And the amenities are fantastic. It may even be possible to undergo remote, robot-mediated surgery, in the comfort of your own home. This barely scratches the surface. Imagine homes whose very building material is salted with dormant limestone-producing bacteria, which awaken upon contact with moisture and repair any cracks or structural damage.
Personal homes will be almost fully independent of a dangerously overtaxed energy grid. One hundred years in the future, our houses will be, in almost all respects, semi-living, artificial organisms—closed systems with a metabolism, sensory apparatus, immune response, and an approximation to a nervous system.
Care about supporting clean energy adoption? Find out how much money and planet! By signing up through this link , Futurism. Share This Article. More on Sci-Fi Visions. Inspired by the need for more urban housing in already densely populated areas, future design will produce homes with smaller footprints, but with more storeys, using balcony and roof space to provide outdoor space.
By , technology will transform homes into collectors and storers of energy, with electricity, now generated by non-fossil fuel, most likely to be used to heat homes and hot water. Electric cars will be commonplace with every property equipped with a charging point. The future home will manage its energy use from a centralised platform, combining heating, electrical consumption, ventilation and vehicle charging.
Most of us live in homes that are very traditional, and styles of architecture from the past have cult followings.
Even homes that are more cutting-edge still have many of the same features that homes did 50 to years ago. We still have kitchens, living rooms, bedrooms and bathrooms. We're still sitting on sofas, eating at tables and sleeping on mattresses resting on wooden or metal bed frames. Yes, there have been some amazing improvements -- indoor plumbing, flush toilets and electricity have all made a huge difference in the lives of everyday people.
While these existed 50 years ago, our modern array of appliances and electronics is dizzying in comparison. If you have older relatives who have trouble using a cell phone or don't understand why we've moved on from cassette tapes and VHS, you know what I'm talking about.
But people of the past would still be able to recognize a lot of what makes up a normal home today. When thinking about what houses might look like in 50 to years, it's hard to imagine that they'd be totally unrecognizable to us. It's fun to speculate and admire some of the more unusual, futuristic home styles, but most of them aren't going to become the norm.
In addition, some architects today argue that newer houses aren't built to last the way that older homes were. That means that there's a good chance houses in the future will be a mixture of newer architecture possibly built of longer-lasting materials and houses standing today that have been upgraded for modern sensibilities.
Let's take a look at what homes might look like in the future, starting with the high-tech and energy-efficient features that have the most staying power. It seems a given that most of our electronics and appliances will only get better and more efficient in the future. Although we have plenty of them in our houses right now, getting all of them to work together seamlessly still isn't common for most of us. You can use your smartphone to do everything from watch TV to check on your home security system, but can you also turn on your oven?
The home of the future will have robot servants -- they just won't be big, shiny metal androids rolling around and cracking jokes. They'll be hidden within your home, unobtrusive, intuitive and easy-to-use, and they'll incorporate more sensitive and touch-screen technology. Microsoft's Future Home, for example, is full of this kind of tech.
It's a concept home that they update periodically to reflect what they think the future will hold, but so far, many of their concepts seem right on track. It doesn't seem like much of a stretch to go from a mat by your front door that charges all of your electronic devices to one that can also retrieve information from those devices and display it on a big, touch-sensitive screen.
Challenges for incorporating this kind of technology today include the expense of retrofitting an existing home, but future houses will incorporate it just like they do plumbing and electricity. There are other challenges beyond cost, though. Microsoft also conducted a study to find out how people felt about home automation, and one of the biggest concerns was security. If everything's automated, you'd have to make sure nobody can hack in and unlock your doors! Right now environmental friendliness is a huge trend in home building, and you may already have things like energy-efficient windows.
These kinds of features will probably become more common, but that doesn't necessarily mean that in 50 years, your house will be covered in solar panels or surrounded by wind turbines. Futurologist Ian Pearson argues that solar panels make much more sense in the African Sahara, for example, than on the roof of a suburban home that sees far fewer sunny days. Given the fact that all renewable sources of energy have their problems, it's hard to predict what will power your house.
But it'll be designed to use that power as efficiently as possible in HVAC systems. Things like graywater recovery systems will become inexpensive and easy to use, so using your shower water to flush the toilet won't be a big deal at all.
A stealth-tech, eco-friendly home is probably on the horizon, but will the walls themselves still be wood and drywall?
As a friend of mine pointed out recently, buildings really used to be built to last; there are churches in Europe that have been around for thousands of years. But that's often because the only materials available were ones that were just naturally durable, like stone. Materials like wood, drywall, fabric and plastic are less expensive, lightweight and easier to work with. But one of the downsides is that very few parts of a modern home are built to last more than 50 years.
The old materials end up in a landfill and then energy is spent to make and install new stuff. Here's where the green movement comes in again. Not only do we want houses that are built to last, but we also want ones that are constructed of materials that aren't as taxing on the environment to make. And we want them to be relatively inexpensive.
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