Vocal Voices

In the absence of a Future Affairs board, I'll have to use this board, although current and future affairs are inevitably linked.

Mrs A keeps telling me that at my age I shouldn't be so concerned about how the future looks for the human race in general, and for England in particular. But I can't help it. I have seen so many changes in my lifetime. Many of them have potential for improving life, but the change that concerns me is the way in which the nature of so many people has changed for the worse. Prosperity has brought with it greed and a lowering of morals in so many people. It is hard to trust anyone nowadays, or so it seems. Why have morals almost disappeared? I read the other day that more than 50% of British people now say that they are not religious, and that this is said to be an all-time low. Could this be a possible cause of the lowering of standards? Or is it a consequence of our becoming an affluent society?

Another factor that makes future life on Earth look frightful, is the anticipated effects of global warming. Even if this possibility could be proved without any shadow of doubt, the measures necessary to prevent a complete collapse of satisfactory life on Planet Earth would be quite unacceptable to most people, until it was too late to implement the necessary changes to our pattern of life. I certainly don't envy future generations. This may sound a very pessimistic view, but mark my words - future generations in their agonies of trying to survive will curse their forefathers (us) for what we have done to our planet. Maybe they will be able to evacuate Earth and re-establish themselves on some other hospitable planet. Who knows?

Rant over.

At work and need some time to reply.

Would you prefer short and to the point or long and rambling....

What a strange coincidence this thread is, Aggers.

I foolishly went to the supermarket at the same time as the school day finished. Looking at the line of about 60 children at the bus stop I was amazed that about 60 - 70% of them were looking down at their phones thumbing this way and that, but that is a rant for another day.

Driving back the above got me to thinking that those of us who were adults in the last part of the 20th century have had the best and most interesting lives of any generation before and possibly of those to come.

Thanks to an array of different technologies our lives are so much easier. With the flick of a few switches we have instant heat, light and entertainment. We have foods of every description any day of the year. We can travel almost anywhere in comfort at the drop of a hat. Our wardrobes are filled with clothes for all seasons and we can clean them in a machine dedicated to the job. We have hot and cold running water, on tap, and with every cleaning product imaginable our hygiene standards are as good as they will ever be. I could go on, believe me I could.

Then comes the downside. In providing all of those things we have decimated the planets resources. We have ruined environments to the point where they will never recover. For so very many of us our contact with nature has disappeared. We could, if we really worked at it, lock ourselves in our homes and never leave. We have more ways than ever to communicate, yet it is one thing we are regressing at. This is another list that goes on and on.

I fear that the future world will be one of dog-eat-dog, where wars and famine are the norm and I am glad I will not be here to be part of it.

Suff wrote:At work and need some time to reply.

Would you prefer short and to the point or long and rambling....

I rather like your rambling ones, Suff. as they usually provide me with much food for thought.
(but maybe others may prefer the 'to the point' variety.) I leave the choice to you.

Undoubtedly this is a subject which could result in a never-ending discussion. I just wish that those
whom we elected to have control of things would treat this subject in the way it deserves.

Workingman wrote:I fear that the future world will be one of dog-eat-dog, where wars and famine are the norm and I am glad I will not be here to be part of it.

Me, too.

Trying to be concise...

WW1 started to change our society but not that much.
WW2 changed it massively but really the seeds is sowed were much more damaging than the direct consequences of so much travel, views of the world and freedom for the women working on the land.

After WW2 things really started to change. America needed an outlet for it's military industrial complex created during WW2 and so it created consumerism. 2 huge developments also changed our lives forever. Injection moulded plastics and the silicon based transistor.

The plastics industry massively drove the throw away consumer society and the transistor morphed into the silicon chip and the advent of the computers we know today and infest all aspects of our lives. The pace of life became frenetic and the old barriers to hedonism, such as the church, were moving far too slowly to be accepted by the youth of the day and also far too many of the soldiers who came back from the war were extremely disillusioned with religion. After all, the German military belt buckles were all engraved with Gott mit uns. My Father in Law broke with the Catholic church after seeing the abject poverty of those who worked the Italian land and the massive wealth and power of the catholic church.

Add to the mix the threat of nuclear annihilation at any moment in time, drugs in the 60's, hard drugs flowing out of Asia on the back of the Vietnam war and we are up to my teenage years in the 70's. By now young people were in open revolt, the church was an anathema and parents were struggling to cope with a society which was rejecting the solid foundations on which they had been raised.

You don't need the church to be good or respectful or considerate. You do, however, have to have an upbringing in which your parents teach you those values, sometimes at the end of a chastisement.

In the 80's we had the fallout of the 1970's collapse of our industry, IMF loans, austerity to fix the problem. Massive unemployment, much higher work mobility and the breaking down of the family unit. Pretty horrific times, but also times where if you were on the crest of the wave you had it good. Too bad if you were not.

Then we get to the 90's. The berlin wall falls, relief is incredible, we're not going to be fried in nuclear fire after all, money is diverted to industry and leisure from defence, cheap flights happen overnight, simply put the technological change is like an express elevator and the whole world is having a huge party. Even the dot com bust didn't stop it, nor 9/11.

At the same time the PC culture's insidious tentacles entered into the mix and we're no longer able to even chastise our children, if we deny them anything we're abusing them and they go out of control.

The warning signs were there over the years. We've known about Global Warming for decades, but the evidence of the impact was growing. But the public didn't care. So what they say. We fixed Y2K, we fixed Acid Rain, we can fix this too, right?

The huge debt fuelled binge finally ends with the mother of all hangovers in 2009. Suddenly the bright colourful world is full of drab greys and browns. Not a hint of red, yellow or orange to be seen. Parenting skills are lost and parents think that their children are either toys or little adults to be "friends with". Children don't understand why they can't just have the newest and the latest "whatever" any more and become more sulky.

But we're left with the PC laws. We can't control our children any more and there are no end of businesses and government quango's going around undermining our control to either make a quick buck or to gain political power. Suddenly we realise that fixing Acid Rain actually made temperatures bubble even faster. Sulphur is a heat reflectant and we pulled as much as we could out of the atmosphere, not just power stations but fuel for cars and trucks too. Heat flooded in and was trapped by the CO2...

Major Oooops.

So there we stand. In hock to our eyeballs. Children looking like a re-run of lord of the flies with every hand turned against anyone who wants to put them back in their box. Climate basically out of control and the best the politicians can say is "we'll go on a CO2 diet but really we need to spend our way out of it". Keynsian climate control. Magic.

The headache is still there somewhere around the back of the head and at the same time those pesky Middle eastern people have started creating a whole new order over there and we let them do it. Now they're exporting their "world order" to us using the stick we have been told is bad to use.

Some day this will be written up. After the wars, after the devastation, when the world has settled down with a stable population of about 3bn, the historians will document it all. They'll get it wrong of course because it will all be hearsay and the "documented evidence" of the winners. The title will probably be something like....

"The century the world went mad"....

Well, Suff, I have read through that twice, and I think it's an amazing summery of the course of events that has occurred during my lifetime, and which has brought us to the present sorry state of affairs. You certainly have an amazing ability to grasp a situation and express it in an understandable manner.

Seriously, have you every thought of writing a book along these lines? I would certainly buy one.

If we were to take someone born in 1890, 125 years ago, and drop them into 2015 what would they see?

Many things would be almost familiar: roads; houses; street lighting; the printed word in books and newspapers; tea (now coffee) shops; department stores. There would also be things totally alien: TV and radio; cars; aircraft, computers, the Internet, phones of any description....

So what, potentially, lies ahead, in the next 125 years? It is impossible to know what brand new things will emerge, but what about things with a ring of familiarity about them? We will no doubt see screenless TVs thanks to 3D holographic projection technologies. There is an implant being developed to allow the deaf to hear, it would be no great leap from that to one that picked up "phone" signals or for one to pick up speech, maybe even thoughts, and transmit them. There are already experiments being carried out to use thought control of things. A prototype device the size of a coin already exists to project images onto any surface. Combine all three and mobile phones can be done away with. We are already on the cusp of some things with smart watches. When it comes to aircraft we are nowhere near the end of the total mass able to be lifted by modern engines, this means that flying objects can get many times bigger. How big? It is not out of the question for them to carry 2,000 passengers, or more, before the mass to power equation balances out. We almost certainly will have robotic kitchens preparing our meals for us. CDs and DVDs will be a thing of the past in the not too distant future. They could well be replaced by USB 4.0 chips in read/write, read only and read a few times formats for different uses. Driverless vehicles will be on our roads. We might not own one, but banks of them will be in cities just waiting for our call. The further development of things we already have knows no bounds.

Why, then, did I mention potential? The reason is that we are not dealing with problems that have the ability to bring the sky crashing down long before we can develop or introduce new things. If we do not act we are likely march resolutely back to the middle ages rather than a bright future, and in doing so our numbers will be painfully reduced.

Aggers wrote:Seriously, have you every thought of writing a book along these lines? I would certainly buy one.

Thank you for your comments. It was not written for that. I'm just trying to align my thoughts and views on what happened over my lifetime to bring us to where we are today. I can honestly say that my youth was part of the problem and I am as culpable as anyone else. However I recognise the faults of my youth and try to make sure it is no replicated, at least in my own family, in future generations.

I was a fairly good Analyst and architect, something to do with the engineering heritage for which I can take no credit. I just see the structure of some things without having to build the picture. Would that Project management was so easy for me.....

Mrs S often talks about us both writing a book. But I find my focus and concentration is totally shot. Just doing my job is more than I can cope with at the moment. I suspect if I ever try any writing tendencies it will be after I've retired. But I have a few other things to do in the physical engineering world before that.

WM is very right to talk about potential. Our potential is incredible. Boundless. But our application is wasteful and self destructive.

We shall reap as we sow and right now the only thing we are sowing is trouble and strife for future generations....

Suff wrote:We shall reap as we sow and right now the only thing we are sowing is trouble and strife for future generations....

AMEN