> 1.Before Nov. 2002 (Nov. 2004 at the latest)there will be a uniform electronic voting system in the United States. There will be no paper ballots or punch cards allowed. Election reform will be one of the most popular subjects ever. The electorial college will not survive until the next presidential election.

Wish that was so, but I don't think it will happen because small/poor counties won't be able to afford 'em. i live in a very sparsely populated county in rural Wisconsin. I vote in - i swear I am not making this up - a barn. I half considered complaining about it because in the last election they had a proposal about financial aid to dairy farmers, and as I was marking the ballot a cow mooed in the next stall over. I was thinking about telling them I felt the cow was there to exert undue influence ;)



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> 2.There will be a boom in passenger rail service in the United States. Trains will be the main mode of travel to and through National Parks. Monorails and maglev trains will only see limited use. Trolly cars, with only minor differences from the ones that ran in the 1940, will make a comeback in a number of major cities.

Hope so! With Amtrak's new Acela line that is about to start daily service on the northeast corridor, and which is slated to come to the midwest, it's gonna finally be fast enough to make trains a viable alternative to airlines. now, if only someone would build a TGV here! (France's high speed, 300km/h train)



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> 3.Cuba will become a democracy early in the century and will enjoy a booming economy based on sugar and tourism.

Especially if we follow through with my plan to sell Florida to Cuba. They get a bunch of people to push them into the democratic age, and we lose a bunch of people who don't know how to work a punchcard ;)



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> 5.The lines between computers, cell phones, television, radio, telephones etc. will blur, and
> by mid-century will merge into one multi-media communications system.
>

That's a bit late. They're already blurring. my cell phone can browse the web and check my email, my comptuer can make long distance calls, I can play DVD's on the computer or output the computer's video signal to the TV. The stereo is already hooked into my computer, etc. I'd actually say that by around 2010 we're gonna have the integrated machines, not 2050.




> Did I leave anything out? Do you have any other ideas?


Gas powered cars will go the way of the animals that made their fuel. With rising fuel costs and the fact that, in order to stabilize the environmental problems caused by fossil fuel emissions we need to cut those emissions by SIXTY percent, there is no way the gas-powered car can survive as viable transportation. They will be not be replaced with electric cars because the darned things suck. the range is too small, the acceleration is barely there, and they're hardly the most comfortable things on the planet. Instead, we'll see cars powered by hydrogen fuel cells (the only byproduct being water) and garbage (they already have one of those running). the CNG (compressed natural gas) cars that Chrysler and Volvo have been mucking about with are also going to disappear because, while they're really cool in their concept, if you don't live in California, it's almost impossible to find a station that has CNG.

Cars will no longer be piloted by people, but by computers. This will not be the choice of people, of course, but once the technology exists to make it possible, the law will require it. People are so busy using cell phones, laptops, the internet, TV's, making out, eating, and doing all sorts of other things when they should be driving that they won't have time for actually driving, so the task will have to be automated or risk even worse accident statistics than we have today. This will result in a loss of personal control, which I will hate personally because i love driving and everything about it, but it will also result in a much higher rate of travel (100-200mph at times) because without people to muck it up, the computer can pilot the cars perfectly safely at such high speeds.

Computers already rival the fictional computers we saw on the original Star Trek series. Within the next century, modular-architecture computers and DNA computers will be more powerful than anything we can possibly imagine, and will completely change the way we live. The internet will be scrapped for a much faster, intelligent network. The speed, connectivity, and nature of the new-internet will revolutionize the global economy. Information will become the new gold standard, with information brokers becoming the new economic rich-kids. This will eventually lead to the abolition of money in all forms, as the nature of the internet is such that information can be gotten for free just as easilly as it can be paid for. With the absence of money, the human race will begin to work for the betterment of humanity, rather than the betterment of their wallets, and a new golden age of discovery will begin.



Just a few of my theories ;)