prediction on the world 50years later

[Terrestrial Dream]

What do you think world will be like 50years later, and please no end of the world. My guess would be China becomes the world strongest economic and military power, reunification of Korea, Taiwan becomes part of China, many of the African nations started to be more industrialized, and maybe economic trouble in middle east since fossil fuel might be replaced in the future.

[aohige]

Cars still won't fly.

We will still be waiting for the invention of the holodeck.

My head will be in a cryogenic glass tube, waiting for a body.

[faustianideals]

I'll be dead from various health issues.

Anyways, in all honesty, I don't see the world turning out so well. I think we will be recovering from our second world nuclear holocaust.

If not that, I expect things to fall apart like in the movie Children of Men.

Okay! I'll try to be positive and think highly of my war mongering brothers and sisters.

Perhaps we'll have holographic moniters, and everything will be touchscreen, manual input devices like keyboards will be a thing of the past. I can also see humanity going to the moon again, or perhaps for the first time. We'll go out into space more too, maybe not a planet, but pretty damn close. It's just in the last century that we started space travel, and many other sciences. We have hope.. :/

[Furuno]

Nerve cells on processors, resulting in 1 THz or more processing power...

Cable is now really an old story, maybe there's even something like "wireless electricity"

Invention on environment-friendly mass destructive weapon made the world more dangerous...
Beam weapon? And maybe there's mechas... lol...

DNA mapping project may already resulting into something like "Destiny Plan"...

I'll become a happy old man with my wife and my grandchildren...

[GunBladeKid09]

We will have EVA's because some dumb!@# will cause the first impact and so forth.

[Nightbat®]

US and Europe will be in a cold war
Microsoft will still fail to release a stable and secure OS
Cancer will be cured, ofcourse being replaced by a more devastating disease
Everyone is monitored by an at birth implanted chip
All cartoons pre-2015 are deemed "Too violent" and banned from TV, Porn OTOH is allowed
to be broadcasted after Sesame street


On a positive note:
I hopefully will have crashed and burned long before all this happens
instead of dropping dead on the workfloor at age 80 or waiting to die in a retirement home
remembering the time when boats were still made of wood and men were still made of steel

[lubuko]

AIDS and Cancer can be cured.
I am Chinese, hopefully China will become most powerful country.

[steelbound]

Roughly in chronological order:

Rome gets nuked by a radical muslim group and the Pope flees to America and sets up in Washington D.C. at this point the Catholic Church is re-energized and religious war breaks out. Fossil fuels last just long enough for the replacement technologys to be put in place. The green leopard plague happens. Global warming fizzles. Japan creates humanoid robots and embed the 3 laws into these robots. Europe and America watch as China lands the first human on Mars. Augmented human intelligence paves the way for artifical intelligence. Then the Singularity happens and then life gets interesting.

And yes cars still won't fly.

[TinyRedLeaf]

Originally Posted by hyperlion

What do you think world will be like 50years later, and please no end of the world.

I'd be well past retirement age, and I'll be very pissed off because I'm not likely to be around to see what the world would be like 50 years later.

Or, I could be literally swimming with the fishes. The ice caps would have melted, half the world would be underwater. The tropics would have moved north. Imagine, coconut trees and balmy beaches in Sweden.

I am Chinese, hopefully China will become most powerful country.

I am Chinese too, but I'm not looking forward to the day China becomes the most powerful country. Fifty years may seem like a long time, but it's only two to three generations at most. Not enough time for a country of one billion people to develop the political/social institutions for a fair, democratic and stable country.

But I would agree with most speculations -- China will likely become the world's biggest economic power pretty soon. Within the next 10 years in fact, if not five.

What else? The so-called "clash of civilisations" and "war on terror" would be a forgotten history (these were never as global a phenomenom as many Americans seem to believe today). The Middle-East will still remain trapped in a mess of religious and racial conflict. The European Union will be largely irrelevant, but it'd still be rich, living off the interest of 200+ years of accumulated capital.

People will live longer (but necessarily better). A cure for some (but not all) cancers would exist. A cure for AIDS will also have been invented. The moon colony would exist, with regular commercial space flights a reality. Not to the moon perhaps -- it'll still likely be a scientific colony at best, 50 years from now -- but regular space flights that drastically cut down the travel time between continents.

Generally, a lot more of the same as today, extrapolated to the n'th degree. Gone are the days when we seemed to be living in dramatic "epochs", like Cold Wars, World Wars, and so on. Or maybe it's still too soon to tell.

[WanderingKnight]

Microsoft will still fail to release a stable and secure OS

Of course, 2057 will be the year of the Linux desktop!

(Just kidding, I'm a Linux user myself I just couldn't resist).

[gabbytay]

Originally Posted by hyperlion

What do you think world will be like 50years later, and please no end of the world. My guess would be China becomes the world strongest economic and military power, reunification of Korea, Taiwan becomes part of China, many of the African nations started to be more industrialized, and maybe economic trouble in middle east since fossil fuel might be replaced in the future.

let me guess you watched the discovery channels 'year 2057'

[Spectacular_Insanity]

Originally Posted by hyperlion

What do you think world will be like 50years later, and please no end of the world. My guess would be China becomes the world strongest economic and military power, reunification of Korea, Taiwan becomes part of China, many of the African nations started to be more industrialized, and maybe economic trouble in middle east since fossil fuel might be replaced in the future.

Reunification of Korea will never happen, and not just because of political and social schisms. It is economically impossible. The rebuilding of N Korea's almost nonexistant infrastructure would cost trillions, which would beggar both countries, ultimately and cause S Korea's economy to implode for the massive budget requirements. I researched this for my final world history project my freshman year, and a bunch or resources, including the QC Researcher told me the exact dollar amount, but I can't remember it exactly. I just know it was one of the most ridiculously high numbers I'd ever seen as far as money goes. I can look up the exact figures again if you want me to, but there's no guarantee I still have it. Then again, I AM a packrat, so I just might. The data might be outdated by now, but that probably means that the amount it would cost to reunite the two has risen even more since I did my project. At this point in time, S Korea wouldn't even WANT to reunite. It wouldn't benefit them in the least. I nice idealistic thought, but ultimately impossible as far as logistics would go.

[Takeru]

Originally Posted by WanderingKnight

Of course, 2057 will be the year of the Linux desktop!

(Just kidding, I'm a Linux user myself I just couldn't resist).

=/ I thought that was last year?
Meh, I like my Mac anyway.

Let's see....50 years....
I'll be 67 and probably not care anymore. China will become the economic power of the world...and then surpassed by someone else. Antigravity will still not exist, cars will not fly. Computers will be FAR past the THz range. Nanomachines and other man-made objects will become common use for household chores and medical uses. War will still be fought, just not with bullets as much as laser/gps guided energy and pulse-weapons. My cousin will still demand that someone build actual mobilesuits. Aaaaaand.....Microsoft will either 1) suffer a major bankruptcy, 2) still fail at Operating Systems, or 3) technology will one day surpass the need for written code and will learn on it's own under a strict set of rules. And the PlayStation9 is flying off store shelves as Sony has perfected it's ultra-realistic gaming system.

That's my prediction.

[WanderingKnight]

=/ I thought that was last year?

Shhh! It's a secret! Don't let anyone know!

[Thewanderer]

Oh cars might fly. I mean we have televisions that can hang on your wall like a picture, phones we can use to view who we're talking to, and even robot pets. Sure some of those things that were originally perceived as "futuristic" isn't exactly as we imagined them... so flying cars might be like that too.

[narmi]

The reasons for wars are going rise, governments in certain countries will become weak and fall to corruption. Global warming will still be a problem because of arrogance. Our technological rise will begin to slow down, we use cybernetics to help and taint humanity. Space exploration might boom, and new diseases will change humanity slowly. If these doesn't happen, the issue of poverty in the world will decreases a bit..... Wars around the world will diminish but some will still continue, propaganda will be used to control the public, ignorant (selfish) people will dominate the world and lead the path to more pain. Sooner or later we will learn and it might be too late for us..... (sad isn't it).

Heck I don't know what life will throw at us in the future and all we can do it continue with life and survive. (Sorry if my thoughts are a bit depressing ahahaha.)

[p015]

My guess is the same exsact thing just new phones etc.
Im hoping im wrong

[[DOT].L]

Parents will finally stop bitching about their children spending too much time online.

[Robotnik]

The proliferation of cellular/wireless will make it one of the top leading causes of disease (via constant long term exposure) and death (fatal accident while talking/texting). It replaces smoking as the most common "second-hand" health hazard, but thanks to our personal and economic dependence on the technology, little is done to change. At the same time, the near-instant availability of information erodes educational standards, since all facts and calculations are easily looked up.

As for politics, wars and other conflicts, it will be more of the same, only the names and faces and arbitrary lines on the map they fight over will change. If nuclear weapons are used, the rest won't matter...

Either that or the UFOs fly out of their secret underground bases on December 21st, 2012 and take over the world. Welcome, alien overlords!

[Jinto]

Biologists in Hamburg/Dresden (germany) developed enzyme cutters to cut out the HIV genetic material in infected cells. The research is still in the early stages and not applicaple for humans yet (but in 50 years I am optimistic all sorts of HIV/AIDS can be cured by the means of cutting HIV genes apart from the human genes).

This development could be modified to fix genetic degeneration in cells, which would basically allow for healing all sorts of cancer and enabling basically endless life time (provided the degeneration can be fully stopped).

And that might cause much trouble... 50 years is too hard to predict. Thats like predicting the next 100 years in 1900. Research and development speeds up... therefore such estimates are very hard to do.