Last modified on 19 March 2013, at 07:22

Wikijunior:Future/10 years into the future

Image you are 10 years into the future.

The year is now 2021. The world has changed quite a bit, but it's still easily recognizable from a look at a map, or, as the case will be, the computer.


In the future, the whole library of congress could be stored on a home computer

Computers have advanced a lot since the days of 2011. Computers are now thirty times faster and better. A look at the hard drive of your future PC tells you that it has fifteen terabytes of information storage - enough to keep three quarters of the library of congress at your fingertips.

The reason for this progress in computing is because of something called Moore's Law. Moore's Law is basically the idea that computers will double in speed, hard drive space and other things every two years. This trend was observed by Gordon E. Moore in 1965, and has continued since then.

Education will also have changed due to the advances in computers. With massive amounts of data, textbooks are becoming outdated, being replaced with computers. Lesson plans will also become more computer-oriented, kept only on computer hard drives rather than paper. This has directly helped save the rainforest, however indirect harming to the rainforest in the production process of computers causes the benefits to nature to be less that it seems at first.

Many advances in AI have happened, too. The supercomputers of 2021 run at speeds exceeding 100 million billion operations every second. That is equal to five human brains! With so much processing power becoming available, scientific experiments about a wide range of subjects that were people of past decades couldn't even imagine are being done on a regular basis.

Space FlightEdit

The futuristic ideas of spaceships and hover-cars are coming closer to reality. They are still a long way off, but progress is along the way. The most important event in space exploration was probably the Chinese catching up as a new space superpower. Three space stations have been built by other countries in the last ten years alone, like India, Japan and especially China with the launch vehicles called the Tiangong series, and their weight ranges between 8 and 20 tons and plans to more manned missions and establishing a base on the moon.

The New Horizons probe, the first spaceship to visit Pluto

As well as the efforts made by the Chinese, the general knowledge about the solar system, comets and asteroids has increased with the use of robotic probes from NASA, ESA (European Space Agency) and Japan. A major event in exploring the solar system is the first space probe to Pluto, the New Horizons probe. It arrived at Pluto during 2015, uncovering a wealth of information such as possibilities for life on Pluto. It then flew by an object in the Kuiper belt, uncovering more information about our solar system. This information will be vital in years to come when humans begin to colonize the solar system. Measurements made by the New Horizons probe include telling what Pluto and its moons are made of, and their orbits.