Future1

What intrigues everyone — myself included — is the question: what future awaits our world in the twenty-first century?

The greatest concern of the average human being is undoubtedly this: will the world, within this and one hundred years, look better, more beautiful and more enjoyable?

The following sketch of earthly civilization in the twenty-first century is at the same time a mental exercise concerning the history of a new millennium of which we — roughly speaking — are experiencing only the beginning, therefore neither the middle nor the end.

Despite all the prophets of doom, earthly civilization will not disappear during the coming decades. Humanity will — sometimes at the very last moment — thwart every attempt at self-destruction in the wisdom that the new human being of the new millennium returns to its own dream, namely that humanity fulfils a central role in the further realization of the history of space.

The greatest innovation of the new century will be linked to the disappearance of the wheel.

Initially, out of nostalgic reflex, human civilization will attempt to preserve the wheel as a carrier of human progress — figuratively as well as literally — but soon the usefulness of movable space without spatial displacement will become apparent: the invention that during the course of the twenty-first century will become embryonically clear but that only by the year 2466 will indelibly determine the human civilization of that moment.

Paper will, contrary to what most people expect, NOT disappear from future society. Wood-based paper will be completely replaced by an artificial paper whose total durability may be estimated at at least one millennium.

The new paper will no longer be directly written upon with pencil or pen. Thoughts will, as it were, become visible from within the fibres of the paper without being written or printed.

A sheet of paper, through its ingenious composition — in fact only truly invented in the year 2078 — will for a long time continue to be used as a single-layer sheet. In the twenty-second century, the multilayer paper sheet — no thicker than one millimetre — will become fully established. As a consequence of the interactive character of the new paper, which mentally will acquire a certain form of artificial consciousness, for example the second or fifth layer of the paper will — without touching and within a single instant — change appearance, for example becoming a blank sheet.

The quality of the new luxury paper will be linked to its multilayer possibilities. This new paper can best be compared with a very large credit card, multilayered in structure, yet possessing a flexibility already familiar to us from present-day paper.

From 2018 onward, the computer will assume a new form or appearance, and this formula will continue to function beyond the twenty-first century.

This new manifestation of the computer can rather be compared with a flexible cube of relatively small dimensions capable, so to speak, of devouring paper and describing it — within a single instant — with a content of 6,660,004 units of data. This unit will be difficult to compare with present memory capacities (megabyte or gigabyte) but rather with several giga squared.

The new paper may literally also be fed into the computer. The computer, which will receive another name — a name sounding more like a pet name than like computer — will from 2051 onward automatically and literally be able to reduce the paper (through its own input) into, for example, a sheet as small as a thimble and either completely reusable or capable of being rewritten with new data.

For duplication, the printing press and offset printing industry will disappear completely, at least as a contemporary means of transporting thoughts. The new books that are produced and that will prove materially indestructible can be adapted to available space (according to the dynamic phenomenon of shrinking and expanding). Rub the spine of the book — initially with your finger, later, that is after the twenty-first century, without literally rubbing — and the book becomes larger or smaller depending on whether you rub inward or outward.

In any case, INK will disappear from the face of the earth as a printing ingredient.

In certain regions of the earth, the described development will not yet become commonplace.

In any case, we shall continue using the alphabet presently known to us as long as nothing fundamentally changes within our brains. That phenomenal three-dimensional transformation, detached from time and space, may be expected toward the end of the twenty-third century. At that moment, this transformation will take place once “other” contacts in distant space impose themselves upon us.

The greatest intervention in our mobility during the twenty-first century will be the disappearance of the wheel. We have already said this, but have not yet clarified it.

Far into the twenty-first century, automobiles will continue circulating in forms similar to those we know today. Apart from old-timers, the streetscape will change extremely dramatically. Strict regulations will apply.

The new automobile without wheels stands upon a wheel-less chassis, thus without mechanical elements or wiring. The driving force is a magnetic field adjusted either at twenty centimetres above ground level or at two hundred metres in height. This means: whoever makes small displacements uses the adapted road system. Whoever independently navigates from region to region or between countries rises to elevated highways. These elevated roads possess traffic signs and signalling perceptible only virtually to the driver. Free navigation will be permitted.

Traffic jams or traffic accidents will belong to the past because every car cabin — technically comparable to the quality of an airtight cockpit — contains virtual sensors that slow the speed of the vehicle in time or, in extreme cases, push vehicles aside and temporarily station them. Speed will be unlimited whenever the situation allows it.

In urbanized regions, before departure one will enter point of departure and destination into the dashboard and, moments later — indeed automatically — navigate through traffic. This will become the general rule for elevated highways.

On ground-level roads one will still be able to steer independently. General standard speed limits such as we currently observe within the existing road network will disappear completely in the twenty-first century. Depending upon the type of automobile, the traffic situation, the relief and weather conditions, daily speed norms will be centrally adjusted and therefore apply relatively per road and per hour.

Already before 2010 every car will contain a navigation control card permitting not only the reconstruction of individual routes and driving behaviour but also the setting of maximum speeds, thus speed limiters. The freedom of the driver remains officially preserved but technologically becomes strongly restricted. This tendency will later become even more far-reaching and more general.

Pedestrians in large cities, instead of moving by bicycle, will move themselves upon large stabilizing footboards obeying the same magnetic propulsion principle already announced above. Footpaths will gradually be replaced, for example in corridors of airports of a new type, certainly in places where intense pedestrian traffic exists.

Bicycles (as we still know them today) will circulate only as curiosities of the previous century because alongside automobile spaces tiny one-person cabins will come into use in which the passenger moves isolated from the outside world. These developments will remain under discussion for a long time because the traffic network prefers movements of large groups rather than individual mobile units. This also relates to the promotion of traffic solidarity.

Environmental nuisance caused by traditional automobile traffic will disappear. Movement will occur noiselessly, apart from departure and ascent. Roads will no longer suffer damage from heavy wheel ballast, so that eventually funds become available to perfect virtual traffic completely.

These traffic developments will only be definitively accepted at the threshold of the twenty-second century, but they will at any rate already have been introduced in urbanized regions. In rural regions the discrepancy between old — that is twentieth-century — and new will create concerns.

The greatest enemy of modern humanity will, however, become impure airspace and protection against all kinds of radiation. By impure airspace we mean not only the massively polluted air or the lack of pure oxygen in the living environment about which we are currently concerned. This toxicity — exhaust fumes from traditionally propelled vehicles and industrial machines — resembles a poisonous sting silently remaining within the skin of twenty-first-century society.

The dangers of all forms of radiation, currently grossly underestimated, will in the millennium of movable space without spatial displacement become a gigantic challenge and mission for living beings wishing to continue living on earth.

The centuries-old adage “A healthy mind in a healthy body” will in the coming decades be thoroughly shaken up, although we must admit that no other field within civilization will bring such silent and unnoticed change for everyone as that of our external appearance.

While external movement will undergo extreme expansion, the body itself will only be set into movement and maintained through internal or mental steering. The greatest modification — perceptible to everyone — will concern the disappearance of mechanical movement through our limbs. The individual will no longer actively set his body into motion. The new craze and cult, later the most ordinary thing in the world, will become vibration upon the body and movement impulse. Small machines of every kind will, like highly sensitive little working creatures, be attached from head to toe to points and zones worked out with the greatest precision.

Transcorporeal training will no longer have anything to do with sport or athletics. The body will be brainwashed so that only indirectly will we work upon our physical condition. Motionless movement will effectively become established, beyond paradox.

Not only will the distance at which we live from one another become shorter — literally and figuratively — but the body itself will move in another direction during the first century of the new millennium. This will certainly become necessary in order to make distant journeys through space feasible for humanity. During those distant journeys, physical condition will be maintained and one will — if desired — remain equally close to loved ones and to one’s professional activities. Virtual proximity will introduce another sensory experience.

A small example. Nowadays, whoever speaks with another person — live or by telephone — still uses his own voice.

Vocal power and vocal timbre will become purchasable and, just as in the time of the Sun King with wigs, toward the end of the twenty-first century it will become commonplace to enter into contact with others through an alienated voice. Hearing will occur through an extremely sensitive headset and no longer through the organic ear.

The acoustic vibration of the physiological voice will go out of fashion. Human beings will still communicate verbally with one another through an artificial speech medium and no longer through the ordinary voice, even when in the same room. A new (expensive) craze will consist in purchasing an exclusive or famous voice that one may use for life.

Telephoning or speaking directly from man to man will from approximately 2080 onward have disappeared from civilized regions. Everything occurs THROUGH, whether one lives nearby or works on the other side of the planet.

The atrophy of the voice will be countered in the same way as the care of wisdom teeth. Once something goes wrong, this speech organ — considered useless — will be removed. This will not be experienced as a handicap but as an ordinary procedure.

Incidentally, we note that in this manner communication in any desired language may be determined through a simple click without any training in the language concerned.

While acoustic communication is replaced by artificial verbal communication, “hand-speaking” will flourish and be cultivated like eloquence in Antiquity. Speaking with fingers and palm has less to do with a possible substitute language for the deaf than with distance and light. Upon the fingertips and between the finger joints one may attach extremely sophisticated adhesive strips. The position of the finger joints, the intensity of finger movements and the spatial distance between both palms then create communication signs in colour and sound that are transmitted to the brains of the communicators concerned.

This reminds me of Thai and Balinese dancers who perform extremely refined dances with their elegant fingers and palms.

Use of the voice is no longer essentially necessary in a new communication without words. Translation problems within the new Tower of Babylon will soon disappear. The new sign language will be taught in special lessons at special colleges to people feeling called toward it, and to human clones.

Artificial human clones will — like boys or nannies from bygone times — take work out of the hands of “natural” human beings who will devote themselves to the cultivation of their own race.

The ethical “prudishness” surrounding the copying of artificial little humans will already by 2026 have disappeared from the discussion table, while gradually only technical problems concerning the total employability of these workers remain under discussion.

Once virtual proximity becomes the norm for basic human communication, the need will be stimulated to grant additional — that is artificial — attention to irrational drives and needs within human beings.

Whereas the twentieth century reached a provisional culmination point in the glorification of the technical-rational, the split between ratio and non-ratio, between external and internal expression, will continue developing further. The transhuman — implicitly the ideal of the twentieth-century modern human being — will be sacrificed upon the altar of devotion.

No other century, moreover, will display clearer parallels with the romantic and absolutist experience of eighteenth-century times than the twenty-first century.

Since the mono-religious image of the previous millennium will be rather definitively uprooted from the streetscape of the twenty-first century, other multi-divine forms of worship will emerge in exuberant proportions, ranging from little mercy cuddles to processions and pilgrimages that may virtually — through the successor of the world-wide web of the internet — be assembled and, if desired, held daily, alone or together with the entire world.

Small domestic chapels will obtain their place in the virtual or non-virtual corner of every house. Superstition becomes THE faith and belief in the one God will be tolerated as an insignificant deviation.

No, in the twenty-first century the irrational experiential pattern will be massively installed within the mentality and experience of future supersociety. Nothing reserved for eccentric exceptions. Rest assured.

Once humanity, thanks to spectacular genetic inventions and genetic manipulations, gains more accurate control over bodily functioning, the (sometimes weak) bodily condition will no longer remain the uncontrollable factor with which one until now necessarily had to reckon. Virtual transcendence of one’s own body — in diverse forms and formulas — becomes the summit of bodily ecstasy.

Already at the end of the twentieth century traces become perceptible of exuberant devotional practices. The formalization of human communication forms will completely break through during the first half of the twenty-first century and strengthen the glorification of non-religious rituals and devotional practices.

In a new century where natural death and the natural coming-into-being of human life are almost effortlessly accelerated, delayed or abolished, less and less moral attention will be devoted to issues such as birth regulation and euthanasia. Life and death come to rest within the palm of the richer mortal, of the new technological industry.

“To conceive and bring children into the world naturally” becomes within civilized society the exception rather than the rule. “Buying children” will be interpreted literally. During the first two decades of the twenty-first century society will be prepared for this through sensational cases.

The phenomenon of natural parents and children growing up under their care and living within the biological family loyalty of former times will make way for a contractual relational pattern of relative duration.

Contractual marriage between man and woman will no longer automatically apply for life but rather be concluded for a legally limited period during which both parties temporarily engage toward one another and may agree to order and, if desired, raise tailor-made children.

The organic bond of love arising when man and woman conceive their own offspring and spontaneously undertake the upbringing of the child until adulthood — this phenomenon comes under pressure once it no longer remains self-evident personally to bring into the world and raise human beings of one’s own flesh and blood.

After 2050 the fixed relationship contract will separately and exclusively inscribe parenthood within the basic agreement for a period of two or more years.

A step that today belongs only to the imagination and not yet to real possibilities concerns children increasingly choosing their own physical and/or virtual parents or educators. The procedure becomes more complicated as one approaches the end of the twenty-first century.

Who are my parents? What will my name be within fifty years? This right to dynamic adaptation of one’s life course and origin becomes a passion within a society that in the twenty-first century longs for a form of new relational stability.

This tendency toward dynamic self-determination of person, family and social forms will — paradoxically — be intersected by increasing appreciation for kingship.

From the early twenty-first century onward, old and renewed forms of kingship will regain historical significance and greater function. “Becoming and being king” will then no longer relate to the hollowed-out role of royal houses within Western democracies but once again to the magical and authentic chosen ones of royal lineages.

Typical of the twenty-first century becomes stricter regulation for private individuals, taking divergent forms in practice and emphatically streamlining supersociety as a whole.

This course of events in no way undermines the principle of personal freedom, which legally will not be abandoned, but relates entirely to the approaching end of individualism as behavioural foundation: from approximately 2065 onward collectivism will be highly esteemed.

This straitjacket of behavioural legislation will determine the new nature of human civilization in search of new relationships.

The approaching stabilization and inevitable normalization (uniformization) of individual behaviour will then fully take shape within a network of refined civilization grids (“this fits here and that belongs there”) once the final remnants of nineteenth-century democratic decision-making rights are cleared away.

The absolutism that is approaching will indeed receive a politically and economically completely adapted execution resembling little or nothing of the bodily absolutism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Virtual control systems will gradually make their “absolutist” appearance so that the image of individually inherited absolutism from eighteenth-century monarchies and nineteenth-century republics disappears.

A beautiful example is the purchasing of human existence.

Whereas now one still mainly lives “for as long as it pleases God,” permission to continue living until a certain age will become a FAVOUR rather than a right; humanity will only receive life into its hands in the form of exchange conditions.

The present system of guarantees for a decent life after labour, paid by Father State, will with the general extension of “eternal youth” during the twenty-first century assume alarming proportions and become unsustainable.

Only from 2044 onward do we see society “ripe” for permanently placing under pressure the social protection of children and the elderly, pensions as gratitude for “proven” services, and the social system of financial safety nets.

The social struggle of Father Daens — more than one hundred years ago — and the right to life will only remain visible in movies about bygone times around 1900.

No one will cry about it, no one will laugh about it. Coming into life will shortly occur artificially. Dying by the end of the twenty-first century is no individual right: it becomes a general social issue no longer resolved through “natural decline.”

Whoever sells his life may secure a place upon a densely populated planet such as earth.

The family bond will no longer remain tradition-bound. Bonds with others become contractually regulated.

Because of the virtual proximity that will arise even in relation to other solar systems, that bond may in principle also be purchased and fulfilled by persons not physically near you every day but living elsewhere upon the globe and nevertheless meaning much to you.

The recycling of human residual waste will, moreover, from 2078 onward be solved thanks to perfected destruction technology capable from then on of reducing the deceased not to ashes but to “nothing.”

Therefore the personal acquisition of grave concessions and urn spaces will gradually disappear from earthly society.

Around approximately 2033 we expect the craze of “being buried in space” and from 2062 onward virtual burial will become generally established.

The explicit inclination and urge toward experience and communication through formal gesture becomes evident already early within the twenty-first century.

Still generally present within everyday twentieth-century life, a number of non-virtual communications become so rare and uninteresting that one may speak of a renaissance within the formal branch: writing letters with ink, personally delivering letters through a transfer person, displaying flags and pennants, wearing corsets, ballroom dancing according to a specific royal tradition, Bal des Masques, purchasing something with physical money, boating upon a “real” pond, cycling in open air, baking bread within the fire of a real oven, authentically living in a clay house, inhaling and exhaling natural air, fishing with bait, listening to orators, yodelling …

These natural forms of communication will undergo a renaissance from approximately 2036 onward.

Whoever stands above you will be addressed in a far more formal manner than someone standing upon the same level.

The urge toward formalization within our communication arises not so much from a need once again to become polite and speak respectfully toward superiors, but from the new power relations.

One motive here is the lack of substantive stability.

Through worldwide access to knowledge and power by virtual means, the quality of information will no longer be determined by content but by its flexibility within recognized situations of use.

What matters in virtual physics is not what the physicist does with it, but the approach taken by the non-physicist.

The power of knowledge becomes the flexibility of informational content.

Knowledge, insights, rules, propositions … derive their truth value not from the specialist but from multifunctional usage.

A lie — a truly impossible fact or connection — becomes authentic reality if through it Antarctica, for example, is virtually brought nearer.

A physical truth — an event resulting from a cause — may informationally become a great lie within the virtual construct that flourishes within the new total science.

The greatest scientific discoveries of the past hundred years — especially within geography and medicine — will be completely undermined by new meta-insights.

The concept of “spatial distance” becomes completely irrelevant from 2018 onward.

The concept of “human being” from 2014 onward will gradually yet ultimately be redefined in revolutionary fashion.

The same will certainly occur with the concept of “universe.”

Money as an effective physical means of payment disappears.

Sound as a physical phenomenon of air-pressure vibrations becomes exceptional once musical function may be directly activated within the brain.

Gravity will in practice be overcome.

The great science becomes holistic wisdom in which the classical sciences — marginally — nevertheless retain their place.