• Long haul air travel will be a thing of the past but not long distance. Scramjets are proving their viability and within a decade we will see sub orbital air travel at Mach 12 to 24 (not a Mach 1 or 2 we have today). A 24 hour flight reduced to 1 to 2 hours. No travel in the future will be more accepted, not less.

• Content is always king and it means that future meetings will need higher take home value. This means new material, new concepts, more meaty subjects and better presentations. It means that mediocre presentations will be a thing of the past – they will have to be more thoroughly vetted, not just for accuracy of content but relevance to the audience.But words are only 10-20% of the total communication medium. Body language, personal interaction etc form the bulk of the message and you need to be face to face to appreciate that – networking is working.

• Ideas come from close collaboration, some consumption of legal recreational drugs (wine, beer etc) and virtual booze simply does not cut it. There is no substitute for the real thing.

• Experience is the key – meetings will offer an alternative and fresh experience to the virtual avatar existence we will suffer daily.

• Reward – the fact that you qualify to travel to an event rather then virtually attend will be a major incentive.

• Perhaps a foot note to the article with a more positive slant would be appropriate. Me – I may not be around in 40 years but my company it certainly there for the long haul and we are passionately adopting new technology to help improve the meetings appeal and experience.

As a closet futurist I look forward to harnessing change for the better of the meetings industry – not killing it off.  -- Ray Shaw, Intermedia Group of Companies

Editor's Reply:

Thanks for your thoughtful  message, Ray. In large part, we agree. I feel positive about the power and future of the meetings industry – there is no such thing as a virtual beer!   I think we can also agree that it's hard to image a future with much higher energy costs. We have lived all of our lives as have our parents, in an era of cheap energy (essentially the solar energy of hundreds of millions of years condensed into liquid form - in other words: "oil"). Our global economy has grown on this premise.

Alternate fuel forms will have their place, but it is unlikely that solar, coal, nuclear, wind, battery, natural gas or hydrogen-powered airplanes will be a viable options in the foreseeable future.  Air travel will likely require the highly concentrated, highly portable energy that fossil fuels provide for some time to come. Scram jets in their current state (and likely in the future as well) use several times more energy than do conventional jets – the laws of thermodynamics will always apply and it takes lots of energy to get objects into suborbital space.

The US passed peak oil production  in 1973 and even the pools of oil in Saudi Arabia are requiring injection of sea water to stimulate flow.  The second half of this oil supply will get increasingly more expensive to retrieve – and increasingly it is in the hands of countries that are hostile to western culture. Additionally, the 1.3 billion people in China and a billion people in India will exert greatly increasing demand on the existing supply.  The 35% fuel price increase we have seen in US this past year is only the beginning. 

An interesting, and some say alarmist, book providing substantial food for thought on this subject is the “Long Emergency” by James Howard Kunstler.