Prediction for the 21st Century  

I found Ten Forecasts by the World Future Society and thought I'd add a bit of commentary to them. Here goes nothing:

1. The world will have a billion millionaires by 2025. According to FORBES magazine, there are 691 Billionaires in the world. With inflation driving down the value of the Dollar and the Euro in the future, I could fully see this happening. The WFS also points out that Globalization and Technological innovation (such as the internet) are making this possible. This aligns with my thoughts, such as e-commerce being some 75% of total business by 2025.

2. Fashion will go wired as technologies and tastes converge to revolutionize the textile industry. While researching for this project, I ran into glow-in-the-dark paints in crayola-16 colors. Also, there is Make Magazine inspiring wearable computers and Arduino Microcontrollers that sew into shirts and other fabrics. With the Arduino-Ethernet Shield this is entirely possible as well. The Arduino is open source and open source will take over the electronics market in the wearable field.

3. The threat of another cold war with China, Russia, or both could replace terrorism as the chief foreign-policy concern of the United States. The War on Terror is hardly talked about under the Obama Administration. The threats in between the US and North Korea and China and their "Hacker State" will lead us ino a Cold War with China. Russia is a wild card. It could go either way, but Russia will be innovating and leading the way in technology soon.

4. Counterfeiting of currency will proliferate, driving the move toward a cashless society. I believe the counterfeiting of money will lead us to Japanese style Credit-Over-Cellphone systems. Either that, or we will use Credit styl cards entirely.

5. The earth is on the verge of a significant extinction event. I don't know about this one. Possibly a mass genocidal event in terms of flu. But that goes against technology and number 7.

6. Water will be in the twenty-first century what oil was in the twentieth century. If they mean costing 1.27 a quart at Wal-Mart and being 50bucks a barrel, it probably already is.

7. World population by 2050 may grow larger than previously expected, due in part to healthier, longer-living people. Futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts that by 2040 or so, we'll have figured out vast long-life or immortality. He also says that the first millenarian is already about 60.

8. The number of Africans imperiled by floods will grow 70-fold by 2080. With the Rainforests being cut down, we're on the way to this in South America as well.

9. Rising prices for natural resources could lead to a full-scale rush to develop the Arctic. This could also lead to us developing other worlds as fast as possible. Or at least two way rovers to bring back as much resources as possible.

10. More decisions will be made by nonhuman entities. Game theory will vastly control our lives. Supercomputers will be commercially available to me and you at a desktop size once quantum computers are properly developed, so I can see this happening by 2030.