America 500? What the U.S. will look like in another 250 years
From space to healthcare and artificial intelligence, what could the next 250 years of the United States look like?
Just four years after he signed the Declaration of Independence , but before the colonies would win the war that granted their freedom, Benjamin Franklin was already thinking about the future.
Franklin wrote a letter in 1780 to his close friend Joseph Priestley, the scientist who discovered oxygen, lamenting being born at the beginning of the scientific revolution. He dreamed not just of what the United States and the world would look like in 250 years but 1,000 years.
"The rapid Progress true Science now makes, occasions my Regretting sometimes that I was born so soon. It is impossible to imagine the Height to which may be carried in a 1000 Years the Power of Man over Matter," Franklin wrote.
Maybe no man in the country's 250 years was more of a multi-hyphenate than Franklin: politician, diplomat, inventor, journalist, postmaster-general and even the originator of the pros and cons list.
But his predictions of what could happen 1,000 years from when he jotted them down in a letter to a friend showed he was also something of a futurist — even if the term didn't yet exist.
In the letter, he presaged maglev trains, writing, "We may perhaps learn to deprive large Masses of their Gravity & give them absolute Levity, for the sake of easy Transport." He also believed all diseases would be "prevented or cured, not excepting even that of Old Age."