Wednesday, April 18, 2007

predictions for the next century

If current trends continue as they are, we will see wonders in abundance. For example:

1)The internet

In the next century, the internet will be available in every home on Earth and the Inner System of Confederated Planets. Still no wi-fi in the Oort Cloud. Despite its reach, the internet will no longer be used by ordinary people. Instead, genetically modified howler monkeys will IM each other all day long, upload amateur porn and hurl insults at each other, which will allow the rest of us to lead productive lives.


2)Food

All food will, of course, be available from home replicators for pennies a month. In most countries, though, dining out will be mandatory, and exclusive use of the replicator for a 24 hour period will entail punitive loss of orgones.


3)Insects

There will be no goddamned insects. You hear me? Enough with that shit. But you can expect a sharp uptick in man-eating spiders.


4)Orthography

In one hundred years' time, no one will know the meaning of the word 'orthography'. The future marks the return of the Golden Age of Spelling, with lots of unnecessary e's and plenty of double consonants thrown in. This will be all Geoffrey Chaucer's fault (see below).


5)Baby boomers

Yes, they'll still be around. Anti-aging therapies will create a race of mummified gerontocrats who continue to wrestle popular culture into submission. From beneath the hollowed-out caverns of Colorado the Immortal Council of 12 will legislate all matters of taste. Their motto: "Take It Easy".


6)Religion

There will be only one official religion, the Church of Classic Hits And The Best of Today. Although services will traditionally fall on a Sunday, congregations are encouraged to “tune in” and “sing along” any old time, especially while driving down the boulevard in a snazzy convertible. This informal worship will be called “the snazz”. The Catholic Church will be reduced to a bunch of homeless men hanging around industrial parks.


7)Women

There will be no women in the 22nd century. In January of 2072, all the men will wake up to find a note on the fridge saying “Take care”. Every six months a glittering alien spaceship will descend from the Oort Cloud and deposit a few thousand male infants, who will stare wordlessly and make mewling noises instead of human cries. An expeditionary force to find the putative Planet of Women will be launched in 2101. For all the men of 2107 know, the members of the expedition have located the Planet but elected to stay there.


8)Geoffrey Chaucer

The invention of a working time machine in 2009 will turn out to be the most decisive event of the future, even though it will have taken only one round trip to the 1300s before being destroyed within seconds of its return. The instigator of the destruction will be the time-travelling stowaway Geoffrey Chaucer, sometime medieval poet and tyrannical genius able to work his will on the minds of men by means of alien technology. After the decade-long battle with the Immortal Council of 12, a peace treaty will be struck in which the Council rule on matters of taste and Chaucer become Official Head of the Inner System of Confederated Planets And The Principality of the Oort Cloud (ISCPPOC, or Iskapok). Chaucer will then declare all history between 1400 and 2009 a dead zone, “a vaste Marshelande withoute Croppes, that is yclept a Middenne”. When greeted with the news of the 2072 departure of the women, he will say, “Lo, my nosethirles waxe wood”. His reign will never end.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

ye frere soothe have shewen me a fantastic visioun of tyme to comen. I gleefulle awaite it, but aye yee thinkes not thee holy church of ravyshed Oprahism(tm) will not shewe forth its ers?

I fear Oprah and her develes swarmen will prevail and everychon will be as one withe her. Yoked withe free cars, laden withe the governments' and Sathanas's taxes none canne paye and are doomed to etyrnal debt. Onlee tyme will tell, and we shall seith, but I hope ye's quod tells truthe.

Anonymous said...

lete us not spak of thee court of Jerry Springer, but I thinkes ye's assumptyen of a Pornoless web bodes not wyll in a world of men, whate forsoothe lends ye to make siche bosteth claim?

palinode said...

That's a good point. The men probably want porn on the internet, but it's all howler monkey smut.

sgazzetti said...

GM monkey-porn? Chaucer reloaded? Is this what we have to look forward to? The future sucks a piss lozenge. I'm going to start shopping for a DeLorean right now.

Anonymous said...

Hehe, howler monkey smut.

Huckleberry Finnegan said...

You may be interested to know that I was recently seconded to the Medieval Time-Traveling Baby Boomer Task Force. My first action was to target Geoffrey Chaucer for assassination. His elimination from the space/time continuum will take place on July 4, 1923 in Shelby, Montana during the fourth round of the Dempsey-Gibbons fight, directly resulting in the cancellation of the counterculture revolution of the 1960s. Once we have obtained an inter-jurisdictional assassination warrant from the Court of Eternal Appeal, we will proceed.

Please treat this information as embargoed until 12:00 p.m. EST, January 1, 1978. Thank you.

Anonymous said...

Are you saying Star-trek has lied to me?

Tom said...

Also, at certain designated times, everyone will boogie.

Anonymous said...

When will the universe end already? Enough with these absurdities.

You had me at man eating spiders.

Anonymous said...

woo-hoo did your Brownian induced scientific epiphany(scrabble value: 18+50=68)of the future foresee that I would finish my last final...dive in to Lake Ontario...and burn my knuckles on my toaster-oven - as I reached for a burrito(which my spell checker thinks is a misspelling of territory)would occur...although not in the order presented.

wooot! I hope to share a pint with you on the 8th at O'Hooligans.

Anonymous said...

we have just folded space from Nix.
New machines on Nix. You are transparent. I see plans within plans. I see you behind it. Your friends on Geidei Prime must perish.

Anonymous said...

So is Geoffrey Chaucer Lazarus Long? Your predictions seem to indicate the infinite reaches of Chaucer which, of course, made me think of Heinlein. (Because who wouldn't make that leap...)