America in 2050 (interstate, wage, global warming, weapon)

[zoomzoom3]

Originally Posted by Capt. Dan

About 40% of the population will be speaking Mandarin. About 40% will speak Spanish. The other 20% will speak one of the Southern US dialects because the Southerners will be the last ones fighting the takeover.

If things keep going like they have been lately, America in 2050 will resemble India in 1980. I think it will be extremely overpopulated (600-700 million people), and extremely impoverished. There will be only two classes of people, a tiny ruling class of obscenely wealthy people, and there will be everyone else who will be very poor.

[mysticaltyger]

Originally Posted by zoomzoom3

If things keep going like they have been lately, America in 2050 will resemble India in 1980. I think it will be extremely overpopulated (600-700 million people), and extremely impoverished. There will be only two classes of people, a tiny ruling class of obscenely wealthy people, and there will be everyone else who will be very poor.

600 million people by 2050? I doubt it, but no one really knows.

The Census Bureau's most aggressive population projections show a population of aboiut 458 million by 2050.

Population Projections - 2009 National Population Projections: Summary Tables (http://www.census.gov/population/www/projections/2009hnmsSumTabs.html - broken link)

By the way, Japan is the same size as California but it has almost 4x the population. It certainly has a much higher standard of living than India (and it has much higher life expectancy than the US while spending a lot less on health care).

In any case, the US could easily accommodate 700 million people in 2050 with better resource management and good implementation of technology. The problem, as usual, is that humans are short sighted and wasteful when it comes to resource management and don't change their behavior until there's a crisis (or until it's too late).

India is 1/3 the size of the US yet it has 4x the population, yet its standard of living is rising rapidly, albeit from a low base.

[mysticaltyger]

Originally Posted by Chango

and better health care means less pain, better and longer lives.

...

Ineteresting thoughts in your post. I don't have time to comment on all of them...but it seems to me many aspects of good health care actually require us to go back in time...as in...eating natural whole foods so that we don't have the epidemic of diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke, obesity, arthritis, and all the attendant costs and treatments that go along with these mostly preventable diseases.

[Gibbous Moon]

The short answers is:
I don't.

2050 is 39 years in the future, rather distant.

Consider trying to imagine 2011 in the year 1972, which was 39 years ago.
Consider trying to imagine 1985 in the year 1946, or 1945 in the year 1906, 1927 in the year 1888, or 1863 in the year 1824.

The next 39 years will feature so many twists and turns that we doubt or don't even imagine.

That's what will make living through the next 39 years (or any 39 year span) so interesting!

[Sealtite]

By 2050, our industrial manufacturing base will return, because it has to. Less young people will be going to college, because they will have realized by then that there aren't enough white-collared cubicle jobs to accommodate the throngs of college grads that flood the market every year. Frankly, I'm surprised most of them haven't realized that fact by now. Programs like the CCC camps will make a huge resurgence in the years to come, which will help rebuild our infrastructure.

These things will happen because they have to. Like it or not, not everyone can go to college and work behind a computer screen. Not everyone is automatically entitled to a McMansion and an SUV upon completing grad school, and in many cases....before securing work. Home ownership does not mean that your house is an ATM machine, nor does it mean that it's alright to upgrade to a newer one and "flip" the old one for a profit in 2 years.

We'll either go back to basics in this country, or we'll completely disintegrate as a nation. It's that simple.

[Kobe25]

By 2050 I think Chicago is like Detroit
Atlanta becomes an international city
San Fran is connected to L.A via bullet train
New York is hit by another terrorist attack but once again rebuilds itself to a robotic type city Las Vegas is like new York an L.A mixed in one as city officials create a man made beach
I think Los Angeles has it's transportation upgraded and has moving sidewalks and flying cars
I

[kevxu]

The United States will be faced with being crushed by its debt, and whatever people in Europe remember the present difficulties of the Eurozone, they will be laughing up their sleeves....and rightly so. The U.S. political parties show no sense of reality about this massive problem, and if they "come to," it will be years too late. And the American people have been living in a world of imported products for ages now, and those days will have to go bye-bye, and all those great foreign products will be replaced by not especially good, but cheapo American-made ones.

The U.S. is already not the Ringmaster of the World, despite its military supremacy. Having to be part of a hegemony of ruling nations is not going to be easy for the U.S., and conservative politicians will continue to swing farther and farther to the Right, dragging the GOP into crypto-fascist territory....and how big a part of the U.S. population will buy fascist agitprop? Probably enough, especially with the U.S. faced with the herculean task of dealing with its debt, that the U.S. will then become one of the most dangerous nations in the world.

This situation will be exacerbated by the struggle within the Arab and Muslim nations to supress extremist organizations in their part of the world, without setting off religious upheavals with a Sunni clergy who may feel that they are all being attacked.

The Dems will still be trying to get it together, and still not be able to figure out what that might mean. They will be a weak centrist party, struggling to find a purpose. And one that people vote for on a national level only as a desperate measure to keep the extreme Right Wing at bay.

Life in parts of the U.S. will get very unpleasant for racial minorities, gay people, and non-christians (especially Muslims.)

I think regional secession movements will arise, but fail. Quality education will deteriorate in much of the U.S., but its major institutions of Higher Education will survive in their liberal enclaves, and with large doses of benefaction from foreigners anxious to see that they remain an international resource. Far larger numbers of Americans will seek their livelihoods abroad, and relocate there permanently.

Ultimately by 2050 or soon thereafter, African-American and Latino conservatives (of the European type more than the reactionary American type) will recapture the Republican Party for mainstream politics, and will make it the majority party in the country. At this point, the world might see the revival of a stable nation, able and desirous of seeking its own welfare peacefully in the world.

[Kobe25]

Yeah bro your right......2050 is decades away & I'msure another war will take place"like you said world war 3 were maybe America is destroyed by some UFO battleship.....that may be a little to much for the average brain to comprehend but in reality the world as we know it now is living in the apocalypse or last days according to scriptures so all i can say is hope for the best & prepare for the worst

[PNWdrifter]

not very good.. lol. probably collapsed due to peak oil and a crash in the economy. the government controlling a slowly recovering populace. many dead due to starvation, mass violence, freezing to death, disease, wasr, dehydration and suicide. that or we'll live in an either worse corporate/socialist dictatorship state where freedom is only a sad distant memory.

[GregW]

Some Kristian fundamentalist will preach the Last Crusade and the world will go to war as never seen before. The objective will be to eradicate the entire concept of Islam even if it means killing all the believers. The resulting post nuclear, post plague, post apocalypse world will have the survivors existing in the wastelands still capable of growing food.

Another possibility is greater education about the physical world will reduce the absurdity of trying to please some God figure and get us working on improving living conditions worldwide leading to a steadily declining population leveling off at a world population of less than one billion healthy, educated and peaceful people.

People have a choice of a future of hell or paradise. I figure we will for a number of reasons including the power of the war profiteers pick hell first.