I predict that most of mankind will be wiped out through nuclear and biological warfare. Those that do survive will find joy in using videophones to communicate.
A large percentage of the worlds population will still be living in slums or shanty towns and scraping by at a subsistence level.
As I said in this thread a few days ago:
“In the year 2057, newspapers will still be running “Classic Peanuts.” Other strips, including “Beetle Bailey,” “Hi & Lois,” “Blondie,” “Dennis the Menace,” and “Garfield” will still be limping along, long after the deaths of their originators, with the same old characters, situations, and gags. Oddly enough, “Family Circus” will be taken over by the great-grandson of the strip’s creator, who will take the comic in new, subversive, perversely hilarious directions, to the horror of some long-time fans and the delight of others.”
There will only be one company, DisneyPfizer, for who we will all work and from who we will buy all our stuff.
Dude - we’ve been there - not much has changed, but they live underwater, and your great-great-great-grand daughter, is pretty fine (is pretty fine)…
Grim 
[sup]whaddya mean Busted aren’t time travelers?[/sup]
Widespread technological and economic collapse, dramatically reduced human populations, demoted to more or less 16th century styles and standards of living, with a moderate sprinkling of retained technology, medicine etc.
No matter where in the world—or in the rest of the solar system and beyond—human civilization is, there will still be shitholes.
All the really “progressive” people, philosophies, and movements around today will appear “quaint,” at best.
No matter how “Utopian” we today might consider a future civilization, it’ll still have whiners and activists complaining about how awful and/or unfair it is.
Judaism will still exist…in a completely bizarre, unrecognizable form. This will be the “conservative” branch.
Aristotle will still be read.
Speaking of Futurama…
I think they got it pretty acurate actually. While 1000 years does seem like a long time, people today aren’t very different to how they were 2000 years ago. Heck, if you bring someone forward in time from 1000 BC, their kids would be indistintinguishable from the rest of the population.
No matter what advances we make, people will still be people and the driving force behind everything will still be to get laid.
I predict there will be no cure for the common cold.
And women will still think themselves fat.
And the Lions will never be in the superbowl
apes Will Rule The Earth
AI or the computer augmentation of human brains ( or both ) will produce a quite alien world. Present type humans will at best live in a few reserves; more likely they will be extinct. Most of what happens will be beyond our power to understand, just as an ape can never understand us. Some of our non-organic creations and decendants will use their unlimited lifespans to spread to the nearest stars; others will retreat into virtual worlds and ignore external reality. Every millimeter of every object ( except the Sun and the inner cores of planets ) will be infused with nanomachines; this will allow awareness/control over the majority of matter in the solor system. It will also prevent uncontrolled/malignant nanomachines/biologicals from spreading and destroying; a solar immune system.
Heh, I predict that somewhere around the year 2500; some dipshits going to invent a holodeck. Guy’s everywhere will soon discover they no longer have a need for women because a the cflick of a button they can be boinking Pam Anderson’s great, grea, great…(you get the point) granduaghter.
Because of this, the human race will neglect to propegate itself, thus the human race will be long since gone by the year 3000.
{yeah, I stole the premise of of Futurama…}
A lot of the predictions in this thread make no rational sense, giving me the courage needed to post my own ramblings.
[ul]
[li]There will be no countries. The most important political and economic unit will be something about the size of a large city and its outlying region, with larger units being temporary marriages of convenience or loose trading confederations.[/li][li]Government will revolve around voluntary organizations. Nobody will be locked in to a specific group or clan. The idea that you have to be a citizen of somewhere will be seen as archaic and barbarous as the idea that a serf could be legally bound to his lord’s land.[/li][li]There will be no large corporations. Work will be done by multiple independent guilds/unions contracting together to do a specific job.[/li][li]Diversity of all kinds will flourish. Pervasive computing will enable instant, lossless translation between a near-infinite variety of standards and languages. People will develop communities with highly idiosyncratic ways of doing things and still be able to communicate with the world around them.[/li][li]The solar system will be fully colonized. Not to mention largely reshaped. The asteroid belt will be cleaned up, with a few large manmade objects used as mines and living space; the Oort Cloud will meet much the same fate. There will be massive solar power projects in near orbit around the sun, largely made from former asteroids and Mercury. There will be massive floating cities inside the gas giants, and ice from their rings will have been shipped wholesale to terraform Mars and Venus. Pluto and Charon will be merged into a larger object suitable for launching large craft made out of former asteroids.[/li][li]Generation ships will carry humans to the stars. These are the large craft Pluto-Charon has to support. People who wish for their genes to populate the galaxy will live inside massive cylindrical ships—which rotate about their long axis to provide a kind of false gravity—that have been launched towards livable planets discovered by extremely high-resolution telescopes orbiting the sun out near the furthest orbits of the most eccentric comets. (Think 'scopes that would make Hubble look like a mouldboard plow.)[/li][li]We will make contact. We will find alien life on at least one of those livable planets, but we (on Earth) may not know it until 4000 AD. The life may or may not be sentient, but something on the order of blue-green algae is just about certain.[/li][/ul]
It’s well past time we cleaned up that asteroid belt. It’s a disgrace.
We will have habitats that have perfect weather and gravity, and with all the amenities of any major Earth city - with populations of millions – some of the bigger ones (maybe inside planetoids or asteroids) will have populations in the 10’s of millions.
Some of these habitats will be around other stars
The “human” (whatever that means - see below) population outside of the Sol system will be +100 million by 3000 (I think it will be more but that is as far as I want to go)
There will have been Contact of some sort (not necessarily visits) will other sentient life in the Universe. Maybe better said as “undoubted proof of existence” rather than contact.
The Human life span will be indefinite.
Some people will still worship Jesus in rituals that we would recognize large elements of.
I wish I said this:
People not in graduate level History classes (or just really knowledgeable about our period for some reason - the Tomndeb, Polycarp, Tamerlane, Captain Amazings etc. of 3000 A.D.) will never have heard of Clinton or Reagan or the Gulf War or The Iraq War or the Iran-Iraq War or Vietnam.
I think a Father-son President might make the Bushes more remarkable – but their politics and lives will be less well understood in 3000 than those of Louis VI and VII of France are today.
I think the Cold War will be remembered because of (and almost only in the context of) the Moon Landing. Neil Armstrong and Yuri Gagarin will be remembered by name like Captain Cook or Magellan.
Because I believe that by 3000 there could be some +500 year old people still around, because our movies and music will be digitally preserved and be more accessible to our descendants than in the past … I believe that the perceived differences between 3000 and 2000 will be less than between 1005 AD and 2005 AD. In short Derleth would find 3000 less strange than William the Conqueror’s Granddad would find 2005 – even though the Technological leaps would be just as great and probably greater
There will be non-Human sapient species, created by Man from Beasts, living among us.
They will work retail.
They will bitch about bad customers.
They will be right.
Superintelligent AIs will have arisen and vanished to the stars, we being uninteresting to the superintelligent. They will leave behind subroutines to keep us from annihilating ourselves and satellites to destroy rogue asteroids, etc. The subroutines will be so much smarter than us that they will seem godlike to us. Some of us will probably worship them, but others will say, “Ah, it’s just a subroutine.”
The assumption that all changes will be based on science and technology isn’t based in any logic that I can see. Human history has not been exclusively shaped by technological advancement.
Forget, say, the invention of the printing press. The man on the street of 1005 AD could not have imagined today’s world because he couldn’t have imagined the Protestant Reformation or the Treaty of Westphalia. Such a man couldn’t have possibly foreseen a world broken up into discrete nation-states as we currenlty imagine them, where the Vatican had virtually no real influence. Hell, a world where people would openly claim to be athiests would have been a bizarre to him as a world where the laws of physics don’t apply would be to you.
I don’t believe you can accurately predict the future 20 years in advance. 1000 years is utter lunacy. You don’t even know for sure that technology will progress entirely forwards.
I’ll make one prediction, though; there will be no substantial human presence in space. There never will be.
Cockroaches will still be around, crawling over whatever remains after humans have completely destroyed themselves and any traces of civilization.
We already have this.
It’s called Los Angeles.