Sunday, January 28, 2007

Wikipedia, The Future, and I'm a Nerd

I'm a die-hard Wikipedia fan. For those of you who have been living in a cave, under a rock and with your head in the ground, Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia on the web. It has just about any topic you can think of and is edited, and contributed to, by anyone and everyone. Obviously, this poses a problem to the validity of what is written, but its a great starting place if your looking for information on just about anything. Tonight, on the Discovery channel, there was a show on called "2057." Great show, its all about the future and different technologies and sciences and how mankind is proceeding with advancements. This got me thinking about the future, so I looked up "future" on Wikipedia. There is a ton of shit on Wiki about anything and everything you can imagine about what the future might hold. Its worth a look.

This all got me thinking about my vision of the future. What will the world look like 50 years from now? The funny thing is most likely very similar to what it looks like today with most of the same problems around. Picture yourself 50 years ago, in 1957. The world then, is pretty similar to the world today, but to find the differences you have to look in the corners. They had lots of problems then: terrible race relations in the United States, political instability throughout the world, high mortality rate, no treatments for dozens of diseases, etc... Well today, many of those problems have been either greatly reduced, or almost stamped out. But what is the major difference between today and 1957? Get in the corners and look closely. Our entire world economy is now based on the Internet. Sounds funny, but its true. How is money transferred? The net. How are directions given to oil tankers? Satellites and the net. And who would have conceived of that in 1957? That is one startling difference, but its something you just can't see. When you put the fact that our world now depends on the Internet to function economically, it does make our world almost unrecognizable to that of 1957.

My main point comes back to the article about the future on Wikipedia. All of these people have posted articles about scenarios and ideas regarding what the future will look like. What is funny is that no matter how strange the future might be presented by these different writers and contributors, the real vision of the future will most likely be something we have never considered and be unrecognizable to the world of 2007.

Ray Bradbury, eat your heart out. LOL.

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