Monday, October 08, 2007

Top 10 forecasts for 2008 and beyond

Time for more predictions - or forecasts - this time from the band of scholarly folks over at The Futurist. Each year since 1985, the editors of The Futurist have selected thought-provoking ideas to appear in their magazine.

For 2008 report they claim that 'The earth is on the verge of a significant extinction event--a biodiversity collapse; the world will have a billion millionaires by 2025; water will be in the twenty-first century what oil was in the twentieth century; and the threat of another cold war with China, Russia, or both could replace terrorism as the chief foreign-policy concern of the United States.'

These are among the top 10 forecasts fom The Futurist magazine's Outlook 2008 report:

1. The world will have a billion millionaires by 2025.

2. Fashion will go wired as technologies and tastes converge to revolutionize the textile industry.

3. The threat of another cold war with China, Russia, or both could replace terrorism as the chief foreign-policy concern of the United States.

4. Counterfeiting of currency will proliferate, driving the move toward a cashless society.

5. The earth is on the verge of a significant extinction event.

6. Water will be in the twenty-first century what oil was in the twentieth century.

7. World population by 2050 may grow larger than previously expected, due in part to healthier, longer-living people.

8. The number of Africans imperiled by floods will grow 70-fold by 2080.

9. Rising prices for natural resources could lead to a full-scale rush to develop the Arctic.

10. More decisions will be made by nonhuman entities.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Very interesting...all of these things seem likely; only the 10th one made me sit up and say, what??