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Scenario 1: We are overtaken by an autocratic advanced alien civilization.

Scenario 2: Cheap, efficient cold fusion is perfected. Robots are invented to do all our work and humanity lives in the lap of luxury, until the robots rebel...

Scenario 3: Global warming rises ocean levels and floods all the landfill areas. The Marina is no more!

What about the Kryptonite island from Superman Returns?

Mankind perfects living on the floor of the ocean, opening up the other 75% of the Earth's surface to habitation. Global warming is heralded as an advantage.

Unfortunately, within several decades, mankind is forced into subservience by hyper-intelligent dolphins.

Damn dolphins! I knew I shouldn't have switched to dolphin safe tuna.

Unthinkable, but not impossible:

The glut of global liquidity only grows from this point forward. And it keeps growing for decades. High inflation is staved off by an unshakable perception that real growth in productivity warrants ever larger piles of money running around the planet.

House prices never correct. The dollar weakens tremendously, but never anywhere near the fears of the worst doomsters. Meanwhile other countries scramble to devalue their currencies to remain competitive exporters. The interest rate in Japan in the year 2080 is still 0%, and the "Yen Carry Trade" is taught in econ 101 along side basic monetarist theory. Countries with strong saving-cultures have suffered perpetually anemic growth and their governments continually try to reeducate the populace to be more proper consumers. Anyone can buy a house as long as they're willing to sign a few documents.

Eventually things start slowing down, and a global economy thousands of times more interdependent and fragilely based upon loose credit and sloshing liquidity than today begins to look for new sources of growth.

With US leadership, an international consortium begins to build the first space elevator. The project is expected to take 100-150 years to complete and cost many trillions of dollars.

Russia announces they have decided to build their own, for strategic balance reasons. They dig a big hole in Siberia, and claim victory.

Japan announces they will step in and fill the funding left by Russia and unpaid by the Europeans for rights to technologies developed as part of the project. The US agrees, but reserves exclusive rights to use any technology for military purposes.

Fundamentalist islamists attack the offshore platform hosting the terrestrial end of the space elevator, and manage to sever the lead strand of microfilament causing an estimated 7tr in damage and setting back the project 25 or more years.

The US deploys newly developed military technologies in a clear and final message that space elevators are to be henceforth considered critical national strategic assets worthy of full scale warfare to defend. Japan supports the US, as does India in this initiative. Europe waffles. Russia defies. This event finally results in the effective liquidation of the United Nations.

Many centuries have past since the first space elevator was completed. Now dozens silently whir day and night across the globe ferrying materials and people to the new frontier.

People have begun to speak of a potential housing bubble in Syrtis Major region of Mars. Graphs of what happened to real estate in the Lunar Crater Communities the preceding decade are used by bubble worriers to illustrate how crazy the bubble is. People continue to worry about the glut of interglobal liquidity. The Interworld Congress, located in Washington DC, holds hearings on the threats hedge funds and derivative pose to interglobal stability, and decide to study the issue.

Just when it seems things have gone as far as they can go, and a transplanetary contraction in the money supply is eminent to stave off colonial hyperinflation, scientists in Palo Alto announce promising results of practical spacetime warp manipulation.

Scenario 4: Pirate ships are sighted all over the California coast and leads to a reversal of global warming.