What do YOU think the world would be like in 2050?

Well, i am just throwing this out in the open because i am always wondering due to the fossil fuel shorrtage, how will the world be like in the futere. also, with growing military tension caused by taiwan and china, how will they affect the balance of powers in the world. will nuclear weapons cause mass extermination of a nation or will all nations join together and form a peaceful union.... im just curious

China will be the world's 1# economic superpower, and likely military as well. (Taiwan will likely have reunified by then.)

The United States will have long since fallen on hard times. I'm not sure about nations like Russia and India.

The world will still be a dangerous and bellicose place, as always.

Due to advances, space has now become a major field of economic and military development. There are quite a few space stations and humans have made bases on Mars and the Moon. This soon becomes an area of tension.

Borders will have changed - some provinces of countries will declare independence, Russia might fracture, and about 10-20 new nations will be formed.

Well, its impossible to detect what the future holds...but...

US, China and India would be superpowers politically, economically and militarily.
Russia could be fractured due to its declining population.
Im not sure what would become of countries in Sth America and Africa.
And as Leopard said above, space would be new frontier of tension and conflict.

All that is assuming of course the world hasnt been destroyed by global warming lol

It's always a dangerous game trying to predict that far into the future, just look how much the international scene has changed since 2000, the unexpected always tends to happen. Many people think that by 2050 China will have the World's largest economy, well in 1980, many were predicting that Japan would overhaul America by the year 2000 and it didn't happen! I wouldn't be surprised if China does eventually claim that distinction, but I equally wouldn't be surprised if it didn't!

But if you want me to stick my neck out, the pre-eminent powers will be America, China and India. Europe will have declined relative to those nations and Africa will have been devastated by the effects of climate change and AIDS. I agree that there will be permanent colonies on the Moon and possibly Mars and some asteroids, space travel will also have become available to a wide section of the population and there will be orbital hotels.

In 2050 I predict that the world will have had, be having, or facing global resource wars brought on by countries demanding more than the current capacity of resource production (of most resources, not just fuel). Nuclear war will probably be avoided, but many will die and suffer because the world will have refused to try to live within its means.

It will only be after many years (even decades) of fighting and a global recession that people realise many items they take for granted or want are luxuries and not necessities. But by then it's impossible to say whether it will be too late to do anything, what with the possibility of global warming causing the flooding of many coastal regions, etc.

Humanity will survive, but at a great cost. The only hope is that the current greedy, self-indulgent element of human nature that is taking root in every corner of the world is counter-acted and we find a way to use what little this world has to offer more efficiently.

we all propaply live together as one big happy family united together in level beyond substance and materia by the universal spirit of freedom and mutual understaning.

Gollevainen said:

we all propaply live together as one big happy family united together in level beyond substance and materia by the universal spirit of freedom and mutual understaning.

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:roll: Golly, I knew you spent way tooooo much time with those dang hippies this weekend!!!!

All kidding aside , I'm moving this thread to the members club room.

Airbus will be called Spacebus and Boeing wll be making oversized American fridge freezers

China, India and the US will be the dominant powers. Beyond that I think that there are two paths we can go down and they all depend on alternative energy. If, by 2050, the world is no longer dependent on fossil fuels, then life will be better than it is now. If we are still heavily dependent on fossil fuels we will be facing a number of reigional conflicts that threaten to create WWIII (just as WWII was created out of several resource based regional conflicts). Hotspots to watch will be Burma, Venezuela, the Arctic, Nigeria, Northeast Asia, and Central Asia/the Middle East (duh...I think the Middle East is permanantly on any list of "hot spots")

On the side note of space travel, I think that one day we will see multiple space elevators on Earth's surface. Indeed once nanotechnology makes a space elevator truely feasible every superpower will want one.

Finn McCool said:

On the side note of space travel, I think that one day we will see multiple space elevators on Earth's surface. Indeed once nanotechnology makes a space elevator truely feasible every superpower will want one.

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One of my friends knows a lot about "science" generally, especially physics. He said that every so often the earth's magnetic fields (or something like that) reverse - apparently we're due for another reversal in the coming centuries (maybe even sooner). The problem is that when that happens for a period of time, which can be years or longer, the earth loses the protection it has from the magnetic field against radiation.

So unless we build underground cities, the only solution for humanity to survive is to create enough homes in space!