Not everyone can attend or needs to attend university to get an education that will result in more income earning potential. As civilization becomes more standardized there is a lesser need for the creative thinking that is performed by the top few of the world’s greatest academics.

High school level education needs to address the needs of the trades: electricians, plumbers and carpenters. And the services: landscapers, nursing care technicians, machine oilers. And even then, the construction techniques of a thousand years hence will be nothing like what we do today. These processes will be more formulated too. Not a lot of need for creative or artistic solutions.

The primary and elementary level education will serve to identify who among the masses of students will be the thinkers and leaders of the next generation. The rest will learn how to live in a world where their labor and brain power is not needed. Even in this early 21st Century era, more than one-half of the US population does not contribute labor to the economy or the maintenance of our infrastructure. These people are our children, our retired adults and the people who by birth or misfortune cannot provide 40 hours of work per week at a job that would yield in excess of $15,000 per year. For them, people who do work must support those who cannot.

In the third millennium not laboring will be the norm with 90% or more not producing useful labors.

The Principle of Imminent Collapse asserts that no matter how bad things look, we will end up with a New Equilibrium not Extinction.

[1] 7 Billion people as of 2014.

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Saturday, April 25, 2015

The Year 3052: Introduction

Healthcare 3052

3052: Transportation

3052: Crime

3052: Education