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Mrs Wonderful
2016 Oct 10, 8:36am
You own a galaxy note 7 and that's the 'tell' seconds before your life goes up in smoke.
ohomen171 says
I Awaken And Find That It's October 10, 2116
Dan8267
2016 Oct 10, 8:45am
You might find a world devoid of humans. From nuclear war to ecological collapse, our species' shortsightedness may be our undoing.
NDrLoR
2016 Oct 10, 9:15am
" I speculated to Elena what a driver from 1916 would think if they were transported to 2016 and saw the technical marvels that cars have become. She felt that they would be in shock and awe for the first few days"
My mother (1902-1997) got to experience just this. She learned to drive her mother's Maxwell in 1915 when she was 13, then taught her mother how to drive it. When she began teaching in 1924, she drove a Model T (or its rudimentary equivalent) to school. In 1927, she and my father drove same "T" from Itasca, TX to Chicago to pick up his younger brother who was attending the Univ. of Chicago and came down with jaundice--she kept a diary of the trip and virtually every day had some kind of breakdown. When she retired 46 years later, the same time difference between 1970 and now, she bought a brand new 1970 Ford LTD from my father's oldest brother--a car that had every comfort and convenience of today's models. In 1971, she and three friends drove all the way up the Eastern seaboard as far as Halifax, Nova Scotia without a single problem. The changes were gradual but very fast--the cars that came off the assembly lines at the end of '45 were designed for the environment of the late 30's, then frozen in place for five years. But by 1955, you could buy even one of the low-priced three with a powerful V-8, automatic transmission, power steering and brakes, radio and heater, but most important of all factory installed air-conditioning--overnight all the discomforts and inconveniences that had plagued motorists for the past 50 years were banished. Those "Ts" and "As" looked old to drivers in the 50's when they were 30 years old, but a 60 year old 1955 Chevy Bel-Air looks perfectly contemporary compared to modern cars, in many ways a lot better. All the changes from '55 on were just variations on the same themes.
To demonstrate just one futility of long-range predictions: no one sitting in a gas line in 1976 could predict that 40 years later there would be so much product on the market there wouldn't be storage capacity to handle it or that gasoline prices would have collapsed 50% to the same price as 1965 adjusted for inflation and that OPEC would have become irrelevant.
MAGA
2016 Oct 10, 9:51am
Fort Ord (Monterrey). I miss it.
2116? I wonder how much oil we will have left? Hopefully electric cars will be the norm with 2116 technology.
Yesterday my wife and I were driving back from a company function in Monterrey, California. We were heading North of the beautiful Highway One when we encountered a group of Ford Model A's and Model T's going the opposite way. They looked so frail and primitive. Probably they were up to 100 years old. I speculated to Elena what a driver from 1916 would think if they were transported to 2016 and saw the technical marvels that cars have become. She felt that they would be in shock and awe for the first few days. Then in her mind, they would adapt to the new things.
I have had this recurring thought for years. I got to bed after the Trump/Clinton debate. It is the night of October 9, 2016. When I awaken the following morning and it's October 10, 2116. What am I going to see and experience?
Sadly all of your family, loved ones and friends would be gone. You would have to start your life over again alone. The first challenge you would have would be to convince people who you encounter that you are actually from a century past. With the help of DNA and other medical tests you could prove your actual age.
We then have the dilemma of what the world will be like 100 years from now. Some pessimistic people will say that some stupid war or pandemic has halted all progress and sent us reeling back to centuries past. I look back to the 20th Century where over 100 million people died in World War I and World War II. Another 60 million died in famines in China, Russia, the Ukraine, etc. We had the various flu pandemics that could have killed up to 200 million. Then we had the real danger from 1950 to 1991 to a nuclear holocaust that would have wiped out all human life on the planet. We had some close calls with this nightmare during the 1962 Cuban Missile crisis, in 1983 and a couple of other times when technical glitches pushed us right to the brink of war. We survived all of those disasters and possible disasters. We have made incredible scientific and technical advances.
My good sense tells me that we will survive another century with rapid scientific and technological advances that we could not dream of today. Mars will be colonized. The asteroid belts would see mining and commercial activities. Some moons of Saturn and Jupiter would have human outposts. We will have a serious program to send a manned vessel to some nearby star. Medical science will have advanced to the point that most diseases have been conquered. We will have technology that we could not even imagine in our wildest dreams today.
What will societies and the political structure be like 100 years from now. I could not even hazard a guess.
If one had a 401(K) or some stock investments they would be worth a vast sum of money in the next century, (You would have to reclaim them from the state that probably took them as unclaimed property.) If you owned a house or apartment it would be gone.
I speculate that some people declared dead during the 9-11 attacks are not dead at all. Rather they saw the tragedy as a perfect excuse to escape a dull or very unhappy life to start anew as a new person. Awakening after your long sleepy you would have that same opportunity.