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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.

Second Life has now become so overwhelmingly successful and ubiquitous that avatars begin to grow weary of the daily L$ grind.

Randy H and a group of talented Patrick.net loyalists develop "Third Life", a virtual world for your Second Life avatars.

As Surfer-X, the company's Chief Marketing Officer, says "It's just very fucking meta".

Patrick.net cat owners start Friday Cat Blogging. Patrick.net shut down by ensuing cuteness.

With the help of a robot from the future sent by Randy’s son (who is leading the human resistance against the evil Linden Lab “Furriebots”) Randy, Peter, and Astrid are able to not only destroy Linden Labs, but also (along with some hackers that Astrid’s boyfriend hangs out with) convert all the Linden dollars in Second Life to Swiss Francs and within an hour wire the money through 47 different accounts on four continents (do to a series of server explosions in the Cayman Islands, Eastern Europe and Hong Kong no one can find out where the money went).

The funny thing is that I probably know more hackers than my boyfriend, though he certainly knows more CS majors.

Scenario 5: The attack of techno dancing zombies (with mood lighting)!

In a final front against the living, the underground nation of Vampires forges an alliance of goals with the Lycans. Along with their lapdogs the Zombies and Ghouls, the armies of the Undead sweep across the lands without meaningful opposition. None are spared. From liberals eager to embrace the cultural diversity of Undead Customs such as eating the brains of the living; to conservatives who find neither their stockpiles of non-silver ammunition for their unregistered guns nor their vitriolic AM talk radio effective at blunting the oncoming hordes.

Ironically, voter turnout in Chicago doesn't change.

Any Thomas Friedman fans here?

It'd be fascinating to get Jim Kunstler and Thomas Friedman on a stage together after seeing this post:

http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2007/04/blowing_green_s.html