Musings

There are some long term trends which almost certain and inevitable:

* Global climate change. Overall this means global warming. It also means cold snaps driven by disruption of the jet stream, expansion of the Sahara, shrinking inland seas, droughts, relocation away from the equator of warm weather flora and fauna, increasing habitability of higher latitudes, melting glaciers, rising sea levels, fewer viable ski resorts, more wild fires, more and bigger hurricanes, typhoons, cyclones, and tornados. In the U.S., Florida and Louisiana are particularly vulnerable to rising sea levels.

* Continued mass extinction, especially of megafauna.

* Technology transfer to, and economic development in, less developed countries, than in turn produces urbanization and the demographic transition to later marriage, later child bearing, and few children per family, and accompanying economic development. Most of  the world is already well in the throes of this trend. Africa is the main laggard, but eventually, it took will experience this transition, probably at uneven times.

* Continued urbanization in the developed world, but also more remote work.

* Continued advances in medical technology and biotechnology.

* Continues advances in information technology and artificial intelligence. We will have more automation, more robots and kiosks, more intelligent agents, more guided weapons, etc. Self-driving cars and trucks, and autonomous flying drones and ships and submarines will be among them.

* A transition from petroleum based vehicles to electric vehicles (whether battery powered or hydrogen powered or inductive charging powered).

* The transition to electric vehicles, in turn, will lead to a collapse in the demand for, and price of oil. This is turn will undermine and ultimately lead to the demise of non-democratic and doubtfully democratic regimes and authoritarian and conservative tendencies in the Middle East and North Africa, in Venezuela, in parts of Indonesia, in Nigeria, in Iran, in Brunei, in Russia, in Texas, in Louisiana, and in Eastern Colorado. What does Saudi Arabia look like without oil? Yemen.

* A transition away from coal to generate electricity, in favor of solar power, wind power, tidal power, and probably also nuclear power.

* Proliferation of guided munitions, armed drones (especially small armed drones), longer ranged missiles, leveling the military playing field. 

* The demise of tanks and large surface warships.

* The increased development of and effectiveness of air defense weapons, anti-missile and drone systems, and point defenses from shells, possibly involving directed energy weapons.

* The return of supersonic commercial flight and also the emergence of supersonic military transports.

* The U.S. will become less white.

* In the U.S. there will be massive admixture between European Americans, Middle Eastern Americans, East Asians, Southeast Asians, South Asians, Polynesians, Latinos, and recent African immigrants, and to a significantly lesser extent, African Americans, resulting in a new plurality of admixed "brown" people.

* The non-African part of the world that was not communist will continue to get more secular (especially the U.S. and more religious parts of Western Europe), the former communist parts of the world will get a little more religious but not become heavily religious societies, while Africa's non-Muslim regions will grow more emphatically Christian.

* Christianity will probably become a plurality rather than a majority religion in the U.S.

There are some long shot possibilities:

* Economically viable nuclear fusion power generation. We are close to being able to generate net power sustainably from nuclear fusion. But it is far from clear it will ever be cost competitive or be possible at anything but large scale utility power plant levels.

* Nuclear "batteries". The technology is proven and it scales well and lasts decades, but the safety and waste disposal issues are open questions.

* Quantum computing. In its infancy and on the brink of great progress, but with benefits that are unclear.

* A transition of the construction industry from mostly on site piece work to factory built large components with rapid assembly on site.

* The creation of a man made lake west of the Nile with Mediterranean sea drainage into a basin in NW Egypt, similar to the Salton Sea in California.

* Much greater exploitation of Antarctica.

* De-extinction of extinct species using ancient DNA (a la Jursassic Park, but more likely to involve megafauna species that went extinct in the last 50,000 years). Also micro-fauna revived from permafrost (bugs, bacteria, viruses, etc.), and flora revived from recovered ancient seeds.

* Big improvements in direct mind-machine interfaces, which are currently in their infancy with use in brain research and extremely disabled people.

* Widespread legalization/regulation of psychoactive drugs ending the international organized crime rings that they fuel.

* There may be a reform movement in Islam, in some unforeseeable way, that "tames" its extremist tendencies, driven, in part, by economic development and in part by the demise of oil money that made extreme versions of it feasible, bringing many hard core Islamist countries to the course it was heading on in the early 1970s. Analogize Islam of the late 20th and early 21st century to Christian Europe in the early modern pre-Reformation period through the Victorian eras.

* Iran could mature into a democratic participant that behaves in world affairs.

* China could experience a democratic revolution festering now as an undercurrent in a quasi-capitalist society with authoritarian rule, or could gradually loosen censorship and repressions and democratize intraparty processes over time until it reaches a point where merging with Taiwan wouldn't destroy its way of life.

* China could be expansionist in a negative way, or a positive way, in a much more colonists, globalist, regionally dominance asserting way.

* North Korea could eventually collapse, or could be reformed under some new more enlightened absolute leader.

* We could see a low-level resurgence of sanitized polygamy in the West as economic inequalities and serial marriage rise.

* We could see a return of household servant/slavery type arrangements as economic inequalities rise. A long, long ride towards consent in everything could reverse itself somewhat.

* There is a real possibility of backsliding in terms of economic development in the United States. The U.S. is already seeing falling life expectancies, falling average height, tougher economic circumstances for younger generations wanting to start families, authoritarian tendencies, rolling back of child labor laws, rolling back of abortion protections, scapegoating of transgender people, inflationary erosion of minimum wage laws, undermining of the social safety net, undermining of public education, loss of relative economic competitiveness, increased economic inequality associated with developing economies, and reduced taxes and a weaker state associated with developing economies.

* As Evangelical Christianity further collapses in the South and rural America, Mormonism or Islam or African Christianity, all of which are much healthier faiths could rush into the gap.

* We could see a wave of country fragmentation. Some of this is due to strong transnational institutions making it viable in places like Catalonia, Basque Spain, and Scotland. In Russia it could happen as a result of a collapse of the center that tries to hold onto an empire it can't sustain. The fault lines are present in China and if it liberalizes democratically that could happen all at once. Nigeria is ripe for a north-south split that has already partially happened at a subnational level. Quebec separatism is quiet for now, but could reinvigorate itself.

* The U.S. is less united and could split if regional divides grow stronger. As a movement of the more backward South and rural areas, it doesn't have strong prospects, but if the urban areas in the North and West get too frustrated with being held back, it could happen.

* The U.S. could return to a path of catching up with the developed world with changes like universal health care, more gun regulation, less anti-vax sentiment, metric measurements, more high speed rail, more urban transit, more high density YIMBY development, greater attention to environmental concerns, decriminalization of vice, more tolerance for LGBT+, more higher education on a more affordable basis, democratic reforms, a weaker cultural role for religion, etc.

* Expanded life expectancies would create a global surge of old people that transforms society and politics in unforeseeable ways.

(Image source.)