The Seeds of Time

Macbeth quote, mama jamma. Thoughts upon future history, and predictions, and science fiction.

• Natural disasters. This Cracked list of 5 Major Cities That Are Going to Be Destroyed is quite useful, though the dickweed who wrote it characterized the 12th century as the Dark Ages and said everyone was an idiot—I'd like to see you design Chiaravalle Abbey, smart guy, or mass-production water-powered fullering machines. Nevertheless.
  
  So in my setting, San Francisco no longer exists, Seattle is a shell of its former self (think Winterhold, in Skyrim), Venice is surrounded by a series of Dutch-style sea-walls and dikes and no longer has the canals, and Chittagong is the capital of Bangladesh. Taking the theme further, Miami and several parts of Texas and Louisiana have been hit by worse hurricanes than Katrina; Kathmandu's been hit by landslides, Manila by tsunamis, and both Jakarta and Mumbai have had disastrous flooding.
• While lots of consumer electronics of the future might well look like iPods, future furniture and room decor certainly won't. Why? You'd go effing blind if everything around you was shiny white, that's why. Anyone who's had writer's block and stared at a big white page, whether it be paper or a word-processor, will tell you: you start feeling like your eyes are going to fall out.
  
  Also, while houses will probably have some kind of computerization, most things would probably not be hooked up to it. How come? As John Cheese (Cracked again) puts it, "Now let's flash forward to the first time your power gets knocked out. Or, the first time a virus—or, hell, a faulty software update—bricks the system. So, what, does your heat shut off?"
  
  Probably the main thing in your house that'd be computerized would be the meters, so your account can be billed for water, electricity, and so on, without a guy having to come by and read the thing once a month. Sure, you'd probably set the thermostat and water heater with a computer, too, but technically speaking you already do, it's just (probably) analog.
• Though computers might well project keyboards, either onto a flat surface or into the air under (though not in front of) your raised hands, we're never gonna use the grab-and-drag things interface from Minority Report, at least not to the exclusion of ordinary old mouse and keyboard. Why?
  
  Two reasons. First, it's more tiring to conduct an orchestra than to sit and type. And second, as Tycho put it RE: theramins and the Kinect, "As a user interface, the void is profoundly unsettling."
• Cigarettes. Yeah, I hate to break it to you hairdressing lil schoolmarms, but smoking looks cool. Just, objectively. I'm sorry you don't like it. But in the future, it will be electronic cigarettes, which are basically electric atomizers that steam a little vial of scented oil, with some nicotine in it. No, it's not good for you, but it's nowhere near as bad as actual cigarettes, and it still looks just about as cool.
  
  Making the "people will still smoke in the future" even more plausible, you know how everyone in Europe and America is doing all these fascistical smoking bans? Yeah, well, China—which we're all agreed is gonna own the future in a big way—has experienced its own shift in attitude RE: cigarettes. Namely, women have recently started smoking, which they didn't use to do there.
• You will almost certainly not have the same degree of anonymity on the Internet that you have now. On the one hand, there's the precious civil liberties you mostly made up a couple decades ago, and on the other, there's the fact the main thing you use those rights for is harassing other people to the point of depression and suicide.
  
  South Korea and France both already have everyone going online under persistent identities. Now, your real-world identity is not, I don't think, public knowledge—someone can't immediately look up your home address just from your net-handle—but you can bet the cops will know if you pull something. Admittedly, they pretty much already do, but this greatly streamlines the process.
• Somewhat relatedly, the amount of money that is physical currency will drop from 10%—which is where it is now—to 0%. All transactions will be computerized, and handheld computers will be the new wallets.
  
  In my setting, criminals set up dummy accounts, just as they also use false identities (which they do now), but you might instead have criminal transactions paid for in barter, or at least with some commodity of comparatively stable value.
  (Arguably, by the way, commodity money is actually a form of barter. It's really fun to point out to those Information Longs to Be Free types, who think the future will run on barter—because money is non-physical and thus, supposedly, can't be owned—that they have the same economic views as Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan.)
• Clothes that change color or have glowing logos on them will be commonplace. Mainly as fashion statements—I had not previously encountered people in the future having slogan t-shirts, but I've got 'em in my book—but also, well, for utility. E.g., military uniforms can be changed to camouflage instantly. Only spec-ops soldiers have the ever-shifting, Predator-y type optical camo, though, because dude, logistics.
• Many of humanity's genetic diseases have been eliminated. Many wealthy humans have designer babies, but it's frowned on—the way Hummers are (so...yeah). Gene-therapy enhancements are illegal, but are used by some of the super-rich and less scrupulous government agencies.
  
  The felinoids have essentially cured all their genetic diseases, but they don't bother with gene-therapy enhancements (you wouldn't either, if you could rip a man's head off by slapping him, and jump six meters straight up). Both species do use small amounts of gene therapy to make it easier to live on colony worlds, though, and they heavily modify things like plants and domestic animals for other planets.