The rest of the century

We are now almost one-fifth of the way through the twenty-first century.  On a surface level it's been something of a disappointment, opening with the biggest terrorist attack in history and saddling us with Trump.  But look deeper and the picture is one of remarkable progress.  The internet has become a true forum of mass global communication, with the promise of real independence from governments and from censors, control freaks, and pearl-clutchers of every stripe.  Gay equality and marriage rights have triumphed across most of the Western world.  The decline of religion has accelerated, with fewer than two-thirds of Americans now identifying as Christian, and religious influence utterly collapsing in some countries like Ireland where it once dominated.  The world is investing massively in the transition to non-fossil-fuel energy, even if the US is temporarily absent from that fight.

If there's been one constant across the last four centuries, it's ever-accelerating technological progress and cultural change.  There have been setbacks for a few years in this or that country, but taking the long view, they're trivial compared to the overall trend.  It's a safe bet that that trend will continue.

Here are some things I expect will happen before the end of the twenty-first century:

1) Victory over global warming, by a combination of geoengineering and a massive world-wide shift to non-fossil-fuel energy.

2) General abandonment and rejection of the practice of meat-eating as barbaric and disgusting.

3) Decline of religion to near-irrelevance in the US, Latin America, and even the Middle East, similar to what has already happened in most of Europe.

4) Two or three more profound changes in cultural attitudes at least as fundamental as the sexual revolution or the shift toward acceptance of gay rights.

5) Unmanned space probes to some nearby stars, traveling at close to the speed of light, possibly microscopic.

6) A rigorous scientific explanation for the existence of consciousness and free will.

7) The majority of the "Third World" fully catching up to the West in prosperity and technological development.

8) Eradication of most disease.

9) Transition to a post-work, post-scarcity economy in which most production is done by machines, most humans do not need to work, and income is distributed mostly via systems like universal basic income unconnected with work.

10) A cure for the aging process, widely available in advanced countries, allowing individuals to remain young and postpone death as long as they choose, and eliminating the burden of a growing elderly population.  (So a lot of you may still be around at the end of 2100 to see how well I did with these predictions.)

11) Widespread integration of computer technology into the human brain, to increase human intelligence and expand the range of human sensory experience.

Here are some things I don't expect to happen during this century, if ever:

1) Displacement of English by another language as the dominant language of global communication.

2) A one-world government.

3) Large-scale use of nuclear weapons in a war.

4) China becoming the world's dominant power (unless it becomes a democracy, and probably not even then).

5) A civilizational collapse or abandonment of technological progress (unless caused by an unpredictable natural disaster such as a giant meteor impact).  A few countries may reject science for religion or "spirituality" of some kind, but such countries will rapidly fall behind and become irrelevant.  Most of the world will not follow that path.

6) Colonization of other planets, except in the sense of small manned scientific stations.

7) Contact with another intelligent species.

8) Teleportation (similar to the "transporter" on Star Trek).

9) Faster-than-light travel.

10) Time travel.