A Story of the Infinite Future
It’s the year 2030…
Alex
It was weird watching that movie last night. It was set in the year 2016 and there was so much traffic. You couldn’t have believed that there could be so many cars on the road at the same time. Seriously — why? I mean, I know it was another one of Disney’s super hero movies — but what did all those people need all those cars for. Mom and Dad told me a story about that and it just didn’t make any sense. We have a car whenever we need one, but why waste all that space in the house to have a garage and to just have a car parked there all the time. My teacher told me that back in the 10s, cars used to spend like 90% of their time parked doing nothing. That’s crazy — why would you own your own car?
Jin
I guess it’s time to get up…
The team should be online by now — we haven’t connected in the past few days since everyone was head’s down throwing their parts together. It’s going to be amazing to get a shot at putting another robo-mining platform together. We’ve had 3 successes this week alone — which — for a team this new is amazing. Can’t wait to present our project in class; who knew all that time playing Minecraft when I was 5 would turn into something so real for the Science Fair. My dad says that if we keep this up, university is going to be paid for! So amazing…
Yulia
5 days in Reality 2.0 — it’s always weird coming back and waking up with an IV plugged into my arm. Plus side, we were able to test out a few more molecules out on Venus. I’m hoping we can come up with some material skins that will allow us to put a longer term outpost on Venus and not have to evac so often. For the past ten years, we haven’t been able to maintain one for more than 3 months before the pitting and brittleness passed the safety threshold. It’s amazing though — when we started this team in Russia — I was only 10. We thought it was just some cool new game…
Akachi
Ashanti walked in. “How’s Pluto today?”
“Same as always. Cold. Very Cold.”
“I thought you said that there was a hot core that you might be able to tap into?”
“There is, but it is going to take a month or two before we can get the deep drills sunk in far enough to start the upwelling.” Akachi looked over his shoulder at Ashanti wondering again at the tech that made it possible for her to speak with him across the vast distance. Quantum entanglement was truly magical. The scientists who created this incredible tool for communication had performed the impossible. But, what was impossible today? A house on Pluto? If he had told his grandfather that he would live on Pluto, the old man would have laughed and told him to stop having foolish dreams. A boy from a small village in Mali? Traveling to space? In 2018, when he was merely 12 and staring up at the sky, this truly would have been inconceivable. SpaceX changed everything…
In 2020, just 4 years after the autonomous car race launched, the world looked very different. Autonomous bots didn’t just look like cars. Autonomous bots looked like flexible discs, humanoid helpers, rapidly moving and nearly invisible fish, great airships and speedy wheels. And — these were only the obvious bots. In addition, there were literally hundreds of other shapes that bots might come in — some nearly impossible to see, some looking like fantasies out of some techno-utopia future — but instead of fantasies — made real. The bot age terrified some at first — but the younger generation, having lived with technology embedded in their lives from birth found incredible new outlets for their creativity. It didn’t stop there.
Infinite food — for nearly the entirety of recorded human history, we have struggled, worked, warred and explored to find ways to feed ourselves and our tribes. Whether you look at tribe as a small group of people around a teepee or a great nation spanning a continent — providing food for the entire group has eluded us constantly and brought suffering to some — always. The bot age changed all of that in a few short years. With incredible sensing abilities, tireless and sleepless work, millions of hours of experiment and massive quantities of data analysis, bots found the most sustainable and productive methods for cultivating every crop on the planet. We have learned more in the past 2 years leading up to 2030 about our biosphere than we had managed to learn over the past ten thousand years previously. By leveraging bot interviewers to interview the world’s scientists and native scholars and then running massive data analysis, simulations and micro experiments all across the globe, we have reached the point of infinite food — where the rate of production of food can be ramped and scaled to match all of our foreseeable needs. Food isn’t free, but it is attainable by all.
Read more stories of the Infinite Future like this one and join me in the conversation — https://medium.com/future-feed.
Next… Infinite Shelter…
To find out more about me and what I do, feel free to find me on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/jmscott.
