The obvious answer would be flying cars, hover-suits, lasers everywhere, domestic robots to clean your house, space travel, meals in the form of pills, teleportation, and everyone connected to everything via neural links or chips, right?
But that's the futuristic version of the *cough* future that we saw on television, cartoons and Star Trek. What if the future is simply the past reinventing itself? Could we return to simpler yet darker times in our history with all of the knowledge we have already acquired?
I think there is a good possibility that mankind will face many challenges in the next century - lack of privacy, water, and individual thought, for starters. The new world we have created with the invention of the internet has not only brought us all together, but it's divided us, too.
We can't do a single thing without checking in, tagging, linking, and announcing our arrivals and departures as though we're all International airports. But as many likes we get, there are just as many hateful comments, bullying remarks from keyboard warriors with axes to grind.
Everything on social media screams, "Look at me!" "Like me!" "Love me!" "Approve of me!" "Copy me!" "Be me!" "GIVE ME YOUR ATTENTION!" while more people have social anxiety than ever before. It seems people want to be acknowledged, but not in the real world. Not really.
And as we compete for attention, affection, influence, and acceptance, there are strangers out there who will tear you down in a heartbeat for no reason at all other than to center themselves and say, "No. You're wrong. I'm right," on YOUR post.
These are the same sort of people who will start arguments for free, regardless of the topic, just to have their say on arbitrary things like whether one human being should put fruit on a piece of dough with a dairy topping or not.
Unintentionally, every topic quickly becomes political. Every insult comes down to who you voted for and what your level of education must be to have made that choice. Tiring, isn't it? And the politicians you fight over don't even know you exist. But, hey! Wars have started over less.
What will life be like a century from now? I don't even know if mankind will exist in this form 100 years in the future! Will our narcissism ever end? Will we stop gazing into the selfie-cam long enough to notice the death and destruction we have caused to the Earth?
If life does resemble the barren landscape of our apocalyptic nightmares, with water and natural resources becoming scarce until people are forced to fight over them, I sincerely hope space travel is as common as riding the bus, and those who are exhausted from what humanity has devolved into can plot their escape and buy a one-way ticket out.
A girl can dream...