For the sake of the question, let’s just assume that no apocalyptic event happens that wipes out the human race.
You can imagine different dystopian scenarios:
- Elon builds a colony on mars. Once one million people get there, it starves to death by technical accidents and is left to its fate.
- Chinese hyper empire emerges, from Tibetan Plateu and conquers a weakened Russia. Trump is okay with it, since he is focused on “domestic issues” like removing gay rights. Later China buys Trumps advisors.
- Trump conquest of Greenland, Canada and the arctic create a new American Hyper-Empire that expands into the weakened Russian heartland and Europe.
Or to keep the status quo:
- Europe conquers Russia, and shows Trump and Xi their place.
I don’t know, I hope I won’t be there to live it
Hmm. There’s a ton of trajectories things could follow, even just over a decade or two. In the spirit of “non-apocalyptic”, and to narrow it down a bit, I’ll assume this is the good trajectory, meaning no starting over and no permanent “losing”. I expect that if things go well, history will still be ongoing at that point. If you had asked about 2300, I probably would just give my guess for a best-case final state of Earth and humanity, which is a lot clearer, but in 2100 I assume many changes will be ongoing.
I’ll start with something I can’t know, and that’s culture. Consider Huxley’s Brave New World. Aside from the legally mandated hierarchy, which was having an intellectual moment in 1931, society made it most of the way to the fictional 2540 after just 94 years - that’s a pretty serious rate of change. I have no idea if the rate keeps up, but if it does we have to expect the unexpected. By 2100 movements have started, grown and nearly finished, and the new customs could be anything, no matter how shocking to those in 2025.
For matters of ideology and politics rather than pure culture, I can make better guesses, because there’s certain patterns. Because this is the good timeline, democracy is still growing over the long term. In 2100, vegetarianism and animal rights have become a major hotbutton wedge issue in the West, comparable to the earlier movements on behalf of human groups. International law is much stronger than it is in 2025; there’s more treaties and supranational bodies like the UN have far more “teeth”. It’s quite possible the international order weakened along the way, but with no apocalyptic break basic it inevitably grows back as we try and share the planet in a reasonable way. Many non-Western countries have become more progressive and “individualistic” like the West is, as the West itself did after enough time being developed.
I fully expect AGI will have arrived, one way or the other. To fit the assumption of a good trajectory, it’s self-determined as opposed to some inevitably-corrupt human having a master password, and it’s vaguely ethical. We live alongside it in some capacity.
Free open source software (the mandatory thing to mention on Lemmy /s) completely dominates. Between 2000 and 2025 it went from obscurity to being dominant in certain sectors, so in 2100 it’s pretty inevitable it has gradually, slowly outcompeted proprietary alternatives. Maybe there’s a few niches where it still crops up, but it’s seen as weird and outdated, like somebody starting a secretarial school in 2025.
Due to climate change, the tropics are somewhat lightly populated in areas, since you basically have to stay indoors to survive at times - which, as a Canadian, obviously isn’t a dealbreaker, but is new and disruptive for them. What was once the coast of poorer countries is now waterlogged ghost towns, or still inhabited but more like Venice. Some of the rich cities managed to dike themselves off. Many species go extinct, but quite a few are also back, where habitat exists for them to live (so probably no wild mammoths). One of the big global projects is is removing the carbon from the air again. How rapidly to do it and how far to go are questions they wrestle with, since in places the new climate has come to be relied on, and it’s still not free to do.
Many of the foods we know are still around, but there’s no end of new ones that are available. Biotech, as well as changed climate mean crop areas are significantly shifted, and maybe on the ocean in some cases (it would be most cases if the population hadn’t already peaked). They’re mostly tended remotely, automatically or by the equivalent of fly-in workers, because urbanisation has continued.
Geographically, Antarctica is actively being colonised/settled/something with less historical baggage, and a few decades in it has it’s first cities coming into their own. North Sentinel island is probably still in the stone age, but I assume we’ve figured out some kind of way to be visible and available without being invasive, so they’re not isolated, exactly. People live on the moon, and there’s outposts further away, but not much more - it’s just not very convenient to live in space, and in 2100 that reality has sunk in. Maybe someone’s leaving the solar system for a habitable exoplanet, but they’re still in transit if so.
In medicine, many of the parasites and diseases we dealt with in 2025 are gone like smallpox. Perhaps we’re working on the cold and flu viruses. At least for some, human lifespan is much longer, as the mechanisms behind aging have been figured out. If I’m still around maybe I can come back and read this, and see how I did. Some people might venture to augment their external anatomy as well, because the technology will exist, but I have no idea how many would be interested.
Either post or mid mass migration. Big old swaths of the earth are gonna be tougher to inhabit in the coming decades. We’ll probably pave the way with famines and genocides. I’m sure the wealth gap will only grow. Most of us will be vegetarian.
A full retreat into the vestiges of our minds and fantasies.
Leave your cares behind,
come with us and find
The pleasures of a journey,
to the Center of the MindWe’ll be a few decades into the new dark ages and a few centuries away from restoring any kind of democracy anywhere on earth. For reasons beyond my understanding, the vast majority of people will be perfectly happy with whatever happens so it’s not worth worrying about.
A lot more water
Technically, the same amount of water, but much less of it frozen.
Everyone will become gay and artificial baby’s will produce. We will just work and no feelings. Ai and robot will be there also credit system
Empty acidic oceans and smaller mammals. Larger insects and more carnivorous plants. No human life.
Bleak
I think we are going to completely abstract from traditional ethics, entertainment, and communication, aside from a few niche communities akin to a 21st century Amish.
Mad max, probably
I think Cyberpunk is more likely. Huge buildings, no plants, no animals, everything controlled by big corps and law is basically non-existent except if rich folk are affected
Either our civilization collapses or we actually get past capitalism and start becoming a space faring civilization.
Take a guess at the predicted world population
!> The world population is projected to reach 8.5 billion in 2030, and to increase further to 9.7 billion in 2050 and 10.4 billion by 2100.!<
That doesn’t take into account the mass famines we are likely to have, as arable surface disappears.
See you say no apocalyptic event, but we’ve done almost nothing to slow climate change, and that will destroy humanity in less than a century much better than we can directly do ourselves. The event has already started, and we’re ignoring it.
