Question:
When do you think the next period of big change will occur?
2010-04-24 01:14:01 UTC
For those of you interested in history, have you noticed the world generally changes every 30 years and even bigger every 100 years (for north america, the big change generally occurs every 100 years in the 60's-70's decade). When do you think the next changes will occur, and what will they be? I think a small change will come in 2030, then a bigger one in 2060's-2070's, but I can't predict what they will be. Maybe socialism. Just think, if one occurs in 2060's-2070's like they normally do, we will be old or dead when they occur.
Four answers:
wishnuwelltoo
2010-04-26 07:43:09 UTC
I vote for 2012, I know there is no proof of it, but I am tired and I am weary and I need hope.
Chevalier
2010-04-24 08:55:48 UTC
You're right... and it's going to happen soon, but I think the change is more like between the 90s and the 10-20s.



French Revolution 1789, arguably paved the way for the 19th century. The Industrial Revolution, for sure.



The Modern Age began around 1880-90, but really started after WWI.



The Fall of the Berlin Wall, I believe, was the mark of the end of the 20th Century or "Modern" Age.



Something will happen in the next few years which will change the way we live forever and define the 21st. century.



Some believe that 2012 will bring the apocalypse. Maybe so, but I think it will be an economic issue (could be something as simple as that). Maybe a global economic meltdown, or America going bankrupt which will cause a chain-reaction around the world. If it's not economic, it will be war with Iran, another terror attack, or a virus pandemic.



I wish I could say something positive, but nothing right now is pointing in that direction. The only hope we would have for something positive to happen in the near future for the American people to get someone in power who has everyone's best interests at heart, someone outside the Rep/Dem mold.
?
2010-04-24 09:49:54 UTC
In the 1960's, sociologists and others who study society predicted that we were entering the Age of Leisure. In fact, studies during the subsequent decades found that Americans were working harder than ever, had less "free" time, and people in the growing "working class" often had to find supplemental jobs.



After the first decade of the twenty-first century, it seems that we really don't have enough jobs for all of our people. Corporations that are situated in Silicon Valley annually lobby Congress to increase the H1-B1 visas so that they can recruit more software engineers, computer technicians, and scientists from places like India.



As China gradually adopts cybernated processes, the piecework and assembly that its workers do will dry up. Manufacturing methods will be done by machine, so the idea of outsourcing to sub-Saharan countries will no longer be economically wise.



A combinaton of superconductivity and nanotechnology will make transportation so fast and efficient that even travel will not consume much time or effort.



So, I think that the next revolution will truly be the engineering of the Age of Leisure. However, it will not be the idyllic sort of life that past visionaries hoped for. I think that armies of intellectuals will be employed to figure out what the rest of us will do. As another respondent mentioned, this will likely involve some form of socialism because most people will not have paying jobs.



In other times, such cataclysmic change would probably have forced some sort of biological evolution. However, human beings have arrived at the point where we can pretty well control the biological mechanisms that once functioned for this purpose. I don't think that we'll allow our "selves" to change very much (exceptions: less hair, no little toe, no ear lobes, no appendix, etc.), but we'll have to find some way to occupy our "inquisitive minds" and obesity-prone bodies.

.
2010-04-24 16:28:21 UTC
It's impossible to tell. The future can evolve in many different ways, which are heavily influenced by how things are going like now. Those "cycles of historical change" you came up with are very rough approximations, and while they may have been at least somewhat accurate in the past, there's no guarantee they will be accurate in the future.


This content was originally posted on Y! Answers, a Q&A website that shut down in 2021.
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