What's the craziest thing that could realistically happen in the next 50 years?

Goblins coming up from the ground via a rift caused by a giant earthquake and subsequently warring on mankind, who they see as food. That would be pretty crazy.

I will echo a few others and go with:

1) Semi-intelligent alien life discovered

2) Scientists figure out how to pause the natural death process and then move on to reversing it.

Cole Hocker 3:24 closing in 52.5

90% of this stuff has already happened

USA men win gold in the 4x100 relay at the Olympics

Craziest thing I can think of is a sort of biotechnological singularity.

I think it's quite possible within the next 50 years we will have the capability to accurately predict biological outcome in complex organisms from genetic sequence and have sophisticated enough tools for genetic engineering to make whatever biological outcome we want a reality. When this happens pretty much anything that can be done within the most fundamental constraints of biology will be cheaply and widely accessible. In a way it will be a significant step towards humanity merging with technology because our computational capabilities will more directly impact our material world, including our own biology.

It will ultimately produce a lot of abundance, but there will be massive changes to culture and economics that might be hard to deal with as it's happening.

• Lifespan will be significantly increased, potentially creating a lot of population growth but with demographics shifted increasingly toward older populations.
• Biomanufacturing will overhaul a lot of industries -changing where and how things are made, making some things ridiculously cheap, opening up new material types to large scale production, etc.
• Food insecurity will be effectively ended, but food systems will be changed substaintially.
• Fragile ecosystems and extinct species could potentially be restored, but there also could be an acceleration of destruction in many areas as "ecological capital" becomes more valuable.
• Bioterrorism could become a pervasive problem when every psycho with a decently equipped lab garage can create dangerous viruses on a whim

A tricky part of all of this is that there is massive potential to massively screw something up. In many ways recklessness will be rewarded and appetite for regulation is going to disappear pretty quickly when people see what the competitive advantage/disadvantage looks like here when it comes to fast movers vs slow movers. Not really an issue doomsday tech/disease/creature "escaping from a lab" per say, but rather just that the potential rate of change when this stuff gets commercialized is so huge it will be difficult for society to grapple with.

Robotics will get good enough where AI driven surgeons far outperform humans. All sorts of amazing repairs and recoveries will be made possible, but also mentally ill people with money will transform not only their physical sex but other basic physical and mental attributes. We're seeing the beginning of that now.

They could never logistically support an invasion of North America. Totally ridiculous.

Thank you. One of the dumber thing I've seen posted here.

Back to OP.

The single most dangerous and concerning future trend is eventually Europe hits a tipping point where the native populace realizes they are about to be a complete minority in Europe to Muslims who wear hijabs etc. Crime will increase. Global warming makes middle east uninhabitable so more flood in

It will not go over well and a strongman will emerge to cleanse Europe. I simply cannot believe Europe goes from it's current state to a majority Muslim continent without a massive land war/civil war.

If you don't think thats gonna happen you simply don't understand human nature and history.

It’s possible that AI research improves and we invent a self-improving super intelligence that’s like 1000x smarter than the smartest human. Some that makes us look like mental lizards. It’s possible that there’s some organization of billions of parameters or some design of silicon semiconductors (or some exotic thing it invents itself) that allows this.

That would completely change everything. We’d probably end up enslaved to it.

This is a good on. This and advanced AI both have tail risks that make nukes look pretty benign. Self-replicating microscopic death bots, I.e. viruses.

Granted, I think we can likely engineer improvements to immunity or safeguards at a similar pace, but the risk is there.

theres a lot of people that theorize a strong "luddite" movement will form.

people are beginning to catch on about social media/smart phones. It's possible there is a strong movement to stop using them when the empirical data becomes clear people are far less happy today than the past (and especially before 2012 when smart phone usage became ubiquitous). seriously look into it, a ton of negative indicators related to mental health, IQ started to spike in 2012.

humans are pretty resilient, and I could see mass movement to eschew phones, computers, and returning to the land (there is a ton of space in the usa) despite the addictiveness of tech. the economy starts to crushed as large tech firms and firms that rely on consumers using their tech/apps start to get crushed and go under. banks start to go under pressure as they cant cover their loans etc. more dissaray/chaos leads to more people following the luddite movement.

AGI

1. Some major natural resource runs out.

2. Someone drops a nuke, but it won't be who you think it would.

3. A major world religion is proven to be factually accurate.

4. AI roams the internet but can't tell the difference between what's fact and what's nonsense and effectively becomes useless.

5. We get a sign of intelligent alien life.

6. The US goes to war with a current ally.

Ai replacing labor

yellowstone

Gotta deport them all!

This is the answer. And it will be a lot sooner than we realize.

Crazy and realistic? AI reveals the true nature of humanity. A period of laughter and tears followed by peace and love.

It only erupts about once every 600,000 years or so.

But then again, the next eruption is somewhat overdue.🤨