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[Scoops Novel]

?

[Frumple]

It'll have hypnotoad, so sure.

Less flippantly, the future is always more weird and strange than the present to the folks in the present, and that's a pattern that has repeated itself since prehistory. No reason to believe that'll be any different this time around, one way or another.

[wierd]

Puts on Johnny Carson genie hat.


Prognostication:

In the future, global temperatures will continue to rise, even as many climate agreements are met. (not all will be, a good many, especially from heavily industrial nations, will be postponed, or will only be partially met) This is due to climate forcing, as water vapor increasingly enters the atmosphere from evaporation. This leads to changes in weather patterns, yadda yadda.

Green technology will continue to gain traction, but will continue to have pushback from older generations who will view it with scepticism and disdain.

Right to Repair will get more airtime, and will be consistently lambasted by lobbyist groups, despite some gains being made.  the transition to more complicated technologies from less efficient, simpler ones, will create a legitimate bottleneck in home repair for many items (due to product safety, among other things), and economics of replace-over-repair will favor simply throwing out old devices, even though this creates increased e-waste. Self-driving cars will be a significant player in this progression of events, as lobbyists will quickly point to user-modified control systems being implicated in traffic accidents, as reasons not to allow end consumers to modify or repair their vehicles, and the provisions afforded in the name of such safety, will be further extended to other devices as well.

In terms of civil/social reforms, events will continue to smolder with intermittent powderkeg moments.  This will continue for at least another 40 to 50 years, after which culture will progress toward (but not reach) a more inclusive paradigm. (stagnation will then regain a foothold, and this cycle will repeat) Social censure will happen more frequently on social media, and the gate-keepers of such platforms will increasingly lock down in a "Plastic dystopia" style shell game.  Facebook will go the way of MySpace before it, despite Zuck's best efforts, and new replacement platforms will be eager to prevent the same events that led to its downfall.  Considerable efforts will be taken to walk the razor's edge between currying international favor of power brokers, and obeying increasingly onerous legislation (intended to prevent the platforms from being leveraged as nascent incubators for hate and hatespeech, but ultimately being tools for censorship and oppression.)

Otherwise, things will continue as they always have. People will get married, have kids, go to school, get jobs, et al.

Copyright terms will continue to increase without end.

Medical technologies will make significant milestones with regenerative medicine, but insurance will not cover it.

Healthcare systems will look back on the covid era with terror, but actual improvements in health insurance industries will remain glacially slow, as the profit motives that produce the problems with current systems will remain incumbent.

Advert tracking technology will become even more invasive/pervasive.  The notion of actual privacy will become quaint. Some token legislation will be passed, due to the more egregious actions of the more greedy executives involved, but for the most part, it will continue unabated to erode all aspects of privacy.  Life without privacy invading technologies will be considered backward luddism. No-one will question if the same technologies can function without the privacy invading features. They will just consume the product, wth the bads baked in.  Legislation will be passed to help ensure this, as an expansion to the DMCA will be passed that makes disabling of tracking illegal.

The wealth gap will grow.


If you consider such a future "Weird" or "Strange", then the answer to your question is "yes."

[martinuzz]

You forgot to include cloning technology, so I think 'more wierd' is off the table.

[wierd]

The world struggles with just one of me in it. Why would you be so horrible as to suggest there should be more?

[martinuzz]

Also, I am just a dabbling quantum mechanic, so I am uncertain if there will be more 'strange' in the future.

[wierd]

Barring a sudden upset in the second law of thermodynamics, strange will decline, due to its instability.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strangelet

Strange only increases in prevelence as a result of new energetic events, and the second law, coupled with an expanding universe, indicates that strange will become increasingly rare, over cosmological timescales.

[martinuzz]

Who knows what shenanigans occur on the inside of a black hole

or, from that article:

If the strange matter hypothesis is correct, and if a stable negatively-charged strangelet with a surface tension larger than the aforementioned critical value exists, then a larger strangelet would be more stable than a smaller one. One speculation that has resulted from the idea is that a strangelet coming into contact with a lump of ordinary matter could convert the ordinary matter to strange matter.[16][17]

This is not a concern for strangelets in cosmic rays because they are produced far from Earth and have had time to decay to their ground state, which is predicted by most models to be positively charged, so they are electrostatically repelled by nuclei, and would rarely merge with them.[18][19] On the other hand, high-energy collisions could produce negatively charged strangelet states, which could live long enough to interact with the nuclei of ordinary matter.[20]

The danger of catalyzed conversion by strangelets produced in heavy-ion colliders has received some media attention,[21][22] and concerns of this type were raised[16][23] at the commencement of the RHIC experiment at Brookhaven, which could potentially have created strangelets. A detailed analysis[17] concluded that the RHIC collisions were comparable to ones which naturally occur as cosmic rays traverse the Solar System, so we would already have seen such a disaster if it were possible. RHIC has been operating since 2000 without incident. Similar concerns have been raised about the operation of the LHC at CERN[24] but such fears are dismissed as far-fetched by scientists.[24][25][26]

In the case of a neutron star, the conversion scenario seems much more plausible. A neutron star is in a sense a giant nucleus (20 km across), held together by gravity, but it is electrically neutral and so does not electrostatically repel strangelets. If a strangelet hit a neutron star, it could convert a small region of it, and that region would grow to consume the entire star, creating a quark star.[27]

[McTraveller]

Unless the speed of light drops to 1000mph or something, or we start getting other localized spacetime anomalies, or people really start having superhero powers, I can't think of anything that would classify as weird or strange.

Most things I can imagine (weather, climate, politics, technology) just fall into the "probably annoying" category.

EDIT: dang, ninja'd on the breakdown in physics concepts.

[wierd]

Who knows what shenanigans occur on the inside of a black hole

or, from that article:

If the strange matter hypothesis is correct, and if a stable negatively-charged strangelet with a surface tension larger than the aforementioned critical value exists, then a larger strangelet would be more stable than a smaller one. One speculation that has resulted from the idea is that a strangelet coming into contact with a lump of ordinary matter could convert the ordinary matter to strange matter.[16][17]

This is not a concern for strangelets in cosmic rays because they are produced far from Earth and have had time to decay to their ground state, which is predicted by most models to be positively charged, so they are electrostatically repelled by nuclei, and would rarely merge with them.[18][19] On the other hand, high-energy collisions could produce negatively charged strangelet states, which could live long enough to interact with the nuclei of ordinary matter.[20]

The danger of catalyzed conversion by strangelets produced in heavy-ion colliders has received some media attention,[21][22] and concerns of this type were raised[16][23] at the commencement of the RHIC experiment at Brookhaven, which could potentially have created strangelets. A detailed analysis[17] concluded that the RHIC collisions were comparable to ones which naturally occur as cosmic rays traverse the Solar System, so we would already have seen such a disaster if it were possible. RHIC has been operating since 2000 without incident. Similar concerns have been raised about the operation of the LHC at CERN[24] but such fears are dismissed as far-fetched by scientists.[24][25][26]

In the case of a neutron star, the conversion scenario seems much more plausible. A neutron star is in a sense a giant nucleus (20 km across), held together by gravity, but it is electrically neutral and so does not electrostatically repel strangelets. If a strangelet hit a neutron star, it could convert a small region of it, and that region would grow to consume the entire star, creating a quark star.[27]

Again, in an expanding universe with the second law holding, these stars will become further and further apart. The rate of cosmic inflation will result in the distance between such object becoming greater than the locally observable universe for such objects-- meaning that unless you have extra-super-warp-drive, you may never encounter strange matter.

Further, before then, the same issue that is mentioned in the article-- small strangelets that would infect such stars with strangeness through a high energy collision-- have PLEEENNNNTTY of time to decay before they reach such a viable spot to collide, meaning the rate of conversion would also decline precipitously as the universe expands and cools.

[MaxTheFox]

My opinion of the future is somewhere around the midway point of optimism and pessimism. I don't think we're completely fucked... but the future isn't particularly bright. Not particularly weird either.

[EuchreJack]

Our technological advancement seems to be stagnating, so we have time to better adapt to new technology.  So less weird or strange.

Cloning is certainly in our future present, driven by the need to procreate irregardless of natural biological constraints.  It is a natural biproduct of the desire to convert eggs into sperm and sperm into eggs.  Is it ethical to create a clone of opposing gender just to procreate with your loved one?  Is it ethical to create clones without brains to avoid other ethical issues?

The abortion issue shall change from The Right to Choice to The Right Not to Procreate, as technology makes it less and less burdensome for the parent's unborn child to be  brought to term.  If a woman has a fertilized egg in her body, and can have that fertilized egg removed and planted in another person with the same level of invasion required to terminate the pregnancy, can she still chose to have that fertilized egg destroyed?  What if she was raped?  What if it is now a fetus, because a few days have passed?

Conversely, two consenting adults want to conceive a child and successfully fertilize an egg.  Then they break up, and the woman decides to terminate the pregnancy.  Absolutely legal (your jurisdiction may vary).  The real issue is that the man who is the most zealous in advocating for his rights in this scenario is most likely an abusive piece of shit, the last person that anyone wants to give more rights.
...But what if the fertilized egg isn't in the woman, but is in a surrogate?  Maybe a surrogate that is sleeping with the man?  What if the fertilized egg is frozen in some lab?

[Urist McScoopbeard]

It's gonna be... WeIrD

[wierd]

What if said surrogate is fully artificial, and is technology.

(also, the notion that it is always the man that is abusive, is some bullshit that needs flushed, just so you know. It's actually very close to even in both directions. women tend to be injured more seriously, but this could reasonably be explained by body plan morphology than by increased aggression. The near even statistic on overall violence suggests it is not aggression difference, but power difference in the body being piloted.)

[EuchreJack]

The new technology that humanity will probably need to come to grips with, and that is unexpected and jarring, is AI sentience.  It is being worked on constantly, and there is big money in making AI smarter and more personal.  Since the only sentient beings are us Humans, we're in a perfect position to deny sentience to other beings.