POSSILBLE FUTURE SOCIETIES

Here are some possible societies. Some will choose to live within the larger society, and some will go off by themselves, perhaps to asteroids or even to other stars. Within a country like the U.S. or perhaps even on earth, no subsociety would be able to impose a penalty greater than expulsion except for behavior generally recognized as criminal. No society would be allowed to forbid emigration.

  1. The positive eugenics club. They will arrange their marriages, or matings outside marriage, to produce more fit individuals. I'd prefer a society in which everyone was much more intelligent and also more intellectual. Aldous Huxley in his Brave New World speculated that if a society was composed entirely of alphas, they would kill each other. One can't take him seriously, since the idea was needed to justify his imagined society segregated into alphas, betas, gammas, and deltas, each with an appropriate ideology. However, as sometimes happens to a literary work, some people imagine Huxley proved that an all-alpha society wouldn't work.

    Of course, there are likely to be other biological ways than selective breeding to produce improved humans.

  2. There can be communist societies of all kinds. The Israeli kibbutzim have are based on varied organizations. Nothing really exotic has come of it.

  3. Cults with maximal leaders are a possibility, e.g. a man with a harem.

  4. Imagine a movement or cult that de-emphasized eating. They would have no meals. Instead they would have a bag of "Purina People Chow" in the bathroom. Anyone who felt hungry would excuse himself, go to bathroom, and eat a suitable number of lumps of people chow. I have no idea what they would do with all the time saved.

  5. Religious cults of all kinds. Some would have very large numbers of children. Eventually, these cults would have to be limited by the larger society.

  6. Intentionally technologically backward societies. They could have their islands but presumably would not want to emigrate to space.

  7. Societies bent on expanding to the stars. As far as present science knows, they would have to organize multi-generational voyages in order to get beyond our solar system. Actually, if they had solved the problem of living (say) 10,000 years, individuals could accomplish significant interstellar travel. With million year lifetimes, the whole galaxy would be travelable as far as space is concerned. With 10^11 stars, however, no individual could visit even a tiny fraction.

  8. Science fiction writers, most prominently Larry Niven, have imagined societies based on previous human societies. Making them feudal seems to be especially attractive for fiction.

  9. I suppose societies will arise with doctrines requiring them to conquer the rest of us. They will have to be suppressed if they threaten to become aggressive.

  10. The main possibility is a society like the present democratic, captialist world only much bigger, more prosperous, longer lived, and more tolerant of variation.

The above is just a start on the possible societies.

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