5 Years Out, 15, 50

In five years most newspapers will only be available online. Subscriptions to these papers will allow the subscriber to view the entirety of the paper, whereas people who haven't subscribed will only be able to read headlines and perhaps the first paragraphs of selected articles. There will be more large scale, if not global papers, since the internet will make the news available to everyone rather than just regionally. There will also be even more readily available alternative papers, in which viewpoints other than the most popular view will be expressed. This will be a great thing for society because it will allow people more access to the truth, rather than just being told one side of a situation. Of course hearing multiple viewpoints, sometimes contradictory, can be a bit confusing.

In fifteen years we will have the hitch hikers guide to the galaxy: an electronic book sized machine that can make phone calls (complete with live video), take notes, quickly and easily provide information, perhaps project movies (in holographic form?), etc. Colonization of Mars, hover cars, no fossil fuel, downloadable drugs (virtual reality environment), commercial space travel, and some type of new closeness with machines, whether it be through actually installing microchips or ports into humans, or through enhancing physical human aspects. Certainly virtual reality will be a large part of our realities.

American Idol winners become global emperor for the week, and decide on the distribution of rationing out coca cola and super antibiotics to the world. Mars is cut off, poor bastards, there's just not enough cola to go round. Cola is also no longer sweetened with the extinct plant sugarcane. All sweetener is artificial. Human experiments on mutating the dolphin brain have forced the dolphin to evolve, making it the smartest being on Earth. The dolphins teach humans to breathe underwater (like we did in the womb), and all mankind begins to make the move into the ocean. Surfing takes over soccer as the world's most beloved sport, sharks are butchered into extinction.

On a side note, I really have no idea what the future holds. I am pretty adverse to technology, and don't take in much news. I'm an introverted artist, I can only really tell you what I might be like in the future, and even that will probably prove to be inaccurate.

Lilith's Brood

This was a really neat book that's split into three parts. I was only able to read the first part in which the main character, Lilith, awakens aboard an alien spaceship. I thought this story centered around human sociology, and I found the character's reactions to awakening in an alien spacecraft very true and real to what an actual person might do and feel in a similar situation. I hadn't thought that Lilith's job of awakening forty other human survivors, and aclimating them to the ship would be such an ordeal, in fact I had thought it would be a nice opportunity for her to interact with humans again. I of course found out through my reading that this was not the case; many of the newly awakened humans refused to believe the fantastical truth that they are the survivor's of Earth's apocalypse and aboard an alien craft. A large part of human interaction and human sociology has to do with sex, and the author did not forget to leave that out of this story. The alien 3 way sex was pretty strange, but made perfect sense as the way an alien race would reproduce.