The Future Essay, Research Paper

The word future in the dictionary means: The indefinite period of time still yet to be; time that is to come. The future in other words is what will happen next year, month, tomorrow, the next minute, or even the next second after you read this essay. The future is all that is unknown. Since the future is relatively unknown, every prediction or hypothesis in the following is merely a guess and nothing more.

The future holds much in store for Americans, From that of the pair of shoes you will wear tomorrow to that of the day we walk on Mars. The future is a great topic to think about and is the topic most thought of in America. From the wonder of what grade you got on a project to the bewilderment of life in the universe, the future is all around us in everything you do and think. The United Sates has a lot in store for them; a lot.

Lets start off with that of transportation. The future will hold many vast technologies in transportation. The innovations that come out of our factories every day, still bombard us with fascination. The next big feature in transportation is that of the electric car. This car will not run on fossil fuels but that of a battery that can be charged very inexpensively. The only problem with this car so far is the fact that the battery will only last for up to 200 miles and takes over a half hour to recharge. Other innovations will be the solar car, motorized walk ways, flying cars, and that of teleportation. Although teleportation has been classified as impossible, experiments such as the Philadelphia Experiment have slightly disproved this fact over time. The scientific belief on transportation in the future is that most of these new technologies will die over time. The use of fossil fuels will be distributed more wisely in the future and will be made more cost efficient and will far out way any other form of electric transportation.

Your electric bill in America is going to go swiftly downward in the next twenty-five years. The future of electricity will be that of a great advancement. The new technology of the future is a solar power satellite. The way this new technology works is by collecting the suns energy in orbit and beaming it to earth as microwave or laser light. By the year two-thousand twenty-five, a satellite power system could provide most of North Americas electricity. The age-old problem with this technology is money. As the inventor Peter Glasser says, “Any power system that can provide that much energy will cost a trillion dollars.” So as your electric bill will most probably go down in the future, your taxes will most surely rise.

The prospect of financially profitable industries in space by 2025 or 2030 may sound like the far-fetched schemes of idle dreamers or the ideas of scientific fiction writers. But then again they said the same things about the explorers and navigators of the fifteenth century who believed that a New World was waiting to be discovered. The new era of space will be no different. Only the most entrepreneurial businessmen, the most farsighted investors, will recognize the potential riches that space will yield. They will become the Rockefeller and Carnagies of tomorrow.

Historically, it has most often been private industry – not the government – which has financed the explorations of new terrains. As the beginning of the 21st century draws near we will witness the private sector of business emerge as the leader in space development. Then thereby perpetuate the historical tradition begun by the gold prospectors who flocked to California in the 1850’s or the European companies that carved out China in the nineteenth century. The mysteries of space will soon be answered shortly in the future, and America will be its primary source.

By the mid twenty-first century, space could be just a six-hour train ride away. First suggested almost eighty years ago by the Russian space pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. The so-called skyhook would suspend a crystalline graphite cable from a satellite 22,300 up to a mountain top at the equator. The cars, carrying around thirty passengers or 100 tons of cargo, would climb the cable by magnetic levitation at 3,700 miles an hour. A new version of the skyhook, the space elevator, would use a shorter cable from a satellite spinning in a lower orbit. Twice during each rotation, one end of the cable would drop into the atmosphere to be met by a shuttle plane carrying cargo or passengers. Hooked to the end of the sinning cable, the payload would be lifted into space in only one hour or so.

The age-old question of what will fly through space is now being developed. It is the Boron Fueled Spaceship. This ship’s engine is so powerful that it can, in the words of a Jet Propulsion Laboratory, “be nearly contemptuous of gravity.” The boron-fueled ship can ascend from the surface of the earth to the surface of the moon at the constant acceleration of 1 g. The boron-fueled ship uses anti-matter energized reactions of boron, a seemingly solid element that absorbs particles and energy effectively. The ship would weigh 167,000 pounds with a storage capability of 25,000 pounds. The ship will be an awesome cruiser&emdash; broad, flat, and controllable at any speed. The pulse nuclear engine’s small size and awesome power are the keys to its success. We may however only get to see this type of plane toward the end of the 21st century for lack of money and stability.

According to the United Nations projections, nearly 1 billion additional persons will live in today’s Third World nations by 2005. This will cause immediate and astronomical gains in food production, especially in land productivity because of available land. With the exception to tropical Africa and Latin America which is running short. Fortunately, these astronomical productivity gains do seem likely. The Global 2005 Report to the President projects a 2.2 percent rate of annual increases in world food production between now and 2005. The basis for this future projection was determined by the rate of the past thirty years, adding in weather problems, natural disasters, and diseases.

The need for irrigation and crop control brings many new inventions to the American table. Water conservation will be one of the most frightening issues in the next twenty years, and lasers will be the answer. Lasers will take on an even greater role in preserving water supplies and protecting major crops in the fields. At the University of Oregon, experimental laser systems are being made at this very second. They are being created to perform the task of assuring that a field is absolutely flat at planting time. The problem of uneven fields leads to runoffs, which wastes much needed water and harms the crops in the process. From satellites deep in space, lasers’ scanners can tell with precision of a few acres, where crops are too dry and where they are being over watered. This vital information has almost come to its prime near the beginning of the 21st century. These lasers will lead us into the troubled times of agriculture ahead and will help us feed the soon to be over population in the world.

Another interesting event in the future will be the advancement of the computer. The advancement of the computer has gone a great deal over the past fifty years, from the gigantic calculator to the microscopic Pentium Processing Chip of today. The greatest advancement of the computer will be that of the prediction of around the year 2050. This invention is that of the computer that will think on its own. The realization of this is almost mind boggling. The future could hold the technology of machines doing political works for its country, planting the fields at harvest time, making dinner, or anything else imaginable. The future of mankind will be a lot easier in the future with this new technology now in the making.

The future of time travel is now in the process of being discovered. What was once thought of as just a wish or dream is now slowly becoming reality. From the pages of H.G. Wells’ epic book, ” The Time Machine ” we will soon be off to see the world ahead of us. The elements of time travel are very mysterious at this time. The process of traveling to the future seems to be very near, but traveling to the past is still deemed impossible at the moment. It all comes to life from universal vacuums. This occurs when two magnets on opposite plains are given extreme energy and become highly electron-active. Then, between the magnets a suction affect occurs. If one was to be sucked into this he or she would be traveling at the speed of light. The speed of light would then travel you to the same place hundreds of years in the future, by this process many scientists believe time traveling is surely possible. The only draw back is the fact that they still have not found a way to return from the future. So, if you do go on the trip, who knows how far you will go in the future you will go, and you will have possible way of getting back. Time travel doesn’t look to hot now does it.

The most noticeable change in the future seen by us will be in that work. The future is seen as just a mass full of technology. So as America develops, jobs will become more scarce. The biggest worry in the future should be that of losing your job to a robot. This has not become a realization yet, but will surely come in the future. Another development in the future is being slowly done right now. It is the process of more people creating jobs out of the house. This means more people staying home in the future. So less human interaction will be created. Hence, more tension will build between people and tempers will be more flamboyant. Also, the computer will also help in the downgrading of human interaction. With more people getting glued to the computer screen, the future looks like a dim reflection of people afraid to leave the house. This may not seem too logical to you, but if you think about it, the world looks to have a dim future.

The last chapter in our future is the scariest one bye far. It is the encroachment of death. Although many do not like to bring up this subject it is most undoubtably in everybody’s future. The death of the world and the people that inhabit it is one of the greatest mysteries in the world. We all wonder how man and the universe was created, and we all try not to think about the end of it. Which in the eyes of a clock comes closer and closer every day.

Many people have tried to predict the end of the world, and many scientists alike agree that it is very soon. The greatest of these prophets is that Moses. In which he tells of the great Apocalypse and the end of the world. In which there are seven days to the end of the world. The scary part of this is that most of his predictions have come true. An example of this would be his prediction of the Jews taking over the Holy Land ( Jerusalem ) again. The scary part to this prediction is that he says judgement day will soon follow this event. The day of Judgement is the day that the world will end and Jesus will come down to earth and judge everything living on earth and send it to heaven or hell depicting on how good your life on earth was. So the end of the world could be tomorrow for all that we know. But then again, the book that tells this story could be the greatest book of fiction ever written, but until that day I guess we will never know.

Another horrifying depiction of the future is known as the Ring of Fire. This is a ring of mountains in the middle of the Pacific that erupt with volcanos frequently. It is said that this is where the end of most human life will begin, also known as The New Beginning by Cicerlli. It is said that large earthquakes, Tornadoes, Typhoons, and Volcanic activity will all of a sudden start happening in the very late 20th century early 21st century. This idea was first prophesied by Nostradamus in the mid 1500’s. Who if you did not know was killed by king Charles IX for prophesying his demise. Then later was also predicted by Cicerlli during World War II and was killed by Hitler for predicting the downfall of the German uprising. The Ring of Fire is now a well-known melting pot for many of today’s psychics. So the next time you think of what you are going to be doing in twenty years, remember that many say we are going to die in the Ring of Fire in the next ten years. Aren’t you just shaking in your boots?

Well that is pretty much the main ideas of what the world has in store for Americans in the future. From the electric car to the Ring of Fire, the world ahead of us is just one big prediction. Nobody really knows what is going to happen tomorrow or any day after that. For all we know judgement day is tomorrow. So the next time you think of what’s going to happen to you in the future, just remember; it is full of surprises.