60 Minutes dinosaur Mike Wallace has brought together sixty (see what he did there?) of the world's smartest smarties for a collection of essays called The Way We Will Be 50 Years From Today. Global warming? Alzheimer's? Ant overlords? Forget that crap. Gasoline will be water and we'll all live for freaking ever! "The consensus view is that we'll muddle through many of the issues that vex us today - including climate change and terror threats. And we'll hit upon so many medical and technological wonders that today's 50-year-olds will have a fair chance of finding out firsthand how the world will look in 2058."

Diseases ranging from Alzheimer's and Parkinson's to schizophrenia and bipolar disorder will be shown to be caused by infectious agents that take advantage of genetic predisposition, says psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey, president of the Treatment Advocacy Center. Researchers will be surprised to find that many of those infectious agents are being transmitted from animals to humans. As a result, it will be uncommon to keep cats, birds or hamsters as pets - but we'll still have dogs around, because they've been "man's best friend" for so long that we've already adjusted to their infectious agents.



International terrorism will be brought under control because governments will realize counterterrorism is primarily a police function rather than a job for the military, says Ronald Noble, the secretary-general of Interpol. Passports and IDs will be linked to a global monitoring system, much as credit cards are today. "People will no longer be able to travel and engage in transactions with anonymity," thanks to surveillance and biometrics, he says. All this will pose "thorny issues" for a post-privacy era.

The outlook for longer life spans is a mixed bag: Kurzweil says the pace of life extension will outrun the passage of years, offering at least the possibility of an indeterminate life span 50 years from now. But trends also point to a decline in average life expectancy, due to the increased incidence of obesity among today's young people, says Wanda Jones, director of the Office on Women's Health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Bosh. Don't fret the fatties. Smoke 'em if you got 'em, people. We're all set. [CosmicLog via Digg]