I was watching television with my daughter a few nights ago. I can’t remember the name of the programme we were looking at but it was one of those period dramas, set in the 1940’s or thereabouts. At one point in the story a guy went and sat at the edge of the bed and took off his watch to wind it. I remarked how I hadn’t seen anyone doing that for a long time, winding a watch. My daughter looked at me strangely and asked me why anybody would have to do that. It never occurred to me that she has only ever known battery operated watches.
So I started thinking about what else she didn’t know about and what life will be like for her two year old son in thirty years’ time. How much will change by the time he reaches adulthood and when he looks back on his life with us, will he consider 2016 to be a primitive time in his existence? For that to happen there will have to be a lot of major changes over the next few years but, for me, it’s difficult to see how things can improve that drastically. It seems to me that we have it pretty good as it is.
I can remember my parents telling me about their childhood and how little they had. They had no electricity when they were young, or phones, or cars or sometimes even shoes. Clothes were passed down the line from the oldest child to the next and sizes didn’t matter. Food was basic and by no means plentiful. A coal fire heated the room that the fire was in but the rest of the house was cold. And that was in the good times when coal was available. Cars were few and far between, roads were poor and there was no street lighting.
My childhood was spent in the lap of luxury compared to what they had to put up with. I can remember the introduction of the television and staring in amazement at the test card. For those who have no idea what I’m talking about, the test card was an image that was displayed on the screen when there were no programmes on. I think it was designed to give the technicians something to look at when they were trying to tune in the telly.
I can remember the excitement when a terrace got street lighting. I can remember getting the phone for the first time and the luxury of central heating when it was first installed. So while I have seen huge advancements in my time, I had imagined that we had gone as far as we could and that this was pretty much as good as it was going to get. But then I began to wonder if there are more changes in store for us. Will my grandson look back in thirty years’ time and recall that my house was caught in a time warp? Will he think that I lived in a cave and will he wonder how he managed to survive in such primitive conditions?
Already, at two years of age, he will ask me to get my electronic tablet. He will then park himself on my lap and choose the programmes that he wants to watch. I just have to start up the thing and then he takes over. Some mornings he climbs into my bed and asks me for my phone and he watches his cartoons on it. It’s second nature to him at this stage. He has his own iPad and he is well able to navigate his way around it to find games for himself.
He has an endless supply of clothes that fit, he is used to having heat in every room in the house and there is no shortage of food or drink for him. He has his entertainment at the push of a button and he has a variety of toys. So how much better can it get for him?
There are some who would say that life will change more in the next 20 years than it has done in all of human history so far. By 2030 we could have goods delivered to us by drones and we could be using 3D printers to produce our meals. We could be driving hovercraft type machines instead of cars and we might all have robots at home doing the cooking and the cleaning. There could be a microchip implanted in our wrists to monitor our vital signs and give us advice on what treatment to use when we fall ill.
It looks as if more of us are going to live longer and the population of aged people is expected to go through the roof by 2050. As people live longer, they will get more age-related diseases like dementia, cancer and diabetes. On the other hand, thankfully, medicine will also advance by 2050 so there should be more cures.
However there is more bad news ahead. We are continuing to damage our planet with climate engineering, which could result in the extinction of humanity. There are those who predict that the luminosity of the sun will steadily increase and the long-term trend is for plant life to die off altogether. The extinction of plants will be the end of almost all animal life, since plants are the base of the food chain on Earth. The increase in the Earth’s surface temperature will cause the surface to heat enough to melt. By that point, all life on the Earth will be extinct.
So don’t worry what the world is going to look like in a few years’ time because the future is grim. The planet is set to melt…. in about four billion years.