The Internet

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ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) goes online in December, connecting four major U.S. universities. Designed for research, education, and government organizations, it provides a communications network linking the country in the event that a military attack destroys conventional communications systems.

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Electronic mail is introduced by Ray Tomlinson, a Cambridge, Mass., computer scientist. He uses the @ to distinguish between the sender's name and network name in the email address.

read the predictions

From Discover magazine's "The State of the World: 2062":

6 billion people live in cities—the population of the entire world at the turn of the century.

Earth now home to 2 billion people age 60 and over.

Coastal cities go under. Renewable energy rules the day. Cows use up precious water and drive the ongoing greenhouse effect.

Incomes skyrocket in developing nations.


Ice caps melt. Industry booms at top of the world.

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Teleportation, or Teletransportation, is the theoretical transfer of matter or energy from one point to another without traversing the physical space between them. It is a common subject of science fiction literature, film, and television.

The original Star Trek series is reported to have taken place from 2265 to 2271.

The technological singularity hypothesis is that accelerating progress in technologies will cause a runaway effect wherein artificial intelligence will exceed human intellectual capacity and control, thus radically changing or even ending civilization in an event called the singularity.