The TL;DR List of 12 Obi Predictions:
1. The Israeli-Palestinian situation will be resolved, AFTER a WWI-amongst-Middle-Eastern-Powers conflict occurs...I can't see the Israelis losing unless they keep their (atrocious) right-wing expansionist mentality and government that they have at present (which really disappoints me, they need to fix that NOW, Netanyahu is a terrible PM and he's going to get a lot of Jews and Muslims alike killed if he keeps things up)...but I do think we'll have a Two-State solution in 200 years...I think Israel will have to move its capital to Tel Aviv eventually (which is what it should be, anyway) and cede the West Bank, Golan Heights and other eastern holdings for a State of Palestine while Palestinians, in turn, need to give up the Gaza Strip...and these land exchanges will be long, protracted, and sadly bloody...finally, I think Jerusalem's going to need to have a special UN status to make it a neutral or "world city," because there is NO WAY those two sides even think about halting aggression if one or the other has even partial ownership, just make it a neutral city "owned" by the United Nations or a similar neutral party.
2. I think we'll still have books being printed on paper...sorry, Nook and Kindle fans, those are great innovations, but for many book lovers, there's just no replacing a good old-fashioned bound book...maybe printed books become slightly more of a niche/collector's thing, then, and so printed books might cost more, but they'll still be around.
3. We WILL still be reading Kurt Vonnegut and Harry Potter, we WON'T still be reading the likes of Danielle Steele or Twilight, other romance novelists and series (better or worse) will come along and supplant them, I can't say they have staying power...I'm on the fence about my old "nemesis" Stephen King...one the one hand, he's written so much and has enough film and TV adaptations that he'll have a popular following and be in the cultural mindset for a while now, but I'm not sure if he's written a classic on the order of Beloved, To Kill a Mockingbird, or Slaughterhouse Five/Breakfast of Champions that truly solidifies his place in "the Canon" and makes him indispensable...still, he's written more than any of us, and I'm inclined to think he will still be around in 200 years...but maybe in a more "pulp" way (that is, everyone knows of Tarzan and The Three Musketeers, but not everyone's actually read Edgar Rice Burroughs or Alexandre Dumas...so we still might watch and know of Carrie, but that doesn't necessarily mean Stephen King's actually books will be as widely read and known as the characters and spin-offs in other media from those books.) Also--Shakespeare...totally gonna still be around in 200 years, and he'll be as awesome as ever. Just saying. :p
4. I DON'T see the USA breaking up, sorry...I just don't, it makes better economic sense for most of the states to stay united, and by this point there's enough cultural material holding them together that I can't see the USA completely fracturing. The closest I could ever see is someone--I'm looking at YOU, Bible Belters--threatening to leave or inciting some harmful riots and skirmishes because of a dispute over, say, a Presidential election (wouldn't be the first time the South threatened such a thing or fired shots over an election not going the way they wanted.) That being said, while the CSA might have had at best a slim chance in a protracted war (once the war got past 1862 and especially 1863 it was essentially a long road to defeat for the South, they weren't going to win after that) in the 1860s, that economic situation doesn't exist anymore...simply put, the North and West have far more in terms of capital and overall economic power than the South does. What's more, we live in the Age of Big Cities--if you don't have one, chances are you get overlooked, and while the North has a good 6-8 at least that are internationally known and recognized as places of culture and business and the West has LA, San Fran, Seattle and maybe Portland, the South really doesn't have that...New Orleans, Miami, and then Texas' cities. Texas IS the one exception here--technically, they pay more than they get back, so if they really wanted to and in some bizarro-world scenario managed to actually secede, land-wise and economically, you COULD make the case a Republic of Texas could still fly today...I'd argue that it Texas is still far better off in the Union and that 40+ states would not take kindly to Texas leaving, but still, we could at least debate it, even if it won't happen. But ultimately, no, the US will NOT crumble to bits...it'll go the way of the British Empire--there's no longer an Empire, but there's still a Britain...so we won't be a superpower for too much longer, but we won't go away, we'll just go back to being "just another prominent country," the way the UK is a prominent country but not an empire or superpower today.
5. I sadly think there WILL be a nuclear terrorist attack in the next 200 years, it probably WILL happen, that nightmare of all the civilized world--the suitcase dirty-bomb. I just think there's too much material floating out there and too much religious (and to be fair, nationalist and ethic) radicalism out there...where and when it happens I don't know--I hope it doesn't happen in the US, of course, or a European ally, or anywhere, really, but I am biased so of course I'll hope it doesn't happen to the US or a closely-allied nation "first." It think this event or a similar one will be the apex of the Age of Terrorism and West/Middle East tensions...after that, we'll have a rather major war, hopefully with just conventional weapons, and it'll be the darkest chapter of the 21st or 22nd century.
6. On the topic of religion, I see a lot of it going the way of modern Jewishness--that is, religion will be made secular, and while belief in the supernatural or divine won't go away (I doubt it ever will) it will give way to a far more cosmopolitan version of religion, one that's far closer to almost mythology...an emphasis on the stories, teachings, and ideals of religions as opposed to "Jesus is coming and coming soon so batten down the hatches and Save the Date, the Day of Judgment is nigh!" Frankly, I really do hope this is what happens--it'd be just as much of a tragedy for religion to surge and become radicalized as it would be for religion to completely disappear...too much of our art, history, and cultural heritage is wrapped up in it. Let it become mythology, or something you can believe to be true, but not something that overwhelms nations and sets them at war. I point to the Jews here--a LOT of Jews today are far more secular and less religious...a lot of Jews, like me, view Jewishness as a cultural/heritage thing more than a religious thing. I think that's a good way to keep our people going, and I DO HOPE there are still Jews in 200 years...just because we've lasted this long, I'd admit to being saddened if we did disappear completely. So let the Jews become a more secularized entity, as it looks like we're on the way to becoming, and maybe other religions will follow suit, though this may be easier for some religions for others (ie, this can be pretty easy for Buddhists; by contrast, I can see Islam having a hard time adapting to a secularized state of affairs, and maybe it stays the "most religious" of the religions.)
7. In 200 years, I think we're going to look back on the 1950s-70s in the same way we look at the Romantic Period in English literature and especially English poetry--namely, as a brief but brilliant golden age where an insane amount of talent and art was created in a relatively-short period of time. I think we'll view The Beatles, the Stones, Bob Dylan and similar groups in a similar way to the way we view Blake, Keats, Byron, and other Romantic poets, or early Romantic composers of the period. There's a lot of great and really diverse literature, art, and film that came out of that period, and I think it will be seen as one of the greatest artistic eras in recent times, along with the 1910s-WWII for Modernist literature. On the flip side, the literature from the 1980s-present will be far less popular, I think--it depends somewhat on what follows in those 200 years, but we do tend to remember first the Romantic Era and then "Dickens' London," skipping maybe 10-15 years in between, and then we have a ton of Victorian literature we still read and a lot of Modernist literature, but aside from a few works, literature written from about 1895-1910 or so is far less popular than the eras that sandwich it. Howards End, some Sherlock Holmes stories and a few other works still stand out from that period, but on the whole we sort of go Victorian-to-Modernists, and skip a lot of the 10-15 years in between, because a lot of that's transitional literature and far less memorable. Likewise, I think we're transitioning from that great period of 1950s-1970s literature towards whatever's to come, so with notable exceptions--Beloved, Maus, and probably most notable, Cormac McCarthy's works, especially The Road--I think literature from this period we're living in now will be less popular than those of other eras, including what's to come, as I DO think we're headed towards a literary resurgence...economic and political strife tends to bring out great works of literature, and we sure have that kind of strife today in a way that was maybe less pronounced back in the "good old days" of our booming economy in the 1980s and 1990s.
8. Colonization may be too big a hope, but I do think that in 200 years we WILL have landed men on Mars, and possibly beyond. Overpopulation and crowding is a real problem, so I wonder if "satellite neighborhoods" might pop up over the course of 200 years...if we can master the effects of space on the human body, then it may be plausible to see real estate go skyward in the future. Cost is the issue here as it always is, so I don't know if this will really be widespread, but I have to think that within 200 years this will at least be tried on a small scale, and maybe by private companies.
9. In terms of regional change--I hate to say it...but I think Africa will STILL be a mess and the most impoverished and war/disease/poverty-ravaged continent...by contrast, I think things WILL improve for Latin American countries...barring a major catastrophe, the West will still probably be OK...China may well still rule the East, unless India really industrializes and catches them...and the Middle East is going to be the most schismatic region of all--we're going to see some countries become incredibly modern and strive to be on the cutting edge, and some go the other way and try and stay as "traditional" for as long as possible...and that's going to be one of the last big stages for the conflict between secularization and religion...Hitchens argued that the Islamic world has never had a "Reformation" in the same way Europe's Christian world had, and I think we'll get that in the next 200 years, and with it, the same sort of schism between very devout and more mainstream religion and increasingly-secular attitudes which has played out in the West over the last 600 years or so.
10. What movies were to the 20th century, I think interactive hologram stories/games/worlds will be for the next 200 years. The economic incentive to create such a thing is there, and that's always a drive to fuel artistic and cultural innovation, and the technology is getting better year after year...at the end of 200 years, we WILL see the sort of holodecks that we see on Star Trek, I think, and the sort of hybrid between novel, role-playing game and movie that hologram stories/programs will become will make up one of the next great revolutions in art and culture.
11. There's going to be a major revolution in the way we view work, friends, and relationships, and what we value is going to change as well. I think social media--which will still be around in some form, I'm sure...in Facebook's 9,095th update or so--has shown that, in today's society, connections with people mean quite a bit, and as such, there are certain social media status symbols (having a lot of friends, being widely known on the Internet, etc.) which for some mean a great deal, while maybe getting that promotion doesn't mean as much as it once did. We'll still have a lot of workplace competitiveness, but I think some of the status symbols of a successful, impressive life shift in a world where technology, connections and social media still play a big part. People care about being known or famous, but not necessarily WHY they're known or famous...people want the feeling of having a ton of "friends" on Facebook, even if they're not really friends and you barely know them, for the sake of looking well-connected and feeling beloved, or else they go the other route and pride themselves on having fewer but "realer" connections on Facebook. Whatever the social media landscape becomes and whatever the Internet or its successor is like in 200 years, I think we'll see people caring more and more about the nature of their relationships and how well-they're known and having sheer notoriety or popularity be a measuring stick for "social success" rather than making partner at a law firm. A blogger with a following or a YouTube star with millions of viewers may feel more successful than someone who makes partner and makes more money in a world where celebrity culture and notoriety are a new sort of social capital and nearly as important as job titles...the status symbols, they are a-changing.
12. The Cubs still will not have won the World Series...but Fenway Park might still be around if Boston's smart enough to declare it a landmark and preserve it (which I hope they do, it has too much history connected with it, and it'd be nice to see an area as steeped in and concerned with history as New England preserve arguably the most iconic sports locale in all of North American sports. Yankee Stadium shouldn't have been torn down, but to lose Fenway would be even worse...I hope it's around as a landmark and museum of sorts in 200 years...and I hope the Mets have won a World Series by then--but I wouldn't bet on it.)
Predict the next 200 years.
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