I haven't yet mentioned to either of you just how much the global economic system will have changed in the next five hundred years. You heard me right. Global. It all begins in Europe with your not particularly well-loved merchant class. They will expand in power and influence as the power of kings wanes. There will simply be more commerce. The gold and other riches that Spain will be plundering from the Americas will be reinvested to make her quite a wealthy and powerful nation, for a little while, until she can no longer sustain her own divisiveness and corruption. But business will soon take off all across Europe with manufacturing and trading of goods, including sugar, metals, wood and many other goods from the Americas. Following the revolutions, the Industrial Revolution, when various forms of energy, beginning but not ending with steam and coal, will result in great factories with machines and staffed by poor workers living in near slave-like conditions, producing more quickly as a team within days items that once took months to manufacture. All the gold of the Americas is going to open the most lucrative markets your world has ever seen.
There will be even more revolutions, in the name of socialism and communism to combat and reverse the glaring social inequalities brought on by capitalism, or business gone berserk. Russia, China, and even two countries in Latin America will be transformed by such revolutionary movements, themselves every bit as brutal and murderous as the monarchies and capitalist overlords they will be overthrowing. The struggle between production of wealth and a just redistribution of wealth will be prolonged and bitter and even now in 2017 there are many people fighting for social and economic justice and equality.
In the twentieth and now in the twenty-first centuries growing numbers of people will be living in cities instead of growing food on the land. The world human population will double, triple and quadruple, especially halfway through the twentieth it will grow exponentially from three billion in 1960 to over seven billion now just fifty-seven years later. China will be the world's most populous nation at over 1.388 billion people, followed by India at 1.342 billion. Commerce will be global, with goods freely flowing between countries and creating wealth for some and economic hardship for many others.
On the whole, people will be wealthier today, by far, than your own Mexica or Spaniards of 1519, though there will still be grave concerns of poverty and starvation, especially in many of the African countries, a continent still traumatized even more than Latin America, by colonization, foreign exploitation and the slave trade. Food production will be global, with movements towards a local and sustainable food supply in North American and European countries. The global means of food production will be on such a grand scale that it still staggers even my own imagination.
Communications will also be global. Those little boxes and tiles called computers and phones? That seem to work like magic? Those are the means of keeping people all over the world connected. It is called the internet, you cannot see it because it is an invisible phenomenon with near spiritual and magical properties, through which you can learn and read all the information and all the knowledge of the entire world, present and past, but, fortunately, not for the future.
Almost everyone in the world will have even the most basic skills of reading and writing, and more people will be educated in universities than at any other time in world history, for higher education, while still expensive, will no longer be the exclusive property of the upper classes and aristocracy. In many countries, such as here in Canada, the family and religion are going to lose much of their strength and influence. All the incredible wealth, knowledge and learning that we are now enjoying, that your people would never even conceive or imagine, will do much to advance us as people but also much to divide and isolate us. In wealthier countries people will be increasingly alone, living alone, not marrying or ending their marriages, and many will be expecting a lonely and friendless old age, because we are not going to be able to cope well psychologically or emotionally with these huge and lightning quick changes and advances.
Our very planet, Earth, which we call home, is also now imperilled. All the engines and machines of industry and commerce have wreaked havoc on our air, water and landmasses. This planet is gradually getting warmer, and it is feared that some parts, within my lifetime, could become uninhabitable because of heat, drought, fires, floods and rising sea levels. There is a concerted effort all over the world to fight and slow these changes as we are learning to harvest the energy of your gods, Ilhuitl, the sun and the wind, the ocean, and the depths of the earth, for meeting all our energy needs. Whether we will get this done in time is up for debate and many are living in fear that this century could be our last.
We have many in the scientific community working hard to develop the means and the technology for humans to travel to other planets, even visiting star systems and galaxies very distant from our earth and solar system. We have already flown to the Moon, and we have sent machines of exploration and research farther than the outer planets. There is also a growing dread that with this planet at risk of becoming uninhabitable that we are going to have to think up ways of making our near neighbour, Mars, inhabitable again for human life (if it ever was to begin with), an absolutely hare-brained notion, but we shall see, eh?
I realize, Ilhuitl and Juan, that I have already told you far too much and I can see by both your eyes and faces that you are growing weary of my discourse. Perhaps we should go walking in the forest nearby and simply enjoy the trees? Yes, I can see that you both like the idea. Let's go.
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