Is a trusted TV personality involved?
That’s correct - but it did still revolve (arf) around the dispute of measuring the size of the earth. Some astronomers placed it in the region of 24,000 miles circumference, which (assuming there was nothing between Europe and Asia) made the voyage impossible in the ships of the time. Columbus was convinced that it was thousands of miles shorter. America turned up exactly where he was expecting Asia to be from his calculations, hence his never realising what had actually happened.
(Further hijack - am I right in thinking/remembering that nobody at the time contemplated there being a whole new undiscovered landmass?)
Christianity is the first of many organized religions to be declared in the words of George Carlin to be a " man made , self serving bullshit story".
Columbus’s own journal shows clearly that he realized he had reached a new continent. That he died without knowing that is a 19th century myth.
The Norse colony on Greenland lasted five hundred years (982—c. 1500). From Greenland, expeditions reached various parts of North America, including Baffin Island, Labrador, Newfoundland, and possibly New England. In 1005 homesteaders settled in a colony on the North American coast that they called Vineland, and lasted for two years before conflict with Native Americans made them give it up. The Norse discoveries remained known in Western Europe for centuries.
Cool! Can you give us a reference? I’d like to read more. (In other words, “Cite?”, but not in the I-doubt-it sense.)
John R. Hebert, ed., 1492: An Ongoing Voyage. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1992. p. 100.
Amend that to “…we’ll learn something new about gravity that makes our entire understanding of it an obvious crock…” and you’ve got a winner.
Well, we can hope, anyway. 
Sadly, human intelligence will still be in the same questionable state. :o
But I can’t pass up the opportunity for a 2001 quote"
"Look Dave, I can see you’re really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over. "
But Leibowitz will preserve the information and provide the answers!
Stranger
Let’s just kick this into Row Z, shall we? You cannot possibly get by logic from “There is a brain centre which under certain kinds of artificial stimulation appears to produce ‘religious’ sensations” to “Therefore, it is not designed (adapted, evolved, whatever) to produce such sensations under any other circumstances”, still less to “Therefore, all ‘religious’ sensations are solely the product of random activity in this brain centre”.
You could as readily argue “Not only does God talk to us, but we have identified the mechanism by which he does so!”.
The link gives a plausible explanation to what’s happening/ed when theists claim to have experienced god. It may not be an airtight proof, or even all that plausible, but for me as an atheist it’s a whole heck of a lot more plausible than the idea that there really is a creator. Intil scientists discover a more accurate explanation for experiencing god I’m willing to accept that one.
I’m guessing new discoveries about the human brain and how it works (or doesn’t work) will surprise us. Don’t ask me what that might be, though.
We yuppies will have invented artificial sperm, because our natural sperm counts mysteriously will have dropped to zero in about the year 2200.
This will open up an entirely new world of Sperm Delivery Options.
Babies will be fitted with translucent contact lenses at birth, and the birth of a kid with blonde hair and pale skin will be net with sadness, in both cases because of all the heroic measures required to survive life with no ozone layer.
Well done.
Seconded. Mapping the brain is one of my only viable career options at this point, yet I feel it is a futile endeavor. Since the 1960s it has been demonstrated that retro-fitting animals with robotic limbs was possible and since then, 40 odd years later, we have little growth outward from this. Sure, we can do it faster now, but we haven’t really discovered anything new. In the next 850, hopefully we will have a general idea of how the brain and conscience works, something like the modern Human Genome Project. Our current methods of doing it will just seem quiant and pre-historic.
Oh, and for some reason I feel America and the World in general will be considered a simpler more innocent time, when world leaders played dress up and make believe.
I predict that round about 2200, people will finally give up on the belief that personality is shaped by genes or otherwise determined at birth, and will instead accept the fact that society shapes people’s behavior.
Quantum physics will go down the drain, to be replaced by something that actually makes sense.
Historians will discover that Saddam did not actually have any WMDs in 2003.
There will be proof there is/was intelligent life on at least one other planet.
Genes will be tweaked before conception, so no more childhood illnesses or dseases in newborns and lifespan will increase to 120 on average. Growing populations will make birth control mandatory.
Vacations to the moon will be commonplace.
Weather patterns on earth will force major relocations of entire populations.
Windows XP version 9,349,211 will be released, and computers will still freeze up and need to be rebooted several times per hour.
Law and Order will come out with their 1000th variation of the series.
There will be a remake of the Lord Of The Rings Trilogy in the popular hologram format.
The importance of the appendix will become evident.
As to magic and spirituality, I think it’s gonna be another five thousand years before homo sapiens give up on waiting for paradise.