12 Events that Will Change Everything is an interactive article from Scientific American that offers rich information on potential major discoveries or cataclysms that could change the world, as well as their chances of happening. The list is a surprisingly sane look at future discontinuities as these sorts of lists go: it includes human cloning, artificial life, asteroid collisions, ice caps melting, and room temperature superconductors. For less sanity, see fifty or so ways the world could end at Exit Mundi.
posted by blahblahblah on Aug 13, 2010 - 50 comments

Prophetic Pictures from Menominie, Wisconsin. In 1905, high school senior Albert Hansen took photogaphs of his graduating classmates at Menominie HS. Not as they were -- but as they believed, or hoped, or feared they would be in the decades to come. Dorothy M. Jesse was going to be a mathematician, and Fred Quilling a pharmacist. Alice M. Tilleson would be a prominent socialite, whose "eccentric ideas with reference to danger, force her to cling to that old fashioned vehicle, the automobile, instead of the new wheel-less aerial motor car." William C. Klatt, a future physician, would operate on disembodied heads. And Hansen himself was destined for the hobo's life. The Wisconsin Historical Society has the whole collection available online, together with the text from the yearbook and the truth, as best the Society could learn, of how the graduates' actual future compared with prophecy. (Spoiler: Fred Quilling really did become a pharmacist.) Just one of the many remarkable collections at Wisconsin Historical Images.
posted by escabeche on Feb 7, 2010 - 25 comments

The sky is falling! From Romulus to Ronald Reagan: a comprehensive timeline of apocalyptic predictions. If you decide to put some stock in one or more of these prophecies, you may need to do some preparatory research.
posted by brundlefly on Jun 22, 2005 - 11 comments

A vision of the future? "Although there is debate over the exact date it started, on November 02, 2000, a person calling themselves Timetravel_0, and later John Titor, started posting on a public forum that he was a time traveler from the year 2036." What follows are tales of the "future" involving civil and global nuclear war, schematics for a "time machine", and an IBM 5100 computer from 1974. (Grain of salt not included.)
posted by emptybowl on Sep 10, 2003 - 30 comments

Predictions from an Icelandic prophet for 2001: Total war in the Middle East, a worldwide natural disaster, money market instability, the spread of mad cow disease, and oh yeah - an Oscar for Bjork. I'm not sure what to comment on; what safe bets these are, or the interesting addition of Oscar picks in the predictions.
posted by jragon on Jan 2, 2001 - 6 comments