The World 2050

[Хahar 🤔]

San Marino needs to annex Italy as fast as possible.

No! Have you seen their electoral system? It's terrible!

Belgium is destroyed by the competing forces of regional devolution and supranational centralization.

[Хahar 🤔]

US: Republicans go libertarian, Democrats go authoritarian socialist

Britain: Labour becomes a minor party, two party system between Cons and Lib Dems. We leave the EU in the 2010s.

lolz

[Хahar 🤔]

I really don't see why everybody thinks China and India will do so well. Most of India is still an uneducated, third-world country. China is growing too rapidly to be sustainable, and the one child policy will stifle growth as well. Communism cannot sustain growth like that.

Well, I've actually thought it has down quite well, actually, so far. But the growth is invisible, despite upticks in international clout and domestic "prosperity". China is a ticking time bomb, and basically Japan on steroids. Sometime in the decade after next people will realize that this is just a short term trend for China.

Indeed.

I think India has potential, but there's such a disparity between the urban and rural areas in terms of standard of living.

The disparity's between rich and poor, not urban and rural.

[Хahar 🤔]

China will be a parliamentary democracy as well as a global superpower on par with the United States (by then a clearly declining power in both relative and absolute terms).

Greenhouse gases emitted from anthropogenic sources (factories, vehicles, etc.) will be stabilized, and on their way down to 1990 levels.

The non-Hispanic white population (WASP) in the United States will have only a plurality of the total population.

We will still have a two-party system here in the United States, between Republicans and Democrats.

The U.S. Republican Party will have finally overcome its problems appealing to racial/ethnic minorities (with the exception of African Americans), with traditional (aka, socially/religious conservative) values being the glue tying the new coalition together. 

We will have established colonies on the Moon and Mars.

I am pretty much sticking with these predictions, although I would add India as one of the global superpowers; and that whoever colonizes the Moon and Mars (as well as beyond) will most definitely be either China or India -it certainly won't be the United States leading the effort.  We've shot our bolt by setting a man on the Moon in 1969 as well as building and completing the International Space Station.  We're done as a space-faring nation.

Also, we will have universal health care (much along the lines of the Senate plan).   

Also want to add that Iran and Iraq will be thriving democracies.

Palestine will exist as an internationally recognized state in the West Bank with East Jerusalem as its capital.  And after one last war, Gaza will no longer exist as a separate political entity, with its inhabitants having been trucked out by Israel and dumped into the far southern fringes of Israel.

I don't think anyone will colonize the Moon or Mars by 2050. It takes up too much resources, money, and energy. It takes two years just to get to Mars, not to mention we'll need to find your years' worth of spare oxygen for the voyage (2 years to get there, 2 years to get back). If anyone wanted to colonize the Moon, they'd have done it by now, but we hadn't been in the Moon since 1972.

I think you are speaking primarily from the American point-of-view, and underestimating the strength and power of nationalist passions in India and China.  In either of those two nations, I doubt it (taking up too much resources) would be much of an issue at all.  The race to put a human colony on either the Moon or Mars between these two rising Great Powers is primarily about status and symbolism, just as it was between the United States and the Soviet Union in the years between the launching of Sputnik and the landing of the first men on the Moon.  When your primary mission is to prevent your rival from a national achievement as momentous as setting a man on the Moon or to establish the first human colony on a world beyond the reach of Earth, money is no object -especially when it concerns space.   

India isn't a dictatorship. There are a lot of players, and many of them will not be happy with that sort of program.

[Хahar 🤔]

Hindi culture

I might be nit-picking, but what is this? Most Indians I know speak no Hindi.

A Turco-Persian tacit agreement to divide up Arabia would be terrible. Turkey and Persia have imperialized enough. I don't trust either nation.

[Хahar 🤔]

Hindi culture

I might be nit-picking, but what is this? Most Indians I know speak no Hindi.

"Hindi" is a perfectly acceptable, and in fact, more cultured way of saying "Indian"... it is where the word "(H)Indian" comes from, after all.

I know that they're cognate, but they aren't synonymous. Hindi culture would seem to me to mean the culture of the upper and middle Gangetic Plain.