future 2004

I'm New,

And I wonder why everything gets worse as the years passed. Shouldn't we learn something from History? 14-18 & 39-45 didn't do any good like any other war. Where are the forest? They were here first. Why do we need a car per person? They just kill people.

Nothing makes you wanna stay on this planet or have children. They're just going to live in a huge garbage when you won't be able to breath like normal humans. Everything changes so fast. I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years Luc Besson's film the 5th Element would became true.

The best that could happen? Some huge explosion so most people die, only smart people would have survived and rebuild a brand new world that everyone takes care of. Am I dreaming? Maybe.

The next generation is going to realize that getting bombed or baked is a waste of life.

The incentive to live clean and sober will partly be provided by employers, who will use sophisticated testing techniques that may make drug users unemployable.

Life will be harder as prosperity stops being a birthright. People will have to struggle more to achieve some degree of comfort, and they won't have the time or the energy to get bent.

Young people will look at their stoned, bombed parents and say, "I don't really want to be like that. I would rather be fully alive, fully awake, all the time."

Even if we don't run out of gas we're gonna run out of space. The freeways will become hopelessly choked in major metro areas and corridors, and we'll have to evolve to something different.

More freight will have to go back to the railroad, clearing the freeways for cars.

More people may have to go back to the railroad too...No reason we could not have frequent high-speed train service between all major us cities. Hello? They are already doing this in most European countries, and if you think driving is better, you haven't tried a real train system yet.

Come to think of it, high speed rail would be better than planes. If we had 200 mph trains, you could get from ny to chicago in about three hours. How long does it take now, by plane? And remember, you have to count the time you spend driving to ohare or kennedy, finding a place to park, getting to the terminal, waiting in line after line, etc etc.

The airlines are already losing money despite big taxpayer subsidies and there's no end in sight. In a few years, we're likely to have a federally-owned central air travel system, because the private sector won't be able to keep the planes in the air.

Am I wrong? Don't just sit there, argue!

Our civilization is in trouble because most of us are devoting most of our energy to maintaining the status quo.

This civilization grew and became increasingly prosperous over the past 200 years because it was dynamic, progressive and revolutionary, constantly upsetting the social and economic applecart to move ahead to a brighter future.

Technology: the sailboat and the horse and the flatboat made way for the steam boat and the railroad, then the truck and the automobile.

The pony express gave way to the telegraph, and the telegraph to the telephone and radio, then to the television, the computer, the internet.

Society: It was a struggle, but we managed to move toward equality for women. We ended slavery and then legal segregation.

Now we're stuck in the mud. Yes, I know that computer technology is racing ahead at warp speed, and this is a good thing. But it's not accompanied by any similar burst of creativity in the technology of energy production or transportation of people. If we don't figure out a way to move people around more efficiently, and if we don't develop a clean, sustainable power source, we are going to hit a wall, perhaps a lot sooner than we thought.

People who lack the technical skills to prosper in our new technoworld are beginning to form a permanent underclass.

And on a global scale, we don't seem to be making much progress toward lifting more than half the world out of a meager, hand-to-mouth existence. A world with such massive inequality is inherently unstable.

We are all caught up in the here and now. What will our lives be like in 20 years? This is the place to think out loud about it, to argue with other people, to talk about what kind of future we really want and what we could do to get there.