What are your predictions for the 2020s...? [View all]
...I don't mean what you want to happen, or hope will happen...but what you think *will* happen. Here are a few of my own, and this is just for fun, so don't take it all too seriously:
1. The political turmoil in the US will get worse. The election of a Democratic President in 2020 will be met with a solid phalanx of Trump federal judges, ensuring that any progressive legislation will be squashed in the cradle. This will erode the legitimacy of the courts, especially the Supreme Court, for more and more of the population. Subsequent elections will do little to clarify the situation, and the Red areas will be constantly in a mostly peaceful rebellion against "Washington". Both Blue and Red areas will more and more resort to de facto nullification of the other's laws. By 2030, each party will increasingly be delegitimizing the other; however, it will of course be the GOP which is more radical.
2. The Climate Crisis will generate more heat than light [sic]. Fossil fuels will decline quicker than anticipated, and opposition to nuclear power will mostly vanish. The temperatures in 2030 won't be too much higher than in 2020. Non-carbon methods of transportation will become big business, and spread rapidly. By 2030, the major ecological concern will be the acidification of the oceans.
3. Physical books will make a comeback. The e-book will be there, of course, but the tactile sense of having actual paper will become fashionable again.
4. Baseball--assuming it's capable of solving its problems, always questionable where this sport is concerned--will make up some of its lost ground to football, and again become the National Pastime.
5. The Supreme Court will reverse Roe vs Wade; but the backlash against this will make anti-abortion laws more-or-less dead letters except in the most backward Fundamentalist areas.
6. The UFO mystery will be solved at last, and it will be found out that there is something "real" about the phenomenon. However, it will be discovered to be a "human" matter, as opposed to an "alien" one. This will not, however, mean that the answer is necessarily mundane.
7. One supposedly "dead" celebrity will be found to have, indeed, faked his/her death.
8. The culture will enter a phase of slightly-squarish romanticism. Popular music will have a modest return of the American Songbook feel to it, and old-fashioned romantic movies will come back.
9. The traditional declining Rust Belt cities--Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, St Louis, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Buffalo--will come roaring back.
10. Donald Trump will end the decade living in Russia. No one in the United States will ever admit in public that they ever voted for him.
OK--there's my Nostradamus-like predictions. We'll check back in ten years and see how it went...how about you guys?
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