Hey, you're always asking me where I find stuff...
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
Future Predictions
I've been thinking a lot lately about what the future might be like - not so much about whether we'll use jetpacks to get to work every day, or if there'll be a functioning moonbase, but more general things about how we'll all live as a society.
At the moment we're able (if we choose) to live a very extended lifestyle. We can live 40km from our job and think nothing of travelling that far every day to get to it. We can choose to live in houses with no space for growing plants. We can eat anything we want, whenever we want. We can even eat deap-sea fish that takes 100 years to mature. We can travel to every part of the globe and we do so on a regular basis.
Right now petrol is expensive. And it doesn't look like it will get any cheaper. What's more likely is that petrol will continue to get more expensive. So that means just about everything else will get more expensive.
Food. Clothes. Housing. Air travel. Everything.
If we have to spend more money on the things we currently buy, then we'll have less to spend, so we'll have to stop buying some of those things. I'm thinking that in the future we will all (well, nearly all) be poorer. I don't know how poor we'll be, but definitely poorer. Maybe even 1940's poorer. For example, at the moment we can eat chicken every day. Chicken is a cheap meat. Chickens are raised in massive industrial coops in their millions, slaughtered in huge processing-plants, sliced up and packed and sent off in streams of semitrailers to supermarkets, restaurants, fast-food joints, butchers etc. Chicken is cheap. (And tasty.)
But chicken wasn't always cheap. In the 40's (and even into the 50's) chicken was something that most people only got to eat occasionally. Maybe a couple of times a year. If you kept chickens in your backyard you could have it more often, but you could only have chicken as fast as you could raise them. If there's no fuel, trucks won't be able to minimise the cost of moving large amounts of chicken meat from the processing plants to the cities.
Prediction #1 - we will eat less chicken. The chicken we do eat will often come from the coop in our backyard. It will be tastier, and we will start eating the weird parts of chicken again (e.g. livers, hearts and feet).
Of course to raise chickens, you need room. Houses in the city with backyards will be very desirable because we're all going to have to grow vegies again. The inner-city houses (with little or no backyards) will once again be leased out to poorer people, who will provide the labour for all those industries that will move back towards the city centres so as to minimise transportation costs. Multi-national corporations will find it hard to survive and will inevitably split up into smaller companies that service highly-localised markets.
Prediction #2 - our experience of the last four decades of companies getting more and more massive will change completely. Companies will splinter, new local brands will arise, regionalism will overtake globalisation.
Prediction #3 - we will start learning to do things for ourselves again. There are a lot of things you can grow and make that don't require a huge amount of skill. Making your own beer is a good example.
Prediction #4 - we will get thinner. The reason we're all so fat is because we can buy energy very very cheaply. Sugar is cheap, oil is cheap. That energy will be more expensive, and we'll have less opportunities to buy it.
Well, that's only a few. I'm sure you get the idea...
At the moment we're able (if we choose) to live a very extended lifestyle. We can live 40km from our job and think nothing of travelling that far every day to get to it. We can choose to live in houses with no space for growing plants. We can eat anything we want, whenever we want. We can even eat deap-sea fish that takes 100 years to mature. We can travel to every part of the globe and we do so on a regular basis.
Right now petrol is expensive. And it doesn't look like it will get any cheaper. What's more likely is that petrol will continue to get more expensive. So that means just about everything else will get more expensive.
Food. Clothes. Housing. Air travel. Everything.
If we have to spend more money on the things we currently buy, then we'll have less to spend, so we'll have to stop buying some of those things. I'm thinking that in the future we will all (well, nearly all) be poorer. I don't know how poor we'll be, but definitely poorer. Maybe even 1940's poorer. For example, at the moment we can eat chicken every day. Chicken is a cheap meat. Chickens are raised in massive industrial coops in their millions, slaughtered in huge processing-plants, sliced up and packed and sent off in streams of semitrailers to supermarkets, restaurants, fast-food joints, butchers etc. Chicken is cheap. (And tasty.)
But chicken wasn't always cheap. In the 40's (and even into the 50's) chicken was something that most people only got to eat occasionally. Maybe a couple of times a year. If you kept chickens in your backyard you could have it more often, but you could only have chicken as fast as you could raise them. If there's no fuel, trucks won't be able to minimise the cost of moving large amounts of chicken meat from the processing plants to the cities.
Prediction #1 - we will eat less chicken. The chicken we do eat will often come from the coop in our backyard. It will be tastier, and we will start eating the weird parts of chicken again (e.g. livers, hearts and feet).
Of course to raise chickens, you need room. Houses in the city with backyards will be very desirable because we're all going to have to grow vegies again. The inner-city houses (with little or no backyards) will once again be leased out to poorer people, who will provide the labour for all those industries that will move back towards the city centres so as to minimise transportation costs. Multi-national corporations will find it hard to survive and will inevitably split up into smaller companies that service highly-localised markets.
Prediction #2 - our experience of the last four decades of companies getting more and more massive will change completely. Companies will splinter, new local brands will arise, regionalism will overtake globalisation.
Prediction #3 - we will start learning to do things for ourselves again. There are a lot of things you can grow and make that don't require a huge amount of skill. Making your own beer is a good example.
Prediction #4 - we will get thinner. The reason we're all so fat is because we can buy energy very very cheaply. Sugar is cheap, oil is cheap. That energy will be more expensive, and we'll have less opportunities to buy it.
Well, that's only a few. I'm sure you get the idea...
Links to this post:
- RSS