It has occurred to me several times in the past that Harry Potter is going to live a good long while. If we say wizards can realistically expect to live to ~150 years old, then Harry could live well into the 22nd century, reaching age 150 in 2130.

There are a few fics which feature Harry as an adult Auror, but all of them seem to be rather lazy, in that they don't really do any worldbuilding. The wizarding world is almost entirely unchanged culturally, and the Muggle world is generally completely avoided. This is understandable, as coming up with a comprehensive vision of the future is hard enough without having to do it for wizards as well, but it's still lazy writing.

Let's confront that laziness and brainstorm some ideas. In order to be specific, let's say we're talking about the year 2065. This would make Harry 85 years old. Let's say that makes him physically equivalent to ~45-year-old Muggle. Still has colour in his hair, but grey hairs are beginning to appear.

Two activities:

1. What questions should be considered when constructing this future world?

2. What are some potential answers to those questions?

I'll start us off in answering question one.

Wizarding society

How has wizarding society changed since 1998, both in Britain and globally?

How does it interact with the Muggle world?

What Muggle ideas have penetrated wizarding society?

How big is the wizarding population?

What are the major social issues of the day?

Who are the major players?

What new magic has been developed?

What magic has gone out of fashion/obsolete?

Muggle Technology/Science/Industry

What forms of energy generation are being used?

What advances have been made in AI and robotics?

What advances have been made in medical technology, especially technology capable of expanding the human lifespan?

What “wearable tech” exists, including technology incorporated into the human body?

What do computers look like? How much computing power do they have?

Is human genetic manipulation in use? To what extent?

What advances have been made in GM crops?

How has transportation changed, both individual and public?

What consumer technology is currently “in”?

What advances have been made in military technology, especially with regard to unmanned capabilities?

What advances have been made in space exploration and colonisation?

How common is 3D printing?

Muggle politics/society

What is the UK population?

What is the global population?

What is the status of the EU, and the UK’s relationship with it?

How prominent have China, India and Brazil become?

What are the major political issues of the day?

What impact is climate change having on society?

Has the UK’s political/constitutional structure changed?

What is the USA’s status in the world?

Has income inequality increased, decreased, stayed the same?

What lifestyle changes have occurred?

What are current fashion trends?

What regions of the world are considered problematic?

What regions of the world are considered success stories?

Have corporations increased in power?

How much does advertising penetrate daily life?

 

Those are a lot of questions... I won't even try to answer them, but I have a general idea.

Humanity is growing in alarming numbers. They start taking more land for building cities, and for growing crops. This coupled with pollution ruins the ecosystem, which causes magical plants to die or mutate, rendering some potions null. Magical creatures have less and less areas to roam.
This causes an insurgency among the Magical community, Wizards and Magical Creatures alike want to do something about the "Muggle Problem". Some of them start to senselessly attack Muggles, others try to politically do what Dumbledore and Grindelwald dreamed of, pushing to end the Stature and rule Muggles, for the greater good.
Muggle researchers discover "dark matter"... which is actually magic. They can't control it, but they can detect it, and they come close to discover the magical community. Maybe they create technology that can repel "dark matter", which puts Wizards at disadvantage.

All this finds our retired hero at a moral dilemma, trying to find balance between his distaste for "Death Eater supremacy ideas", and his own resentment of how the Muggle are ruining the world.

 

I actually believe that World War III is inevitable, one way or another. Probably between USA and Russia, but that's just a guess.

As JKR said, muggle and wizarding wars feed each other through some kind of supernatural connection.

This leads me to believe that there will be another powerful Dark Wizard emerging in the Wizarding world at roughly the same time as WW3 begins.

Now, as much as DLP likes to think that Harry in the future is a badass, let me remind you that he's no Dumbledore or Voldemort. He may be competent, but being competent is not enough, you have to be a magical prodigy, which Harry isn't.

This in turn leads me to believe that while Harry will fight this new wizard, he will be no match for him and a new Hero will emerge to defeat this new dark wizard. In fact, Harry may be killed by this new threat.

JKR also said that while in the future muggles will notice more things about magic, they will never discover it and the magical and muggle worlds will never rejoin. Interesting choice of words: never.

So, by JKR's own words, no matter how many centuries pass, the Statute of Secrecy will be never ended. Muggles will never learn about the magical world etc.

This gives us some degree of help in worldbuilding, because we have at least this one certainty.

Regarding the wizarding population, I suspect that it will become larger, but not by much. While muggleborns help out, they're not nearly enough.

 

Or an almost-WWIII like the "Wet Firecracker War" in "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress"?
If humanity is going to expand to space, the wizards gonna ride along and set up secret wizard communities on some big-ass rocks in the asteroid belt.

 

Do you have a link to that information?

 

Both the muggles and the wizards continue to grow, and some wizards want a "final solution" against the muggles. Powerful yet aged, Harry Potter must maneuver two communities to avoid war. He encourages muggles to continue their space program, and secretly helps the development of interstellar travel.

With his guidance muggles begin leaving the planet, persuaded by reports that global warming is running out of control and Earth will be uninhabitable within decades (in reality wizards had discovered a solution for it). Giant city-ships are built after a cluster of habitable planets are discovered, and muggles and wizards part ways, muggles to the stars while wizards and other magical beings spread out on a suddenly empty Earth.

Fast forward three or four centuries...

 

I think it might have been on her old website, I recall that it was from an interview where someone asked about muggles ever finding out about magic and she replied:

"While muggles will notice more in the future, the two worlds will never totally merge."

I'm sure Taure has the relevant quote, he seems to have a way with them.

 

How has wizarding society changed since 1998, both in Britain and globally?
That is a very difficult question to answer.

How does it interact with the Muggle world?
If it stays secret I can't see it changing too much. Possibly at one point the Muggle Government might demand more oversight given how inept they appear to be.

Personally I think JKR is wrong though in saying it will flat out never be revealed. The fact is the mass proliferation of camera phones, CCTV and the internet will make covering up magicals more and more difficult. You can't modify the memories of the whole world.

What Muggle ideas have penetrated wizarding society?
Hopefully more democracy (I think I've argued in the past that there is no way it's truly democratic based on what we know of it's structure and how it works).

How big is the wizarding population?
It's difficult to figure out why magical Britain is so small to begin with to be honest. Even if we inflate the size of Hogwarts four-fold and account for long lifespans we're only at 30k odd witches and wizards.
Without any data that is hard to predict.

What are the major social issues of the day?
Hopefully blood will be a thing of the past. Going back to my democratization bit, I think that along with political representation will be the big one.

Who are the major players?
No clue

What new magic has been developed?
Difficult to say knowing we know nothing of Arithmancy (we are assuming that is the core to spell creation?). It could be possible that advances in muggle mathematics filter into the magical world and open up new magical possibilities.

What magic has gone out of fashion/obsolete?
I don't think practical magic will go out of fashion or become obsolete unless something better replaces the role which comes back to the previous comment

Muggle Technology/Science/Industry

What forms of energy generation are being used?
Nuclear Fusion hopefully. They predict we should have the first self-sustaining nuclear fusion plant by about 2040.

What advances have been made in AI and robotics?
It should be impressive but I don't expect flawless cyborgs.

What advances have been made in medical technology, especially technology capable of expanding the human lifespan?
It would start catching up to magicals I think. 100 to 120 years sounds about right.

What “wearable tech” exists, including technology incorporated into the human body?
Implanted brain/computer interfaces (at least in the military and high-tech industries). Phones I expect will stay external as people are fnd on being able to feel things they use. I also makes it hard to take a picture if your phone is worn.

What do computers look like? How much computing power do they have?
Keyboards will stay for a long time as will 2D screens. I don't think voice activation will ever really take off; we've had it for ages and nothing has happened with it. Aforementioned brain/computer interfaces will have a place where keyboards are not practical such as soldiers, military and (possibly) civilian pilots, and people who need faster responses than a keyboard.

Is human genetic manipulation in use? To what extent?
Mostly to correct hereditary diseases I would expect. I don't expect it to go down the path of Gattaca where non-enhanced people are second-hand citizens

What advances have been made in GM crops?
Depends if people drop their silly fears of them. Hopefully we can end world hunger with them.

How has transportation changed, both individual and public?
Electric motors for cars powered by ultra-high density batteries. Suborbital flights might be available from major transport hubs could enable a trip from Sydney to Los Angles in only a few hours (or less!). Congestion will necessitate massive public transport projects in nearly every major city.

What consumer technology is currently “in”?
Mobile/Cell phones will stay in forever and the fact they have become multimedia devices means they will keep screens for a long time. How they change from now though is difficult to predict.

What advances have been made in military technology, especially with regard to unmanned capabilities?
Drones are massively overstated by the media.

They're great for shooting dirt poor farmers with AKs in the world's shitholes but are useless against any map-worthy power because they require a connection back to base that any map-worthy power can counter with Electronic Warfare systems mounted on aircraft or the ground.

What advances have been made in space exploration and colonisation?
Hopefully scientific bases on the Moon and Mars and astronauts having visited most of the solar system's celestial bodies. I don't expect long term habitation however.

How common is 3D printing?
3D printing will never replace mass production. It will however see uses in anywhere that requires one off or small run products, and in customizable products. I would like to see 3D printed limbs, organs or even bodies (I'm thinking brain transplants).

Muggle politics/society

What is the UK population?
We can use scientific data to give it a good guess.

What is the global population?
See above, minus losses because we nuked a few places in WW3 or possibly even 4

What is the status of the EU, and the UK’s relationship with it?
As much as it's a fuckup atm, I can't see it collapsing because of internal factors. It might get run over by the Russians thought.

Assuming it's still standing, the UK will be pretty integrated into the EU out of economic necessity.

How prominent have China, India and Brazil become?
If we see a massive economic collapse which kick starts WW3, China will be the big bad. It really depends on how many nukes the West drops on them.
India is difficult to predict. At the moment they're courting both the West and Russia meaning they could go either way.

Brazil will be the dominant super-power in S-America and unless they get really fuck over in WW3 or WW4 they will stay that way for a long while. They simply have no regional threats to them.

What are the major political issues of the day?
Difficult to predict. A Cold War or two, perhaps?

What impact is climate change having on society?
Depends how seriously the world takes it in the coming decades.

Has the UK’s political/constitutional structure changed?
I can't see the monarchy full disappearing without outside intervention.

What is the USA’s status in the world?
Depends if they survive the World Wars

Has income inequality increased, decreased, stayed the same?
Despite some claims, income inequality was far worse than it is now 100 years ago. I think it will plateau eventually but it won't get any worse.

What lifestyle changes have occurred?
Not sure

What are current fashion trends?
No way I can predict that

What regions of the world are considered problematic?
The Middle East and Africa will continue to be a problem.

What regions of the world are considered success stories?
Difficult to say.Hopefully the industrial counties without much religious strife will progress. I'm thinking Asia and S-America.

Have corporations increased in power?
I honestly don't expect and Oligarchy in the West despite dire predictions

How much does advertising penetrate daily life?
Japan levels, probably.

 

We don't even know if magic shows up on video equipment.

And hey, we have evidence of magic being able to affect concepts (the Defense Position), I'm sure casting a spell on the entire internet would not be a problem.

 

The curse could just as easily have been cast on Hogwarts where the only thing stopping Dumbledore from removing it was the fact it was hidden under layers and layers of other magic.

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It also begs the question why they don't just trial exposing themselves to the world. If it doesn't work out then they can just make every muggle forget.

I'm sure most magicals don't want to have to go to the effort of hiding.

 

Am I the only one who wishes Taure would spend less time creating thought provoking threads and more time updating his fics?

 

Here's some answers I feel fit to some of Taure's questions, starting with the muggle ones:


Muggle Technology/Science/Industry


I believe the biggest change in the near-ish future will be advances in AI and automation. Already huge number of people are basically out of jobs because the manufacturing industry has scaled down in the workforce, and the same will happen in transportation and a lot of the services. Also the management side will see a lot of change in desk jobs as automation increases.

And the same goes to military too.

Wearable tech will also increase a lot. From all kinds of HUD-systems and augmented reality to id-chips implanted under skin.

I don't see all too radical changes in the energy system; the same methods we use today will be in use in the future, too. Oil and coal will go down while solar goes up, and all kinds of smart grid features with large scale energy storage and automatic regulation will change how the system works, but for the normal people nothing much will change.

Computing power will continue to increase and sizes will drop. Also cloud-computing is probably going to be a big thing. One interesting future concept might be computers/screens integrated to pretty much everything, with a universal cloud-computing interface that brings up your personal working environment from the cloud the moment it recognizes your ID-chip nearby. So you just go the the café, and the table there opens up the same environment you closed back at home.

3D-printing as a dream of "replicators" in every home I feel isn't going to happen, but on the other hand local small scale manufacturing does have a certain appeal.

Space is and continues to be the final frontier, with no revolutionary progress made.


Muggle politics/society


The global population will top up at around 11-12e9 people. Food will be provided to more or less everyone using GM crops, but water will be the problem. Europe will see a massive influx of people from Asia and Africa, and it'll be interesting to see how the individual nation states will cope with it. EU will continue to exist, and despite differences in opinions the leaders will understand that co-operation is the only way Europe can compete with the others.

China and India will continue to grow their economies, and they will be the two largest economies in the world. They will develop thriving home markets, and there will probably be quite big differences between the "consumption culture" between China, India, Europe and North America.

The biggest societal changes that might happen come from the automation. Labor can't continue to be the most important mean of distributing wealth in the future, so some kind of Socialism 2.0 needs to happen at some point. What form it will take, I don't know, but probably something along the lines of basic income funded through property and consumption taxes combined with free markets. How this will be implemented will affect lifestyle: there could be a large underclass of people with basically no private income, and the wealthy upper class who reap in the profits from the automated industries they own, or from the relatively few specialized jobs requiring high education. In the middle there might be a lot of service-related jobs for things where human touch is more important than efficiency. Things like police, nurses, teachers, etc.


and finally, Wizarding society


I think it's inevitable that the "information age" will catch up with the wizards. From muggleborn children who won't understand why they can't just bloody check the name of the goblin leader in the 1456 rebellion from the internet ("What is this dusty heavy thing with paper in it you asked us to buy?"), to obliviators struggling to find everyone who has seen the latest viral video of wizards duking it out on the streets ("It's photoshopped! Can't you see the reflections are all wrong?")

The possibilities of interaction between the two worlds are interesting, but I don't know how much they would change in the future (i.e. do we know that these things are not being done already?) Things like using legillimency, divination, compulsion charms and the works to gain soft power over the muggles by manipulating/playing the markets and gaining masses of money and influence, to a wizard born to a family of radical Muslims deciding that magic gives a certain edge when planning a terrorist attack.

On the other hand it might prove difficult for wizards to interact with the muggles in the future, as all kinds of transactions will require electric fingerprint of some sort or another. If some kind of implanted ID-chips become mandatory, what will the wizards do? Maybe some will simply let go of magic and find it easier to live their lives as full muggle than deal with constantly breaking electric systems? Some kind of "technomagic" seems to be a necessity. Or the wizards could burrow deeper into their own closed communities, obliviating the new muggleborn from their childhood memories to protect their world from outside influences.

Other possibilities might emerge from environmental issues. Suppose that magic is directly linked to the overall ecosystem of the planet; how will things change when the climate changes? Or what will happen when the only Pacific Ocean island supporting a population of humdingers that are vital to potions industry sinks under water?

Magic in and of itself doesn't seem to develop all that fast, but that might be because the magical world has been so much better place in almost every physcal aspect than the muggle one that there hasn't been enough competition to drive innovation. Automation and advancement of technology providing true alternatives and even improvements to a lot of magical things might kick-start some kind of magical Renaissance, spawning new fields of magic like the "techomagic".

Or it might not if magic simply is too irrational to conform to any kind of method that could be used to strive towards specific goals.

 

The machines will rise up and try to enslave humans, however, they never planned on a small segment of humans capable of reality altering powers that destroy the AIs in less than a week

I'm really liking Oruma's idea of muggles leaving Earth behind and wizarding kind coming out and claiming the entire planet for themselves. Earth goes through some big changes. All traces of muggle tech are vanished, magic forests filled with magical animals become widespread, the medieval style of HP is widespread making the world resemble a high fantasy setting we see in 95% of fantasy books.

 

It's a lot of guesswork, but I would like to think that the muggleborns would step up, slowly but surely. We know that the wizarding world is slow to change, but in 50 years, with the world getting worse, not even counting any eventual world wars, I can't see he Wizarding World to be completely unaffected by climate changes and stuff.

The question is, how would they step up. Could wizards clean/purify the oceans? That would be just one example. If the population grows too much all over the world that we get even more hunger problems, I could see muggleborns who have family in those areas using magic to help. Magical crops or whatnot.

How would these changes affect magical creatures?

Or, to get back to the oceans example, how will the muggles react when the water in the oceans suddenly becomes clean again? Or the drying water reservoirs are getting fuller? You could go either way, really. Either have a story where the world gets shittier and shittier for various reasons and muggles and wizards alike don't know how to deal with it or the muggles are really confused why so many problems solve themselves for no reason.

In less depressing news, I can't imagine that muggleborns who were born after the years 2000, and are, let's say, 11 right now, and get their letters, that they would completely forsake technology. Magic is awesome but would you really let go of the internet completely?

Was it even canon that stuff like cellphones don't work in Hogwarts? Even if it was so, 20 years have passed, nearly 80 if we go with Taures timeline, who says that the electronic devices of that timeline would meet the same failure in Hogwarts and around magic?

What I am saying is, that technology would definitely find its way into the Wizarding World. That stuff is just too convenient for most people to drop, and I could see those who were raised in the Wizarding World to be interested in it after they are exposed to that stuff. Not to mention that stuff like instant communication without a fireplace, letters, or the difficult patronus charm should be something that draws attention.

 

Yes. I could drop the Internet in a heartbeat if it meant I could go learn legit magic. I think it's more likely that muggleborns would try to make a magic version of the Internet; let's call it the MagiNet. Wizard go and buy a special book and quill where they can store information accessible by other owners of these Wizipage books. Cause computers are not allowed

Also, even if muggles make technology allowing teleportation they'd still be inferior to the magical way of doing it. Hence, Wizards with tech makes no sense. Take cell phones; what's the point when you have two way mirrors, floo, apparition, and whatever other ways are possible.

 

Yes, cellphones are not very useful transportation devices, you are correct in that. They are, however, better for communication than two way mirrors and floo.

 

Global warming is spinning wildly out of control and this is insighting considerable anti-muggle sentiment. Yes, wizards can reverse or at least compensate for the effects, but not with a considerable inconvenience. And after all, the statute of secrecy exists so that wizards won't have to bother fixing muggle problems.

Even the most benevolent wizards have always viewed muggles with good-natured contempt. Wizards still don't think of muggles as quite...human?

So there is a great deal of discussion about the "Muggle Proplem," and the more liberal wizards don't think the muggles should be left unchecked. They just oppose the general slaughter.

There is a campaign to reinstate muggle-hunting for purposes of population control.

 

There was once a documentary about an asteroid about to hit earth and the subsequent development of the spaceship, the selection of the people an so on.

A Muggleborn fresh out of school hears about the asteroid in the news. Maybe he has a relative, who works at a project and gets the unfiltered truth about the impending doom. He panics and wants to save the wizarding world, but they brand him as nutter or think "swish and flick" no problem for them, because they have literally no idea what to expect.

Meanwhile the muggleborn tries to create a magical trunk to house as many as possible and to smuggle those willing and himself onboard the spaceship.

The rest of the community will face death or an apocalyptic wasteland.

 

Actually, I think a meteorite would be easily solvable with magic.

 

All of this is ofcourse barring a breaktough by the wizards. For example we know unspeakables does resarch on space, What if they found a planet they can live on? I can see wizards leaving. They just have to figure it out how to hide the planet and they would never have to bother with muggles ever again.

I also had a plot bunny where Wizards had replaced Exalted in The Creation but it didn't get anywhere.