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the Singularity
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Period: to
Robotic pets popular
One particular fad at the moment is for robot cats, dogs and other domestic pets with highly realistic movements and behaviour, often indistinguishable from the real thing. These have a number of advantages – such as never getting sick or dying, never requiring food or water, never scratching or biting their owners, and never leaving a mess around the home. Certain species of tropical fish are also popular in robot form, especially those which have recently become extinct. -
Birthers United
A cult where the point is to have children and indoctrinate them into the cause so they'll vote appropriately in elections. Birthers can have as many babies as they want, no laws against it. Legal loophole, have huge farms/factories of mass-produced babies. Now they have education tailored to what they want, and are able to get elections. -
random guy chosen as representative
Internet lets you vote, but people are lazy, so allow representatives. AI whose purpose is to judge all existing online data, find best voter for something. Average guy who has the most correct opinion about something and is decided to be the leading judge, just because he has that opinion as selected by the AI. People say “why did this guy get elected? He’s never worked on a wind farm.” -
Presidential Election Day
Rob Paul is the libertarian party runner. The conservative party is based on: The LGBT community will become the new conservatives and perhaps more than any other group bring back traditional family values and morality. IDEA: first race where Americans vote directly, online, in direct democracy -
world news database launched
a program that catalogues all data and spits out the most interesting news stories. Podcast will be just reacting to what this program spits out. -
Scientists discover direct evidence of dark matter
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Birthers United thinks the world will end in 2050
They thought the same in 2045 when the singularity happened -
No more doctor's offices
Users can do medical diagnostics at home using spit, and doctor's offices are a thing of the past. Doctors work in research now, or else man the diagnostics that need human insight via computer. Hyperspecializing using AI optimized efficiency for doctors, role of doctor becomes a minimum wage job. -
Martin Luther King, Jr. Day
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Period: to
Rob Paul presidency
middle child of Rand Paul -
New console developed
A computer company develops a MMORPG that requires people to plug their brains directly into a computer to play. Technology for game will be there by 2020, but the politics of “they’re hacking our brains” may take until 2050, and be a political issue -
parade against bullying of non-bionic people
Trend of not being “upgraded” with more powerful limbs and brain function being like a handicap. People who stay fully natural have an annual parade to end bullying. -
Supreme Court ruling on privacy
Supreme Court will allow police and rescue officials a reasonable-basis standard for their grabbing our microchip data (DUI tests roadside, etc). -
Valentine's Day
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Google Beats marketed
Listen to live music, at any hour, all around the world, wherever we are, through some inner-ear adapter not unlike what we have with today’s Google Glass -
April Fool's Day
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Japanese cloning pop stars
Cloning technolgy used to make knock-off versions of European entertainers, to entertain foreign audiences. -
Easter Sunday
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Mother's Day
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50th anniversary of death of Shel Silverstein
American author and poet. His works are classics. -
Mark Zuckerberg turns 65
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Prisoners do not have the right to an artificially extended life
While waiting for immortality, this is an ethical debate about whether prisoners with life sentences should be allowed out after a long time, or if they would be imprisoned forever at the cost of the state. It's decided that their life will not be artificially extended. -
Designer babies
legislation to make changes to babies more available to lower income families. Talking points focus on how this should be a human right, NOT whether actually changing the babies is ethical. why should the rich people have to pay taxes to help the poor people who choose not to modify? Like the vaccine debate, but all over again -
Alien planet with life found
"Earth twins’: planets around other stars that are roughly the same size and distance as Earth and we will be able to detect what’s on their surface and their atmospheres -
Annual Contract in place of Marriage passed
I think we will certainly see some weaker forms of marriage that are designed to last a decade or two rather than a whole lifetime, but traditional marriage will still be an option. Increasing longevity is the key - if you marry at 20 and live to well over 100, that is far too long a commitment. People will want marriages that aren't necessarily forever, but don't bankrupt them when they end. What happens to children? -
New drug popular among teens
A caterpillar that is covered in pustules that can get you high if you lick them. It is not common because the caterpillar stage is short before it goes into a pupa stage and comes out as a white moth. -
Great Barrier Reef almost completely destroyed
Less than 2% of coral remaining.* Rising levels of greenhouse gases have made the water too acidic for calcium-based organisms.* Most of the colourful fish for which the reef is famous have also disappeared. millionaire replaces great barrier reef? -
human-robot marriage legalized
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DreamDiary.com becomes a big deal
A website that hosts dream diaries of actually recorded dreams; users can upload directly or manually, and site has comments for dream interpretation -
Regal Cinemas dies
Regal Entertainment Group shuts down the chain of theaters, allowing them to be bought up by individuals, because movie theaters are obsolete. Regal cinemas will have died 20 years earlier, but will have adapted to a new ocular rift thing. -
The Dead Sea is drying up
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atomic bomb anniversary
U.S. President Harry S. Truman announced that the USSR tested the atomic bomb in 1949, 100 yrs ago today. -
Lifespan cap imposed
People are living longer and longer, but it gets costly to keep them alive toward the end. Therefore the government stops assisting people over age 100, though does not actively kill them. Protest to that law—we don’t know that there is anti-aging in 50 years that could make these people regular then. -
asteroid mining by prisoners
by 2050, at point of one of the worst jobs in the world to be shipped off as an asteroid—so they send prisoners. -
Halloween
holograms and directed sound creates whole new level of scary -
Thanksgiving
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Bjork dies at age 84
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Christmas Day
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Noah Cyrus turns 50
sister of Miley Cyrus -
Martin Luther King, Jr. Day
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parade against bullying of non-bionic people
Trend of not being “upgraded” with more powerful limbs and brain function being like a handicap. People who stay fully natural have an annual parade to end bullying. -
child abuse scandal
The story begins with a wandering magician demonstrating his tricks to the destitute populace. After the mechanism animating the magic unexpectedly goes off, the onlooking public discovers that the mechanism was operated by a tortured, hungry, pale boy of scarcely 10 years, concealed in the cart. The talking points are, why did the guy not use robots instead, and this child is undocumented, which is unusual nowadays. -
Valentine's Day
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politician caught in scandal
a politician was caught in a sting when he tried to pay to have his wife's memory of finding out he had cheated erased -
April Fool's Day
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Easter Sunday
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Jurassic Park museum opens with robot dinosaurs
incredibly realistic -
Mother's Day
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world peace achieved
If an AI takes over the world, it puts nanobots everywhere, which detect a weapon. When the weapon is pointed at someone to be used in a harmful manner, the weapon melts and is no longer in use. World peace is inevitable. -
Time capsule from 2020 opened
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first Bionic Olympic Games
replaced the Para-Olympic Games. These Bionic athletes are stronger and faster than normal humans and are attracting a bigger crowd than the normal Olympic Games as the feats and records are much more impressive. New records are now following an exponential trend instead of a linear one and new records are being made nearly every year. -
Hot button issue about how many votes clones get
Should people start cloning themselves, you get a whole society of one person, except how many votes do those people get? -
new chemical weapon invented
bees engineered to be super-aggressive with an exact target, poisonus. -
torture drug scandal
scopolamine refined- scandal that they are using it -
base being built on Venus
A Mercurial Base is a large installation on a planet extremely close to a star—so close that direct sunlight would be lethal. As a result, the base is continually moving, to stay in either perpetual twilight or perpetual night. it's quite reasonable to think that we'll send 3D printers to other planets to print habitats for humans prior to our arrival. -
A-list actor tries to marry his clone
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Halloween
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Benjamin Travolta turns 40
John Travolta's youngest son -
Thanksgiving Day
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Christmas Day
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parade against bullying of non-bionic people
Trend of not being “upgraded” with more powerful limbs and brain function being like a handicap. People who stay fully natural have an annual parade to end bullying.