Anybody can predict what we can look forward to or fear for the future, but when NewScientist.com collected forecasts from the most brilliant minds in their fields, it’s worth taking a look.
1. Steven Weinberg predicts the discovery of a final theory to dictate all properties of particles and fields.
2. Paul Davies suspects we’ll find alien life soon
3. Sydney Brenner sees major advances in understanding the biology of the most interesting species - us
4. Lewis Wolpert suggests that development of embryos will become "computable"
5. John D. Barrow sees the direct detection of dark matter and gravitational waves
6. Francis Collins claims entire generations of us will be living happily into our hundreds
7. Gerard 't Hooft predicts the uniting of quantum mechanics, gravity, and the evolution of the universe
8. Max Tegmark sees T-shirts on which are printed equations describing the unified laws of our universes
9. Frans de Waal disentangles the feedback loop between brain development and the ancient primate tendencies that shape our societies as a huge advance
10. Edward O. Wilson predicts the near-complete mapping of global biodiversity at the species level
11. Marcus du Sautoy expects a revelation of secrets behind prime numbers
12. Steven Pinker said, "I absolutely refuse even to pretend to guess how I might speculate about what, hypothetically, could be the biggest breakthrough of the next 50 years"
13. Rocky Kolb expects the discovery of background gravitational waves produced in the very early universe
14. Richard Miller sees breakthrough in the elucidation of the molecular pathways that render cells from long-lived animals so resistant to injury
15. J. Richard Gott expects a self-supporting colony on Mars to change world history 16. Michael Gazzaniga predicts a focus on the social mind and on relationships
17. Robert May suggests a better understanding of human institutions, particularly of the impediments to useful cooperation
18. Lisa Randall says the Large Hadron Collider should tell us more about the underlying nature of matter and how elementary particles acquire mass
19. Ellen Heber-Katz expects an ability to prescribe drugs that cause severed spinal cords to heal, and hearts to regenerate
20. Niles Eldredge sees retro-fitting existing advances in molecular and biology to a more integrated synthesis of evolutionary theory
21. Daniel Pauly predicts device to detect, amplify and transmit to us the emotions of animals to build our empathy
22. Peter Norvig predicts a growing transformation in the global access to information.
23. Stephen Wolfram sees a systematic exploration of the "computation universe" of all possible programs
24. Timothy Gowers speaks of half a dozen problems that almost all mathematicians agree are supremely important
25. Martin Rees hopes we'll know if the laws of physics we know are the only ones there are and if our big bang was unique
26. Igor Aleksander predicts scientific understanding of consciousness will come from a recognition of the brain as an informational machine
27. Bernard Wood says we will know exactly how we evolved to be us and not chimps
28. Michael Benton sees near-complete picture of the "tree of life" will reveal rates of evolution and patterns of mass extinctions and of diversification
29. Andrew Knoll suggests that most fossils will have been found, but there’ll benew technologies and a greater focus on physiology
30. Frank Wilczek expects a golden age for physics, computers with superhuman intelligence and solar power providing much of our energy
31. Geoffrey Miller undermines consumer capitalism, and sees stronger communities that replace religion with a naturalistic moral philosophy
32. Chris McKay predicts evidence of alien life frozen in Martian permafrost or on other worlds, perhaps dead but preserved
33. Rodney Brooks expects artificial intelligences that can recognize and classify objects – finally!
34. Lawrence Krauss predicts we’ll discover the mystery behind dark matter
35. Elizabeth Loftus imagine a world where anyone with the correct technique and the right pharmaceuticals can implant false memories into anyone they choose
36. Peter Atkins says computers will continue to illuminate chemistry and the reactions of natural life – and eventually build synthetic life from scratch
37. Sean Carroll sees details that describe exactly what happened at the awesome moment of the big bang
38. Arthur McDonald expects elucidation of dark matter
39. Bruce Lahn predicts that iomedicine will be transformed when we discover the ability to produce unlimited supplies of transplantable human organs
40. Terry Sejnowski expects breakthroughs to occur that we cannot anticipate
42. David Deutsch sees construction of a working, general-purpose quantum computer by an eminent physicist
43. Nathan Myhrvold expects applied physics to be revolutionized by advances in metamaterials and intricate synthetic structures
44. Eric Horvitz predicts a computational revolution to be recognized as a transformation as significant as the industrial revolution
45. Paul Nurse says it should be possible to provide mechanistic explanations of the intricate self-regulating nature of the cell, the basic unit of life
46. Ray Kurzweil expects people to create computers that pass the Turing test, with formidable results
47. Philip Zimbardo sees the best to come for psychology
48. Robert Ballard thinks that high-bandwidth fibre optic cables could literally "wire the world"
49. Fred Gage says neuroscientists will have developed a non-invasive device that measures brain activity in real time, in free-living humans
50. Roger Gosden expects technology to conquer infertility, birth defects and genetic disease
51. Christof Koch predicts that machine-brain interfaces will be realized
52. Bruno Latour says social scientists will visualize connections between human organizations and technological objects
53. Michael Marmot sees new keys to understanding and improving health
54. Irene Pepperberg expects birds to help us understand how human language evolved
55. Oliver Sacks predicts a general theory of imagination, consciousness and self
56. Daniel Schacter says we will uncover the basis and evolution of our memory
57. Leonard Susskind expects to discover if the laws of physics are the same throughout the universe or variable
58. Anthony Atala predicts an injection universal donor cells will naturally migrate to an injury site, where tissue repair and regeneration can occur, all without rejection
59. Simon Baron-Cohen sees that cognitive neuroscience, look at what has emerged over the last five years and multiply it by 10
60. Gregory Chaitin predicts weird astronomical observations to add radical new fundamental physics, so people tamper with the human genome for fun
61. Simon Conway Morris predicts that imagination, intuition, abstraction and even pre-cognition to be revealed
62. Antonio Damasio expects advances in molecular neurobiology and an understanding of the systems related to cognition and behavior
63. Dan Dennett predicts we’ll figure out how neural nets in the brain are stitched together to produce the mental activities familiar in cognitive psychology
64. Carl Djerassi has us storing a young woman's ovarian tissue or eggs to be used years later
65. Freeman Dyson predicts that we’ll discover alien life
66. Jane Goodall sees a turnaround in deforestation
67. Monica Grady sees Mars and Europa as suitable hosts for life within our solar system
68. Susan Greenfield expects brain imaging to show changes at the synaptic level that underpin learning
69. John Halpern predicts an increasing use of "psychedelic" drugs may lead to a new field of medicine which kindles spirituality without fear
70. Piet Hut The discovery of life elsewhere in the universe
71. Bill Joy expects an inexhaustible source of safe, green energy that is substantially cheap
72. Jaron Lanier predicts computer science will achieve a new unification between the inside of the computer and the outside
73. Charles Nemeroff has people identifying gene variants that confer vulnerability to major psychiatric disorders will result in the emergence of preventative psychiatry
74. Colin Pillinger expects we should at least have brought back Martian samples
75. Carolyn Porco sees the discovery of either extant or fossilized extraterrestrial life forms on another solar system body
76. Carlo Rovelli predicts a coherent way of thinking about the world will emerge, compatible with new discoveries such as quantum theory and relativity
77. Steve Squyres expects a more significant advance in learning whether there is life elsewhere in the universe - either way, a definitive answer would be profound
78. Kip Thorne sees gravitational waves from the big bang detected, first indirectly by the imprint they leave on the cosmic microwave radiation and then directly
79. Alan Walker expects to have found hundreds of beautiful skeletons of those bipedal apes that were the ancestors of modern humans
80. Beverly Whipple expects understanding of brain activity during sexual response and orgasm, and sexual health is a fundamental human right
81. Tim White sees breakthroughs in hominid palaeobiology such as the recognition that fossil vertebrates are a limited and non-renewable resource
82. Edward Witten says there will be numerous discoveries involving, for example, extra-solar planets
83. Anton Zeilinger we’llunderstand why nature is such that we have a description that is so enormously successful, yet so counterintuitive
84. My Prediction is that the next such list of brilliant minds will hold at least half from brilliant women’s predictions, since men and women are about equal in number and similarly matched in brilliant predictions, and inclusion will make us all richer.
85. You What’s your best prediction for the next 50 years? ….
