Another Year Gone. What Will Another 100 Bring?

[Guest danax]

A friend sent me this email. It really puts the span of 100 years into perspective. Year to year we hardly notice the changes. As quickly as things seems to change nowadays, the next 100 to 2105 should be more dramatic than the previous 100.

One thing that seems to be changing is that our life spans are slowly creeping up to our "natural" span of 100-120 years. It might be late for a lot of us, but I'd speculate that in another hundred years, living long enough to see and comprehend such dramatic changes will be commonplace.

Imagine how the population will be swollen by then with all of the oldsters hanging around. Plus, at a 3% annual population growth rate, Houston should have close to 40 million people by 2105. When we talk about density now, we're talking about boutique-level density. 40 million is in-your-face density.

Will the inner cities revert to ghettos again as the less-educated become the overwhelming majority? Will freeways exist?

Some fun stuff to ponder.

The year is 1905

Just one hundred years ago. What a difference a century makes!

Here are some of the U.S. statistics for the Year 1905 :

The average life expectancy in the U.S. was 47 years.

Only 14 percent of the homes in the U.S. had a bath tub.

Only 8 percent of the homes had a telephone.

A three-minute call from Denver to New York City cost eleven dollars.

There were only 8,000 cars in the U.S., and only 144 miles of paved roads.

The maximum speed limit in most cities was 10 mph.

Alabama, Mississippi, Iowa, and Tennessee were each more heavily populated than California.

With a mere 1.4 million people, California was only the 21st most populous state in the Union.

The tallest structure in the world was the Eiffel Tower!

The average wage! in the U.S. was 22 cents per hour.

The average U.S. worker made between $200 and $400 per year.

A competent accountant could expect to earn $2,000 per year,

a dentist $2,500 per year,

a veterinarian between $1,500 and $4,000 per year, and

a mechanical engineer about $5,000 per year.

More than 95 percent of all births in the U.S. took place at home .

Ninety percent of all U.S. doctors had no college education.

Instead, they attended so-called medical schools, many of which were condemned in the press and by the government as "substandard."

Sugar cost four cents a pound.

Eggs were fourteen cents a dozen.

Coffee was fifteen cents a pound.

Most women only washed their hair once! a month, and used borax or egg yolks for shampoo.

Canada passed a law that prohibited poor people from entering into their country for any reason.

Five leading causes of death in the U.S. were:

1. Pneumonia and influenza

2. Tuberculosis

3. Diarrhea

4. Heart disease

5. Stroke

The American flag had 45 stars.

Arizona, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Hawaii, and Alaska hadn't been admitted to the Union yet.

The population of Las Vegas, Nevada, was only 30!!!

Crossword puzzles, canned beer, and ice tea hadn't been invented yet.

There was no Mother's Day or Father's Day.

Two out of every 10 U.S. adults couldn't read or write.

Only 6 percent of all Americans had graduated from high school.

Marijuana, heroin, and morphine were all available over the counter at the local corner drugstores.

Back then pharmacist said, "Heroin clears the complexion, gives buoyancy to the mind, regulates the stomach and bowels, and is, in fact, a perfect guardian of health." (Shocking!)

Eighteen percent of households in the U.S. had at least one full-time servant or domestic help.

There were about 230 reported murders in the entire U.S.

[WesternGulf]

Some things I would love to have back and some are like damn.

[editor]

The "good old days" weren't so good.

[RedScare]

I would suggest it will depend completely on oil. If the predictions of "Peak Oil" occurring in the next 5-15 years are accurate, 2105 may be remarkably similar to 1905 in many respects. Transportation will revert back to bicycles and some advanced form of steam. Since mining coal or uranium is energy intensive, power usage, even nuclear power, would be severely curtailed. Agriculture, relying heavily on oil to cultivate and harvest and transport crops, will revert to more inefficient methods. This may cause food shortages, shrinking the population. Virtually all communication, computers and household goods either require oil to be produced, or are made from oil (plastic), or both. Even the military, which will be vital in fighting for remaining oil supplies, is hugely dependent on oil.

I read an article yesterday that said that if not for the oil embargo of the 1970s, which cut oil usage and forced conservation measures, Peak Oil would have already occurred. Regardless, the American system, which demands a continually expanding economy, which consumes more oil, combined with China's and India's expanding economies, will put an increasing strain on oil supplies.

Given that we have not even started planning for a future with less oil, or exorbitantly priced oil, the changes, when they occur, will be drastic. It will be interesting...or terrifying...to watch.

Happy New Year!

[TJones]

Did any of you happen to watch 20/20 tonight. John Stossel was debunking myths, it was great, he was putting everyone on the spot and they were like, wwwweeeeellllllllllllll................ I loved it.

<------BTW, Red,that is just for you buddy.

Edited December 31, 2005 by TJones

[sevfiv]

i was just discussing "progress" over the last century or so with a friend...

it's amazing to try and look back and see the exponential growth of technology, industry, medicine and so on in perspective with history...

Edited December 31, 2005 by sevfiv

[TJones]

i was just discussing "progress" over the last century or so with a friend...

it's amazing to try and look back and see the exponential growth of technology, industry, medicine and so on in perspective with history...

100 years, we will either all be teleporting to Xavious 5 or Planet Earth will be recovering from a nuclear winter.

[Subdude]

To me the most surprising item on that list was that there were only 144 miles of paved roads! Probably most of those were in the largest cities, which means that most of the country must have had none. That's just amazing.

[RedScare]

<------BTW, Red,that is just for you buddy.

Gee, thanks, TJ. Here's a little Stewie/Brian dialogue for you.

Stewie: I'm the dog. I'm well read and have a diverse stock portfolio. But I'm not above eating grass clippings and regurgitating them on the rug.

Brian: I'm a pompous little antichrist who will abandon my plans for world domination when I grow up and wind up settling with a rough trick named Jim.

[TJones]

^^^ ROFL ^^^

[Guest danax]

To me the most surprising item on that list was that there were only 144 miles of paved roads! Probably most of those were in the largest cities, which means that most of the country must have had none. That's just amazing.

It must've been pretty hellish trying to drive a car around Houston will all of the rain. Even into the '30s, there were a lot of unpaved roads here, and a lot of the so-called paved ones were just shell roads.

With all of the speed-demon drivers in Houston, I wonder how those same people would've vented their energy, anger, restlessness, aggression; whatever it is, in an era when riding a galloping horse was the fastest thing available.

[editor]

It seems to me that road paving has been exponential as the years passed. Even in the last 20 years there were a lot of places without paved roads.

A town I lived in in the 1970's and 1980's still has a lot of unpaved roads -- and this is in New Jersey, the state with the nation's highest population density. We had a house at the top of a mountain, and the TV antenna would get hit by lightning all the time. One time it blew up the TV and started a small fire in the kitchen. The fire department came and took care of everything, but the storm left the road all muddy and the heavy fire truck sitting there for an hour got stuck in the mud. It took two days for them to get the fire truck out from in front of our house. Shortly after, the road got a few dozen layers of gravel and tar. The last time I was there would have been around 1998. It still wasn't paved.

When I lived in West Virginia there were unpaved roads even in the capitol city. I'm glad I owned a truck at the time. But sometimes if I drove too far south into the coal fields I had trouble getting gas at gas stations because I had "Yankee tags" (New York license plates).

Of course, anyone who's tried to take a shortcut across any substantial-sized chunk of Texas knows there are dirt roads everywhere. Anyone who hasn't already spent a week wandering aimlessly around the area between San Antonio, El Paso, and Amarillo should do so right now. It will change your life.

BTW: It's the new year and I'm feeling my age, so for now all of my replies are going to be crazy old man stories.

[TJones]

editor:BTW: It's the new year and I'm feeling my age, so for now all of my replies are going to be crazy old man stories.

........and that is gonna be different froooooooooommmmmmmmm ? ? ?

Edited January 2, 2006 by TJones

[VicMan]

There were about 230 reported murders in the entire U.S.

Of course, back then it was much easier to get away with murder - Make it look like it was an "accident" or dump the body somewhere....

That's kinda hard to do now, of course.

[TheNiche]

As drastic as the changes seem, you've got to keep a few things in perspective. Two such critical things are inflation and the notion of buying power. If the average worker made $200 to $400 per year, then in real terms, that's $4,100 to $8,200 per year. The accountant would be making $41,000 per year. Once we've adjusted for inflation, you can easily see that wages have indeed gone up relative to prices of the average basket of goods, but not by any drastic rate. The notion that goods have actually decreased in price in real terms is a little counter-intuitive, but these are the facts. Moreover, the quality of goods has increased substantially.

And as was already mentioned, getting away with murder was easy. With all the access to poisons that people had and the lack of immediately-available or well-educated doctors, if someone died fairly spontaneously, there probably wasn't much that could be done to verify whether it was a murder or not. Moreover, I'm not sure whether fingerprinting had yet arrived on the scene, but it sure as hell would have made a difference. DNA evidence was light-years away. Also, given that such a large percentage of the population (a smaller population) lived in rural areas, disposing of the body was indeed easier.

By the way, 3% population growth is not a sustainable rate for a first-world city. Europe, I have heard, has fallen below the zero-population-growth boundary, and wherever they are growing, it has more to do with immigrants from third-world countries than it has to do with the birth rate. The U.S. is teetering on the ZPG boundary, and if it were not for immigrants, would not be growing almost at all. Houston is only growing like it is right now because we're a sunbelt city with a large Hispanic population.

Edited April 2, 2006 by TheNiche

[TheNiche]

I would suggest it will depend completely on oil. If the predictions of "Peak Oil" occurring in the next 5-15 years are accurate, 2105 may be remarkably similar to 1905 in many respects. Transportation will revert back to bicycles and some advanced form of steam. Since mining coal or uranium is energy intensive, power usage, even nuclear power, would be severely curtailed. Agriculture, relying heavily on oil to cultivate and harvest and transport crops, will revert to more inefficient methods. This may cause food shortages, shrinking the population. Virtually all communication, computers and household goods either require oil to be produced, or are made from oil (plastic), or both. Even the military, which will be vital in fighting for remaining oil supplies, is hugely dependent on oil.

I read an article yesterday that said that if not for the oil embargo of the 1970s, which cut oil usage and forced conservation measures, Peak Oil would have already occurred. Regardless, the American system, which demands a continually expanding economy, which consumes more oil, combined with China's and India's expanding economies, will put an increasing strain on oil supplies.

Given that we have not even started planning for a future with less oil, or exorbitantly priced oil, the changes, when they occur, will be drastic. It will be interesting...or terrifying...to watch.

Happy New Year!

Up to your old antics again, are you Red?

Where shall I start? How about with the opinions of the experts...tens of thousands of them. They are called energy traders. Their jobs and their wealth are completely dependent upon their ability to forecast the price of various energy-related commodities. They have a great incentive to research the future of the oil and gas industry and every component that goes into commodity pricing. What each individual trader ultimately comes up with is a forward price curve that shows the price that they expect a commodity to be at within a set period of time. Go to nymex.com and look at the futures contracts for Light Sweet Crude and Natural Gas. Find a month, say December 2006 (and I'm using it because it is the month for which there are the greatest number of open contracts into the future), and compare it to December 2007, December 2008, December 2009, etc. in order to avoid seasonality issues. The pricing per barrel of light sweet crude as of 4/2 should be $69.67(2006), $69.40 (2007), $68.20 (2008), $67.20 (2009), $66.20 (2010), $65.35 (2011), and $64.70 (2012). You can think of this trend of initial contango and then continued long-term backwardization as being the average conclusions of tens of thousands of investors, all weighted by the amount of money they put into their investments. That is to say, those with the most to gain/lose and who have more incentive to do thorough research are given a larger vote. So what might they know that you don't?

First of all, even though oil consumption is higher now than at any point in human history, the real price of oil is LOWER. With a couple of notable examples to the contrary, all caused by short-term political interference, the price of extracting oil from increasingly hard-to-get-to places has gone down faster than demand has caused prices to go up. The price of extraction continues to go down as new technologies are developed. Oil companies are competitive with one another, so they usually end up pricing their product so that they earn only a marginal profit (that isn't true right now, but only because of price disruptions caused by speculators in the financial markets).

Aside from lower production costs, the United States and most western countries have become increasingly more efficient in regards to energy consumption. There is no sign at present that the amount of energy consumed in the manufacture of almost any given good is going to begin going up. Even when energy prices were low, energy-intensity was going down...it's all part of technological advancement. Second- and third-world countries, on the other hand, waste incredible amounts of energy with older and less-efficient machinery. There are a couple things that will contribute to their not using as much energy. Firstly, at some point in the future, China will have a recession...we don't know when, but we do know that it will happen. That'll put a major short-run damper on global demand for energy. In the long-run, however, as China develops, the price of labor will continue to increase. At a certain point, each firm will discover that although their labor costs are still lower than western countries, their operations are enormously inefficient. Firms will need to assess where they can reasonably cut costs, and energy usage is likely to be very high on the list.

So having said all this, what would happen if energy prices went up drastically? If it were a short-term phenomenon, then you might reasonably expect to see a jump in the sales of bicycles. But if it were a more gradual process that allowed for the construction of nuclear reactors...the answer is pretty simple, really. We'd adapt to the next best alternative or create that alternative from scratch...at that point, R&D of energy technologies becomes pretty profitable. Also at that point, alternative fuels actually become economically viable. Hybrids go away and are replaced with hydrogen, ethanol, possibly solar, etc, and its all done in the span of possibly 5 years. Nuclear power, if allowed time to be built, could easily replace oil and gas power plants. Coal would also likely see a resurgence. Even if mining uranium and coal is energy-intensive, it's only a relatively small portion of the cost. That is to say, electicity prices would go up, but they certainly wouldn't match the rate of price increase of oil or gas.

Another thing...when energy prices go up, what happens to consumers? They consume less luxury goods and generally consume about the same levels of energy until they make their next big-time purchase decision...and even then, people are generally more willing to give up toys for the kids in order to keep their homes air conditioned. But these are all ifs...

Realistically, higher energy prices wouldn't be the end of the modern world. When it comes down to it, humans are only the most dominant species because we're the most adaptable. We'll survive...or I guess I should say that we WOULD survive, since there is certainly no guarantee in the first place that we'll be facing such high prices.

Edited April 2, 2006 by TheNiche