The Leaps of Technology

In 2015 when SpaceX landed an orbital rocket booster, the world changed. People have landed rockets for decades, and people have used rockets to get to space for decades. No one had put the two together before.  Now, nearly seven years later it is mostly taken for granted that we can land rockets. Another example, aluminum in the early 1800s was worth more than gold because we didn't know how to extract it from ore. Now we use it on single use aluminum cans. Electric cars might be a similar story. Currently they are really only luxury cars, but continue another 15 years of battery development to halve the price of the battery and likely raise the price of gasoline, and that trade off in initial cost versus recurring fueling costs might look even more lop sided than it is today. 

I'm writing this because I have been doing a little thought experiment lately thinking about what the world in 2050 might look like. I don't know what the future holds. A friend was recently telling me about fusion power, and that's another area where the first commercial power plant would be a total game changer. 

Those cool things being mentioned, something that I don't expect to change much are the mountains I enjoy. Specifically the San Juan mountains in southwest Colorado. They are some of the most rugged and most remote in the state, and I'm confident that many of those valleys in 2050 will not have roads, that they will be similar to how they are today. Of course they might burn in a fire, and not have the snowpacks they used to have, but in general they will probably look very similar. 

What do you think the world will look like in 2050? What will be the same and what will be different?