The twenty first century will be very much like this one. It will start with wars and shifting borders in the first half and end with resettling and technological growth in the latter half. Throughout, we will still carry all our deeply embedded hang ups, prejudices, and hopes along with us.

I know you want details, so I've broken down the future into: Global Politics, American Politics, Education, Medical, Race and Immigration, Environment, Space Exploration, and Communications and the Internet.

Global Politics

The cold war isn't completely over yet. The future of global politics will be governed by the same two forces that governed most of the twentieth century. On one hand we have the free market group, led by America, Canada, Japan, and the European Economic Community. On the other we have China, still holding onto her totalitarian ways, and the remenants of the Soviet Union, which are dieing a slow death of disease, war, and crumbling social and technological infrastructure.

The big question at the start of the next century will be Where is Russia Going? The once great country is now in severly critical need of some kind of order; even an extreme figure reminiscent of Stalin or Peter the Great would be preferable to the chaos that has consumed that nation. Therein lies the problem. There's a very good chance that hard line communists will be able to regain power and offer a strictly imposed stability while capitolism and personal freedom take a back seat. Over the next twenty to thirty years, as the Soviet power play settles out, there will continue to be a great deal of tension and fighting in that area. Our best bet is to stay out of it all and make as few enemies as possible.

The Middle East will continue with its same old problems. Hundreds of years of struggle, pride, and religious conviction don't vanish overnight. Even though the PLO and Isreal are talking more politely lately, it remains to be seen whether the extremists will settle for anything less than total victory. The next ten years specifically will be dangerous as the rising ferver of religious fundamentilists await and then induce major changes at the end of the millenium in an end times ferver. That will settle down some when they realize the world hasn't come to an end and they still have to live with one another.

Whatever happens, there will be a growing world wide connection between individuals. This will affect the grand political events by making grossly slanted propoganda less effective and by making it more difficult to get away with wholesale brutality. More and more, nations will have to behave reasonably and humanely, because the world will be watching.

There will be more nations following the lead of Singapore, which is a mix of old world empire and new world technology. That balance will look more and more favorable to countries like North Korea and China which will be unwilling to give way to free market capitolism, but which still need to keep up with the rest of the world's technology.

By the mid to late 2100's, unless we see a severe backslide or major war, communism, socialism, capitolism, and perhaps even a few remaining monarchies will cooperate in a major new wave in technological expansion.

American Politics

America's political future will focus on the role of the Federal Government. Given the continuing problems of much of the world, and the inability of Washington D.C. to handle social issues effectively, we will turn the attention of the national government outward, while moving social concerns like education, welfare, and morality based laws to the state level.

However, this trend will have to overcome the tendency of the news media to cover only national politics. News programs with a nationwide audience focus on the national level, and so it has always been natural for everyone to look to their Senators and Representatives to be responsible for all matters of government.

This will change. We will begin to question the assumptions of the previous generation that bigger is better. We will have parents who grew up in the increasingly troubled public school system and will be looking for alternative choices for their own children. We will have less tolerance for throwing good money after bad to feed the federal machine and the national debt. We will see the growth of the Sega Generation, computer savvy, creative young adults without hope of seeing any social security money who will reject outright the idea that Big Government has anything to offer them.

There will be a great sins-of-the-father backlash against federalism in general. States will be encouraged to do their own thing, and the Libertarian Party will become a strong nation wide force.

The next century will also force us to deal with new waves of immigrants who will be fleeing the turmoil of Eastern Europe. This will come at a time when Americans are re-evaluating the social programs that often end up supporting the unemployed immigrant population. Our own discomfort with the situation won't stop the expectations held around the world that if only one can get to America, everything will be okay. This will manifest as an increasingly severe problem with illegal immigration, followed by new, inventive ways to integrate them into America.

The great issues of American Politics in the twenty first century will be: Foreign relations, states rights, the environment, and immigration policy.

Education

Even today, most parents would prefer a better set of options from which to select how their children are taught. The socialization of education will continue to be seen as an unnecessary, expensive, and ineffective intrusions on the simple task of teaching the core disciplines.

Home schooling will increase, as will local neighborhood schools run by groups of home schooling parents. Day care centers will seek elementary school accreditation and will work around the schedules of working parents, offering year round school that covers the full work day. As private elementary schools expand, companies will start offering tuition as part of employee benefit packages. Some large companies may even expand on-site day care to full schools for the children of employees.

New teaching methods, now seen in a few pilot programs and magnet schools, will quickly be adopted. Back to basics, Montessori, self-directed learning, will all inspire new methods heavily influenced by multi-media computer based drills and exercises.

This will begin as a push to issue vouchers to parents so that they can use government money for the school of their choice. As more and more non-government schools are established, competition for vouchers and then tax money itself will heat up, and the traditional public school will be quickly out maneuvered by newer, private companies. Eventually, most public schools will be administered by private companies that sell their educational services to cities.

Medical

Genetics will stay at the leading edge of medical research throughout the next century. Genetic screenings will become a standard part of a medical checkup to determine both acquired and hereditary conditions. Medicinal controls for obesity, hair loss, and predisposition for alzheimer's, heart disease, and cancer will become common in the latter half of the next century. At the far end, controlling cell growth for repair of damaged nerves, replacement of burnt skin or other damaged organs will become possible.

On the near side, the medical world will be thrown into a grey period during which the treatments for common bacteria and viruses will begin to fail against newer, more deadly attackers. Ebola, Ecoli, and variations of polio, tuberculosis, and so on may appear which are all but immune to the vaccines and antibiotics used today. Until there is an advanced enough understanding of genetics to be able to quickly respond to the new viruses, we may see a period of severe epidemics.

We will also be living longer. It will be common in the next century to live into one's nineties, and the number of people over the age of one hundred will continue to rise. This will push back the age of retirement from one's fifties into late sixties. It will be common for people to work well into their seventies. There's a good chance that someone born in the next ten years will live to see the year 2125.

Race and Immigration

Both black and white Americans will push for the abolitions of bussing for racial balance, and of affirmative action plans. A true healing is still a couple generations away. As long as people are still alive who have lived through institutional separation of the races, the pain of that period will still literally be living in us. By the end of the next century, the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. will still be a necessary reminder, but tolerance and understanding will by far be the norm.

Culturally, black and white America may be forever separated, just as both races will always be separated from Japanese, or Russian, or Mexican society. The issue isn't skin color, and hasn't been for quite some time, but culture. The efforts of the next century will not be to diminish the differences between the people of America, but to share them, honor them, and integrate them into society in productive ways.

Education reform and new leadership will work together to remove the stereotypes that remain an impediment to full acceptance and trust between the races. Still, it's going to be a long, difficult road.

One thing that will boost the status of black America will be the renewed flood of unskilled immigrants from around the world which will form a new lower class population. Unskilled immigrants will receive the brunt of prejudices and racial anger in the next century. This is unfortunate and not very flattering, considering all but the native Americans are descended from immigrants, but the issues will be based mostly around resources and capacity, and not racial hatred for its own sake.

Environment

By the end of the next century, we will very likely have over ten billion humans living on this planet. The eyes of the world will turn to Japan. This country will have the most experience dealing with extreme population and limited resources. As more and more cities become as crowded and strained as Japan is today, the Japanese will be off building mega cities that house hundreds of thousands and are almost completely self sufficient.

Many seasonal crops will be diverted to factory production, which will be able to produce a steady stream of fruit, vegetables, and grains twenty four hours a day year round. The production of beef will drop off as the return per acre drives the price of grazing land to unprofitable levels. You'll still be able to get a good steak in the future, but it will cost you sixty dollars instead of fifteen. Chicken will become the primary meat source, followed by fish and sea food that can be grown in large factory vats.

Recycling will be common and automated. Interstate and then international garbage dumping will become hot political issues for future senators and ambassadors. Most people will drive hybrid ethanol/electric cars. Hemp and bamboo will replace trees to supply most of the paper products. Building materials will be paper and plastic hybrids that will be cheaper and stronger than plain timber. Cleanup of this century's landfills, chemical dumps, and spent reactor rods will be a major industry in the next century.

Space Exploration

Space exploration will be slow. Managing the clutter of Earth Orbits will a large concern, especially considering that we will be launching a global net of polar orbit satellites to give instant cellular access to any point on earth. Space technology will expand in commercial activities, and unless something like the Delta Clipper is built, manned space missions will not be commercially viable, considering what could be done remotely using robot satellites and standard unmanned launches.

We will likely build some form of space station, but the lack of clear mission will cause it to be short lived as it suffers from public disinterest and poor funding.

This assumes, of course, that we don't discover pyramids on Mars and don't finally meet aliens face to face, in which case we'll be doing little but space exploration.

There is a wildcard here. If someone can devise a relatively cheap orbital jumper, we may just go ahead and build a massive space station just because we can. I can even imagine launching a couple shuttles into orbit, retrofitting and refueling them in orbit, and then sending them on regular missions back and forth to the moon. If that happens, a permanent lunar base is not too hard to imagine.

It's very unlikely that we will have anything like those large pinwheel space stations any time in the next century.

Communications and the Internet

This one is easy. It gets bigger, faster, and more entrenched into everyday business. Instead of GIF icons that slowly come into focus while a web page loads, we'll have high definition commercials running constantly in the back ground and we'll pay a premium for sites that don't blare at us.

Telephone services that rely on the touch tones will migrate to web services. Trouble shooting and customer service will also migrate from interactive voice to interactive web sites. Most hotel and airline reservations will be booked directly by the end customer.

The big business opportunity of the early part of the next century will be commercial catalog sites to direct human and automated agent searchers to the right place. The arcane http addressing will be replaced with trademarks and registered catalog keywords. Direct key-wording of all pages will fail for two reasons. As the number of pages indexed increases, even the most narrowly defined search will return thousands of documents. Also, most data will not live in static pages but be delivered by dedicated servers, and so most of the really good information will not even be available to web crawler indexers.

The battle of encryption will die a quiet and sudden death as strong encryption becomes the standard in other countries. Criminalizing the export of strong encryption will be pointless, because even better stuff will already be globally accessible. For American businesses to participate in global trading, they will have to participate in the strong encryption that will become standard. Don't worry, the NSA will still find ways to listen, either by grabbing the analog signal before or after encryption or by simply having more money and tips (trillion instructions per second) than the bad guys.

There it is.

You don't need a time machine or tea leaves. The future, like our past, is filled with people just like us, and like us they will do their best to get by with what they have. There's no magic panecea, unless you consider video wrist phones some sort of cure all.

The future is already mostly set by the inertia that has come from the past, moves through us now, and will move on to tomorrow. Free will is a luxury that belongs to the individual.

:^D