“100 years from now only little girls will ride horses, men will walk on the moon, and Henry Weinhard’s will be sold as far away as Denver!”

And 100 years from now there will be more Chinese in Canada than there are now people, everyone will vote Green and the ordinary person will live their entire lives in one building.

Henry Weinhard did their classic beer ad with the benefit of hindsight but the point was still valid: major shifts happen and they are, to some extent, predictable.  You just have to look.

China simply can’t continue to grow they way they have without having a spill-over or high-pressure release mechanism and BC has already proven to be willing and able to accommodate.  That trend will only continue.  It is no coincidence that Vancouver is the second most expensive city in the world to live (by house prices) after Hong Kong!  We are, in many ways, the same market. One thing is indisputable: the Vancouver market is Chinese driven.

Everyone who continues to vote (and that number will continue to drop because voting does not result in sufficient change) will be voting a GREEN political message even if that message is eventually co-opted by the main parties (as it is now being and like all popular messages have been).  The Liberals and the Conservatives will be green. Climate change and pollution are becoming the biggest threat to human existence and most people know that. Given enough time, even the dumb-as-merde Conservatives will get the point.

And putting living residences downtown where people work only makes more and more sense if you are going to be stuck in the matrix anyway.  You can already be born, raised, entertained, housed, work and socialize in some large complexes in Hong Kong, New York and Chicago.  And, I assume, some other large cities.  It is only zoning laws that restrict the modern vertical village impatiently waiting to happen.  The buildings will get bigger, car-sharing will grow and that life-in-a-box, all-in-one convenience-plex will multiply. Plug and play.

Already in Vancouver, one can live their entire existence in the square mile that is False Creek and Yaletown.

No, I am not going to try to predict more for 100 years from now.  That is not the point. The point is that life is somewhat predictable, trending is visible to everyone and the big forces affecting life are also somewhat predictable. Ergo, the future is somewhat predictable. If you can’t see far into the future nor very accurately, you can certainly see a few years ahead and you will likely be pretty close in your vision.

So, what do we see in the near future?  It appears that more, not less, conflict is coming. Many experts believe climate change will precipitate mass migration and already mass movements of people have proven disruptive.  There will be more underemployment – which is the new unemployment.  More obesity.  More mental illness.  More homelessness. The middle class will disappear.

More and more state/police/legal controls will be put in place – as they have been increasingly since the first world war and as they seem to be accelerating more and more lately. And those controls will create the friction and the very disturbances they are there to prevent.  Police states create criminal responses.

John F. Kennedy famously said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

But – and here’s the real news – many people will simply opt out of all that.  Many people will go off the grid, off the radar and off the social media.  They will not vote.  They will not work in the ‘system’ and they will become a real ‘underclass’, a relatively feral, passively revolutionary contingent that cooperates amongst themselves and like-minded groups away from the high-density ‘hives’.

The revolution so long predicted will be passive.  Non-violent.  It will be quiet.  And it will be by way of a subversive black market, disconnect, invisible rejection of the hive.  It will be almost an evolutionary departure.

And 100 years from now, the new alien will be them.