In 2100, what will be the world's #1 superpower?

[12th Doctor]

At this rate, China. The US would have fallen like Britain did after WW2. Though anything else can happen in 100 years. We may see world government by then, or an Oceania-Eurasia-Eastasia arrangement, or more than 180 countries in all shapes and sizes like now, or the human race could be extinct by then due to a nuclear war.

Kind of hard for the United States to collapse like the British Empire, since the US acctually incorperates 98% of it's territory (99.9% once Puerto Rico becomes the 51st state) into it's boarders and grants full representation to all those citizens.

If you are speaking about the so-called "neo-imperialist" United States, this kind of "imperialism" does not generate nearly the level of resentment (towards the US in particular) as did Britian.

The way things are going, however, it appears as though the Western world as a whole will more than likey expireince continued decline of it's acctual power in this century.

If the Euroweenies don't get their ing act together, there will be no "Western Civilization" in 200 years.

[12th Doctor]

How the hell are we supposed to know what will transpire over the course of 95 years?

I would love to hear what people in 1910 thought the world would be like in 2005.

I don't know about political predictions from 1910, but you can revisit old issues of Popular Mechanics or Popular Science to see the technological predictions they've made at different times, mostly about the year 2000, which was seen as sort of a benchmark.

Some of the predictions were spot-on; some were WAY off.

Most of the bad predictions are made by people who suffere from what I call "Malthus Syndrom".  That is to say that they cannot possibly see the future in terms of anything different from what is immediatly know to them.

[12th Doctor]

How the hell are we supposed to know what will transpire over the course of 95 years?

I would love to hear what people in 1910 thought the world would be like in 2005.

I don't know about political predictions from 1910, but you can revisit old issues of Popular Mechanics or Popular Science to see the technological predictions they've made at different times, mostly about the year 2000, which was seen as sort of a benchmark.

Some of the predictions were spot-on; some were WAY off.

Most of the bad predictions are made by people who suffere from what I call "Malthus Syndrom".  That is to say that they cannot possibly see the future in terms of anything different from what is immediatly know to them.

Yes, but the only problem is that, in general, you don't know what you don't know when it comes to predicting the future, so avoiding such a thing while still making a concrete prediction is a difficult task, to say the least.

Well, one can predict the basic course of things by looking at current trends, and then guess what might derive from them.  I guess my point is not that we should not look at current forces, simply that there needs to be something added onto that analysis.  Malthus' problem, for instance, was that he could not look at what advancements were being made in the field of machanics, could not invision what the impact of having more people around to think things up, and could not imagine a society more advanced than his own, and thus, could only imagine a future that was a slightly higher tech version of what he knew.  So, his predictions of mass starvation and loss of resources were wrong, because he simply could not make mental leaps.