MN healthcare workers are wearing black ribbons tomorrow.
Healthcare workers everywhere are invited to join us in solidarity.

I like both of them. A lot. But I think Talarico is more electable in Texas.

Science fiction has always explored these questions safely. Science may soon force us to answer them for real.

I’d be genuinely interested to hear which of these developments you think are inevitable, which feel impossible, and which make you most uneasy.

But it seems increasingly unlikely that the next century will look like a simple extension of the last one.

We are not just building better tools. We may be reshaping aging, intelligence, energy, reproduction, and identity itself.

travel onward, carrying humanity’s curiosity into the dark.

None of this guarantees happiness. Power always comes with cost. Longevity raises questions about meaning. Intelligence amplifies inequality as easily as it solves problems. & every new capability forces society to renegotiate its values.

healthy and unscarred. Their grandparents are still active, still learning, still contributing. Diseases that once terrified entire generations are managed early or cured outright. Scientists work alongside AI systems that suggest ideas no human would have imagined. Somewhere beyond Pluto, machines

Conclusion: A Glimpse Forward

Imagine a world where energy is cheap, illness is usually temporary, childbirth is safer than driving to the hospital today, & people expect to live long enough to reinvent themselves several times over.

A child born from an artificial womb into their parents’ arms,

ambiguous. An echo rather than a continuation.

Whether that would still count as “you” may be the wrong question. The harder one is whether it would change how we think about identity completely. If parts of us can persist, does death still mark a clean boundary?

clearer, even if humans themselves never leave the solar system.

Human-AI Continuity

Advanced neural interfaces combined with AI may allow partial preservation of personality, memory, and decision patterns beyond biological death.

Not immortality. Not resurrection. Something more

By the late century, AI-driven probes could explore nearby star systems independently, reporting back across decades. If they find nothing, that matters. It tells us something about how rare we are. If they find something, it matters far more.

Either way, humanity’s place in the universe becomes

Falling natural birth rates would, paradoxically, make longer lives easier to accommodate without unbearable overcrowding.

Interstellar AI Probes

Human bodies are poorly suited to interstellar travel. Machines are not.

fairness, access, meaning, and motivation in a world where time is no longer scarce. Careers might span centuries. Relationships might evolve or fracture under new pressures. Education could become a recurring phase rather than a single early chapter.

2075–2100: The Stretch Zone
Optional Aging

If aging itself becomes treatable, death shifts from inevitability to contingency. People would still die, but not because their cells simply wore out.

This would force society to confront difficult questions about

physical cost and risk of pregnancy has become a major deterrent.

Parenthood wouldn’t become easier. But it would become safer and more predictable. But one possible problem might be rogue states deciding to use birth creches to breed an army of totally loyal janissaries.

parents present, lifted from the womb tank and handed over.

If made safe & affordable, this could dramatically reduce infant mortality, eliminate much birth trauma, & give women far more control over reproduction. It could also help address falling birth rates in many developed societies, where the

trimester, then is safely transferred to an artificial womb. From there, it grows in a controlled womb creche environment, supported by machines that replicate the conditions of pregnancy with extraordinary precision.

At nine months, the baby is “born” into a room with the

Artificial Wombs and Womb Creches

Artificial womb technology is already being tested for extreme premature births. By mid-century, it’s plausible this expands into a broader reproductive option.

One likely model is hybrid pregnancy. The baby develops naturally in the mother’s body for the first

without keyboards or screens.

The ethical questions will be intense, but the pressure to adopt will be just as strong. When memory and attention become competitive advantages, it will be hard for people to refuse the upgrade.