The world seems to bring surprise after surprise in more concentrated doses the farther we get away from history and into reality. It took how long for us to develop the first horseless carriage, and then how quickly within that century did we develop jets that could fly twice the speed of sound? How long did it take for us to develop the first gun? And then within the next few centuries, casualties in war became greater than they ever were. Then in the last century we developed nuclear power, the apex of our technology, with the power to energize and then the power to remove all of human life within seconds of a simple command of a single commander and chief or premier.
Can you imagine what will happen within 50 years? Maybe we are still in the fallout of the power Cold War era, or on the verge of a new world order with the need to prevent climate influenced global disaster, but either way, technology will play a key order in accelerating that change. Perhaps it will with that new technology that scientists are hoping for us to discover at any moment, or maybe it will be a new war over scarce resources, allowing the militaries of the world to unleash some of the greatest and most deadliest weapons that world has yet to experience. It is certain though, that our current technologies are taking away our resources at an accelerated rate, and the step that will be taken to address the issue could either cause even more destruction or a way to save the prosperity of our species.
In 200 years, if things are in the way they have been, resources will be so scarce that I believe that there will be several wars for resources, especially within the Middle East over water issues between Israel and the rest of Arab nations. Because the loss of oil would make the formerly oil rich nations of no use to the US, the US would back Israel appropriately, determining the victor. China would burst on its own consumption and production cycle, causing mass famine and loss of productivity, with its environmental efforts halted because of the economic melt down it would face. This would lead to America, the king of consumption, which because of its relatively geographically isolated location and the fact that it has enough nuclear weapons to destroy any nation that dares attack its lands, to have to force its economy to focus on stabilization rather than growth. The cost of living would increase so much that birth rates would go down in cities where people have to fend for themselves and in isolated regions where food production for the focus to be on producing energy through bio fuels and enough food. Immigration would be closed off because the focus on a downward economy with little resources to produce would lead to a hatred of immigrants “leaching off” American sources. Now this leads to the cities, the main cities, especially cities planned well like Portland, Oregon, would by now be advanced to provide jobs for citizens, while those cities not as well planned like New York would be forced to revamp the mass transportation system and provide a way to sector off all those new immigrants to the city away from established regions. DC would be even more segmented from the world with areas that are designed for work that are somewhat well off versus areas that are total slums of new and old poor inhabitants. With the economy as down as it is, city planning would be revamped to find out a way to give its citizens jobs that would be able to sustain them as well as plan more mass transportation in order to conserve fuel. Electric rails would be introduced because in 200 years coal would be the only somewhat abundant fossil fuel left in America. In fact, this would be something America would ration out to the rest of the world at high prices in order create some semblance of an economy.
While this future seems bleak and I would love to see no one hurt, it almost makes sense to me for things like this to happen, and I wish it wouldn’t happen. I would like for there to be green housing with reusable clean technologies, but I can’t see that happening until citizens feel like there is an advantage to changing their way of life, which our advertising isn’t really helping us realize. But, as I write this dark assessment, I realize that there is hope. Even with the suffering that will happen, for at least US citizens, they will be able to regroup and reassess the damage done. We went through the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, a crisis probably at a much lesser degree than resource depletion and climate change, and recovered. While I acknowledge the pain that will happen, the deaths that will occur, we will be annihilated and stuck in a stone age. As long as we do not realize those hydrogen bombs, we will continue to survive and innovate eventually into a sustainable way not because we want to, but because we will have to in order to live properly.
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