My Letter to the Future 

"haha jokes on you hank this is how we solved population decline!"

*144

Wouldn't be the most ridiculous thing with medical science advancing

Unironically yes

@@aozoraking1092 thanks for the correction. i was shocked that hank was already 46 ... but no ... he is only 44. An old teen :)

An impeccable reference for a racoon 👌

We kinda do...

@@vlogbrothers- I need that elaborated on, Hank.

@@mykadassano438 ok so my guess is that the argument is either that there are fish that are superior to us in some aspect for example swimming and therefor superior fish beings or that we are the superior beings and because we are descendants from fish we are kind of fish. Edit: Now I too am looking forward to Hank elaborating cause my guess could be super wrong.

@@mykadassano438 pretty sure ur technically still a bony fish

omg. new theory just dropped

+++ incredible

Dr. Never-Sneezer Scrooge is a wise doctor

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Dr. Never Sneezer Scrooge is a time traveler!!!!

That would kick ass...

Please see this people of 2124!

a nostalgia sale

That would be so gooooood!!!

@@vlogbrothers Mark your calendars, folks!

Yeah I don't want them looking back with nostalgia

@@griffinblades8475 They are allowed to be nostalgic for our fashion and that's it.

@@ethank5059 Eh ... I think a bit of light nostalgia over old stuff is fun. Not enough to say "let's go back!" mind you, just enough to have people playing stuff like old PCs/software and toys or even trying old food recipes like you already see on youtube.

@@xarin42 yeah that’s the good kind of nostalgia

We are on rails now, we can slow down but we're still gonna fly off the cliff. Our choices right now decide if the whole train is going over humans, bugs, fish and all.

Put it on the schedule!!

@@vlogbrothers- iPhone calendar will legitimately let you set an event out that far. 🤣 Do it. Make sure to include the video link.

​@@vlogbrothers I honestly think that everything will be in a pretty bad spot from stuff like ai, outdated laws, and other things along those lines but never know I could be wrong.

​​@@vlogbrothers I just legitimately put it in my calendar 50 years from now, so I can at least check on Hank's predictions at half time hahaha (fingers crossed I live to age 72)

@@vlogbrothers I added it to 2058, when i'll be 70, to be on the safe side.

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A 100 years from now they will have a throwback sale in nostalgia of this video

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We miss you John, I hope you're doing a lot better now

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So glad to hear you say those words. Not that I haven’t enjoyed listening to you these past weeks, but I miss your brother.

🙋🏻‍♀️

The amount of likes in this comment will grow exponentially as more time passes

OMG

Does being a time traveler from 2124 count?

😂

Am Gen z and have had chickenpox and my parents talk all the time about how scary it was. I never thought it was rare becuz of that but I guess thats good, still considering measles came back we can assume it’ll stick around for many years to come

Yup. We exist. Almost 30, never had chickenpox, and the only people in my life that have had chickenpox are in their 60s and 70s. Maybe there's people I know that haven't told me though. It's not a common conversation topic.

I think i was part of the last group to get it

I'd bet a few pennies that I was in the last cohort to *purposely* get chickenpox. Our parents knew it was worse to get it as adults, so they had us play with the contagious kids to "get it out of the way" while we were young. I am 42, and I still have scars.

@@numinaluna That pockmark in the center of my forehead is a metaphor for this previously medically-supported tactic. Amazing.

There will definitely be grilled cheese in 100 years. If there are people, there will be grilled cheese.

@@vlogbrothers- wow this is such a random memory... when I was in uni (in the UK) a group of friends and I had a side hustle where we made grilled cheese (called cheese toasties over there) between the hours of 9pm and 2am for people studying during midterms and finals. People would page us (yup... like on a pager) their order and room number... and then we brought them their food. We made a ridiculous amount of money. So... yes. I agree. If there are humanoid beings, there will be grilled cheese.

@@vlogbrothers yes, but what will the biosphere look like after humans are extinct? Will we have been a transitional species or a terminal species. I think that answer will come much later than 100 years from now, but I’m still very curious what it will look like.

I *love* grilled cheese

​@@vlogbrothers This is surprisingly comforting.

+++

+ (also, road kill. 1 million vertebrae animals per day are killed by cars.)

Electric vehicles still hit pedestrians. I don’t think the rate of collision is any different. That’s why we should replace ICE vehicles with public transit and walkable cities! But I predict that, in the U.S., that will not have happened by 2124

and the over 1 million people each year who die of curable tuberculosis

It's so weird to me that people just accept this. Every time you get in your car, you run a not-insignificant chance of dying. Why are we not building more trains?

I hope that in 100 years there will be no differentiation between clothing "for men" and "for women", and people will just be able to wear whatever they think looks good on them, and accessorize however they want.

@@billd66 I thought about commenting something like that, but I expect there will still be gendered fashion trends because a lot of people like them. Though I do think it's likely that clothing will become less gendered and we'll wear it for longer, so "trendy" may not be as much of a thing? Fashion isn't really my area, the whole pocket thing is just ridiculous

I hope that in 100 years clothing will have gone back to being custom made for an individual's body and will be of a quality that lasts much longer.

Fun fact! W women had pockets tied to a little string under their dresses, so big they could hide a book or a sandwich. It wasn’t until the fashions changed, and everyone started wearing sheer tight Muslin dresses that purses were invented. They were called reticules. Because men thought they were ridiculous. And we basically lost pockets until it became fashionable to wear pants. AND Men had at one time up to 37 pockets in one outfit. Their pockets in the pants, the jacket, the vest, and the overcoat.

@@billd66 Loose fitting clothing can be broadly unisex (and was, medieval peasant clothing was generally unisex) but tight fitting clothing needs to be modified to fit different body shapes, and that means there will be always be sex differentiation for items like t-shirts and trousers.

thats how some people think about plastic now. have you seen the vid of an anti-plastic person talking to congress (or something)? they say "you want to eliminate plastic, but your glasses are plastic, your car is plastic, etc" i could imagine that same conversation about lead in pipes

@@2blazedinfl yeah that's what the best predictions for the future are, extrapolations on the present

Plastic itself is not inherently awful, it's the fact that once its usefulness has been exhausted we just bury it in the ground instead of recycling it. Plastic's properties mean that it's actually an incredibly useful material, we just don't know how to sustainably use it. Contrast this with lead and aesbestos, both of which pose significant health risks just existing near people.

@@cooperlittlehales6268 plastic has some health risks as well. not as bad as lead i dont think. but also, plastic can only be recycled a limited number of times, and it usually can't be recycled back into the same product even once. e.g. plastic film gets turned into things like lawn furniture and deck planks. multilayer plastic gets turned into lumps, like for cinderblock replacers or fake rocks for use in growing plants. And the lifespan of plastic far outlives its usable timespan. It really is useful, but hopefully we will figure out something that can function about the same way but not take 100s of years to breakdown, and not end up a bunch of toxin-concentrating micro pieces on the way there.

@@cooperlittlehales6268 plastic recycling is not sustainable, because every time you melt it down and reshape it it degrades, it has to end up in landfill eventually. and we dont know the long term effects of microplastics in the body but i highly doubt they're good! lead and aesbestos are also very useful unfortunately they're a hazard to public health, and plastic is just the same.

Well, OBVIOUSLY

I mean, people still watch The Wizard of Oz and Frankenstein. It's not THAT far fetched.

I'm hoping a new religion will be built around Hank. Which would of course appall now-living Hank (and also secretly please him. 😁).

misread that as if it was a proto-futuristic lifestyle brand called "Hank Green Living"

He'll be listened to for as long as Crash Course is still accurate and useful enough to be used as an educational resource, so probably when the English language dies out?

+++++++

I think it's kinda unlikely and at some point we're probably going to stop relying on paper as a society but I can also imagine that tactile technology is going to get good enough for digital books to "feel" like paper books

They gonna keep being a thing like how vinyl still exists. Some people will value the "experience" reading an physical book brings. Also lot of Books in librarys, museums and archives some people will interact with.

I think physical books aren't going to get much more rare than they are now. They could already be almost entirely replaced by digital if necessary, but they haven't been. I think all kinds of wood and paper products are going to keep being in demand. (After all, paper being a useful product is what keeps some forests from being torn down and replaced with other economically beneficial developments.)

Prediction: they'll be printed on sustainable paper from hemp or bamboo, but there will always be books.

Right, this perspective is why I love studying history! What seemed normal to people of a certain era? What did they think was perfectly natural, a fact of life so immovable it seemed like it had always been there and always would be? And conversely, what will we look back on 100 (or even 10) years from now, and think - “how did we survive without it?”

1920 only feels 80 years ago though. Surely 100 years ago was 1905, right? 😢

Yeah this! I was surprised to hear that figure from him too. It’s really sad to see how decades of historic disinvestment from the railroad system has shaped this country… it’s mind boggling to think of how interconnected we once were, and a good reminder that our car-dependent society is one entirely designed by humans, not a natural result of technological or cultural progress.

Then the FRA came in and said that railroads had to install automatic train control and in-cab signaling and a bunch of other safety improvements if they wanted to go faster than 80mph...so instead of making the upgrades, the railroads simply speed-limited their trains, which had previously hit speeds in excess of 100mph on some routes, to 79mph. (There were a few exceptions, where such improvements had already gone in. One was the Pennsylvania RR's northeast corridor route between NYC and DC.)

@@priyabuddhavarapu Are you saying that planes don't connect us? You do know that they're faster than even the fastest trains in existence today, right?

​@@itsaUSBlineplanes are huuuuuugely less fuel and cost effective, though. That will always be accessible to way fewer people than a good rail system.

Ah, those car names bring back such nostalgia! (And the stench and sounds😁)

We commonly think of cities as "loud" today but really they're only loud because they're so car dependent and we use internal combustion engines. If we switched cities to being primarily based around public transit/walking with some electric cars the average city would be much much quieter.

You might very well be right, but RU-vid re-encodes it's library all the time!

I would say RIP to RealMedia, but they're STILL being developed

I don't think so. I think we're past the era of major file types becoming obsolete because all major filetypes we use are made by standards bodies who post their specifications openly, not proprietary companies who keep them secret. When NEW media filetypes get introduced it is a massive headache even when those new types are just as open and objectively better. The GIF format was created in the 80s. 100 years from now we will still have jpegs.

I am studying to be a digital archivist, and I think this is a very strong prediction. As someone in the replies said, we have gotten some pretty good file types with pretty strong staying power. But technology vendors do keep on changing. I was just researching "how do you back up an iPhone's live photo" and the answer seems to be that you can currently only do so via iCloud backup. Otherwise it creates a jpeg and gif as a surrogate for the live photo. But it doesn't provide you a way to re-import that to view the seamless live photo. Regrettably (imo), dominant formats are still shaped by corporate whims and we're a long way away from interoperable standard everything.

VLC will live forever

I never sneeze, sneezing isn't normal

... and that's not true of the present? /j

+ 😂

People will finally be normal! \(°-°)/

BUT SNEEZING IS SO FUN! 😭😭😭

The more I think about it the more it actually makes sense. We keep seeing increases in productivity and at the same time birthrates around the world keep falling. Better farms+fewer mouths=less need for agricultural land. Additionally a lot of our food is grown specifically to feed livestock and so if we can make chicken or beef without killing animals it dramatically reduces how much food we need to grow and then there are the biodiversity+recreational benefits of returning land to nature.

If you listen to some people, especially in r/collapse, you'll hear that the the world will be nothing but cannibal gangs roving the sands for water and oil like in Mad Max by 2035, and by 2050, the planet will have become a second Venus.

I can't even imagine not having premium. Ad rolls would make me insane.

It will be mid-ad videos by then

I'm pretty sure we will have a different type of economy by then. Since we will need to deal with social collapse and all that.

@@edupunknoob By then? Pretty sure that's already a common thing.

@@xarin42 Even Sci-show has started doing it. :(

You can't die without one.

I knowwww i feel the same

Hell yeah, I desperately want to know what humans are gonna evolve into over the course of millions of years

​@@mykadassano438 - Guess I just won't die then.

​@@2pppppppppppppp657 - Technically, the way we classify animals with taxonomy, future human descendants will still be humans, even if they branch into other categories of animals. We might, however, see our understanding of taxonomy change drastically in the future to accomodate its many inescapable flaws!

As a European, that was basically my reaction when I learned that Americans can drive at 16

​@@hiiamelecktro4985wait, what's the legal driving age where you live?

Yep, I frequently have the same thought. Cars are just...weird. And illogical. Yet despite that we all drive them (and let teenagers drive them) anyway

Counterpoint (or counterprediction I guess?): people in the future will think of graphic tees as 'basic' and will be used to much larger presence of graphics in fashion - regardless of if that's what's 'in' or is commonly worn by normal people. I bet graphic t-shirts themselves will not have fallen completely out of fashion either, and will still be available in some form.

i hope there will be fashion history nerds in the future who will look at our graphic tees and say "you can tell its from the '20s because of xyz"

@@wormoffthestring I'd honestly be very surprised if there _weren't_ fashion history nerds looking into our era 100 years from now, there's definitely a bunch of pretty unique and iconic stuff in all strata of fashion and apparel.

Even if the site and the videos survive, there's no way RU-vid's going a hundred years without breaking the comments again, I'd bet my long-extinguished life on it

Well probably in the same way that we look back on slavery. But it will be from ignorance.

I'm not so sure. 100 years from now conditions like paralysis are likely to be much rarer then they are today, and advances in robotics and exoskeleton technology may mean things like wheelchairs may become unnecessary, since everyone has working legs, be they mechanical or biological, or both. Similarly for sight and hearing impairments, artificial eyes, ears and advanced medical techniques may also mean there are far fewer blind or deaf people. Disability in general might be seen as a problem of the past, something rendered mostly obsolete by technology.

they will look back and think we were so bigoted in every way, and also super unaccommodating for various types of people i hope in the future that open-mindedness and flexibility will be a very widespread part of culture and people will be less likely to be hateful or dismissive towards any type of person that may exist

@@Croz89 Yeah, but people generally attribute better circumstances to moral virtue.

@@Croz89 Please consider reading the book Against Technoableism by Ashley Shew

There is a psychological phenomenon called "negativity bias" where pessimistic and negative things just tend to stand out more in our minds. People who make pessimistic predictions are thought of as smarter and more realistic than the same optimistic predictions. It's easy to look at all the problems the world has and assume "things will only get worse" but history teaches us that if anything the opposite is happening. Sometimes the reason we see so much darkness is just because our brains are better tuned to emphasize the negative and deemphasize the positive. If we zoom out and try to be objective there's a lot of reason for optimism.

​@@ethank5059No look at the worst climate predictions and we're following that course. We have a major problem to tackle, take it seriously please.

@@vaga4239 US emissions are falling, the US recently passed the single biggest climate bill in world history and a number of other countries are also passing big climate legislation. Work is being done on the climate and we are no longer facing the worst trajectory but there’s still a lot of work to do. I am incredibly serious when it comes to environmental issues and part of being serious means acknowledging the good things that are happening. If you can’t see those then you aren’t actually being objective.

@@vaga4239 You can take it seriously and also look at the number of animals who have been taken off the endangered list

Some dedicated hobbyists on the internet archive (or a successor organization) will collect long-term predictions from the past.

if everyone shows it to their young children, some of them may be around in 100 years

This post is a collective outcome that will be made by choice by either the whole of humanity or a single human with a button.

@@samplesandtests the odds are very good that at least one teen that is seeing this video on there own decision is still around in 100 years

I only had to put those in because I flubbed a line and had to re-record the audio!

@@vlogbrothers- rule one of theatre (and I suppose RU-vid video making) is to make mistakes look intentional

Hot take: those outfits will be super normal in 100 years

This.

I doubt it. Polymer science might advance to the point where we have more biodegradable packaging and the like, but we're not going back to the era of glass, metal and paper, there's far too many drawbacks. Plastic will still be around, and still very common, even if it's not longer used for some applications.

I love this idea

Eh. Hopefully they will have less single-use plastic by then, and even better, have reliably means of dealing with plastic waste. But plastic is unlikely to go away. It's a VERY useful material for a lot of different purposes.

Plastic as a material isn't awful, it's the fact we don't know how to sustainably dispose of it that's the problem.

Single use _everything._

I like this not just because of climate change/excessive trash aspect, but because it implies a future that's less hectic, where people take their time to eat, and do more of it at home.

@@Alex-js5lg "The people I meet on each flight? They're single-serving friends."

Fingers crossed!!!

And conversely: people 100 years ago were doing their best too! They were figuring things out, and living in the particular culture(s) of their day (see Hank's "super racist" line) but mostly trying to be good people and living their lives, just like we're doing today. Their world was a lot bigger and less connected and they had way fewer vaccines, but they kept going and led to us

Hello future. We aren't trying hard enough, I'm so sorry.

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I'm gunna go out on a limb and say coffee will be extinct.

@@mrdeanvincent Replaced, at least in part, by cannabis and some psychedelics. But caffeine and alcohol will stick around too, they won't completely die out

@@deadlyshizzno Agreed. Cannabis and psychedelics will continue to be commercialised and industrialised in the short term, which might collapse within 100 years, but they can still be grown locally on a small scale... if we somehow don't have a full scale nuclear war or other catastrophe.

I just watched a video about James Baldwin on @greatbooksexplained

We absolutely must. If we don't, things will be catastrophic and/or dystopic.

I bet we will have moved to an entirely digital currency

Agriculture 100 years ago was very different to today, and 100 years prior, was far more different, I don't think Hank's predictions are that crazy when it comes to agriculture.

Technology has been growing exponentially fast. I really don't think it's that far fetched. I believe we have no way of even comprehending what could be in 100 years. My abuela is 96 and does video calls with me. There's no way she could have predicted computers being small enough to fit in pockets and accessible enough that pretty much everyone has some form of it. She likes to tell stories about how when they got their first microwave all their neighbors and extended family came over to see the magic box do its work. Who knows what magic box we'll have in another 100 years?

I think it's actually quite reasonable. Agricultural technology keeps making huge strides in productivity. In a "rich" country 100 years ago 20-30% of the population generally worked in agriculture and now it's about 2-3%. As time goes on we'll likely produce far more food with far less land. At the same time human population growth is slowing and will likely fall in most parts of the world so there will be less mouths to feed. A huge portion of our agriculture goes to feeding livestock and if we're using artificial meets at scale a lot of farms may just no longer be economically viable for food production.

I hope so too, fellow Nerdfighter :) ❤

V. important question. I also want to know!

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yeah it has

No doubt it will, unless the currency shifts the decimal at some point.

I found baby! But hey, as a near-33-year-old, I find my own parents' era wild, too. Like, the pop culture obsession, the lack of Japanese animation or video games in the abundance we have them today, the giant phones attached to wiresーheck, some of my childhood TV show favorites must still feel like "the new kid's stuff" to people who were already hitting adulthood when I was born. I baaaaaarely remember cassette tapes before we upgraded to CD players. Do we still use CD players today? I still see CDs in stores sometimes...

@@Junosensei My childhood was definitely CD players! I still have one! and a record player. I also had an iPod shuffle growing up. The Gen Alphas would have no idea!

@@candystash8826 - I got a 160GB iPod Classic for my 16th birthday (oh god, probably when you were born...) and it is still my go-to MP3 player. The only downside now is that it doesn't connect to new cars (which primarily use bluetooth now), so I've had to copy all my music to my phone, which was a lot of work to figure out. That iPod has been through so many washing cycles and so much pummeling over the years, I'm shocked it still works. Lol

"Tacky, old-fashioned"

I wonder if storing it on an analogue tape would have more chance of still being played back than digital media that will likely suffer from bitrot and the challenge of decoding an outdated and perhaps no longer known data format. I guess an archival DVD disc and battery-operated (batteries not included of course, because they'd just leak and wouldn't hold charge anyway) portable dvd player might work, but I think some form of film would be easier to recover.

Worth noting that solid state drives and hard drives won't last 50 or 100 years, your best bet is probably an archival grade DVD like M-DISC

@@FiXato OH thats a lot of ideas to go over. I was thinking DVD and DVD player and Id like to think Retro tec will still be a thing in 50 years the transcribe is my back up plan lol

@@AuroraBorealis-dh6nr i wasn't goning to do a solid state or a hard drive i said playable storage thats.. a LOT of stuff

-my century future prediction: we’ll have “dollars” (U.S. or otherwise…), but inflation will have amped up such that the common denomination is measured in “Hundies.” (And “give a penny/ take a penny” dishes will be obscure little trinkets at whatever antique shops exist and most ppl won’t intuitively understand what they were for.)