Looking ahead 200 years: another age of epic growth

What will humanity do next, after two centuries of extraordinary growth?

Last week I asked this futures question, starting off by introducing the incredible boom humanity experience after around 1800 and continuing through the present day. I then offered one answer to the question, looking ahead for the next 200 years in terms of retreat, repair, and redressing harms. It’s the opposite of growth, but not for purely retrograde reasons. If you haven’t read the post, please do so. It’s what explains this one.

Today I’d like to answer that future orientation question in a very different way. What if, unlike the Demodernists (HT Ed Webb) we instead decide to continue the two centuries of rapid growth for another 200 years? Instead of less growth, more of it. We might double down on the industrial revolutions. Where might that take us?

This school of thought views the past 200 years as an era of continuous innovation and rapid development, and one to celebrate and refine. It takes the industrial and postindustrial eras as a civilizational launch pad and wants to rocket away.

Think of this future model in terms of the metrics people used to understand the two-century boom time. From circa 1800 to now human lifespan extended, say from roughly 40 to the 70s. If we continue that into the future, lives lasting longer than a century become normal, and two century lives are unsurprising. The past boom saw massive improvements in human health and well being, so we continue to run those arcs upwards, with more diseases controlled or eradicated and more satisfactions in our lives. Education expanded immensely during the industrial and postindustrial eras, so the next two centuries see us learning ever more. We go much further with human flourishing, coming up with new cultures and ways of living. Humanity creates a zeroth world at scale, then races ahead to make civilization even more awesome.

Science and technologies obviously took off in the past two centuries, so the pro-growth futures school expects more such advances, some through new scientific and technical revolutions. For example, space exploration races ahead as machines, then humans spread through the solar system (think of The Expanse, either the books or the show), then reach out to…