ABSTRACT
The word “Far” in the title of this chapter indicates a focus on the state of the Earth’s soils far enough in the future that present trends and recent experience with patterns of soil change and function begin to lose their predictive value. The time span of interest is decades to a century or more. Despite the difculties of long-term prediction, it is worthwhile pondering the possible states of soil over a time period that will be experienced by our grandchildren, or even our children. On geologic time scales, measured in millions or billions of years, a century is very short. However, the apparently inexorable rise of technology as a new force in the world means that we should not be surprised to see transformative change in soils over this period of time. In the next section, we discuss how technology is likely to set the stage for future evolution of soil.
