Predictions: What Earth Will Be Like 100 Years in the Future

Predicting the future can be a fool’s errand.

Need proof? Just look at our previous post showing a timeline of failed tech predictions by some of the biggest names in business, academia, and technology over the last two centuries.

Experts not only get it wrong – they get it embarrassingly wrong.

The Earth 100 Years in the Future

So why predict the future? Because it’s fun and it helps us critically think about how to take advantage of future investment and business opportunities.

In the case of today’s infographic from Futurism, the predictions are courtesy of a team of “futurists, architects, technological forecasters, and sociological soothsayers” that were hired by Samsung to look at what life may be like in the year 2116.

We’re happy that we’re not on the hook for any of these.

The full publication containing all predictions can be found here.

The types of predictions fall into three main categories:

Future Living
The report predicts that homes of the future will be be 3D-printed by swarms of drones, and that cities will take completely different shapes than what we are used to. Cities in the future will use stronger materials such as carbon nanotubes that will allow us to build skyscrapers that are unlike anything we’ve seen. On land they will be taller and stronger, but we will also be able to build cities underwater and underground, or in arcologies (architectural ecologies) that will dwarf today’s tallest structures.

Science and Research
The fusion of humans and machines will blur the lines of what is human and what is not.

(As a side note: Futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts that we have no option but to do this. He says that by 2045 “the pace of change will be so astonishingly quick that we won’t be able to keep up, unless we enhance our own intelligence by merging with the intelligent machines we are creating”.)

Medicine and Aging
In 100 years, much of healthcare will take place in our own homes. Walk-in medical capsules or pods capable of multispectral scanning will constantly assess our bodies for disease or damage.

Leisure and Travel
There will be a rise of a “nomadic and rootless” culture as private sub-orbital spaceflight blurs the lines between nations. 3D-printed homes may be folded up and moved to new locations.

Space Travel
Humans will become an multiplanetary species, using new propulsion technology to explore the solar system with manned flight.