Write in 150 words what you would do in each of the following situations.
2. If you woke up one day and found yourself 20 years in the future.
Answers
Except for that, I would want to check up on various scientific advances and social developments that interest me. I am suddenly in the mid-2030s; have we landed on Mars, or are we at least close to doing so? Have we detected oxygen in the atmospheres of exoplanets, suggesting life? Have our probes penetrated the ice on Jupiter's moon Europa, and were any lifeforms found in the ocean beneath?
Did Terrafugia get their flying cars off the ground? If so, was there a mass market for that sort of transport, or is it just a toy for the rich? Do we have glassless 3D television?
How is Artificial Intelligence coming along? Robiotics? Nanotechnology? Life extension? Having just lost 20 years of my life, I would hope that the hoped-for life extension techniques foreseen by transhumanist visionaries are now actually being developed. Is Ray Kurzweil (whether still living or dead/in cryo) by 2035 regarded as a kook, or hailed as the greatest futurist ever? It will now be pretty clear whether his ideas had merit or were largely the pie-in-the-sky fantasies of a man undergoing his midlife crisis.
Did the percentage of religious people in the US continue to drop, America gradually becoming more like a normal Western country in this respect?
Did the EU generally succeed in uniting Europe, or did the grand experiment collapse?
Is China a major world power, maybe even the dominant one? Have they made the transition to democracy? And how does the Muslim world fare? Still unstable, or did the values of the Arab spring take hold after endless bloodshed? What about Africa? Latin America? The most primitive dictatorships are largely gone even in our time, and I wouldn't expect the trend to reverse itself over 20 years, since technology makes the world ever more transparent.
And as regards popular culture: Are "soft" recreational drugs largely legal now? Do they have much appeal left, in a world where advanced Virtual Reality will often produce a better experience than any drug high? Is gay marriage now almost wholly uncontroversial, to the point where anyone opposing it would be regarded as just as reactionary as a person opposing interracial marriage would be now? (And are evangelicals by 2035 boldly claiming that THEY were the ones that fought for the rights of their gay brethren and finally succeeded in having the laws changed?)
And there are movies etc. Did Disney actually manage to do something interesting with the fabled Star Wars "sequel trilogy" (2015-2019)? They have likely produced one or two MORE trilogies by 2035, plus a lot of spin-off movies. Did they beat the franchise to death by overexploiting it, or did they actually tell some stories worth telling?
Yes, there would certainly be a number of things I would want to check out. But I prefer getting to the mid-2030s in the slow way, one day at a time