Year 2100

Posted by Johno on December 28, 1999 on World Wide Wits End, and refined on December 29, 1999

What was the human life expectancy in the year 1900? 50, 60? What is it now? About 80?

What will it be in year 2100? Add another twenty-five or thirty years, or will medical science add 50 or 60 more years? Probably the latter. 

In 2100 my son will be 103 years old.  And what will he see in his lifetime?

I look back on my 45 years, and I am still amazed at what the human race has accomplished. We put a man on the moon in the late 60's. We have space ships circling and landing on Mars. We have sent broadcasts into space that might just now be reaching intelligent life somewhere in the Universe. It makes me wonder what they might be thinking, as the first signals that we sent into outer space were from Howdy Doody.

I remember Dick Tracy and his two-way wrist radio. How ridiculous that seemed at the time. Now we think that anyone without a cel phone is a Neanderthal.

I remember the black and white TV that received only three channels, on a good day, if you were lucky. Then came UHF with the funny little round antenna. UHF added three channels in Philly, 17, 29, and 48. I could only imagine getting all of the others in between.

And then came the computers. I remember in the early 1980s a 350-Megabyte disc drive was the size and weight of a bowling bowl. We now store gigabytes and terabytes on media the size of a cassette tape.

Does anyone remember the high school and college library Dewey (sp) decimal card system? I spent 16 years in school, and I never did figure it out. Now first graders type into a computer on a myriad of World Wide Web search engines anything that they need to research, and in milli-seconds they get a listing of about 100,000 web sites that contain all of the information they seek, and then some.

Medical science now can clone living things. We have the ability to re-engineer the gene. We have broken the DNA code. But, we still can not cure the common cold. However, I can see the day that medical science cures every disease and malady known to man, with two exceptions being old age and stupidity. And there lies the rub.

What could the human race accomplish in the next 100 years, if we could eradicate stupidity? We now live in a world where China, North Korea, India, and Pakistan all have nuclear bombs. And they say that Iran, Iraq, Libya, and other not so stable governments and lunatics will soon be members of the nuclear age.

Now that we as a species, in the last century, have developed the technology to blow up the world 100 times over, maybe in the next century we can figure out how to feed this planet's population and live in peace and prosperity. I know that I won't be around to see it, but I hope that my son and his children can be a part of it. The alternative is something that defies imagination.

And Sarah responded to the above.