World building 301: some projections

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World building 301: some projections

Right now, over at the venerable discussion board known as the WELL, Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky and having their regular annual State of the World pow-wow, this time for 2012.

I always find these fascinating, because Chairman Bruce is the pre-eminent thought leader of modern near-future SF.

He's been one jump ahead of the pack ever since the early 1980s (when I avidly subscribed to his pseudonymous crit zine Cheap Truth, the house self-criticism session of the early cyberpunks), then the mid-1980s when he basically invented the New Space Opera and moved on before anyone else had time to notice, and then the early 90s when he got the implications of the internet and climate catastrophe in Heavy Weather ... seriously, if I'm ever at a loss to know what the big near-term global issues are, I look for his footsteps and follow them. (It's no accident that a few years ago he seemed to lose interest in dying media and high-tech environmentalism and went after industrial design and 3D printers.)

Anyway.

I'm going to use some of his mojo as a jumping off point for asking: what is the world going to look like in 2032? And in 2092?

It's an important question. I expect to be around in 2032, albeit somewhat more creaky (I'll be 68) — the state of the world in 2032 is a matter of personal interest. By 2092 ... well, if I'm still alive in 2092 there will have been medical breakthroughs, because I'd be 128 years old, and that exceeds the current boundary with which human life expectancy converges (which is roughly 121-122). My grandfather died a couple of months short of his 70th birthday; my father is still going strong at 87: a straight line extrapolation would peg me at making it past 104, although I don't think I'm as healthy as dad. So it's a matter of rather more theoretical interest to me, but nevertheless worth worrying about just in case the next 20-80 years bring us some massive breakthroughs in life prolongation.

What do I predict for 2032?

Climate: the current remaining question marks over climate change will have been answered, and the answers won't be anything pleasant. Climate change denialism will probably be about as respectable as Lysenkoism is today — an intellectually corrupt pseudo-science emerging at the behest of a bankrupt ideology. Chunks of the world will be suffering heat stress with damaging effects on agriculture (notably Australia, where imported European-style agricultural prac...