Some say the world will end on December 21 of this year. If, however, the Earth lives to see a December 22 and beyond, it will be a fascinating place.

By David Silva

Yes, it’s still those first bright and optimistic clean-slate days of the New Year when (most) diet and exercise routines are still being adhered to. But – let’s flash-forward to 11:59 p.m. December 21, 2012.

Across the planet, everyone from crystal-adorned New Agers and purple-robed mystics to sullen Goths in black eyeliner are gathered on hilltops and mountain peaks to catch Earth’s grand finale.

You’re there, wearing everything you own because you cashed out your stock portfolio, emptied the kids’ college trusts, short-sold your house and eBayed all your worldly goods to raise a pile of hard currency, which you’ve since blown on that one, last, wild weekend in Vegas. Your stomach churning from your final meal of Lobster Newburg and filet mignon (why worry about calories and cholesterol?), you lift your bleary eyes to the starry heavens and giggle like a giddy schoolgirl. It’s the end of the world and baby – you’re ready!

Five, four, three…you take a deep breath…aaaand…Nothing.

Across the globe, millions of New Agers, mystics, Goths and you are simultaneously checking watches to see if they’re working properly. Seconds turn to minutes, minutes to hours and still, the heavens refuse to open, the seas simply do not rise, and if there’s a black hole or rogue planet heading our way, it’s taking its sweet time. Finally, at exactly one second past midnight, as the date unexpectedly turns to December 22, 2012, someone says what everyone’s been thinking for the past 24 hours:

“We’ve been had.”

What if the end of the world came and nothing happened? What if the clock ran out on the Mayan long calendar and Time just laughed as it went about business as usual?

Preparing for the apocalypse is easy, once you get past the freaking-out part. All one has to do is wait and let the calendar take care of everything. When you think about it, waiting for the end of all things is so easy, you can do it in your sleep, which perhaps is a big reason why end-of-the-world predictions are so popular.

Conversely, preparing for the future is hard. That requires foresight, planning, a lot of hard work and groceries – which is why we reached out to some experts to get a sense of what the future may hold, in the event there is a day after December 21, 2012.

A VAST SEA OF CENTENARIANS

“Fifty-year-olds and 60-year-olds have not only their kids to worry about, but also their parents,” says Michael Rogers, a New York City-based futurist. “That’s why they’re growing really interested in a technology called ‘aging in place,’ which is part of a broader concept of people being allowed to stay in their homes for as long as possible, with nursing homes as a last resort.

“Sensors with intelligence and a wireless connection to the Internet will be put in seniors’ homes where they can measure everything from how long the occupants are walking every day to whether they turned the gas on or off and what time they go to bed. The caregiver living 1,000 miles away will get this constant readout on their computer screen – it’s a real-time check that mom or dad are moving around and getting their morning paper, and if something goes off the rails, an alarm goes off. This technology is of great interest right now for baby boomers.”

Rogers has made a career out of closely following trends in everything from technology to public policy and then interpreting the data to make highly educated – and, more often than not – highly accurate predictions on where those trends are taking us. A leader in his field, he has worked as futurist-in-residence for the “New York Times” and writes a column called “Practical Futurist” for MSNBC.

Of particular interest to him is what the near-future – 10 to 20 years from the present – will hold for older Americans. In 2009, he conducted a study for AARP called “Boomers in Technology,” for which he held focus groups across the country with people over 50 to seek their thoughts, enthusiasms, frustrations and hopes about what modern technology means to them.

Rogers knew going into this research that, despite all those condescending text messages from snotty teens about their parents being “so lame when it comes to tech stuff,” the exact opposite was true. Baby boomers don’t just “get” tech stuff – their generation invented it.

“A really interesting thing about the baby-boomer generation is we’re not really following the pattern of our parents – the World War II generation – which seemed to get to a point in their 60s where they said: ‘That’s enough technology for me,’” says Rogers. “We, however, were pretty much the inventors of information technology. If something makes sense in our lives, we adopt it – we’re a generation of early adopters.”

But how has the proliferation of all this high-tech gadgetry affected their adoptive parents’ lives? The focus groups yielded a wealth of answers, all of which could be listed under the category: “For the better, in almost every possible way.” Tech stuff was helping the boomer generation expand their networks of friends and business contacts make more-informed consumer and political choices, stay abreast of news as never before, and generally enjoy better, more vibrant and charitable lives.

But perhaps the most-revealing finding that came out of the study was the kind of technology boomers most wanted going forward, into that as-yet-undiscovered world wherein futurists like Rogers have set up shop. What they wanted in general was safer and easier-to-use tech, most specifically as it related to healthcare.

Fortunately for the boomers, that is, in all likelihood, exactly what they’ll get.

“The area that will affect our generation the most is healthcare technology,” Rogers opines. “It will not be so much in the way of new medicines; it will be more in the usage of information technology. An emerging technology is what people call ‘Doc in a Box.’ Instead of having a nurse come visit people with chronic conditions, there will be a box put in homes that can perform whatever tests are needed, like blood sugar checks. You’ll get up in the morning and the box will ask: ‘How did you sleep?’ ‘How is your energy level?’ It asks a series of questions that performs whatever diagnostics are needed, then uploads this data through digital technology to your doctor. Only when something is really wrong will they send someone out.”

Rogers also sees a time, probably by the end of this decade, when all a medical practitioner needs to do to access a patient’s complete medical records is scan a chip implanted in the fleshy part of the patient’s arm. That now-emerging technology holds great promise in solving the age-old problem of treating sick or injured people unable to communicate what’s wrong with them.

This should go a long way in helping fulfill a recent prediction by the World Future Society that more than half of all baby boomers – about 106 million strong –- will live healthy lives beyond the age of 100.

But won’t centenarians’ parts still wear out, even if "we" don’t? The society, which publishes “The Futurist Magazine,” cites ongoing research in such Star Trek-like technology as a robotic surgical machine that will literally build living organ tissue right in a hospital ward. “The process, called bioprinting, could use the patient’s own cells as a catalyst and thereby not only help alleviate demands for new organ donations, but also negate the resistance of many patients’ bodies to transplanted organs,” writer Vladimir Miranov noted in materials provided us by the society.

WHERE NO AVATAR IS ABOVE THE LAW

With information as critically sensitive as medical records (not to mention military research and development) increasingly becoming a purview of the digital world, the importance of protecting the data from hackers and cyber-terrorists has become nothing less than a national security issue. That would explain why the U.S. government has suddenly gotten very serious about developing and promoting another technology – one that Rogers and others see coming to the fore by 2020: Legal Internet identities.

Gone will be the age of online anonymity, where anyone can do or say anything in cyberspace – like, say, insisting the world will end in December of 2012 – without worrying that their actions will come back to haunt them.

“We’ll move out of the area of anonymity that really has characterized the Internet since it began,” he continues. “The Internet is getting too important in commerce and so many other ways that we need to know who’s out there. Quietly, the government is working on ways to prove who you are online. It’ll be something like driver's licenses – voluntary, but if you want to get on an airplane, it’s handy to have. Americans are resistant to national ID cards, but it’s pretty clear we need Internet IDs.”

According to the World Future Society, that ID may come in the form of online avatars, empowered as our legal proxies to “conduct such high-level tasks as performing intensive research, posting blog entries and Facebook updates, and managing businesses.”

“The lines between ourselves and our virtual other selves will blur to the point where most of us will, in essence, have multiple personalities,” the society reports.

The rapidly approaching reality of legal, permanent and wholly traceable online IDs raises its own set of questions. Rogers nailed the biggest concern with a single word: privacy.

“There will be a lot of drawbacks around the question of privacy,” he says. “We’re already seeing your phone broadcasting where you are. By 2020, there will be all kinds of objects in your home that will broadcast a lot of information.”

YES, BUT WILL THERE BE COMPLIMENTARY PEANUTS?

If we are willing to presume that the world will soldier on beyond the end of this year, and with the prospect of so many boomers conceivably living longer than the average shelf life of a Twinkie, one has to ask: What are they going to do to keep themselves entertained?

Most futurists agree the future of entertainment will involve more of what we have today: More home-based fun and games through our computers, pads and smart phones; more online video gaming, albeit fantastically complex video games on a super-mega-massively multiplayer-role-playing scale; and much, much more video and music on demand that will allow consumers to fast-download pretty much any movie or song ever created.

We might also get a chance at entertaining ourselves with an experience not previously viewed as entertainment: space travel. The World Future Society cites a Futron/Zogby estimate that by 2021, the heavens above will be filled with some 13,000 suborbital passengers shelling out a collective $650 million for the thrill of escaping the bounds of Earth. Unfortunately, that thrill will likely be reserved only for those wealthy few who can afford it.

ONE USERNAME, ONE VOTE

Back on Earth, civic-minded folks will see significant changes in how we elect or reject politicians seeking public office. Perhaps the most significant development in the U.S. will probably be a national embrace, at long last, of online voting, says Rogers.

“Several countries now have completely turned to online voting,” he says. “Those tend to be some of the Eastern European countries – very young democracies. The thing that’s blocked online voting in this country is our Constitution. The founding fathers made sure that every single state controlled their own voting to keep the federal government from having too much power. To switch to voting online, you have to have 50 states that agree to it. It’s ironic that, because we’re such an old democracy, we may be one of the last countries to do it.”

What will eventually push the switch to online ballot-casting, Rogers says, is the adoption of the aforementioned legal online identities. Once that technology is perfected, again within the next 10 years, the rest will follow.

But 10 years is a long time if you’re a politician looking to grab the reins of power before arthritis sets in. Already, candidates for public office have turned to cyberspace as a way to bypass traditional media gatekeepers and take their cases directly to the people. Prior to the Iowa Caucuses, Republican presidential candidate Michelle Bachmann did just that by using her smart phone to target potential voters, some of whom were standing mere feet away.

That kind of high-tech campaigning impressed Matt Silverman, a young writer and humorist whose 2010 article: “Four Predictions for the Future of Politics and Social Media,” anticipated what he called “the devaluation of old media” in influencing future elections.

“Essentially, it’s a tech-forward form of political canvassing,” Silverman says. “Whereas volunteers might go door-to-door to get out the vote in historically partisan neighborhoods, Bachmann's team [used] a new form of data to target potential supporters. Location is one data point, but future campaigns should be paying attention to what marketers are looking at: chiefly, a person's ‘social.'”

“If banks and marketers can predict what kinds of products you’ll buy or whether you’ll default on a loan based on your web-browsing habits and Facebook friends, why couldn't campaigns predict who you'll vote for?” Silverman continues. “By crunching lots of data, campaigns could better see where they need to spend their money. That’s the future of social-media politicking, for sure.”

Silverman isn’t a futurist – he just knows the power of new media. A features editor for Mashable, a website focused on social media news, he spends pretty much all of his waking hours analyzing, reporting and generally thinking about where social media is taking us. He foresees a time, very soon, when the use of social media, or the lack thereof, will alone be enough to make or break a political candidate.

“New media is not inherently good or bad,” he says. “I see the pros of it: Politicians will need to be better at engaging in a direct dialogue with constituents. People will grow tired of seeing a 30-second TV spot that they can’t interact with. However, with the flood of new communication channels comes potential for abuse. There’s no network or newspaper saying what is or isn't appropriate for publication, so campaigns may view it as a free-for-all, in terms of content. Lots and lots of bad content isn't necessarily better than a few good TV spots.”

So there ya have it – the future – or at least a little bit of the future as envisioned by some very smart people in positions to know what they’re talking about.

With a few notable exceptions (let’s not even think about the dire predictions about climate change, jobs, the economy, people outliving their savings, wars and the rumors of wars), the world of tomorrow promises to be a vibrant, wired and wildly creative place full of healthy, long-lived people sharing their common experiences with one another at the speed of light.

It certainly seems like something to which we can all look forward.

Or the world could end on December 21 – in which case – never mind.

David Silva is a regular contributor to “Life Afater 50” and lifeafter50.com. He is an award-winning freelance journalist and has served as an editor for the Los Angeles Times Community News Division.