These things could change everything.

There are 5 big breakthroughs that could happen and change everything….

1) The energy solution: whether it is cold fusion, zero point energy, or some other kind of exotic matter reactor, we will hit something that will be to nuclear power as nuclear power is to a hamster on a wheel.
2) Artificial gravity: the stuff going on at CERN looking at the Higgs boson is pretty cool. It's going to help us understand the nature of gravity. Not just how it works, but what it is made of. Once that goes from theoretical physics to applied physics, it'll change a lot. The ability to manipulate gravitational forces will give us a lot of cool sci fi widgets: artificial gravity, inertial competitors, possibly even some sort of reactionless propulsion system. Travel to other planets in our solar system will be measured in hours or days instead of months, and could even help with the next item on the list…
3) FTL propulsion: post-einsteinian physics is doing some interesting things, on paper at least, that shows that while the speed of light is a maximum limit to velocity that can never be exceeded, there are ways to bend the rules. We have observed how gravity, time, and space interact and are malleable. If we bend or stretch it enough, we can beat the speed limit, or at least sneak around it, and travel faster than light. Back in the 90s, a dude named alcubierre worked out the math for bending space, the ‘warp drive'version of FTL travel. And there's stuff in string theory or M-theory, or that line of thought that suggest maybe we can use extra spatial dimensions to get around three -dimensional limits….the ‘hyperspace'version of FTL.
4) AI: this is gonna be big. We wont get a Kaczinski style apocalypse, nor will we get a Kurzweil style ‘singularity', but creating machines that can think, and problem solve, will change so much. There is still a long way to go, though, and it is tough to know how we will actually get there.
5) Quantum computing: it is another sci-fi buzzword tossed around a lot, and I'm using it in a much more vague sense than a proper computer engineer would, and I'm probably lumping a few unrelated concepts together…but there is a physical limit to how small we can make processors, how many of them we can cram into a microchip. Now, like I say, I am fuzzy on the specifics, but basically, all those processors are simple switches, two positions: on, or off. It is all that binary jazz, and those switches are still physical, made of atoms. Folks are working on ways to get past that, go subatomic, get into quarks, muons, quantum photon states, whatever it is….being able to cram a whole order of magnitude more processors means insanely faster computers, nanotechnology, and all sorts of cool stuff.

What do you think?