Small, niche communities, and unfortunately you’ll probably need to know what ideas you’re interested in ahead of time to get there.

People with intelligent but divergent ideas are always outnumbered by people pushing an agenda, and they end up getting moderated together because it’s hard to know the difference, superficially.

Note that it’s entirely possible to have an echo chamber that’s divergent from bigger echo chambers, and that’s were a lot of people are pointing you, because of the instance you asked on.

Wait, what does the middle track do?

Well, keep reading. Conversation did ensue. You basically write a summery of the important bits of what would be in the search (reminder Google alternatives exist), and then it’s OP’s turn to ask follow up questions, make a joke, counter with their own information, share an idea if one occurs to them, or just say thank you.

Androgens, evolution, the state of medicine and the the difference between head and body follicles have all been in immediate replies, and then there were spin-off conversations (honestly including this one, although an attempt was made to prevent it).

As a very bald man, let me assure you, hair does not merely keep growing other places. The exact same hormones that cause the baldness make it start coming out of unexpected places like weeds in a sidewalk. So cool. /s

As to why hair follicles work backwards specifically on the very top tip of genetically predisposed individuals, I can’t say. There’s a lot of information on the Wikipedia, but probably more we’re yet to discover. I know it’s still an active area of medical research. Especially active, even, because it’s an old white/asian guy problem (usually).

There’s also studies showing everyone (at least in the study areas) thinks it’s goofy unless you shave the sides to match, so that’s interesting. Either one of those two facts are wrong, or cavemen were dexterous enough to get the job done with a piece of flint.

Yeah, but what if OP wants a conversation?

Am I foolish to hope people are getting over the tradition, too?

There’s also “you forgot to save before you ran the compiler”, and yeah, whatever is on that line in the stored to disk version is garbage.

Yes, very overbaked headline. Even just going by the summary this is something that might be part of the puzzle in some cases.

PopSci press is usually cancer, I’d avoid websites like this.

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 like smallpox. 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.

Literally has tons of the same kind or reactor, and Europe is working on one that might actually do practical things.

Different kind of fusion. Don’t forget hydrogen bombs have been around for decades, right? They’re just not very controlled and harnessable.

To the sun’s credit, it’s 4.5 billion years in and it’s still got plenty of juice left to go.

It’s low in the core too, just not quite that low.

How does nobody else here know that we’re talking about artificially fusing some blend of deuterium or tritium? The sun fuses ordinary hydrogen at this point in it’s evolution - that’s why it’s a nice slow 10 billion year burn.

No, OP is right - or rather, OP’s physics professor. There’s different kinds of fusion, though, and nobody’s suggesting we do the exact same kind here on Earth (we basically can’t).

Fusion creates a shit tonne more energy than 150w/cm3. Heck, you’ve never seen what a nuke does

That’s power density (Watts). Multiply by 10 billion years to get energy density.

Well, there’s been incremental progress all along. I remember reading about milliseconds being a big accomplishment at some point.

Also, it’s pretty heavily dependent on the exact plasma in question. One hot enough to do lots of fusion will probably be different, so this isn’t the finish line. Relevant XKCD.

Well, there are counterexamples. Oswald Mosley just kind of rotted in jail until everyone forgot about him, IIRC.

Martyrdom is massively overrated in Western discourse - usually a crackdown just works. Probably exactly because it’s a great excuse not to do scary but necessary things, which is something we’ve grown unused to.

True, but I did imagine OP as American. OP’s grandpa presumably wasn’t German, anyway. Or they were/are, and are extra cool, I guess.

Yup. Rising Nazism doesn’t need to be the exact same guys again. That’s just lazy.

Every once in a while I hear boomers waxing poetic about the wholesome days of old nudie mags.

Well, I happen know the boomer’s own parents were plenty outraged by them, actually. And, have you ever read one of those? The copy is pretty damn disrespectful about the women appearing therein, as were the men running the show.