LoneKiller said:
I think it's going to horrendous. I believe that a huge war will have taken place. I believe natural disasters will run rampant. I also believe that crime will be way up there. Don't know for sure. Just what I believe. You?
Very good topic. Thank you for posting this.
-Natural Disasters: Will probably continue at the current rate. There is fluctuation in the level of hurricanes that depends on the El Nino/La Nina cycles. The only reason that hurricanes have been so much more devastating is because there are more and more population centers concentrated along the coasts.
-Crime: This will probably vary from one country to another. I can't speak for the UK or the rest of Europe, but crime in the US has been falling since the mid 90s. One of the reasons for this is because our population has gotten older, a trend which will continue into the foreseeable future as the Baby Boomers retire. Teen pregnancy rates have fallen as well, which means fewer children born into a home situation where they're more likely to drop out of school, develop drug or alcohol addiction, and end up in prison.
War: There are two possible scenarios here, India/Pakistan or Sunni/Shia. India and Pakistan have a population of over 1.2 billion (1.3 billion if you include Bangladesh, a historical ally of Pakistan) and they're situated in a land area not much bigger than the US east of the Mississippi. Throw in a desert covering about 1/4 of the land, a falling water table, and two groups of people who have already fought three wars in the past and you have a recipe for disaster. Did I mention that they each have nukes?
The Sunni/Shia divide is somewhat more complicated because it could spill over into so many different nations. Most Muslim nations are Sunni, but all Sunni nations have Shia populations, some more than others. Iran is mostly Shia, and has butted heads with Saudi Arabia to be the cultural center of Islam.
Iran has threatened on numerous occasions to block the Strait of Hormuz, which would cut off the flow of nearly 15 million barrels of oil per day. I seriously doubt this would ever happen considering that it would be an act of war, an act which would justify the US, British and French navies to take retaliatory action. Still, it is a possibility.
Famine: Sorry to say, but this is going to get much worse. We're dangerously close to reaching carrying capacity based on existing technology, yet we refuse to accept limits on our population. Population control is the elephant in the room that nobody wants to discuss.
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What actually frightens me more than this is the next global pandemic. It's not a question of if, but when. The last major pandemic was the 1918 Flu which circled the globe in 18 months and claimed over 50 million lives. This was before the era of air travel however. If it were to happen today it wouldn't take 18 months, but probably 18 days.
It's not very often that an influenza strain will make the drift from animal to human, then make a shift to human-to-human contagion, but it has happened. Swine flu, to use as an example, can spread from pig to human only if the conditions are as such that you have close contact with an infected pig. Something like that can be contained. It's when it makes a shift to be spread from human-to-human that you've got a major outbreak on your hands.
Only one other disease in recent memory has taken lives on such a colossal scale, and that's AIDS. Since 1985, AIDS has claimed over 25 million lives. Based on the current rates of infection, it is likely that another 25 million lives will be lost by 2020. AIDS is different in that we know how to prevent it, and do so to great effect. This isn't the case with flu.
