22nd Century: Predictions

Here are some amazing predictions about human society and the earth on which we live for the 22nd century. Remember, these are intelligent predictions, whatever really happens remains to be seen.

• From 2100 onward, 12% (about 1250) of the bird species existing at the beginning of the 21st century are expected to be extinct or threatened with extinction.
• From the beginning of the 22nd century, human intelligence will be vastly amplified by artificial intelligence.
• Around the same time, nomadic floating cities will be roaming the oceans.
• Also, by 2100, Emperor Penguins could be pushed to the brink of extinction due to global climate change, according to a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution study from January 2009. The study applied mathematical models to predict how the loss of sea ice from climate warming would affect an Antarctica colony of Emperor Penguins, and they forecast a decline of 87% in the colony’s population by the end of the century.
• In 2110, man-made control of earthquakes and tsunamis will become possible.
• In 2120, mind uploading will enter mainstream society.
• From 2130 onwards, a large-scale civilian settlement of the Moon will be underway.
• From the second half of the 22nd century onwards, interstellar travel will become possible.
• Also, in 2150, androids will be physically indistinguishable from real humans.
• In 2160, mass extinctions will level off.
• Around the same time, the first humans will live to be bicentenarians.
• In 2180, antimatter power plants are about to start up.
• In 2182, with an estimated probability of 0.07%, Apollo asteroid 1999 RQ₃₆ (also known as 101955 Bennu) could hit the Earth. It has a mean diameter of approximately 493 meters.
• In 2190, global languages will have become few in number.
• According to the UN Population Bureau, life expectancy in 2200 will be around 100 for developed countries and the world population will be about 8.5 billion.

“When the number of factors coming into play in a phenomenological complex is too large scientific method in most cases fails. One need only think of the weather, in which case the prediction even for a few days ahead is impossible.” ― Albert Einstein

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Lesbianism in Ancient Greece

Women in Ancient Greece were sequestered with each other, and men with men. In this homosocial environment erotic and sexual relationships between males were common and recorded in literature, art, and philosophy. Hardly anything is recorded about homosexual activity between women. Nevertheless, there is some speculation that similar relationships existed between women and girls.

Aphrodite on a swan, in Kameiros, Rhodes.

Much of the daily lives of women in ancient Greece is unknown, specifically their expressions of sexuality. Although men participated in pederastic relationships outside of marriage, there is no clear evidence that women were allowed or encouraged to have same-sex relationships before or during marriage as long as their marital obligations were met.

Women who appear on Greek pottery are depicted with affection, and in instances where women appear only with other women, their images are eroticized: bathing, touching one another, with dildos placed in and around such scenes, and sometimes with imagery also seen in depictions of heterosexual marriage or pederastic seduction. Whether this eroticism represents an accurate representation of life in ancient Greece is unknown.

There are a few sources available to us however, here is an excerpt of a play by the poet Lucian of Samosata (CE 125 – after CE 180) which illustrates a view on lesbianism in ancient Greece:

Leaena
I love you as much as I love any woman, but she’s terribly like a man.

Clonarium
I don’t understand what you mean, unless she’s a sort of woman for the ladies. They say there are women like that in Lesbos, with faces like men, and unwilling to consort with men, but only with women, as though they themselves were men.

Leaena
It’s something like that.

Clonarium
Well, tell me all about it; tell me how she made her first advances to you. How you were persuaded, and what followed?

Leaena
She herself and another rich woman, with the same accomplishments, Demonassa from Corinth were organising a drinking party, and had taken me along to provide them with music. But, when I had finished playing, and it was late and time to turn inand they were drunk, Megilla said, “Come along Leaena, it’s high time we were in bed; you sleep here between us.”

Clonarium
And did you? What happened after that?

Leaena
At first they kissed me like men, not simply bringing their lips to mine, but opening their mouths a little, embracing me, and squeezing my breasts. Demonassa even bit me as she kissed, and I didn’t know what to make of it. […] “And do you find these desires enough?” said I. “If you don’t believe me Leaena,” said she, ” just give me a chance, and you’ll find I’m as good as any man; I have a substitute of my own. Only give me a chance, and you’ll see.”

Well I did, my dear, because she begged so hard and presented me with a costly necklace, and a very fine linen dress. Then I threw my arms around her as though she were a man, and she went to work, kissing me, and panting, and apparently enjoying herself immensely.

Clonarium
What did she do? How? That’s what I’m most interested to hear.

Leaena
Don’t enquire too closely into the details; they’re not very nice; so, by Aphrodite in heaven, I won’t tell you!

– Lucian of Samosata, Dialogues of the Courtesans (Section 5; Leaena and Clonarium)

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The Microskirt in Kogal

A microskirt is a very short skirt indeed. It is shorter than a miniskirt, being less than 20 cm (8 inches) in length. They are predominantly worn by teenage girls or young women to evoke an impression of cheekiness and playfulness, especially in an appropriate social context.

Japanese student with ‘kogal’ loose socks and skirt

Microskirts are rarely worn as streetwear in Europe.

They are, however, quite popular among girls in Japan, where they are made part of school uniforms.

The uniforms grils wear to school in Japan always include a skirt which is made shorter by the ‘popular girls’ within the kogal subculture – the culture of popular youths.

Microskirts are important within kogal and the fashion item is popular among teenage girls, especially among those who want to practise panchira, a form of softcore exhibitionism where women try to show just a hint of their panties.

Nowadays the term panchira is also used by Japanese women to warn each other that their underwear is visible.

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Kinship‏ Systems

The anthropological term kinship entails all human relations or connections by blood, marriage or adoption. Seven major patterns of kinship systems of the human family can be identified through anthropological and ethnic terminology:

• Eskimo kinship (lineal kinship)
• Hawaiian kinship (generational system)
• Sudanese kinship (descriptive system)
• Iroquois kinship (bifurcate merging)
• Crow kinship (expansion of bifurcate merging)
• Omaha kinship (expansion of bifurcate merging)

All systems listed below have a nuclear family in which everything is viewed from a person called Ego; he or she has a brother and a sister, a mother and a father. All supplementary descriptions (listed below) explain the uniqueness of the respective kinship system.

Eskimo: Ego has a mother and a father, a brother and a sister. Siblings of Ego’s mother and father are known as aunts and uncles, all of their children are cousins. In short, this is the common European kinship system. (lineal kinship)

Hawaiian: All cousins are brothers and sisters of Ego. Also, all aunts and uncles are mothers and fathers of Ego. Basically, Ego’s entire family consists mothers and fathers, and brothers and sisters. (generational system)

Sudanese: Ego has no aunts or uncles but father’s brothers and sisters, and mother’s brothers and sisters instead. The children of these people are paternal and maternal cousins to Ego; the paternal and maternal cousins who are children of Ego’s father’s brother and Ego’s mother’s sister are parallel cousins, the paternal and maternal cousins who are children of Ego’s father’s sister and Ego’s mother’s brother are cross cousins. (descriptive system)

The Iroquois, Crow, and Omaha kinship systems have the following in common: Ego has a mother and a father, a brother and a sister. The sisters of Ego’s mother are Ego’s mother as well, the brothers of Ego’s father are Ego’s father also. All children of Ego’s mothers and fathers are his sisters and brothers. The brothers of Ego’s mother and the sisters of Ego’s father are Ego’s uncles and aunts respectively.

Iroquois: The children of Ego’s uncle and aunt are Ego’s cousins. (bifurcate merging)

Crow: The children of Ego’s uncle are Ego’s cousins; the female children of Ego’s aunt are Ego’s aunts as well, the male children of Ego’s aunt are Ego’s fathers. (expansion of bifurcate merging)

Omaha: The children of Ego’s aunt are Ego’s cousins; the male children of Ego’s uncle are Ego’s uncle as well, the female children of Ego’s uncle are Ego’s mothers. (expansion of bifurcate merging)

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Dutch Bible Belt

The United States and the Netherlands share a regional social-religious phenomenon called the Bible Belt, also known in the Netherlands as the Bijbelgordel. In both countries the Bible Belt is a strip of land which is inhabited chiefly by a concentration of segregated conservative Protestants.

The Dutch Bible Belt with religious prevalence shown in red

The Netherlands, best known abroad for its liberal policies on sex, drugs and homosexuality, is also home to a Protestant Bible Belt. It is a world away from big cities like Amsterdam or Rotterdam, where society is a lot more free and diverse.

Just 90 minutes’ drive from Amsterdam and its temptations is a village so devout that swearing is banned, women refuse to wear trousers and the bank machine does not dispense cash on a Sunday.

The Bijbelgordel stretches from Zeeland, through the West-Betuwe and Veluwe, to the northern parts of the province Overijssel. According to official figures 41 percent of Dutch have no religion, 30 percent are Catholic, 12 percent Protestant, 6 percent Reformed Protestant and 6 percent are Muslim. Currently, the traditional Dutch churches have around 250,000 members.

The Protestant faith in the Netherlands is fragmented. Besides the traditional Protestant church, there is also a more fundamentalist Reformed Protestant Church, formed in the 19th century.

When Flanders and North Brabant were reconquered by the Spanish army during the Eighty Years’ War, their Protestant inhabitants were required to either convert to Catholicism or leave. Many emigrated north of the border, particularly during the Twelve Years’ Truce of 1609 – 1621. Many of them later became staunch supporters of the pietist movement known as the nadere reformatie (further reformation).

In Bijbelgordel communities, a strong religious tone in public life is accompanied by conservative outlook and an emphasis on traditional values: a preference for large families (protected sex is frowned upon); children attend special religious schools; parents are suspicious towards state-run vaccination programmes; women are not allowed to ‘rule’ in a professional capacity and are not expected to work when they start a family.

The Bijbelgordel differs from Dutch society in many aspects, amongst them a regular Sunday church attendance – often twice on a Sunday. The region also bears a strong contrast to the traditionally Catholic provinces of Noord-Brabant and Limburg in the south and northern parts of the Netherlands where Sunday church attendance averages between a mere 2% to 3% of the population. Overall, the Netherlands become increasingly secular with every passing year.

In the Bible Belt however, conservatism slows this trend. The doctrine of the faith plays a central role in the life of the more fundamentalist communities. Consequently, they typically oppose the liberal ways of Dutch life – perpetuating their segregated outlook on life. Nevertheless, secularisation is causing the Bible Belt to slowly shrink and become clustered into ever smaller societies.

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Superiority Theory

‘The superiority theory implies that the point of joking is to feel better about our sorry selves by mocking people or situations we find ridiculous. This is probably the oldest attempt to explain what’s going on when we tell jokes, dating back at least as far as Aristotle, who called humour ‘educated insolence’.

Seventeenth century stand-up Thomas Hobbes thought that laughter was ‘nothing else but a sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others’. Later refinements of the theory suggest that we also gain some psychological comfort from laughing at people who we purport to be ridiculous, but secretly hate and fear.

The superiority idea was revisited by Henri Bergson in his famous 1900 essay ‘Laughter and the meaning of the Comic’. He thought that in making a joke or at laughing at one we are experiencing a spontaneous failure of empathy: the situations which strike us as comic are those that enable us to see a human being as somehow mechanical, as less than human. For Bergson, joking had a social purpose: to ridicule eccentricity, thus brushing aside any untidy idiosyncrasies and weaknesses which might otherwise constitute triphazards on the pathway of society.

More recently, Charles R. Gruner has developed a new superiority theory which reads joking as a playful game, but one with clear winners and losers. Finding the winner and loser isn’t always simple. Often, the joke-teller ‘wins’ and the audience ‘loses’ – for example, in the case of a riddle where the teller’s intention is to leave his audience stumped. Even simple puns can be seen as expressions of superiority according to this reading, since the punner intends to prove himself intellectually superior to his audience.

“I used to think that the brain was the greatest organ in human body, then I realized ‘Hey! Look what’s telling me that!'”
– Emo Philips

Other jokes have a clearer butt – an Irishman, a lawyer or some other hapless (deserving?) victim – and joke-teller and audience both ‘win’ at the expense of the character in the joke.’

“You cannot have everything. I mean, where would you put it?”
– Steve Wright

– Carr J., Greeves L. 2006. The Naked Jape – Uncovering The Hidden World Of Jokes London, Great Britain: Penguin Books (2007) p. 89-90

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Unknown Facts About The Kama Sutra‏

The exact origins of the Kama Sutra are quite vague, but it was written between the 1st and 4th centuries AD by a man called Vatsyayana, who lived in the North Indian city of Benares – now called Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh, India.

It was first translated into English by the 19th Century British explorer Sir Richard F. Burton in 1876. Born in 1821, the adventurer, who spoke 25 languages, came across the Kama Sutra in Bombay in 1842 and became fascinated with Indian erotica. Following a visit to a prostitute, Burton, who had three Indian mistresses said:

“We British never knew of this kind of love-making. Had we known, we would not have ruined the lives of so many British virgins.”

Kama Sutra Illustration

In 1883 Burton risked prosecution and imprisonment under the Obscene Publications Act after publishing 250 copies of the Kama Sutra privately in Britain. The book did not become legal in Britain until 1963.

It was written in the ancient Sanskrit language. In Sanskrit, Kama means desire and Sutra means rules. In the context of the book “desire” includes singing, reading, poetry and dancing as well as sex.

The Kama Sutra contains a total of 64 sexual positions. Vatsyayana believed there were eight ways of making love, multiplied by eight positions within each of these. In the book, they are known as the 64 Atrs.

Only about 20 per cent of the book is devoted to sexual positions. The remainder gives guidance on how to be a good citizen and insights into men and women in relationships, a bit like Men Are From Mars & Women Are From Venus.

The Kama Sutra describes making love as “divine union”. Vatsyayana believed that sex itself was not wrong, but doing it badly was sinful.

Lovers who suffer from medical complaints such as back pain and arthritis are warned not to attempt some of the Kama Sutra’s positions. Vatsyayana states: “They predispose for rheumatic pains and sciatica.”

After Burton published the Kama Sutra the prudish British Raj banned the book in India. At the same time they also stopped temple prostitutes and child marriages.

The Kama Sutra may have originated in India, but in 1996 the authorities there clamped down on the film “Kama Sutra – A Tale Of Love” and demanded that 14 explicit scenes were cut before it was fit to be shown to Indian audiences.

Kama Sutra Illustration

Code breakers also find the Kama Sutra fascinating as it contains instructions  for making messages unreadable – one of the earliest books to do this. The Kama Sutra included encryption as an art a woman should study, presumably to help her make secret meetings with her lovers.

Kama is the Hindu god of love. The word also refers to the pursuit of love or pleasure, one of the four aims of life in Hindu traditions. Kama is always depicted as a handsome youth, shooting arrows of love that produce love. His wife is Rati.

According to the book a man becomes irresistible to women if he ties the bone of a peacock or hyena which has been covered in gold to his right hand.

It recommends both biting and scratching as ways of improving love-making, but insists on high standards of cleanliness. It states:

“The qualities of good nails are that they should be bright, well set, clean, entire, convex, soft, and glossy in appearance. The defects of teeth on the other hand are that they are blunt, protruding from the gums, rough, soft, large, or loosely set.”

The Kama Sutra also gives tips on the best ways to arrange a house. It suggests that people will be happiest if they have a pot for spitting in, a lute hanging from an elephant’s tooth, a soft bed and pots of flowers

A chapter is devoted to methods of seducing and getting away with sleeping with other men’s wives. But at the end Vatsyayana does admit that men shouldn’t make love to married women.

The book contains an early recipe for Viagra. It suggests that sparrows eggs boiled in milk and then mixed with clarified butter and honey will do wonders for a man’s love life.

There are 10 methods of kissing in the Kama Sutra (including) – the nominal kiss, the probing kiss, the touching kiss, the straight kiss, the bent kiss, the turned kiss, the pressed kiss and the greatly pressed kiss – and four ways to administer the kiss. That gives a total of 40 different ways to kiss a lover.

In April 1998 former president Bill Clinton was handed a copy of the Kama Sutra as he did a walk-about with Canadian Prime Minister Jean Cretien after the Summit of the Americas in Santiago, Chile.

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Pederasty in Ancient Greece‏

‘Anal intercourse in general, usually between a man and an adolescent boy’ is the archaic meaning of the word paederasty.

The Greek word paiderastia is an abstract noun of feminine gender. It is formed from paiderastês. Although the word pais can refer to a child of either sex, paiderastia is defined as “the love of boys,” and the verb paiderasteuein as “to be a lover of boys.”

The erastes touching the chin and genitals of the eromenos. Side A of an Attic black-figure neck-amphora, ca. 540 BC.

Pederasty in ancient Greece was a socially acknowledged relationship between an adult and a younger male usually in his teens. It was characteristic of the Archaic and Classical periods.

The words: erastês and erômenos are standard terms for the two pederastic roles.

The erastês is the older lover, seen as the active or dominant partner. Erastês should be distinguished from Greek paiderastês, which meant “lover of boys” usually with a negative connotation. The erastês himself might only be in his early twenties, and thus the age difference between the two lovers might be negligible.

The erômenos was regarded as a future citizen, not an “inferior object of sexual gratification,” and was portrayed with respect in art. The word can be understood as an endearment such as a parent might use, found also in the poetry of Sappho and a designation of only relative age.

Both art and other literary references show that the erômenos was at least a teen, with modern age estimates ranging from 13 to 20, or in some cases up to 30. Most evidence indicates that to be an eligible erômenos, a youth would be of an age when an aristocrat began his formal military training, that is, from fifteen to seventeen.

Vase paintings and an obsession with the beloved’s appealing thighs in poetry indicate that when the pederastic couple engaged in sex acts, the preferred form was intercrural. To preserve his dignity and honor, the erômenos limits the man who desires him to penetration between closed thighs.

Pederastic courtship; detail from a black-figure Attic hydria, ca. 540 BC.

Anal sex may be depicted, but far more rarely. The evidence is not explicit and is open to interpretation. Some vase paintings show the erastês seated with an erection and the erômenos either approaching or climbing into his lap. The composition of these scenes is the same as that for depictions of women mounting men who are seated and aroused for intercourse.

As a cultural norm considered apart from personal preference, anal penetration was most often seen as dishonorable to the one penetrated, or shameful. A fable attributed to Aesop tells how Aeschyne (Shame) consented to enter the human body from behind only as long as Eros did not follow the same path, and would fly away at once if he did. Oral sex is likewise not depicted, or is indicated only indirectly; anal or oral penetration seems to have been reserved for prostitutes or slaves.

The myth of Ganymede’s abduction by Zeus was invoked as a precedent for the pederastic relationship, as Theognis asserts to a friend:

There is some pleasure in loving a boy [paidophilein], since once in fact even the son of Cronus [that is, Zeus], king of immortals, fell in love with Ganymede, seized him, carried him off to Olympus, and made him divine, keeping the lovely bloom of boyhood [paideia]. So, don’t be astonished, Simonides, that I too have been revealed as captivated by love for a handsome boy.

Greek myths provide more than fifty examples of young men who were the lovers of gods. Pederastic love affairs are ascribed to Zeus, Poseidon, Apollo, Orpheus, Hercules, Dionysus, Hermes, and Pan. All the Olympian gods except Ares had these relationships, which are adduced by scholars to show that the specific customs of paiderastia originated in initiatory rituals.

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