Atheism. Atheists will be looked upon as slightly deranged.
In 100 years…
Gay marriage will be commonplace
Recycling will not be optional
Marijuana will not get you locked up for decades
The forty-hour work week will be considered overkill
(one can only hope, anyway)
I God help me I hope not! I love work!
I think they’ll laugh at our quaint ideas about how the Internet will take shape.
I think in 100 years people will be more religious. Maybe there will be some new, hugely evangelical religion. The neo-Victorians of The Diamond Age might actually appear. But I forsee an end to moral relativism.
I believe/hope nation states as independent entities might become redundant (although a single century may well be too short a timescale). Certainly the idea that all nations should act solely in their own interests for evermore will be seen as a recipe for disaster.
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The division of the world into nation-states will be in the early stages of its demise.
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19th/20th century Spiritualism (ESP, seances, dowsing, copper bracelets to cure your shingles, UFO abductions, crap like that) will be more or less gone. Straight-up religious zealotry will still be as strong as ever, though.
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I’ll make a more daring prediction, and probably an unpopular one; I think the current trend towards acceptance of homosexuality will NOT last the next 100 years. I suspect our great-grandchildren will be less tolerant and open-minded in this regard than we are.
This is a fun game and an interesting question, so I don’t want to put TOO big a damper on it. But if we’d asked leading progressive intellectuals this same question 50 or 100 years ago, how well do you suppose THEY’D have done?
It wasn’t so long ago, after all, that it appeared the future of the Moslem world would be determined by secular socialists like Nasser and Mossadegh. Did ANYONE foresee the resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism?
I say this solely to remind you: it’s FAR from obvious that beliefs you find absurd are destined to shrivel and die.
This whole notion of commuting to work in an office will probably be incredibly archaic, roughly on the order of having somebody deliver a block of ice to your house to keep your food cold. You’re working over a network, talking to people on the phone; why does your body need to be physically there in the office? Ridiculous.
I lost you here. I don’t think there is much room for a large change in understanding of how airplanes fly. If it wasn’t well-understood, they wouldn’t be able to design them so successfully.
I think you are engaging in a logic fallacy here. I.e., even if psychological illness comes down to biochemistry, it does not necessarily follow that these therapies have no value because it is likely (probably even proven although I am not sure) that we can influence the biochemistry in our brains by our thought processes.
That to me is what makes psychology so fascinating…the whole interaction between “mind” and “body”. I think your reductionism is too extreme. [As Bob Laughlin, Nobel Prize winner in Physics said a few years ago, in attacking the idea that all interesting physics can be reduced to understanding the fundamental particles in isolation (as some particle physicists seem to believe), “As we close out the 20th century, reductionism is finally dead!”]
Exxxxxcellent, I will finally be able to rule the world with a wooden spoon.
That all diseases can be controlled by anti-biotics.
Either a completely new form of treatment will be developed
or bacterial infections will become the fearful things they once were.
I agree. Although I hope Creationism is extinct in 100 years, I am sure religion will still be around for a few hundred more years at least, and probably a few thousand.
The best I think I can hope for in the next 100 years is as you described, where religion loses its political power. And even that’s iffy.
One of the professors at my undergrad alma mater was less than fond of the idea that Bernoulli’s law explained airplanes.
[Caution: hand waving, half-remembered third-person argument follows. I am not a fluid dynamicist.]
His complaints were roughly as follows: if Bernoulli’s law is giving a boost to airplanes in flight, then why exactly is the air moving faster over the top surface of the wing than the bottom surface (which is presumably why Bernoulli comes into play)? And even if the air is moving faster over the top surface, why isn’t this balanced out in part by the fact that the top surface typically has a larger surface area?
And finally, why is it possible to build a plane that flies upside-down? In other words, why doesn’t Bernoulli’s effect cause such planes to have negative lift equal to their own weight (since presumably when they’re flying right-side up they have positive lift equal to their own weight).
He also claimed that he had once calculated the net air pressure on a wing-shaped object moving through the air and found it to be zero.
Of course, I can’t verify any of this; I especially don’t know what assumptions and simplifications he used in his calculations. (And to my eternal regret I never thought to ask him if he had ever build an airfoil with a perfectly symmetrical cross-section, just to test his theories.) It’s just enough to make me go, hmmm…
Beautifully put.
I will go along, conditionally, with the first two points in RickJay’s response. The uninational sovereign state will not be eliminated, but it will be reonsidered as to being THE natural and necessary form of political entity. OTOH, at the same time the idea that the alternative to this is the “One World State” should ALSO become discredited. More likely there will be overlapping spheres of authority of different breadth according to their different jurisdictions, but no single global one. There would be a limited number of regional/continental EU-type entities, within which 20th-Cent artificial states could afford to dismember in more manageable units, plus a few self-standing megastates (e.g. USA, Russia, India, China)
Also, a comment: People seem to conflate the form of specific religious practices, which come and go, with the apparently constant interest in some form of spiritual/religious/transcendent experience.
I should have known there’d be a column on this 
Yeah, the whole “upside-down planes” thing is a weak objection. As I said, this just begs for someone to build a symmetrical airfoil and start doing wind-tunnel experiments. Where’s a fluid dynamicist when you need one?
Funny, I predict the complete inverse:
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Spiritualism in the rise, acceptance that science cannot explain everything. Meditation common practise, gathering “information” from this source being at least equivalent to the “mathematical induction” used by experimental science (refer to Karl Popper).
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Rising natural spirituality against dogmas introduced by archaic religions. Spiritual people will think/feel more before trusting priests or gurus.
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Homosexuality commonly accepted. Why should we re-criminalize something which cannot be changed anyway and which has no victims? We are not talking about pedophiles here …
Good, sound advice will be as valuable as ever, but the idea of going to marriage counseling for months and even years on end will be considered quaint.
Care to elaborate why* you think this?