10 Profound Ways The World Will Change In Your Lifetime - Listverse
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10 Profound Ways The World Will Change In Your Lifetime
December 15, 2013
Society and culture can change beyond recognition in a lifetime—people with
are today seeing gay marriage become legal. A bunch of you are reading this on a multifunctional device that would outperform any supercomputer from 20 years ago, and when you’re finished, you’ll put it in your pocket.
The great physicist Niels Bohr is said to have written, “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.” As correct as that may be, the world will definitely evolve in the next few decades, and we’ve got a good idea just how some of those changes will play out.
10 A Cash-Free Economy
Cash has had a long history (going through some
before we got it to the coins and paper we know today). Yet its importance has faded dramatically since this whole computer thing took off. You can now use your
at a vending machine, and cash is looking increasingly archaic and cumbersome.
The cost of maintaining hard currency is up to 1.5 percent of a country’s GDP. In 2008, the US spent
and used tens of thousands of tons of metal in the process. Counterfeiting (and the law enforcement to combat it) makes a dent, and resources need to go towards . Criminals and tax evaders enjoy anonymity thanks to cash. In total, maintaining cash costs the US economy , more than the . On the subject of healthcare, paper money tends to .
So will there be a cashless society soon? Almost certainly.
might switch over first. You can no longer get on a bus in Sweden using cash, a direct response to robberies of bus drivers. A bank workers’ union calls for ditching cash altogether to stop bank robberies, and their campaign has attracted supporters such as Bjorn Ulvaeus from ABBA.
There are possible disadvantages to going cashless. The US would need to rethink its tipping culture, for one. There are privacy concerns, as everything you spend would be tracked. Human psychology seems to make us spend more sensibly when we’re forced to part with physical objects from our purses and wallets. And there are street performers to think of—it’ll be a while before that guitarist on the side of the road accepts MasterCard (though at least one ). Nevertheless, a country will likely soon make the switch, and you may live long enough to see your own do the same.
9 Peak Population
The worldwide human population has been going
and has increased . The best estimates reckon we hit
a couple of years ago,
after we hit six billion. It’ll probably take just over another decade to hit .
Could population peak and start going in the other direction? Some studies say it will, and in the not-too-distant future. One study by demographers from Vienna suggests there’s an 84-percent chance the population will . Scientists from Spain think it could be even sooner—we may see
Of course, there’s the possibility it’ll keep growing. We might hit
by the end of the next century and see a decline after that. In that case, you might need to live to 150 to see Earth’s population peak.
8 First Person To Reach 150 (And Other Milestones)
It was arbitrary, but the “seven billion” milestone got people’s attention. We might have celebrated reaching 5,159,780,352 if we did numbers slightly differently (that’s if you can figure out why it’s significant, show off your cleverness in the comments). But milestones are what they are, and they resonate with people. Breaking a
made Roger Bannister famous, hitting 100 years old gets a bigger party than 97 or 102, and we celebrated the arrival of the year 2000 by partying like it was 1999.
British aging expert Aubrey de Gray thinks the first person to hit 150 has probably . It may well be you, in which case congratulations in advance. You’ll have plenty of time to see humanity pass other milestones. If humans are capable of it, someone will run a . Haile Gebrselassie, one of the world’s greatest ever distance runners (and the man that held the marathon world record for many years), thinks it’ll happen in a generation. Other people . The
almost certainly is, at least without upgrading the body with drugs or technology.
is likely to come in the next few decades. Computing will hit a big milestone with the advent of
in place of today’s petaflops. We may never, however, reach the next unit prefix, the zetaflop. At least not with silicon chips.
7The End Of Silicon Chips
Many of you will be familiar with Moore’s Law, an observation that reflects the exponential improvement in computing over the last decades. Originally, it noted that the number of transistors we can fit on integrated circuits doubles roughly every two years. Yet we are reaching the limits of what we can do with silicon computing. While silicon will probably do for a lot of jobs for quite some time, higher-end computing will soon be due for a .
Computing giant IBM is keen on
as the solution, and researchers at Stanford have already made a small circuit to demonstrate the technology. Nanotubes are smaller, lighter, and quicker than silicon, and so could allow computing power to continue to increase. , an even greater advance, gets increasingly closer and may define the forefront of computing technology in the near future.
6 The 4-D Printing Revolution
Many people say that the future is going to be all about 3-D printing, and it does offer some pretty . But we can go one better in a very literal way using a related technology—4-D printing, which involves objects that assemble themselves.
Getting manufactured goods to do the manufacturing has a number of advantages. For one, it means you won’t have to puzzle over instructions from Ikea as your . Programmable materials—that is, materials that change their shape or behavior based on conditions such as temperature—could also enhance 3-D printing. You print an object, then parts of it would reshape themselves afterwards to allow a more complex creation.
Furniture, buildings, and vehicles that can help put themselves together would be particularly helpful in . Engineers are already working on spacecraft that assemble themselves while in orbit to create the big, bulky solar arrays needed for power.
But 4-D printing really comes into its own on a much smaller scale. Putting together nanomaterials requires a lot of energy and effort using traditional methods. Self-assembly is the most promising route for mass production of nanostructures. A team of chemists from the University of Sheffield in the UK are working on a tiny robot that would assemble itself
then track down and kill cancer cells.
5 A New Way To Fight Bacteria
Such fantastic new medical advances are becoming increasingly necessary as we see our current methods start to fail us. Antibiotics, which have likely already saved you or someone you know from death, won’t be around for much longer, as we’ve . Bacteria are getting resistant, and we need a new tool to fight them.
One possibility is to fight bacterial infections with viral infections—that is, . Viruses that attack bacteria are known as bacteriophages, and they cause their hosts to literally fall apart. Scientists don’t necessarily even have to use the full virus—a team in Israel have recently isolated a
which could lead to the development of drugs that destroy bacteria from within.
Another possible method is to introduce chemicals that link
with infectious agents, assisting the body’s immune response. This technology is being fronted by Kary Mullis, a Nobel Prize winning microbiologist. DARPA, famed for being at the forefront of military technology, is putting its money on . It wants to develop a nanoparticle that can hit bacteria with reprogrammable gene-altering chemicals. That way, as soon as bacteria evolve, the technology can be adjusted at short notice to get around the resistance.
Other teams working on antibiotics that operate differently from current ones, for example by
of the bacteria they target. A team from Taiwan are working on particles that will capture bacteria in groups and then heat up and kill the germs when . Meanwhile, scientists are also working on preventing infection to reduce the need for antibiotics. Scientists from Singapore have created a positively charged
that draws in negatively charged bacteria so that they rupture and die. The team hopes to develop it into an ingestible substance for fighting diseases like pneumonia and meningitis.
4 The Mammal Apocalypse
species are under threat of extinction in the next 30 years.
These aren’t obscure species—many scientists predict we could be living in a world without , , and
within a quarter of a century.
are also facing extinction as they are hunted for meat, and their habitats are destroyed by timber and mining operations. That’s not to mention the Siberian tiger, or the
that the IUCN list as endangered.
In a couple of generations, half the animals in our children’s books could be no more relevant than the dodo. In fact, scientists suggest we are currently living through a , like the one that killed the dinosaurs. This “holocene extinction” would be the sixth mass extinction in Earth’s history. And yes, it’s in a large part .
3 The Last Gasoline Car
While it seems like a battle for the future, the war between electric cars and those with internal combustion engines has a long history. Until 1900, —less smelly, quieter, and easier to operate than their fossil-fuelled cousins. The first road death in the US involved an electric vehicle, and it wasn’t until the 1910s that the problems of battery technology paved the way for gas guzzlers to define the automobile.
The switch back to electric vehicles has now begun in earnest. Whether or not you accept anthropogenic global warming (as ), we’re still stuck with the fact that
and we may soon run out. We need a more renewable (or at least longer-lasting) method of powering our vehicles. So when will the switch back to electricity be complete?
The oil company Shell suggests the last gasoline car might roll off the production line . Their report looks at different ways fuel production may go, and in both of their most likely scenarios, they see oil falling by the wayside in the next 60 years.
Potential game changers could accelerate the process. If we crack nuclear fusion—a leap so major that it’s already taken on —we’ll have so much clean, dependable, and safe electricity that oil won’t have a chance.
2 The End Of The Landline Telephone
What type of phone do you have? A quarter century ago, that question wouldn’t have had many answers beyond “rotary dial” and “one with buttons.” If you wanted to communicate instantly with someone across the country, you spoke to them using a copper wire network.
Countless lives have no doubt been saved by the existence of emergency numbers like 911 (or 999 or 112, depending on where you live). The US government has therefore forced telecommunications firms to maintain the network’s infrastructure if they want to stay in business. This costs the companies billions, and they argue that this diverts funds from switching us over to newer alternatives.
The old telephone system has seen its usage decline drastically. The number of home landlines in the US is dropping at a rate of
and dropped from 139 million down to 75 million between 2000 and 2008. A huge chunk of communication is now down via IP-based connectivity, rather than the Public Switched Telephone Network of the last century.
Many in rural areas would quite like to see the old telephone network hang around a while longer. For some, it’s the only communication that works. And it has some advantages over newer technologies—it often still operates during power outages. Yet with only
still sticking exclusively to the Plain Old Telephone System (as it’s been nicknamed), it’s probably inevitable that you’ll see it go the way of the telegram in your lifetime.
1 Conquering Iconic Diseases
For many people reading this, the rise of HIV and AIDS has occurred entirely within their lifetime. It went from being nothing to being one of the world’s most ubiquitous diseases within a generation.
of people are living with the disease, and tens of millions more have already died. Yet the tide is turning, and the disease that rose in a generation could be defeated in another.
The number of children infected with HIV each year is falling at an increasing rate, . The statistics on deaths are also impressive—in South Africa alone, 100,000 fewer people died of AIDS-related diseases in 2011 compared to 2005. The key milestone in this fight will be a time when almost no children are born with the disease—an . Current medicine can take us there, and a vaccine may arrive and bring the milestone sooner.
The first disease to be eliminated worldwide without a vaccine will probably be , a horrible parasitic infection causing hellish burning near the skin, which is spread by unclean drinking water. The number of people with the infection has fallen from
cases in 2012. The World Health Organization hopes to get rid of Guinea worm by 2015.
That’s not the only disease on the WHO hit list. Yaws is a bacterial infection that was targeted for eradication in the middle of the last century, and numbers dropped from
between 1952 and 1964. It’s hovered at that level ever since, but the WHO expects it to be gone by 2020. Yaws has already been eliminated from India, as has polio, another disease which we should all live to see disappear completely.
Alan is particularly looking forward to hoverboards, personal jet packs and living on the moon. You can find him on ,
or read his blog (which he promises to update more often) at .
November 20, 2011
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September 28, 2015一生只爱一个人的英文是怎么写的
你的矜夜7208
一生只爱一个人.1.Only love one person all one's life.(one 比 a 更强调一个）2.Only love one person throughout one's life.3.Only fall in love with one person all one's life.4.Only fall in love with one person throughout one's life.5.Only love(fall in love with) one person during one's lifetime.
为您推荐：
其他类似问题
Love only one person throught out one's life time.
love you foreverness
Love one in whole life.
I love and treasure you forever!
I will just love one person for my whole lifetime.
在美国我们都这样说的。
The life only loves a person
I will just love one person for my whole lifetime.
我觉得我这个很简洁，很有杀伤力：One life, one love.一生，一个爱。。虽然简短，但是充分蕴涵了自己的痴情和坚定的决心。我感觉还是很棒的。当然如果你用书面语的话Only fall in love with one person all one's life.我比较喜欢这句。。
一生只爱一个人--------Life of a person only and
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