I envision that Western medicine will have been married with Eastern medicine to create a level of healthcare never seen nor imagined in human history.
I believe that war will once again rearrange the face of the planet and that the United States will cease to be a global military superpower. However, ancient nations like Egypt and China will still exist.
I predict that the human brain will be much better understood and manipulated (for better or for worse), but it will never, ever be fully understood.
I forsee that we will have a moon base and a Mars base, but we will stop short of exploring the gas giants due to the cost being greater than the benefit.
I think that most of the land mass of the industrialized nations will be covered in sprawling metropolises.
The research and advancement of technology will hit its plateau, and technological innovation will slow.
People will not have changed for the better. We will be more technologically enlightened, but we will always be selfish, imperialistic, warlike, and hypocritical. Some things never change.
We’ll still be waiting for the flying car. Affordable solar power will still be just around the corner. Brett Farve will be considering retirement. We’ll finally pull out of Iraq. Family Circus will publish a gut wrenchingly funny cartoon.
A thousand years is a loooooong time in historical terms.
Modern civilization could utterly collapse and be reborn from its ashes in 1000 years. Entire empires could rise and fall.
A few things will persist. There will probably still be human settlements at the locations of most contemporary cities, for example.
But no large political structures will survive. There might still be an entity calling itself the United States of America but it almost certainly won’t be a democracy and it may not even be located in North America.
Even what it means to be human may change. We are poised on the brink of having the ability to completely reshape the human genome. A thousand years from now there could be dozens of different human subspecies.
Barring some sort of massive technological collapse I would predict the existence of artificial intelligences that are far more intelligent than we are.
Almost two hours and not a single Futurama reference? Jeez.
(Assuming not too many collapses of civilization) I’d expect we’d be pretty well established on Mars by then, and maybe even thinking seriously about what we could do about Venus.
despite playing twice a week, I will still not have won the lottery.
Cher’s farewell tour will be wrapping up soon.
Twinkies will still not have reached their expiration date.
In a brilliant stroke of marketing to finally wipe clean the national debt, the US agrees to accept $500 Trillion to change the name from The United States of America to The United Gates Of America. For an additional $10 Trillion, the city of Seattle changes their name to Microsoftia.
The newly formed SDMB Party officially gets more votes than either the Democrats or the Republicans in the Presidential election, and Cecil Adams XXII is elected President. In his first act as President, Adams declares ignorance a crime, punishable by a minimum of 4 years in an institute of higher learning, to be paid for by the government.
You may be wrong. Whatever changes will occur in 1000 years, they will be based on hard science and technology–and we already know the basics. Instead of our crude medicine, they will have genetic engineering. Instead of silicon chips, they will have quantum computers. Even if they invent telepathy and mind control,and stop the biological aging process, it will be comprehensible to us primitive 21st century folks.Because whatever they do, it will be based on the same laws of physics that we already know, but which we don’t yet have the technology to use.
Now compare a cave man suddenly entering the 21st century. He would be stunned and unable to cope, right? Wrong! Look at the primitive tribes of the Amazon, or the jungles of New Guinea: -once contact is made , they may still run around naked, but they learn to use guns, radio, antibiotics and even computers within a few months.
But even by the year 3000, nobody will have laughed at a Family Circus cartoon…
Ewan MacGregor’s character in Trainspotting said in the narrative that in a thousand years there won’t be nay more men or women. We’ll all be wankers.
A person in the year 1000 wouldn’t be able to conceive any transportation more advanced than a horse, any machine that didn’t require humans to power it, or instant communication to thousands of miles away.
I think in a 1000 years we will look different physically, in that there’s no longer any need for our limbs as everything will be fully automated. We’ll have big heads and bulbuous pupalike bodies. We will be able to travel via quantum mechanics for distances that are light years away. We won’t need space craft. The limit of light speed will be irrelevant, as we will be limited by speed of microprocessing, i.e.: thought.
Genetics will advance to a point where we can get customized bodies. Racism, religious differences, and so forth will ebb in favor of genetic prejudice. It will reinforce class warfare, as the welthiest get the best bodies. The imperfect will be shunned regardless of race, creed or national origin.
Speaking of which, there will be no more ideas of national origin so much as there will be continental origin. Individual countries will mold together and become provinces to nation conglomerates, which will then annex more nationalities for competitive power bases. Also by this time, orbital city-states will be plentiful, so people used to living in space will consider themselves apart from earth dwellers. They will also be the primary food producers, as their orbital location are more ideal for controlling growth conditions. Most growable food will be cultivated in their massive hydroponic labs, as conditions on Earth will be inferior due to ozone depletion and pollution. Rural will now mean outer space.
I’m optimistic. Humanity will have spread across the solar system, we’ll have located nearby habitable planets, and we will have sent colony ships out to them. One or two might even have arrived at their destinations - I’m not sure that we’ll have developed FTL drives, but that doesn’t really matter.
We will learn how to create new universes, and establish a connection between our universe and the newly created universe. We will use the newly created universes for all sorts of purposes including: creation of space, matter and energy, storage of knowledge, and computation. Space travel in our own universe will be the hobby of eccentrics. Fringe groups will simply create new universes, enter them, and then cut themselves off from the common universe. Our universe will become a sort of “holy universe,” like Jerusalem, (and Earth a holy planet) but few people will choose to live there because the laws of physics here will be thought overly constrictive. The ability to create universes will be controlled by a totalitarian regime which will solve all of its problems by creating new universes, but will have an extraordinarily complex, essentially religious power structure in place to prevent the creation of universes destructive to our own, or to its power.