What will happen before 2050?

These are the events that will happen before 2050

So as most of us are probably aware, predicting the future is a very difficult business to be involved in. Unanticipated events can always change what we thought would happen, but we're still free to make our best-educated guesses with the means that are available to us.

With that in mind, here are the events that will most likely happen before the year 2050 for you to look forward to happening. Starting out just next year in 2018, two new countries may emerge in the form of New Caledonia and Bougainville in the Pacific as they hold independence referendums from France and Papua New Guinea, respectively. The FIFA World Cup will be held in Russia, and NASA will deploy the James Webb Space Telescope, which will be significantly more powerful than the Hubble Space Telescope.

In 2019, the United Kingdom will officially leave the European Union, and the FIFA Women's World Cup will be held in France. The next year in 2020 will probably be quite eventful. The Jeddah Tower in Saudi Arabia is scheduled to be completed, which will become the new tallest structure in the world at a full kilometer tall. The Summer Olympics will be held in Tokyo, and Bigelow Aerospace plans on beginning construction of the first-ever space hotel that will be able to accommodate six very wealthy guests at a time.

In 2021, India is expected to launch their first-ever manned space mission, and the following year in 2022, China plans on constructing their first very own Space Station. In addition, the FIFA World Cup will be hosted once again in Qatar, and the Winter Olympics will be hosted in Beijing, China. In 2023, the copyrights on the earliest Mickey Mouse cartoons will expire under current US copyright law. But 2024 will be much more eventful. The company SpaceX ostensibly has plans on launching their first rocket carrying cargo to Mars this year in preparation for a future manned mission. At the same time, the International Space Station will probably run out of funding in this year and be decommissioned as a result, although this may be delayed until 2028.

Finally, this year, the Femarn Belt Fixed Link will be completed, which will provide a direct rail and highway link between northern Germany and Copenhagen in Denmark. In 2025, the Giant Magellan Telescope is scheduled to be completed. It will be the largest observatory in the world at this point and have ten times the resolution power of the Hubble Space Telescope. In addition, the UK will have completely phased out all of their coal power plants.

The next year in 2026 will possibly see SpaceX launch the first-ever manned mission to Mars if everything goes according to their current schedule. NASA also has plans to send a manned mission to visit an asteroid this year, and construction on the Catalan Cathedral Sagrada Família will also be finally completed. Construction on this epic church began all the way back in 1882, which means that it will have taken 144 years to finally complete it.

This year in 2027, ten years from the current year if you are watching this in 2017, the SpaceX crew that launched the year previously will finally arrive at their destination, meaning that we might witness the first-ever humans to set foot on Mars this year. Also, the full autopsy report on Elvis Presley, which was agreed to be sealed for 50 years following his death, will finally be made publicly available.

In 2028, the Summer Olympics will be hosted in Los Angeles, California. At near the end of the decade in 2029, the cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles will be connected by a high-speed rail line that can transport people from one to the other in just two hours and 20 minutes.

But when the 2030s finally arrive, we'll all be in for a very interesting decade. At some point this decade, NASA plans on launching their own manned mission to Mars. So if SpaceX failed to accomplish this in 2027, then NASA will probably land the first humans on the Red Planet sometime around now. China further has plans on launching their own manned mission to the moon sometime during this decade as well, and Russia has plans on landing their own cosmonauts on the moon in the year 2031.

Skipping ahead to 2036, however, and we arrive at perhaps the most ambitious upcoming space project called Breakthrough Starshot. Without going into too much detail, the plan should be able to send tiny spacecraft to the Alpha Centauri star system. The nearest other star to Earth, a planet inside the system, Proxima Centauri B, is located inside of the habitable zone here and could possibly be home to some form of alien life. When the tiny ships are hopefully launched in 2036, they will arrive in the system 20 to 30 years later and can take detailed photographs of this mysterious planet.

In 2037, we may see the first summer where there won't be any ice in the Arctic, and by 2040, France will have completely banned the sale of all gasoline and diesel vehicles in the country. In 2042, the world population will have probably reached 9 billion people, while Americans of European ancestry will become a minority group inside of the United States for the first time this year. We'll also probably see the advent of the world's first trillionaire as well, and in 2044, the works of JRR Tolkien, including the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, will enter into the public domain.

2045 is the estimated year of the technological singularity according to the famed futurist Ray Kurzweil, meaning that this may be the year where artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence, which could lead to enormous and unforeseen changes in society. In 2048, the Antarctic Treaty will come up for review, which could lead to mining and oil industries opening up on the continent for the first time. And finally, we will arrive at the year of 2050. By this point, half of the Amazon rainforest will likely be deforested, about 70% of the world population will be living in cities, about half of the global population may not have access to clean drinking water, the average global life expectancy may be 76 years old, there will be super-smart artificial intelligences that will be even smarter than humans. Self-driving cars will likely be normal, and a new world of possibly hundreds or even thousands of people will be living and working on Mars. There are things to be both afraid of and excited for in the future, so let's make sure to work as hard as we can in the present to make our future the best one that we can possibly imagine.