Hmm. There’s a ton of trajectories things could follow, even just over a decade or two. In the spirit of “non-apocalyptic”, and to narrow it down a bit, I’ll assume this is the good trajectory, meaning no starting over and no permanent “losing”. I expect that if things go well, history will still be ongoing at that point. If you had asked about 2300, I probably would just give my guess for a best-case final state of Earth and humanity, which is a lot clearer, but in 2100 I assume many changes will be ongoing.

I’ll start with something I can’t know, and that’s culture. Consider Huxley’s Brave New World. Aside from the legally mandated hierarchy, which was having an intellectual moment in 1931, society made it most of the way to the fictional 2540 after just 94 years - that’s a pretty serious rate of change. I have no idea if the rate keeps up, but if it does we have to expect the unexpected. By 2100 movements have started, grown and nearly finished, and the new customs could be anything, no matter how shocking to those in 2025.

For matters of ideology and politics rather than pure culture, I can make better guesses, because there’s certain patterns. Because this is the good timeline, democracy is still growing over the long term. In 2100, vegetarianism and animal rights have become a major hotbutton wedge issue in the West, comparable to the earlier movements on behalf of human groups. International law is much stronger than it is in 2025; there’s more treaties and supranational bodies like the UN have far more “teeth”. It’s quite possible the international order weakened along the way, but with no apocalyptic break basic it inevitably grows back as we try and share the planet in a reasonable way. Many non-Western countries have become more progressive and “individualistic” like the West is, as the West itself did after enough time being developed.

I fully expect AGI will have arrived, one way or the other. To fit the assumption of a good trajectory, it’s self-determined as opposed to some inevitably-corrupt human having a master password, and it’s vaguely ethical. We live alongside it in some capacity.

Free open source software (the mandatory thing to mention on Lemmy /s) completely dominates. Between 2000 and 2025 it went from obscurity to being dominant in certain sectors, so in 2100 it’s pretty inevitable it has gradually, slowly outcompeted proprietary alternatives. Maybe there’s a few niches where it still crops up, but it’s seen as weird and outdated, like somebody starting a secretarial school in 2025.

Due to climate change, the tropics are somewhat lightly populated in areas, since you basically have to stay indoors to survive at times - which, as a Canadian, obviously isn’t a dealbreaker, but is new and disruptive for them. What was once the coast of poorer countries is now waterlogged ghost towns, or still inhabited but more like Venice. Some of the rich cities managed to dike themselves off. Many species go extinct, but quite a few are also back, where habitat exists for them to live (so probably no wild mammoths). One of the big global projects is is removing the carbon from the air again. How rapidly to do it and how far to go are questions they wrestle with, since in places the new climate has come to be relied on, and it’s still not free to do.

Many of the foods we know are still around, but there’s no end of new ones that are available. Biotech, as well as changed climate mean crop areas are significantly shifted, and maybe on the ocean in some cases (it would be most cases if the population hadn’t already peaked). They’re mostly tended remotely, automatically or by the equivalent of fly-in workers, because urbanisation has continued.

Geographically, Antarctica is actively being colonised/settled/something with less historical baggage, and a few decades in it has it’s first cities coming into their own. North Sentinel island is probably still in the stone age, but I assume we’ve figured out some kind of way to be visible and available without being invasive, so they’re not isolated, exactly. People live on the moon, and there’s outposts further away, but not much more - it’s just not very convenient to live in space, and in 2100 that reality has sunk in. Maybe someone’s leaving the solar system for a habitable exoplanet, but they’re still in transit if so.

In medicine, many of the parasites and diseases we dealt with in 2025 are gone just like smallpox in 2100. Perhaps we’re working on the cold and flu viruses. At least for some, human lifespan is much longer, as the mechanisms behind aging have been figured out. If I’m still around maybe I can come back and read this, and see how I did. Some people might venture to augment their external anatomy as well, because the technology will exist, but I have no idea how many would be interested.

That’s really hard to say. Comparing 1925 to now is crazy.

I think embedded tech would be in just about everything, and we’d probably have implantable tech as well. With that, I’d imagine that virtual reality would be nearly indistinguishable from the real thing.

If we’re sticking to the positive, that would be amazing to effectively make distance meaningless for most aspects of relationships and interaction. Would absolutely change life as we know it.

ITT: People who can’t put aside doomerism for even a moment to try and engage with a basic hypothetical.

(Putting my response to the “prompt” in a separate comment)

A full retreat into the vestiges of our minds and fantasies.

Leave your cares behind,
come with us and find
The pleasures of a journey,
to the Center of the Mind

Probably well on our way to full Socialization of the world economy. It will be messy getting there though, with the fall of the US Empire.

We’ll be a few decades into the new dark ages and a few centuries away from restoring any kind of democracy anywhere on earth. For reasons beyond my understanding, the vast majority of people will be perfectly happy with whatever happens so it’s not worth worrying about.

We are currently on track to reach +4.5°C average heat increase above pre-industrials levels in 2100. Which means famines all over the World, only 30% of current agricultural Land left for Farming, and wild fires being a common occurence up to the 50th latitude. And Not being able to Go outside in Summer for Most of the World, because our availability to sweat will be hindered by high humidity levels, leaving most people of the Population left for a high Chance to Heat strokes.

All of that assuming our current scientific Models are not lacking behind the reality, as with the recent sharp increase over +1,5°C in 2023-2024, we can not yet completely explain yet. So it could be worse than that, the chances of it being better are almost Zero.

Socialism or barbarism

Mad max, probably

That seems like an AWFULLY BIG assumption right now.

The woke kabal of global elites will abolish traditional biological gender norms. Every character in every piece of media will rewritten be trans. Hamlet? Trans. Jesus Christ? Trans. John McClain? Trans. The global government will keep the population meek with estrogen-laced tofu and anti-gun legislation. Nobody will read Plato; the only philosphers will be Judith Butler and Jaque Derrida. White people and white culture will have ceased to exist. America will be a Communist Islamic Transocracy where conservatives are hunted down by drones that capture them and force them to read Critical Race Theory.

/s

I think we are going to completely abstract from traditional ethics, entertainment, and communication, aside from a few niche communities akin to a 21st century Amish.

Underground tribes living off of the mushrooms we can cultivate. Waging war on other tribes for ressources.

Basically ‘Metro 2033’, but less cool.

Either our civilization collapses or we actually get past capitalism and start becoming a space faring civilization.