In my previous post, Oil and Water, I made some predictions on a 30-90 year time horizon.
What are some other predictions I'd make in that time frame?
* The U.S. birthrate will fall significantly from current levels, and the U.S. population will decline. Later in that time period, peak global population will be reached as Subsaharan Africa reaches is demographic transition, and the global population will start to fall.
* Life expectancies will rise significantly, not only in the less developed world, but in the developed world. Many diseases that are commonplace today with be virtually eliminated or will become much more effectively treatable. These include: M.S., lupus, gum disease, most common STDs, many kinds of cancer, and conditions like Down's Syndrome and cerebral palsy.
* The proportion of people who are non-religious will reach a majority in the U.S. Mainline Protestantism will take the biggest hit. Evangelical Christianity will become much less influential politically and much less conservative as it undergoes generational transitions of leadership. Mormons will experience some of the smaller declines among Christian and Christian adjacent faiths.
* Quantum computing will be developed, but it will only make much of a difference in specialized applications.
* Popular consumer software will become much less buggy.
* Legacy communications technologies like shortwave radio, a.m. radio, landline phone service, and broadcast television will finally go dark.
* The concept of dark matter will be abandoned in favor of some gravitational law based explanation for phenomena attributed to dark matter. This will probably also be the case with dark energy, and the time period half half a century to a century when these theories were the conventional wisdom will be known as the dark ages of astronomy and cosmology.
* Most global military forces, including the U.S. military, will stop using manned tanks.
* Large surface combatant naval ships will become more scarce globally.
* Everyone's whole genome will routinely be recorded as an infant.
* Existing U.S. race categories will break down and be re-conceptualized as more and more Americans are mixed race.
* There will be at least one major political-economic catastrophe that greatly reduces income inequality.
* Drugs like marijuana and psychedelics which are just being legalized now, will not be re-criminalized.
* Putin's regime will collapse, possibly accompanied by a further break up of the components of the Russian state, and will be replaced by a flawed democratic regime or regimes that are still less authoritarian than the current regime.
* China and the countries of South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Latin America will join the ranks of fully developed countries.
* The Palestinian territories of Israel will cease to be. There are multiple, hard to predict scenarios regarding how this comes about.
* Moderate and modernist tendencies within Islam will eventually start to prevail over extreme Islamist factions in most countries. This will happen earliest in countries where fossil fuel production is the least important part of the economy on a percentage basis.
* Cryptocurrencies will go out of style and will be relegated to a historical curiosity.
* The number of people employed to transport goods will dramatically decrease.
* Global manufacturing employment will decrease to due increased automation and Africa will become a manufacturing center due to its cheap labor and permissive regulatory environment, once political stabilization is achieved.
* A much larger share of construction employment will work in factories making large subcomponents of buildings to be transported to the building site for final assembly.
* Economic growth rates will start to stagnate, especially outside Africa.
* People on Earth will launch a space probe to the nearest star, although it probably will not yet have reached its destination and will be in deep space moving very fast towards its destination. In the meantime, it will function as a deep space, space telescope.
* Social norms will increasingly devalue privacy.
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