30 Craziest Predictions About the Future Experts Say Are Going to Happen

The future! It's either going to be really, really amazing, or really, really awful. Will we be commuting to work on flying bicycles on air-conditioned highways, or replaced by robots and hiding in our homes because antibiotics have stopped working? Will cancer be cured? Will there be Internet on Mars? Will the letter Q still exist? We have so many questions, and luckily the experts have answers.

Here are 30 predictions about the future that may surprise or even shock you—but one thing is certain: They're backed by some pretty smart people. So will they come true? Are they getting closer to reality even as you read this? Who knows! Stick around long enough and you just may find out. And for more amazing trivia, don't miss the 20 Crazy Facts That Will Blow Your Mind.

Ray Kurzweil, a futurist and director of engineering at Google, doesn't like the idea of people he loves dying any more than you do. We can't stop them from dying, but we can preserve their memories a little better than just fading photographs. He thinks we're heading towards an age when we'll be able to create virtual reality avatars of our deceased loved ones, realistic enough that we can interact with them. "This will be a way to bring him back," he says, referring to his father. "Even if it isn't fully realistic to bring these people back in A.I., it'll be close." And for more astonishing factoids, check out the 100 Awesome Facts About Everything. 

Amazon is already launching drone delivery, but if even that sounds like too much effort, the kitchen of tomorrow won't need you to notice that your milk is running low or you're almost out of beer. Containers will send out alerts, on their own, when they're in need of replenishing. And to make sure yours will keep you healthy for longer, give your fridge this list of the 40 Heart Foods to Eat After 40.

Engineers at Samsung are hard at work trying to develop a pair of contact lenses that let you go online and read your favorite websites without lifting a finger. How does it work? Well, it involves a "light-emitting diode on an off-the-shelf soft contact lens, using a material the researchers developed: a transparent, highly conductive, and stretchy mix of graphene and silver nanowires."
They've already tested it on rabbits, who apparently have been tweeting lots of mean comments from their eyes all year. (No, that's a joke. But the contact lenses are entirely real!) And if you're looking for more mind-blowing trivia, don't miss the 50 Crazy Celebrity Facts You Won't Believe Are True.

Saturn's rings always made it the most recognizable planet in our solar system, but it may lose those bragging rights in another 20 to 40 million years. Mars could one day get its own outer ring. It all depends on its moon, Phobos, which is getting closer and closer to the red planet's surface. If it doesn't crash into Mars, it will break apart into countless tiny bits, which will continue to orbit the planet. Pretty cool, right? And for some surprising trivia much closer to home, check out the 20 Amazing Facts You Never Knew About Your Body.

The BBC is pretty confident we can make this happen in the not-so-distant future. "Picking up thoughts and relaying them to another brain will not be much harder than storing them on the net," claims futurologist Ian Pearson. Oh great, so now even our own thoughts have to be politically correct all the time? We are in so much trouble. To learn how to train your mind to avoid any future awkwardness, try the 10 Ways To Focus Betting During Meditation.

At least according to George Friedman, author of The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century. One out of seven exports from China go to Walmart, he says, and even Warren Buffett doesn't believe Walmart has a future. "All of the prosperity of China is built on the willingness of the U.S. and Europe to buy its products," he says, and that time is coming to an end. When that time comes, he doesn't think the current version of China will be able to survive "a billion [angry] peasants."

Thanks to advances in cloning technology, we might be able to bring back animals like the woolly mammoths. But according to Akira Iritani, a professor at Kyoto University, "Now the technical problems have been overcome, all we need is a good sample of soft tissue from a frozen mammoth." Russian scientists are working on doing just that, and the big question in the medical community isn't "is it possible," but "should we do it?"

CGI has been used for everything from creating new scenes of actors in their youth to replacing actors who've died. How long before it just replaces them completely? Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise can relax for now, but according to Nadia Magnenat Thalmann, a computer graphics scientist and founder and head of MIRALab at the University of Geneva, as the technology improves, anyone who isn't an A-list actor will likely be done "more and more by computer."

Also according to futurist Ray Kurzweil, computers will be able paint, write, and compose far better than humans ever will.

We're not talking about the summer solstice, where it just feels like the days are longer because there's more sunlight. We mean literally longer. Granted, you'd need to live a long, long time to experience it, as we're only gaining about 1.7 milliseconds every 100 years. But it's still amazing to think that one of the things we consider absolute can actually be altered. It won't affect you, but your great-great-great-great grandkids are going to have a little more time in their day to get everything done. And if you're looking to get more done in our paltry 24 hours, know the 15 Ways to Double Your Productivity in Half the Time. 

Sean Raspet, a former flavorist-in-residence at Soylent, recently launched a new company called Nonfood that makes food entirely out of algae. As in, the gross slime that floats on the top of swamps. Pretty soon we'll all be eating food that isn't really food, some of which tastes (according to one early review) like "vinyl, and latex, and the dust of my grandfather's ashes." Yum! And for some great health advice you can use right now, check out the 40 Life Changes You Should Make After 40. 

Google's X Lab announced in 2014 that they're working on a pill that'll send microscopic particles into your bloodstream, capable of identifying cancers and even future heart attacks long before they become deadly. We'd prefer a cancer cure, but knowing about cancer years before it's diagnosed could save millions of lives. And for ways to fight cancer right now, know the 20 Everyday Habits That Increase Your Cancer Risk.

If companies like Technicon Design in France and the UK's Center for Process Innovation have their way, everybody will get a window seat in the plane of tomorrow, which will offer panoramic views of the sky as you fly towards your destination. Relax, the windows aren't technically real, they're just cameras mounted on the plane's exterior. Still terrifying, though. Happy flying! And though we're not sure they'll help on an aircraft with a transparent fuselage, we'll help you out anyway: Here are the 10 Best Tips for Sleeping on an Airplane!

Worried about sun damage or the possibility of skin cancer? Ian Pearson, a senior futurologist at the U.K.-based company Futurizon, claims we'll soon have bathroom mirrors with LED displays and high-resolution cameras. "They'll be connected to the Internet so you could have a video check-up with your dermatologist," he says.

We've already identified 2,341 planets outside our solar system, but thanks to a collaboration between NASA and Google, that number is projected to jump to 4,496 in the near future. Will there be life in any of those planets? We'll find out soon enough.

Weren't we all supposed to have robot butlers or maids by now? Even David Eagleman, the neuroscientist and writer, is disappointed. "I predicted that 20 years ago, when I was a sanguine boy loving Star Wars, and the smartest robot we have now is the Roomba vacuum cleaner," he says. Even though he's holding out for robot assistants, "I won't be surprised if I'm wrong in another 25 years. Artificial intelligence has proved itself an unexpectedly difficult problem."
As for fears that robots will soon steal all our jobs, Wired magazine isn't too concerned. As they reported last year, "the problem we're facing isn't that the robots are coming. It's that they aren't." Unless…

Only not as personal assistants and vacuum cleaners. Ask any smart person and they'll tell you, "Oh yeah, we're making robots that are way too smart. We're all doomed." Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator, a Silicon Valley startup, believes that "we will be the first species ever to design our own descendants."

Dr. Nayef Al-Rodhan, a Neuroscientist and Geostrategist—which are two occupations that almost sound like fake jobs from a science-fiction movie—says that it's only a matter of time before human beings create "transhumans," which are just "improved versions of themselves that will eventually pose a threat to non-enhanced humans."

Kris Pister, a computing professor at the University of California, Berkeley, came up with the idea for "smart dust" particles in the 90s, which were basically tiny sensors, almost undetectable to the human eye, which would record everything that happened in the world. From big cities to small towns, billionaires to working class citizens, everything humans do will be recorded. "It's finally here," Pister told CNN in 2010. Except not really. We don't think so anyway. Hmm. Maybe we should all vacuum our homes again, just to be on the safe side.

In 2020, which is just two years away, automated cars will start to become something most people take for granted. By some projections, there'll be nearly 10 million cars on the road with self-driving features. The thing that seems so weird and futuristic now will, by the next presidential election, become something that annoys you if you don't have it. You know how angry you get when you rent a car and it's an older model without satellite radio? In the next five years, cars that don't drive themselves will be the hand-me-downs that nobody wants. And for more cars that nobody wants, here are the 30 Worst Cars of the Last 30 Years.

Think terrorism is scary now? Just wait till they're making their own diseases. In 2016, Oxford's Global Priorities Project curated a list of potential future catastrophes that could kill off 10 percent or more of the human population. A man-made pandemic was probably the scariest of the bunch, not just because of the death toll but because of the human evil necessary to create it. (Sorry, every prediction about the future can't be rosy.)

Okay, we're all on board with the "not getting sick" part. But tiny robots in our bloodstream, that might also be transmitting our personal thoughts to a data-mining cloud? That sounds downright Orwellian. But we like the idea of not getting cancer because of our robot protectors. Hmm. Well, if it won't be a reality until at least 2030, according to some predictions, we still have time to think about it and not seriously ponder the ethical dilemma until it's too late.

Wait, did we say might? That's right, based on NASA calculations, there's a less than 1% chance that a mile-long asteroid will collide with Earth, wiping out all human life, on March 16, 2880. Of course, that means there's a 99% chance humanity won't be wiped out. And as NASA is the first to admit, "the upper limit could increase or decrease as we learn more about the asteroid in the years ahead." Also, relax, you'll be dead many centuries before that happens.

We've come to depend on antibiotics as a quick fix for so many medical ailments. But what if the medicine just stopped working? What if you got pneumonia and doctors just shrugged and said, "There's not much we can do, sorry?" That time may be coming sooner than we think. In fact, a 2016 report found that the new era of "antimicrobial resistance" could kill up to 10 million people each year by 2050.

That's according to an issue of The Futurist magazine. Do you want to know what any of that means? Or is it enough just to know that "tiny, agile robot teams will go through mines and landfills to extract anything of value"? It's possible that the less you know about your robotic earthworm garbage men, the better.

That's what Google's Eric Schmidt was promising in 2005, saying that the company would eventually "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." It would take 300 years to make it happen, but it'd be worth the wait. Imagine having the ultimate Wikipedia at your disposal, but filled with all human knowledge, and none of it fabricated by trolls!

They were first announced in 2oo3, but we're still years away from a commercially available "neural prosthetic." Bryan Johnson, who launched a startup called Kernel, is making strides to be the first to produce a brain implant. "Just like we've had civil rights, human rights, abortion rights, marriage rights, the next big debate to consume our society will be evolution rights," he says.ae0fcc31ae342fd3a1346ebb1f342fcb

We take it for granted that there'll be colonies on Mars someday. But will the red planet get any Internet access? We can't be expected to survive without social media in deep space, can we? Where will we upload all our Mars selfies? Well relax, an interplanetary Internet has been in the planning stages since 1998. When we finally make it to Mars—which could be by the early 2030s—you won't have to give up your Twitter account.

Have you ever watched your latest episode of the Walking Dead and thought, "That would've been so much better if I could smell the zombies?" You may be in luck. Nicholas Negroponte, a former director of M.I.T.'s Media Lab, predicted back in 1992 that we'd soon be getting "full-color, large-scale, holographic TV with force feedback and olfactory output." It sounds exciting and troubling at the same time.

70% of people surveyed across the globe claim they'd let medical science mess with their brains or bodies if it helped their career prospects. And they might be in luck! Some have predicted that "smart drugs" will soon become commonplace at offices. And a 2017 report from professional services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers found that "medically-enhanced workers" will be a reality soon enough.

Stephen Hawking, the world famous physicist and cosmologist, isn't very hopeful about the future of our planet. Thanks to dangers like climate change, epidemics, population growth and even direct hits by asteroid, he believes we'll need to find a way to leave Earth in the next hundred years.

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