Empathise: Blog Post 2

When we discussed the future as a group, we eventually came around to war and how it is affecting the world. We decided to go for the war route for our vision because there is never a time around the world where there is not any conflict going on and this means that there will always be war in the future. From where we are right now in terms of weapon technology me and the group discussed how far away we are from achieving technology as big as the movies ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Star Trek.’ From what we can find on the internet we came across a youtuber called ‘”Hacksmith,” this youtuber creates a lot of fictional gadgets such as an Iron Man laser cutter, a real-life hover board and the most important, a real-life retractable plasma lightsaber. “Not only does the lightsaber’s blade actually consist of plasma, but it burns at a titanium-melting 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit.” (Matthew Hart, 2020, Nerdist)

This type of technology can be refined into military grade weapons that will revolutionise war and could even create the opening of an AI robot army. For some people this might sound scary, but if it is in the right hands, it could lower the chances of war happening and even lower the crime levels around the world. On the other hand, people who will protest against AI robot army will then just start a war.

Alongside talking about wars and weapons me and my group also spoke about what the world’s power situation would look like in the future. For example, on the coast of mumble’s beach there will be a revolutionary hydro power station built into a coastal walk so you can walk on top of the power station itself. Imagine how much power that would create over the course of a year. In fact, the latest built hydro power station scheme is the Coire Glas hydroelectric Power Plant, this facility “once operational, Coire Glas will be able to generate enough power for 3,000,000 homes in just 5 minutes.” (SSE Renewables, 2023)

Finally, we investigated some apocalyptic approaches to our future and in terms of war reoccurring over and over, the number of nuclear missiles in the world we could potentially put our world in a permanent state of ruins and barrens, because in this day and age there are “nine countries in possession of roughly 12,500 warheads as of early-2023.” (Hans M. Kristensen and Matt Korda and Elina Reynolds of the Federation of America Scientists, 2023)

When we decided to go with wars we started looking at where we would be able to locate the walk for echoes, I suggested Pen Y Fan because I thought it would be cool to walk up the mountain with an apocalyptic soundscape in the background, but we all agreed we were doing war not apocalypse. After a few head scratches I also suggested the Llanelli Wetland Centre if we wanted to change to something that links to climate change but had no luck linking it to any evidence. As a group we had a look at the mumbles beach and tried to figure out how long it would take to walk along the beach and in the end, we found out that it would take at least 40 minutes to go from one end to the other, so we decided to scrap that Idea. We then started to think about how we have changed from the past wars in history such as the Cold War and both World War 1 and 2, and we started looking for castles that relates back to World War 1 and 2 around the Swansea are and the only one we found was the Swansea Castle which was bombed in the Blitz in 1941. (John Cooper, 2020)