Things are changing and it’s happening a lot faster than many thought it would. I have said for the past couple of years there would have to be a guaranteed income given to people due to the fact that increasing automation is taking away so many jobs. Ontario, Canada has decided to give a guaranteed income to the people there. It will be a little over C$1300 per month. It is not exactly what I was talking about because this money is being provided by the local government. In the future it should be provided by the companies reaping the benefits of automation which is saving them huge amounts of money for labor and benefits. One of the problems is the money given as a guaranteed basic income is not enough to live on. This will have to be corrected in the future and there is also psychological problems people will get if they just sit around doing nothing. These problems will have to be addressed.

In some ways the future seems bright, but in a lot of other ways it doesn’t. People will have to get used to the idea the way they live now will change. One of the ways life will change will be governed by how efficiently we develop our space travel capacity. I think there will be huge leaps in space travel much as there is in electronics, optics and even in the growing of food. One of the keys will be making space travel cheaper for all of us. If travel gets cheap enough, cities will start to grow in places like the moon and maybe even Mars. In the beginning they may be under some sort of dome, but as time goes by at least on Mars, the planet may be terraformed eliminating the need for domes to keep an atmosphere in. Once these things happen people will start to travel back and forth to these places and further and even go to them for the holidays, especially if they have family living there. It is not a question of if, but more of a question of when.

Our lives are going to change in ways it is hard to imagine. There has been a prediction made which states hospitals will disappear in the near future. You might be saying to yourself this is a ridiculous prediction, but if we look at the way things are now and what is coming in the near future, we can see this may not be as ridiculous as it sounds. Picture a home which is totally connected to the Internet. Also picture miniaturized medical devices and even apps which can turn our cell phones into medical devices. In the future it may be possible to have access to miniaturized and very powerful medical devices which today exist only in hospitals. Also picture an artificial intelligence that can diagnose as good as any doctor. Add to that mix a robotic nurse controlled by this AI and you may have home care better than we receive today in any hospital.

One thing is true, it is hard to predict some things about the future since we have no knowledge about what might exist at that time. It is one thing to predict things based on what we have now being improved, but it is an entirely different thing to try and figure out something which might exist. We do know science has ideas of what they would like to see come about. We have just discovered a possible fifth force in nature which may exist. Scientists believe this force may be linked to the electromagnetic, strong and weak forces. If they are correct this could substantially change our ideas about the universe and dark matter. When new forces are discovered they can lead to new inventions and who knows how this new force could be taken advantage of? Could it be used for propulsion or perhaps in medical devices? I hate to say this, could it be used in some sort of weapon? Since we are finding out there may be a new force in nature, who is to say there aren’t others we haven’t found yet?

We know the days of petroleum as a power source are numbered, but what will take its place? As far as automobiles go, electricity is making a strong case for replacing petroleum, but it may not be the ultimate winner, this could turn out to be hydrogen powered cars in the future. Hydrogen has been talked about for quite a while as an alternate fuel, but it had many problems. It had storage problems and it had processing problems. One of the problems is hydrogen does not exist in the natural state on earth even though it is the most abundant element in the universe. One of the problems today is hydrogen is extracted from natural gas, but scientists have been studying plants and they believe they have developed a way of creating hydrogen by a process similar to photosynthesis. They have developed water splitting solar cells which they believe could last up to 20 years and as the hydrogen is burned the only exhaust would be water which would help with our pollution problems all over the world.

Many of the diseases which exist today may disappear in the future. This may be accomplished by gene therapy. There is talk about repairing genes at the fetal stage in people who have genetic diseases. This could eventually eliminate all the genetic diseases on the earth. Just recently a gene editing technique was used to fix gene defects that cause sickle-cell anemia disease. Sickle-cell disease is actually several related disease which cause the formation of hemoglobin S or sickle-cell shaped hemoglobin.

Humans are meat eaters, at least most of us, but things are about to change for us in a way never seen before. Scientists have been able to grow meat in a laboratory and if they can do it cheap enough it may eliminate the slaughter of animals. Meat grown today is far too expensive to become a viable alternative, but scientists are predicting they will be able to get the price low enough to make it competitive with the meat from an animal. This leaves the question of how will it taste? Some experts are saying we will not be able to tell the difference. I guess we’ll just have to wait for this one to see if that’s true.

The future could be a rosy one, or a terrible one. It all depends on the path our leaders take now. Will the emphasis be on peace or will futuristic weapon be blasting people into pieces? I vote for peace.