AI will take over a lot more than just media interviews.

Brick and Mortar shops will not be the primary means of commercial shopping (if such a thing is still feasible in the future)

8.3 quake rocks the USA

Meat will be banned in a 10+ million person country

3D Printing becomes commonplace

Humans will set foot on Mars but they probably won't come back seeing as they'll be colonists or what have you.

Major epidemic will kill 25% of a 10+million person country

The US will no longer be a superpower.

And BTW, we already have flying cars. It just was a few years late for Avery Brooks' taste.

Also, time travel is already possible assuming you can reach speeds approaching light.

I didn't do any research to develop the list, so I just threw 8.3 in on the earthquake since I figured that would be "really big".

The USGS has this list of the largest earthquakes in America, and it's pretty interesting: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquak...largest_us.php

Alaska rattle around a lot, but it looks like the official scoreboard shows only one earthquake in the continental US at or above 8.3 in recorded history, and it was in 1700. I thought the New Madrid quake was the biggest, but they're only showing those quakes at 7.5 to 7.9.

You know that there is a 1km skyscraper being built currently... it was initially planned to be 1 mile tall but they had to scale it back due to geological issues (I think). I would be amazed if no one at least starts construction on a mile high skyscraper in the next 50 years.

http://www.kingdomtowerskyscraper.com/

http://www.businessweek.com/articles...de-the-u-dot-s

Interesting. I wonder what the geological issues were, and if that's going to be a problem anywhere. It seems like at some level unpredictable things start happening.

It's cool that they were originally planning for a mile, though. That's insane. It seems like you're messing with air traffic patterns at that level. I don't think I'd be comfortable with an office or a home that high, personally.

Seems, with our finite amount of land on this planet, building up is the most logical thing to do.

I dunno. In some places I suspect it makes sense, like islands and mountain valleys and ports where the land supply is truly finite. But there's still a whole lot of land in the world that's undeveloped. I don't really suspect there's a big need for tall buildings in most of the world, and particularly for 100+ story buildings.

Evidence of a pre-Ice Age civilization is discovered

Can you give a timeline for this option?

It depends on whether the time travel thing happens, but ... in the next fifty years, will some discover evidence of a civilization that existed before the last ice age. What was that, something like 12,000 years ago?

I guess technically it should be "before the end of the last ice".

I think there were "civilizations" before 12k years ago depending on how you want to define the word.

Man, nobody ever tells me anything. I didn't know it even came close. I was thinking the oldest was maybe 6,000 BC or thereabouts.

Let's adjust and go with something like "pre-Lascaux cave paintings".

I'm a conservationalist so this conversation probably won't go very far.

#4 - A third party holds the U.S. presidency.

I voted yes on this.

It may just be a temporary hiccup, but Americans seem to be very tired of Democrats and Republicans, who do not really represent the mainstream population any more. We haven't had a new party formed since the Republicans, but the Bull Moose party made a good run, and at various times we've created Democrats and Whigs from the original Federalists. So it's not unprecedented.

The biggest challenge is that the two parties have built in financial perqs for themselves that make it very difficult to create a third party these days. But I think Americans are close to the point where a populist movement could take hold and climb up enough to get into the matching funds game. At least I hope so.

I think we have a third party president sometime in the next fifty years.

You see streams and forests. Real estate moguls see opportunity.

Which of these things will happen in the next fifty years?
 

I know! I'm not one to oppose progress but progress at any cost bothers me. All of this unnecessary expansion, urban sprawl, and pollution is taxing Mother Nature. We're lending a hand in the extinction of something like tens of thousands of species a day.