Humanity is at an incredibly challenging transitional point right now. The technology that got us to this point(fossil fuels) will be our undoing unless we can transition to newer and more advanced energy sources. We also need to tackle population growth (challenging because it goes against our basic instincts to reproduce), and religious radicalism. Can people put aside their selfish and superstitious ways and work together for the good of the human race? IMO the next 100 years will make or break us as a species.
What do I imagine will happen in the future? I think we're basically at a point in the road with 3 separate paths. Our actions from here will determine which path we go down as a civilization.
1-We get our acts together and the end result would be a world something like star trek. Resources for all, relative peace and good times etc. People would eventually establish bases on other worlds/moons in our solar system and maybe even reach for the stars.
2-We fail to get our shit together and a global totalitarian government steps in to force us to. Think something like 1984, Dredd, the running man, Hunger Games, Aeon Flux, Divergent etc.
3-We completely fail at doing anything and continue down the current path blindly. What happens? Think Mad Max. WW3 over resources due to climate change and overpopulation.(religion might also be involved). Eventually nukes fly or a global pandemic comes. A large % of humanity dies from war, disease, starvation over a few decades and we're left with burned out ghost cities and scattered bands of nomadic survivors.
I have to disagree about us being at a "point" like you say. While it's certain we're headed in a bad direction towards a serious critical point, I'd say it's still going to be a long way off. Not that we can wait until then though.
We're likely not going to start seriously running low on resources until probably the end of our lives or the generation after all of us on this forum are gone. The issue is that the more we exhaust our resources and continue like we are, the harder it is to transition to something better.
There are tons of unfortunate examples:
We've built ridiculously inefficient cities and dwellings with respect to our lifestyles for the last century and a half. We're getting better, but what are we going to do about what we've already built? Not many new cities are going up, so we need some sort of way to convert current ones.
We've been using petroleum fueled vehicles for a long time and developed them a lot, but renewable and electric powered vehicles have been around just as long. Now that there's a push for EVs and biofuels, how long is it going to be until the existing fossil fuel powered vehicles stop operating?
Our power has come from coal and inefficient and environmentally hazardous dams since the beginning of the industrial revolution. We can slowly replace them with more intelligent renewables, but how long will it take until everybody stops using fossil fuel plants and replaces their old dams? Both types can last near a century or more.
Antibiotics and antibacterials have been used for over a century now on every bacterial issue big or miniscule. When everything develops a resistance to them due to overuse, what will we use? How are we going to get medicine to completely shift away from using them unless necessary in time?
People live in some places that have very few resources and still demand a lot of them. What will we do if it turns out that water would be better used elsewhere than in an inefficient desert metropolis? Make millions of people uproot themselves? Level the city and build a more efficient one?
Food has been farmed in massive amounts at factory farms far from consumers especially due to urban sprawl for the last 50 years. How would we get food closer to where it's used? Dedicate expensive indoor growing facilities in cities? Level suburban areas to reinstate farmland?
People in a lot of the developed world have mostly been using cars to get around for decades. While the American mindset might say everybody deserves to have a car, it's completely unfeasible and ridiculous for billions of cars (of any power/type) to be on the road around the world. Even communal self-driving cars are questionable. When we get to the point we need a massive and efficient public transit system to support society, where's it going to be? That kind of stuff takes years, and we've mostly destroyed our more thorough rail infrastructure in North America.
Desalination is probably going to be one of the most critical technological areas we need to advance. Not nearly enough research is going into it, and it's not at a position where it's feasible for many societies. What's going to happen when there's a widespread drought and we still need to figure out a good way to do it?
We're using increasingly rare materials in our consumer products and don't recycle well at all. What's going to happen when we've thrown most of them away and can't find a good way to re-extract the materials?
Forests are still being cleared. If we don't start to transition to faster-growing genetically-engineered tree farms that are less resource intensive, our forests' old growth will be history. What will we do about rising CO2 levels then?
The ocean is the basis of our food chain. If we don't figure out exactly what we're doing wrong with it soon, how would we cope with the issues?
The list goes on and on, but I think most of these are more "The sooner, the better" solution that could have also happened for the last two or three generations and might still be doable for the next few generations. I imagine the point of no return will feel much more dramatic than any other disaster humanity has ever experienced, and this frankly hasn't presented any signs that it's happening soon even though it is still coming in the future. Do we really want to pass our problems on instead of solutions though?
Honestly, if we don't get it together, everything's going to fall apart sometime in the future, and humanity may very well drive itself to extinction or back to the primal days. I don't think any entity will be able to pull everybody together and into a stable direction unless it happens ASAP. Comparing success at restabilization to Star Trek is also questionable. The future could go many ways depending upon how available the technology that shapes it is and how society changes with it.
Anyway, that was a bit of a rant, but I'd rather have people think about these kinds of things than not. People of all sorts all around the world have to work together over time to overcome problems like this..
