Here is my scenario for the upcoming decades and beyond. It is based on my extensive reading and thinking about future technologies and their effects on society. There are many websites that have the latest stories about all sorts of new or predicted technological and societal developments, but they present the future in a piecemeal fashion. I haven't seen any websites that digest all of those stories and put them together into a coherent timeline of the future, so I guess I'll just have to do it myself. I try to stay up-to-date, and periodically check the best websites for new developments, and update my scenario whenever I find out something new. For an explanation of the thinking behind the accelerating rate of change in my scenario, see my essay The Singularity on my Singularity page.
Predictions as of 8-16-08:
But one possibility is that Cheney and Bush attack Iran before the election, and the backlash from Iran and the rest of the world (see below) gives Bush the excuse to declare martial law, suspend the last vestiges of democracy in the US, and continue on as dictator. Another possibility is that another major terrorist attack in 2008, possibly in backlash to what Bush has done in the Middle East, possibly aided by Bush as 9-11 may have been, gives him the excuse to declare martial law. Still another possibility is that Obama is assassinated before the election. Large numbers of liberal Americans start trying to escape the country, mostly to Latin America, but millions of Americans are barred from air travel, with the excuse that they are potential terrorists. When they try to escape by car, the same border security used to keep Mexicans out is used to keep Americans in, with the excuse that they will try to mount a terrorist attack from outside the country. The last vestiges of free speech are eliminated, and large numbers of Americans who were active in opposing Bush are arrested, thrown into the numerous concentration camps being built around the country, and disappear, tortured to death. Almost all dissent in the US is squashed.
Assuming the illusion of democracy continues, and another Republican becomes president, there continues to be a growing political rift between the southern states and the rest of the US, just as before the Civil War. If the new president reinstitutes a draft, as will be needed to continue the wars in the Middle East, that may unintentionally provoke a crisis that further widens the rift. Unlike during the Vietnam War, being gay is no longer a stigma among liberals, yet most Republicans would never allow gays in the military. Therefore, massive numbers of Americans, liberals mostly from the North, would probably evade the draft by simply claiming that they're gay. That might provoke the president to retaliate in a way (such as jailing everyone who makes that claim) that further polarizes the country politically, and pushes calls for a break-up of the Union into the political mainstream, this time among Northerners, 145 years after the end of the Civil War. However, it would be even more dangerous if gays were allowed in the military, getting rid of that way out of being drafted. At least a draft would finally provoke massive demonstrations, as during the Vietnam War, but the government would simply ignore them, or find an excuse to declare martial law after the 2008 elections rather than before.
The Crash of '08 that started Great Depression 2 began in late 2007, when the housing bubble burst. As adjustable-rate mortgages reset at higher interest rates, a wave of foreclosures created a glut on the housing market, further lowering house prices. Increasing numbers of people owed more on their mortgages than their houses were worth, so they considered what they'd already spent on their houses as rent, and walked away from them, increasing the glut, in a vicious cycle. Housing prices collapsed to 1/10 of what they had peaked at, just as during the first Great Depression. The only advantage of this was to first-time home buyers, who could now afford the cheap prices.
However, the value of the US dollar crashed as well, as investors grew wary of dollars because of the US's massive trade and budget deficits. It may have also crashed because China, Russia and other countries retaliated economically against the US for its attack on Iran in 2008 (see below) by calling in the debts that were financing the US's wars, in an attempt to halt it. Also, after the US attacked Iran, the price of gasoline jumped from around $4 a gallon to around $10 when Iran retaliated by closing off shipping through the Persian Gulf. The dollar lost its role as the world's reserve currency, and the Euro took its place. As a result, even as domestic goods and services, such as housing and health care, plunged in price, after previously skyrocketing, imported goods such as oil and consumer electronics and everything else skyrocketed in price. The prices of domestic goods and services plunged because consumers, after having to spend so much for gasoline and other imported goods, and getting little work as the economy collapsed, had little money to spend on anything else. After the initial crash of the dollar, the prices of imported goods stabilized, then began to fall, and a general deflationary spiral set in, as happens during depressions.
Most Americans have become destitute. As consumer spending plunged after the housing bubble burst, leaving consumers with little way to borrow to continue spending, the economy slowed drasticly, so jobs disappeared. Unemployment is 25 or 30%, same as during the first Great Depression, and, with the rise of temporary and part-time jobs, many more Americans are underemployed rather than completely unemployed. (They are only underemployed in the sense that, at the low wages employers are paying, they need more work than they are getting to survive. Actually, due to the high amount of automation already by 2010, there isn't much work to be done, and the economy could provide for everyone even at their short working hours. It doesn't only because the rich are getting all the money.) Lenders will not lend money to people, knowing that with the depression, they will likely not be able to pay it back. Most who are working at all are working at part-time jobs that pay little. The US becomes a Third World country, with the sort of economy that such countries have: massive disparities of wealth, with most people destitute, and a low cost of living, but even lower wages. Once the dollar has collapsed, American workers are Third World workers, and no longer have the economic disadvantage they used to, so jobs start coming back to the US from Third World countries. However, much work is being automated away, so there are fewer jobs left to come back. Also, the US has dragged the whole world into a Great Depression, albeit not as bad for the rest of the world, so there are fewer jobs to come back. The price of gasoline is so high, and wages so low, that it barely pays for people go work anyway, since most of what they earn goes to paying for the cost of commuting. Increasingly, Americans must live very close to their jobs so they can get to work by bicycle, car pooling and bus. Those who can even afford to buy cars anymore shift to small energy-efficient cars, and plug-in hybrid cars. Telecommuting is becoming common, not for the good of workers, but so companies can weather the economic storm by saving money on office space. High unemployment gives them such an upper hand over their employees that they can chance letting them work out of their sight, plus technology allows them to monitor their work from home. Many companies still refuse to allow their employees to telecommute, however, since they can always find enough desperate workers that employers have the upper hand.
Crime skyrockets, of course, which is ironic, because of all the people who voted for conservatives because they would be tough on crime. They are, but their economic policies breed even more crime.
The pace of automation is quickening, and eliminating jobs. Around 2010, advances in sensor technology, along with continued slow advances in artificial intelligence, allow computers and robots to do more of the work, and robots start becoming a part of daily life. They rarely look humanoid, however, unlike what science fiction always portrayed.
In addition to the debacle in Iran, the US is possibly attacked again, and perhaps the White House is destroyed, or a major city, most likely New York City or one in Europe or Isreal, is nuked, most likely with a "dirty bomb", a conventional bomb that spews radioactive material. Bush may have conspired in the attack, just as he may have done with 9-11. The Republicans probably use that attack or the backlash from the war with Iran as an excuse to impose marshal law in the US and suspend what's left of our democracy and freedoms. They then go on to attack yet another country, most likely Syria. But their wars backfire as fundamentalists overthrow the governments in Pakistan (thereby getting hold of nuclear weapons), Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and then the US prepares to attack them too. As our regular armed forces are destroyed, Bush and then McCain shifts to using his own private army, Blackwater, to take over for them. China, finally alarmed enough over US attempts to occupy the Middle East and control its oil, attempts to stop the US by calling in its massive US debts to China that grew as a result of our trade deficit with China, causing the dollar to crash. China was basically funding our wars by lending us the money for them. However, as the economy crashes and there is no other way to fund their wars, The Billionaires who Bush represents increasingly use their own money to fund them, and Blackwater as their private army to wage them. They hope to get more than they spend by taking over the whole Middle East and stealing its oil.
Europe and the rest of the developed world increasingly view the US as a rouge nation and threat to world peace, and US relations with the rest of the world continue to deteriorate. The US completes its transformation to a Third World dictatorship, run by an oligarchy with its own private army, and supported by insane Christian fundamentalists who deliberately start wars in order to bring on the prophesied end of the world. The rest of the world grows increasingly alarmed at our attempt to control the oil in the Middle East, and at the possibility of a nuclear war between insane Christian fundamentalists and insane Muslim fundamentalists.
Increasing robotic military technology makes the private US military even more formidable, even as we can reduce the number of people in the military needed to fight any given war, and we can fight wars with even fewer casualties. Increasingly, remote-controled vehicles fight wars, and military personnel control them in safety from a distance. As those vehicles become more autonomous, a single military employee can control greater and greater numbers of them at once, only directing them when non-routine events are happening. So the US has the resources to keep an increasing number of countries under occupation simultaneously, though not to completely suppress guerrilla warfare. So even if we remain bogged down in Iraq and a growing number of other countries, we have kept developing the capability to invade additional countries. We increasingly adopt the attitude of accepting that we won't completely suppress opposition, and occupy an increasing number of countries imperfectly rather than a smaller number of countries completely.
China is rapidly becoming a developed nation, and the world's 2nd superpower, after having absorbed much of the world's manufacturing jobs, and possibly invades Taiwan while the US is too involved in the Middle East to do anything about it. North Korea also possibly uses the opportunity to do something insane, now that it has nuclear weapons and missles, but most likely its deranged paranoid leader just uses them as a threat to prevent an attack on North Korea. India is also rapidly becoming a developed nation, by absorbing much of the developed world's information jobs.
There is increasing economic and social chaos in the Third World. All the jobs that corporations had moved there, because those workers were willing to work for a fraction of the pay of workers in developed countries, begin to disappear, between the depression and increasing automation.
Thanks to the US self-destructing over the Middle East quagmire, socialism continues to spread in Latin America, and elsewhere, while the US is too involved and weak to do anything about it. Previously, socialism could never advance, despite continuous effort, because the US was always squashing it. However, since socialists tend to glorify work instead of getting rid of that source of lack of freedom, and are too stupid to realize that socialism will not work well without them automating away work in order to increase worker productivity, those economies do not fare well, except in countries with some fairly easily-obtained natural resource to sell, such as oil.
For the first time, a majority of the general public has lost its skepticism of the approach of A. I., and a large minority has become aware of the idea of an upcoming tidal wave of technological change, bringing all the science-fictiony things that had been predicted for a long, long time. And yet they have mostly still failed to make the connection that artificial intelligence would be the death of the work ethic. Liberals worry that they'll lose their jobs, and fear automation, while conservatives reap the benefits of automation, as profits go up when they eliminate workers, with no thought about what the poor and middle class will do when they lose their jobs. Virtually no one is willing to suggest that we should increasingly de-link work from pay, both so that people would no longer have to worry when their jobs disappear, and so that consumers would have the money to spend to keep the economy going.
Computer programs are increasingly used to make high-level decisions, better than people can. Computers have proved to be better than people in deciding whether to approve loans, hire employees, pick winning stocks, even predict which songs will become hits based on how much they resemble previous hit songs in some abstract way.
Even though A. I. is still mostly in the experimental stage, and cannot contribute appreciably to productivity yet, people continue to find ingenious ways of making a little technology go a long way, just as has happened in the two centuries since the Industrial Revolution began. In that period, the productivity of farmers went up by at least 100 times, and it obviously didn't happen with A. I. or robots, since those did not exist.
Most important, the productivity of scientists continues to increase, and the more it increases, the faster the rate of scientific and technological change. For example, in the Human Genome Project, automated gene sequencing machines increased the pace of the project so vastly that it could be completed in a decade instead of thousands of years. There are now machines that conduct series of experiments on their own, and even automatically adjust later experiments based on the findings of the previous ones, and automate the routine gathering of data that is at the heart of science, and makes up the large majority of scientific work. Increasingly, scientists only have to do the creative part of science, and are freed from the drudgery of doing experiments and collecting data, and the time it takes to do the drudgery. Computers are even being used increasingly to do non-routine scientific work and invent new technologies. Computers have been doing so for several years, and have already produced inventions that have been awarded patents. As computers assist scientists and researchers in becoming extremely productive, including those people working on creating more powerful computers, they further speed up progress in an increasing snowballing effect.
As the pace of scientific and technological progress increases, productivity increases at a quickening pace. Productivity has soared another 20% in 3 years, and yearly increases have reached a phenomenal 8% or so. More and more stores are becoming almost totally automated, especially fast-food restaurants. The customers order their food by pushing buttons on a kiosk as they enter, the food is cooked by robot arms or other automated devices, and the customers pay by credit card. Kiosks are already being used increasingly in airports and hotels, so that travelers can change reservations and check themselves in without requiring the time of employees. In supermarkets and other stores, the customers increasingly bag their purchases and check out by themselves. There are far shorter lines than when cashiers had to do it. And of course, the amount of business conducted automatically over the internet continues to increase.
Even more jobs are eliminated behind the scenes. Packages are starting to have tiny chips, called RFID (radio frequency identification) chips, that uniquely identify them and their locations to sensors so that computers can track them. In the next decade, this allows shipping and warehousing to become almost totally automated.
In 2008, The first car went on the market in Europe that can drive itself, although a driver is still required to sit behind the wheel and take over if necessary. In the more litigious US, car companies will not put such cars on the market because even if they had fewer accidents than human drivers, unlike with human drivers it is the car companies that would get sued in case of accidents. Otherwise, the latest cars have distance sensors and automatically avoid hitting into things, so car accidents are starting to decrease, along with the auto insurance for people with that new feature.
The latest personal computers have no moving parts; much more durable flash memories are replacing rotating hard drives. Companies are starting to make 3-D chips as the cost of miniaturizing 2-D chips further, in order to increase their speed, becomes prohibitively high, and computer processing power keeps increasing. (3-D chips minimize the length of wires that data must pass through, reducing travel time.) Massively parallel computer processing is being used more and more to increase computer speed, for applications that lend themselves to that sort of computing, such as weather forecasting and artificial intelligence. Unused processing time on millions of personal computers connected to the internet is also being used to function like supercomputers. The cost of personal computers is coming down because of new nanotechnology allowing the most expensive part, the screens, to be produced much more cheaply, and computers become small-ticket items.
More and more people walk around everywhere with small computers that can connect them to the internet at all times. They also increasingly record every moment of their lives with miniature devices, both as a crime deterrent and for future reference. Tiny surveillance cameras are everywhere, cutting crime drastically, but also provoking a libertarian backlash, between privacy issues, the certainty that breaking any traffic laws that almost everyone formerly broke will result in a ticket, and the certainty that all victimless "crimes", formerly not decriminalized because few people got caught, will now be caught. But it isn't only the government endangering people's civil rights. Far worse, companies that hire employees are increasingly able to look up all sorts of details about them as people leave an increasing electronic record that becomes increasingly easy to access. Corporations can find out the political party people belong to, the books they read, the pornography they watch, etc., and refuse to hire them if they don't like what they see. Americans live in a totalitarian society, created not just by government, but corporations. They lose their freedom to express their opinions, or even buy books or borrow them from libraries, for fear that companies won't hire them. Increasingly on the job, their every move is monitored. Most Americans are so fixated on the threat to freedom from government, and so blind to the threat from corporations, that they are slow to realize what their employers are doing to them, or care.
Meanwhile, the US manned space program is still just limping along. The space shuttle program ends this year, and the plans are for the rocket to replace it to not be ready till 2015, not even counting the usual delays. In the meantime, NASA buys space on manned and unmanned flights from SpaceX and from Russia. The construction of the International Space Station, a nearly pointless boondoggle, is supposed to be finished. Thereafter, NASA buys flights from SpaceX, and Russia and Europe contribute to keeping it manned. The number of people staying on the station is supposed to be increased from 3 to 6 in 2009. The US military has its own space program that may be launching people into space by now.
A series of lunar orbiters and landers are supposed to start searching for ice at the moon's poles, and for the future site for a moon base. A probe to thoroughly map Mercury, called MESSENGER, made a flyby on January 14, 2008, and will do so again on Oct 6, 2008 and September 29, 2009, before going into orbit on March 18, 2011. The only previous probe, back in the 1970s, only photographed half of its surface. The Mars Science Laboratory is scheduled to land in the summer of 2010. Also, the Russian-Chinese Phobos-Grunt probe is supposed to land on Mars' moon Phobos in August or September 2010, collect rock samples, and return them to earth in 2012.
Meanwhile, Russia's space program continues to limp along on little money, sending manned missions to the ISS twice a year, including tourists. But it too is working on a replacement for its space vehicle that has put people in space for decades, the Soyuz capsules, with help from the European Union. China continues to put astronauts into orbit occasionally, about once every 2 years, just for prestige.
In the rest of the world, the Depression is not so bad, because most of the rest of the world has leftist policies that increasingly pay people whether they work or not. Since they are paid, they have money to buy things even when there are no jobs. Since they have money to buy things, there is more economic activity, which produces some jobs for people who want more than the guaranteed minimum income their governments provide. After the initial hit from losing most of the business from American consumers after the US economy collapsed starting in late 2007, other countries start to recover, building up business among themselves. With their leftist policies, the more that work is automated away, the better their economies do, rather than the worse they do as in the US.
Normally, economic desperation leads to a great increase in crime, and political activism, but surveillance of all public places, and even private places, with microscopic cameras everywhere, and surveillance of all communications, keeps the lid on both, and the US becomes the ultimate totalitarian society. But many Americans like it that way. Most Americans like that violent crime has almost been eliminated, and have become resigned to having cameras watching them everywhere.
The economic collapse and fascist dictatorship further widen the divide between the "red states" and the "blue states". Those in the Union increasingly depise those in the Confederacy as having been the ones who brought fascism and Depression upon them, and an underground movement grows into the prevailing opinion in the Union, calling for allowing the Confederacy to secede from the Union, 150 years after the Civil War ended. But unfortunately, no open dissent is allowed in the US.
Increasing world-wide surveillance of public places is decreasing the threat of further terrorist attacks, and is enabling the US to suppress opposition in the Muslim countries that it occupies. There are spy planes the size of insects, and new weaponry such as "smart" bullets, small guided missles that kill individual targeted people. Most developed countries strike the right balance in maintaining freedom despite the new technologies, but aside from the fascist US, the remaining dictatorships tend to be just the countries that are the least advanced technologically, such as North Korea, where such technology has yet to arrive.
China is increasingly a developed nation. But it is also increasingly a totalitarian surveillance state, just like the US. As China becomes increasingly powerful in the world, and the US self-destructs, China challenges the US for superpower status, and competes with the US for oil in the Middle East, to fuel its rapidly-growing economy. While increasing military automation is enabling the US to project more power with less effort, it is doing so for other developed countries as well, which can buy the same technology. More than a decade of disasterous economic and military and anti-science education policies in the US is starting to take its toll, and the US is further sinking in superpower status relative to other countries, especially China. India is also becoming a developed nation. Between the formerly developed world, most of North America, Europe, Australia and Japan, with around 1 billion people, and now most of Asia, with well over 3 billion people, for the first time a majority of the world is developed, and the Third World, mostly Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, with over 2 billion people, is a minority of the world. Now it's the turn of Latin America.
Computers that businesses can afford have more humanlike abilities. Artificial intelligence in daily life is improving, but still, computers have a suite of isolated, rather specialized talents, and not the generalized, flexible intelligence that humans have. Even computers costing $100,000 have 1/100 as much processing power as the human brain, and can replace human workers for many manual and mental tasks, and since they can work around the clock, they are competitive in price with typical worker salaries. As a result, productivity increases each year are skyrocketing, now at around 15% a year. At that rate, wealth could double every 5 years, or leisure could massively increase as working hours halve every 5 years. That is happening in most of the developed world, and increasingly in the developing world, but in the US, instead, unemployment is massively increasing as technology halves the amount of work in the economy every 5 years.
Inexpensive single-purpose robots, with animal-like abilities to move around and manipulate objects, come into widespread use. Rich people in the U. S. have expensive prototype household robots for use as servants, and somewhat less-wealthy people can rent them to clean the house periodically as some people now hire maids. In Japan, where they are robot-crazy, most ordinary people have robots in their households, and hobbyists in the US have them as well. Even expensive robots are still very primitive and highly inflexible, and can only do a small number of set tasks, such as vacuuming, washing and putting away the dishes, carrying laundry to the washing machine and putting it away afterward, or cleaning windows and mirrors.
As computers become more capable, computers, used for scientific purposes, are pushing scientific and technological progress at great speeds, with a rapidly-increasing torrent of discoveries and inventions being announced every year. Computers now create most inventions and conduct most scientific research, leaving humans increasingly in the dust. As those computers continue to double in speed each year, with the doubling speed itself starting to speed up rapidly, the pace of progress, already about 4 times as fast as over the past century, starts further increasing rapidly each year.
Nanotech-produced reconfigurable nano chips have 1000 times the current number of components packed into the same space as now, produced far more cheaply than today's silicon computer chips. They consist of a uniform grid of electronic components something like a crystal. Rather than having specific circuitry as current chips have, they are programmed to function as if they have specific circuitry, and are completely flexible because the programming can be changed at any time. Computer chips have become 3-dimensional to shorten connections and speed up processing time, and the size of the components is approaching the size of individual molecules. Massively parallel computers, with millions of processors working on a problem at the same time, can simulate complex phenomena such as biology and human intelligence.
Most products now have those tiny RFID chips in them to allow computers to uniquely identify and locate them, and now supermarkets and other stores are starting to replace the scanners that use bar codes, that must scan each item separately, with ones that scan a whole cart full of purchases at once. Even stores that eliminated some cashiers by allowing customers to check out faster by scanning bar codes themselves had to have people spy on them to make sure they were scanning all purchases. Now, that is unnecessary, since the scanner never misses anything, and checkout is fully automated. Customers bag their purchases themselves as they select them in the store aisles, before they get to the automated cashier where they pay by credit or debit card.
Computer-controled cars in Europe can drive themselves with increasing safety, but in the litigious US, car companies are still too afraid to put them on the market.
Airliners can basically fly themselves, and the pilots are just there because people don't yet trust the idea of pilotless airliners. In order to prevent the possibility of hijackings, airliners can be remote-controlled from the ground, so that control can be taken away from hijackers. Airliners' computers also have increasingly sophisticated software that recognizes if the planes are being flown into skyscrapers or other objects, and refuses to allow that.
Personal fabricators, computer-controlled machines that can produce objects of any shape specified, are coming down in price to the point that some individuals can own them, so that all manufacturing capabilities are shifting downward from centralized factories to small businesses and later into individuals' homes. (They're coming down in price especially because personal fabricators could make almost all the parts for more fabricators.)
Perhaps some of those rare pro-technology liberals in the US, who want technology to increase wealth and leisure and want to spread them to everyone, retreat to high-tech egalitarian communes, or virtual communes connected to each other via the internet, out of disgust with what's going on in the rest of the US, between conservatives promoting technology but keeping all the benefits with the rich, and liberals often fighting technology and the liberating end of work. In the past, communes had little success because they were low-tech and work-intensive, and people didn't want to do the work, but now, even small-scale technology, those personal fabricators, and increasingly capable household robots, could provide for everyone's needs with little work.
Meanwhile, if all goes well (which it usually doesn't), NASA's Project Constellation begins, its manned space program after the shuttle was retired 5 years earlier. NASA separates the manned and cargo aspects of the space shuttle, and use pieces of the shuttle by themselves, and just retires the manned orbiters. For the manned flights, it uses a single solid rocket booster (those 2 small rockets on each side of the shuttle), which is slightly modified, with a smaller upper stage rocket atop it, and a manned space capsule atop that, going back to the way astronauts got into orbit before the shuttle. That space capsule is called the CEV, or Crew Exploration Vehicle. It takes up 3 to 6 people at a time. For large cargo, NASA might continue to fly the space shuttle in its current configuration, but unmanned, so that no one would be killed in case of accidents. With no lives at stake, such flights would not need to be as safe as with the current manned shuttle, and that would reduce the cost of the flights. Later in the decade, NASA would use the full shuttle configuration, but with a large cargo hold instead of the winged shuttle orbiters, on unmanned flights to put up 4 times as much cargo as the current shuttle can put up in the cargo bay of the orbiters. That is as much cargo as the Saturn V took up, that took astronauts to the moon. Russia and Europe in partnership are working on a similar program.
However, at the same time, private companies continue using their own rockets to take up people, and putting up cargo with their own Saturn V -sized rockets. If they are able to do launches more cheaply than NASA's shuttle replacements can (which is most likely), NASA might simply buy seats and cargo space on those private flights, and contribute to funding their development, and not develop its own shuttle replacements. At a mere $5 million a flight per astronaut (compared to shuttle flights, which cost about $1 billion each, and took up to 7 astronauts into orbit, plus cargo), NASA could afford to put up many times more astronauts than before. With relatively inexpensive flights, and far more government money than private enterprise and tourists could afford, the number of manned flights could later shoot up to monthly or weekly. (Of course, the Depression will probably severely limit spending, and maybe even end the government space program altogether.) But in the mean time, NASA is devoting most of its funding to developing the rest of the new vehicles of the post-shuttle era. Most likely, NASA will develop both strategies at once, developing its own new vehicles and buying space on private companies' vehicles, rather than putting all its eggs in one basket the way it did with the shuttle. So there will be an increasing number of organizations all putting people into space at once, both NASA and a number of private companies, and that redundancy will assure that space activities are not vulnerable to the interruptions now, when all manned US launches stop for years at a time after an accident, and that progress will go more quickly.
The US and Russia take turns sending 2 flights each, each year, to keep the International Space Station permanently manned with 6 people. Meanwhile, larger space hotels house greater numbers of tourists, and growing. The US military possibly has a permanently-manned space station of their own by now.
Increasingly, as robots become more capable, companies use teleoperated and increasingly autonomous robots to perform various tasks that formerly could only done by humans, making it possible to accomplish more things in space without going through the greater expense of sending up people. At first, such tasks are probably limited to satellite repair.
A US unmanned probe called Dawn is scheduled to orbit and photograph 2 of the largest mini-planets (asteroids) between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, Ceres and Vesta, Vesta from September 2011 to April 2012 and Ceres from February to July 2015. It may be sent to another asteroid after.
Also in 2015, on July 14, an unmanned probe, New Horizons, is scheduled to pass by Pluto, the first object discovered in a belt of mini-planets out beyond Neptune. (At the time it was built and launched, most astronomers were still calling Pluto a planet, only for sentimental reasons, but they finally demoted it soon after).
But even as ordinary people keep becoming worse off, the economy starts skyrocketing back upward for the rich. The more money they have, the more they spend on products from each others' businesses, increasing profits, so increasing their investments, so the more money they have. Since their incomes never depended on working, the disappearance of jobs never affected them directly. It only affected them indirectly, as ordinary people lost jobs and could no longer afford to buy the products businesses (mostly owned by the rich) sell. After they took an initial hit when the non-rich lost their jobs and could no longer afford to buy things, once the non-rich had no further to fall, there was nowhere for the rich to go but up, from their own independent economy.
For everyone else in the US, out of that economic loop, the economic cycle has been broken. They depended on income from working, yet there is almost no work. Hopefully, politics finally shifts far to the left in the US, and the rich are not successful, as they usually are, in deflecting blame to the poor, foreigners, anyone but themselves. There is so much wealth, as a result of automation, but it is so concentrated among the rich, that the richest person on earth is now a multi-trillionaire or even a quadrillionaire (in today's dollars). That one person in 2020 has more wealth and income than the entire current world economy! And that doesn't even count the additional greater total wealth from the other world's richest people.
After the Republicans completely eliminated all taxes on the rich in our decade, politicians, or the people voting directly if they have gotten that power by now, begin taxing a small percentage of the income of the rich, and that tax is enough to support everyone else in the US, and soon the world. Once that happens, the economy soon starts recovering for the non-rich as well. The economic cycle is rejoined, and money flows to the rich when the non-rich buy their products, and back to the non-rich so that they can buy more products. As incomes from the rich skyrocket even faster than before, now that everyone has money to spend, the taxes from them, and therefore the amount that government gives to the non-rich, skyrockets upward ever faster. Even most of the rich see that being taxed doesn't hurt them, and even helps, because the money only comes back to them when ordinary people buy their businesses' products.
However, in addition to a sudden shift to the left politically, people cope with the crisis in a variety of ways in order to survive in the mean time. Americans start using all the free time they now have to engage in do-it-yourself projects and chores that they used to pay others to do. For tasks that require more specialization, they form support groups and virtual communes, and use their skills to engage in volunteer work for each other on a massive scale, helping each other to survive, often using the internet to connect people who need help with volunteers willing to provide it.
Americans have a choice between the Republicans, with their brutal policy of throwing people out of work and therefore not paying them, and the Democrats, with their stupid policy of forcing people to do make-work as an excuse to pay them. It takes a few more years before a third way gains political acceptability, of abandoning the connection between work and pay, and throwing people out of work, and STILL paying them.
Even assuming there was any democracy left in the US by now, regardless of whether the Republicans or Democrats are in charge, they reluctantly put paltry ad-hoc measures into effect to deal with the situation. In reaction to the Depression, the US populace has been shifting to the left, except in the Confederacy, which becomes even more fascist. However, the politicians of both parties are strongly resisting any shift to the left. Unemployment insurance is reinstated for people out of work, almost all of whom have long passed the normal 6-month end of their unemployment pay. But the poor and others who were out of work before the Depression began are carefully left out, and get nothing. At that point, what used to be the middle class starts getting some income, at least the economy starts to bottom out overall, and even starts rising again for the rich. We likely see the world's first trillionaire (in today's dollars), and then possibly even the world's first quadrillionaire. But even still, jobs keep disappearing as automation keeps picking up speed.
It begins to dawn on Americans that maybe the jobs aren't ever coming back, due to rapid automation caused by the approach of human-level artificial intelligence, and that maybe they should even be paid well despite them not working, and that maybe even those who were poor or out of work before the Depression began should be paid as well. They still don't get the idea that redistributing wealth downward would even end the Depression, because consumers would then have money to spend, or connect the fact that the economy slowed its downward spiral as soon as people were given some help.
In the "blue states", better known as the Union, the poor riot until they receive help, and the lower middle class protest for more money. What used to be the upper middle class, getting by with unemployment insurance and some income from investments, can no longer object to the idea of the poor getting something for nothing, since they aren't working themselves. Even the rich, who have taken a big hit from the stock market plunge, have so much wealth that they can support everyone else with a tax on a smaller and smaller percentage of their incomes, and a majority of them finally decide to help the masses under them before they come after them with guillotines.
However, in the Confederacy, there are massive riots among the entire populace, as enraged people scream "SOCIALISTS!!!!", when the government attempts to give them more money. All efforts to help them come to nothing, as they immediately give any money they are forced to receive to billionaires and televangelists.
People have more time for community affairs, and can vote from the convenience of their homes, and the economic crisis spurs people to take matters into their own hands, so there is a move toward direct electronic democracy, possibly first at the local level, later at higher levels, in which people vote directly on issues instead of voting for politicians who in turn do so. On matters where the public feels it has insufficient expertise, it votes for a panel of experts to make decisions, assembled ad hoc, on an issue-by-issue basis. Increasingly, the idea of political parties disappears, as people can vote independently on individual issues instead of having to take the parties' combinations of stands on issues as a "package deal". Even if direct democracy isn't instituted, instant runoff voting is. Voters get to number the candidates in order of preference, so they no longer have to choose between the lesser of 2 evils rather than waste their votes. Thus the monopoly the 2 political parties (which are really the same party) have on elections is broken.
A coalition of countries, alarmed at the spread of US fascism by force, and the threat of nuclear war between fundamentalist Christians and Muslims, finally defeat The Billionaires' US forces, both in the Middle East and in the US, due to the US's growing weakness. Cheney, Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Nancy Pelosi and others are hanged at Nuremburg for war crimes, the same place where previous Nazis were hung after World War 2. The US possibly splits up into separate countries. The Northeast, northern Midwest and the Pacific Coast from northern California upward join Canada. Part of the Southwest is given back to Mexico, and the rest is given to Native Americans. The Bible Belt, which includes the Confederacy and the southern Midwest, remains under UN occupation indefinitely, along with most of the Muslim Middle East, because they are deemed a danger to themselves and others. It is decided that polls will be taken each decade, and whenever a small enough minority of the populations believe in fundamentalist religion that they are no longer a danger, the occupation will end. (A man can dream, can't he?)
After the prices of various kinds of renewable energy go below that of oil, oil becomes less and less important. So even if the US hadn't self-destructed, it would still lose interest in occupying the Middle East, and so do other countries.
Cars that drive themselves approach a record of safety in Europe that drivers are no longer required to be ready to take over, but can even sleep if they want. Truckers now merely own their trucks, but don't have to drive them. Perhaps car companies even introduce self-driving cars in the US by now, especially if they have the law changed so they cannot be sued for accidents. Since they drive much more safely than people, car insurance rates plunge toward zero, and the concept of needing such insurance becomes obsolete. Perhaps tiny magnetic road markers are embedded in all roads to make it easier for cars to drive themselves (such a huge project made faster and easier and less expensive with automated machines that embed the markers), but most likely, computers increase in ability to drive, faster than we could put down all those markers, so before we could finish, they no longer need them. Laws designed to increase people's safety, such as driving laws, are being made more lenient as technology is taking the human element out of everything and making life safer. Cars that drive themselves mean that speed limits can be raised, and tailgating laws eliminated. Traffic jams become less frequent, because computerized cars can travel at high speeds even practically bumper-to-bumper, and can keep track of all other cars in the vicinity and react in a way that prevents tie-ups. Besides, rush hour has disappeared because most work has disappeared.
Intelligent computers have taken over almost all science and invention, and are pushing progress at many times the current rate, and rapidly accelerating. Scientists' jobs change to merely keeping up with understanding what the computers are coming up with, and even that is becoming increasingly difficult.
Between personal fabricators and robots, the economy is shifting from one of huge centralized corporations that produce goods and services, to one that is increasingly decentralized, where small groups and then individuals have come into possession of enough technology to produce more and more of what they need. Those who do happen to own robots lend them to others to perform needed services, and those who happen to own personal fabricators use them to manufacture products for others, either voluntarily or to barter for other things. Since robots and those personal fabricators can increasingly reproduce themselves with a decreasing amount of human involvement, people who own them increasingly use them to create additional copies of them, and give them to both friends and strangers, the way people now make (technically illegal) copies of music for each other, so those technologies soon come to be owned by everyone.
Some individuals tinker with them to improve them, so that they can make more complete copies of all of their parts, using more commonplace raw materials, and can copy themselves faster. Each improvement rapidly gets copied, faster than the previous one, and sweeps around the world.
The means of production therefore rapidly shifts downward, from huge centralized corporations, to small businesses, to small communal groups of people, and finally to households and individuals, so that they are increasingly self-sufficient. As that happens, people have a decreasing need for trade with each other, therefore a decreasing need for money. Individuals in the US, as well as governments in Europe and other places in the liberal rest of the developed world, start using their technology to run off extra copies of those devices, and start shipping them off to the Third World. People all over the world become increasingly self-sufficient and prosperous.
An alternative to automatic taxi cars that run on existing roads is to put up systems of overhead monorails, with car-sized vehicles to take individuals or families directly to whereever they individually want to go. Such systems would not require artificial intelligence, only conventional computers, since they would run on rails, and would have no unexpected obstacles such as pedestrians to contend with, so could be put up even today. Several companies promoting such plans claim that, due to the fact that overhead systems would require almost no land costs, they would be less expensive to build even if such rails cost more than paving roads. The vehicles would travel at around 100 mph within cities, and would get people anywhere within minutes, although passengers would have to walk up to half a mile to the nearest line. Between cities, the vehicles could go 150 mph. At that speed, it would be about as fast to travel up the east or west coasts of the US that way as by plane, given the time it takes to get to and from airports, wait for flights, and wait for luggage. Even travel from NY to LA would take 20 hours, so would just be feasible to do in a day, in about twice the time as by plane, but far less hassle. A disadvantage is that they would be more unsightly than roads. Perhaps a few cities will put up such systems, but given the lack of public knowledge of them, and the speed that governments make innovative decisions, most likely A. I. will develop first, and we will see ordinary cars that drive themselves on existing roads.
Meanwhile, the official government space programs of the US, Russia, Europe and China are becoming rather pointless. The US, and a joint effort of Russia and Europe, are planning the first manned moon landings for around 2020, but tourists are already landing on the moon, beating them to it. Those government programs are struggling to keep up and revise themselves so that they are not reduced to irrelevancies. As of 2008, the US, and Europe and Russia in partnership, plan to resume manned lunar landings in 2020, and then go on to Mars. Soon before the manned moon landings, the US plans several other interesting manned missions in the late 2010s, before it builds the landers needed to land on the moon or Mars, with their substantial gravities. It plans a manned lunar flyby, a manned visit to an asteroid, and a manned visit to Mars' 2 moons. But as usual, the dates for these missions keep slipping by almost 1 year per year, so that it never seems to get much closer.
However, by now, the economy has become so decentralized, as people have the ability to produce most of their own goods and services, that the use of money is rapidly disappearing.
The tide started to turn away from science during the 1960s. At that time, the pace of technological change started to slow in that lull between the Industrial Revolution and the Information Age, and predictions for such things as robots and cities on Mars failed to come true, so people became increasingly skeptical of radical technological progress. Widespread concern arose about technological problems such as pollution and nuclear war, and stupid liberals put the blame on technology, rather than on the conservative policies that misused technology, so that we had not just a resurgence of traditional religion on the right, but New Age beliefs on the left. And during the Cold War, when the US's enemy was atheistic communism, Americans, in knee-jerk fashion, became more religious because that was the opposite of our enemy's ideology.
But all those things reversed starting in the 2000s. Americans got a taste during the Bush years, and in their aftermath, of just what stupidity and irrationality bring. The pace of technological progress started to pick up with increasing acceleration, and people regained respect for the prospect of radical technological advance. The prospect of indefinitely long lifespans especially took away most of the need for religion, which soothed people's fears of mortality by claiming that when we die we don't really die. Pushed to the limits by the 2nd Great Depression, Americans finally took the necessary radical measures to stop conservative misuse of technology, and finally saw its liberating potential again. And after the Cold War ended, and the "War on Terrorism" (really the War Against Muslim Fundamentalism, in addition to the War to Grab All Their Oil) began, our enemy was now religion rather than atheism, so a counter-reaction began that grew into a great political movement in favor of rationalism again.
At first, Christian fundamentalists were the main opponents of Muslim fundamentalists, while stupid liberals preached tolerance of intolerance. But the disasterous rule of Bush decreased the political power of the Christian fundamentalists in the US. And the threat of both Christian and Muslim fundamentalism, both in the US and in Europe, provoked a militant atheist backlash. In the US, people feared a Christian theocracy and Muslim terrorism from abroad, and in Europe, with its large imported fundamentalist Muslim population that threatened to become a majority due to high birthrates, people feared a Muslim theocracy, and Muslim terrorism, and a US - Middle East fundamentalist Christian - fundamentalist Muslim nuclear war.
Computers, acting as scientists and inventors, thinking many times faster than people, accelerate progress in a rapidly snowballing effect, called The Singularity, so that in a very short time, computers reach their ultimate limits, thinking thousands of times faster still, and produce decades, centuries, maybe millennia's worth of innovations and discoveries each year. Most importantly, computers invent the next generation of computers that are far faster than they are, therefore can invent yet the next generation of far-faster computers far faster still. Those most powerful, most expensive computers quickly become virtually free, along with everything else, so that everyone soon owns them, and soon many people own enough computing power to out-think the entire human race.
Thanks to the use of diamond and other super-strong materials in large-scale construction, cities are starting to have forests of skyscrapers a mile or more tall. The only thing limiting them from going higher is the lower air pressure that makes people dizzy on mountains, starting at close to 2 miles high. The connections between buildings (begun in order for people to escape in case of terrorism or other disasters, and just so that people can travel from building to building more easily without having to go down to ground level) are evolving into entire city levels far above ground, with their own horizontal transportation systems, etc.
Now that people can order robots to do anything, massive projects become feasible, which would have been prohibitively expensive before because of the expense of paying all the workers. Groups start building idyllic floating cities on the tropical oceans, which soon multiply to the point that they can house most of the earth's population. They are powered by OTEC (Ocean Thermal Electrical Conversion), which uses the difference in temperature between the surface and deep waters to run turbines to generate almost unlimited amounts of energy. A side effect of that process is that nutrient-rich deep water is pumped up to the surface where the sunlight is, creating massive algae blooms, creating massive blooms of fish and shellfish that people eat, in regions of the oceans where formerly, there was little life because the sunlight was at the top but the nutrients were at the bottom. With the creation of those new ecosystems, the amount of humans that the earth can support increases massively. Billions of people start moving off of the land to those floating cities, and start taking the pressure off of existing ecosystems.
Meanwhile, humans gain complete control over ecosystems, and can alter them for the better without worrying about unintended bad side-effects. People can produce countless numbers of tiny and even microscopic robots, which can be ordered to overwhelm and eliminate any unwanted pests, from rats to insects to harmful microorganisms. For instance, a few months after the project is begun, the last species of mosquito on earth is driven to extinction. Some rabid environmentalists protest this, and are attacked and killed by angry mobs. (Maybe not, but wouldn't it be nice? I'd settle for just tying them down, naked, in the Everglades in August, and leaving them there overnight, without insect repellent on, of course.) People no longer have to worry about infectious diseases evolving faster than medical science can find cures for them, because the pace of technological progress now exceeds the pace of evolution of infectious diseases.
Companies put rotating tethers in low earth orbit, super-strong cables hundreds of miles long that ships hook onto to get a boost the rest of the way into orbit. Since the rockets then only have to reach suborbital speed, which is far easier to reach than orbital speed, the price to orbit drops to not much more than suborbital flights. Tethers would work like flywheels, gaining energy from ships returning down to earth, and using that energy to boost up other ships going up into space, so that ships could go up and down using no net energy or fuel, as long as there was equal amounts of traffic both ways. Next, they put up additional rotating tethers in slightly higher orbits to fling ships from low earth orbit to lunar orbit, and next put tethers in orbit around the moon, which gently deposit passengers and cargo on the surface, and pick up passengers and cargo going the other way.
Another possibility is scramjets: rockets that scoop up oxygen in the atmosphere on the way up in order to burn their fuel. Current rockets have to carry up oxygen as heavy fuel, when oxygen typically weighs 7/8 of the total amount of fuel, so scramjets would only have to bring up 1/8 of the fuel they do now, and could therefore take up far more cargo at far lower prices. Scramjets could lower the cost of the initial part of the flight, though the atmosphere, and rotating tethers could eliminate the cost of the remaining part of the flight.
Another possibility would be to build long tracks angled up the sides of mountains that would give rockets a boost magnetically, in the same way that maglev trains work, and reduce the amount of fuel they need to carry, therefore greatly increase the cargo they can carry, since a great deal of fuel is used just to get ships a short distance off the ground. Unfortunately, such tracks could not boost ships all the way to orbital speed, because atmospheric friction would become impossibly great. However, if the Diamond Age has begun, and diamond is used as a building material, such tracks could be put up on stilts at least 20 miles high, above almost all of the atmosphere, and atmospheric friction would be minimal. In that case, ships could be boosted into orbit magnetically, and no fuel would be necessary. Such tracks, called rail guns, would need to be several hundred miles long in order to boost ships all the way to orbital speed without imposing more acceleration on passengers than they can stand. Shorter tracks could initially boost ships to a good portion of orbital speed, and then far-smaller rockets could boost them the rest of the way. Shorter tracks could also be used to boost cargo, which can stand far higher accelerations than people, into orbit.
Another possibility would be to use nanotechnology to produce ultra light and strong and almost maintenance-free rockets, made out of such materials as foam diamond.
Finally, if public knee-jerk hostility can be overcome, perhaps nuclear-powered rockets are developed, which reach orbit with little effort and by wide safety margins.
Suddenly, tourists are going into space and visiting the moon by the thousands, and large orbiting hotels, and then hotels on the moon, are being built to house them. NASA and other governments' programs become almost irrelevant, as private companies have rapidly overtaken their meager plans. Thousands of people are staying in space to live there permanently. Large space stations rotate to create artificial gravity. They are begun as 2 capsules spinning at opposite ends of a cable, and then more segments are filled in until a complete wheel-shaped station is completed. There are also huge zero-gravity habitats, a good fraction of a mile across, which consist of little more than giant plastic bubbles filled with air, and are relatively easy to set up.
A split develops between environmental groups, who want to return the environment to its natural state, and animal rights groups, who are against all the suffering in the natural world and want to use nanotechnology and robots to turn the Earth into a kind of giant park or zoo, in which all conscious animals are cared for like pets. Currently, the same people are usually both environmentalists and animal rights advocates. But yet another, even more radical political group emerges, which is anti animal rights and pro (enhanced) human rights. That group argues that animals are like humans with extreme retardation, and it is immoral to bring such genetically disadvantaged beings into the world if we can prevent it, and should only bring the most enhanced human intellects into the world instead. A slightly less radical faction of that group argues that it is okay to bring animals into the world, as long as we enhance their brains up to the level of enhanced humans (and also, in the case of cats and dogs and other animals, provide them with prosthetic manipulative arms, to make up for the disadvantage of their rather useless paws, prosthetic voices so they can speak languages, etc.).
Additional rotating tethers are put into earth orbit in order to fling astronauts beyond the earth's region and into the rest of the solar system. The first astronauts are sent to Earth-approaching asteroids. Soon after that, the first astronauts are sent to Mars, but perhaps they don't land yet, only fly by, and land on one of its moons. Soon after that, rotating tethers are put in Mars orbit so that people can easily go down to the surface and come back up again, and the first people land on Mars. Tourists soon begin to explore the whole solar system.
The first large space cities are being built in high Earth orbit. They consist of enclosed rotating cylinders a mile across. People live on the interior surface, which has houses, trees, lakes, etc. The number of people living in space is quickly shooting up toward the millions.
Space population is in the millions, and many more space habitats, of increasing sizes, are being constructed. A system of rotating cables is being installed throughout the solar system to allow for routine travel using virtually no energy, as long as there is as much traffic going both directions. Enormous multi-mirror space telescopes map planets around other stars. A microscopic probe has been sent to Alpha Centuri, the nearest star system to our own, and though it is microscopic, it can do everything our current probes can do because it contains microscopic machinery. Millions of people have moved to floating cities on the tropical oceans. The earth's population, which was about to level off at around 9 billion, starts increasing again, now that earthly and economic limits have disappeared, and lifespans are indefinitely long.