A wise man once said, never make a prediction that has both a fixed date, and an outcome. ‘Something important will happen by summer’ is fine. ‘I will get a vaccine sometime’ is fine. ‘I will get a vaccine by summer’ is risky. I like risk.
So what does the future hold? The problem right now isn’t that prediction is hard, it’s that the future is dismal...and on that happy note - predictions for the next while.
COVID
Right now the evolutionary pressure on covid is all ‘more infectious’ - thus in places where there is a lot of infection, there is the appearance of more infectable strains. The UK, the US, South Africa, Brazil etc. If you remember way back in the beginning, a mutation that turned up in Italy is the one that most of the world got, as it was more virulent than the one that came out of Wuhan. The Virus’ ‘random mutation machine’ has been working on that since day one.
Once a significant number of people have had a combination of covid or a vaccine, the evolutionary pressure becomes ‘avoiding immunity’ It’s just a numbers thing. Because millions or billions of people are going to have immunity in the same environment as people are infected - if a mutation is possible that avoids the immunity, it will happen. Not might, the numbers are just way too big. There are trillions of viruses around. There are trillions of mutations around. Most of those mutations aren’t stable, so they’re no big deal. Some of the mutations will be...both stable and a big deal.
It could be that a stable mutation that avoids the immunity isn’t possible, so it might not turn up, but man-kind isn’t doing too well on the ‘good luck’ thing lately. Even if there are mutations that will be stable, they might not make people all that sick. Viruses that kill their hosts stop replicating, so it isn’t a good survival strategy for a virus to be all that deadly. We just need to hope the virus figures that out in time. It probably will - especially when helped along by all the brain power and money being thrown at the problem right now.
For a happy longer term prediction, all this new science on vaccines and treatments will likely greatly reduce the risk of future virus problems! Yay science!
US politics
It was hopeful for a few weeks that the republicans would throw Trump to the curb after the whole ‘insurgence against the US government’ thing. They mostly didn’t. There is a Cheney among the few moral highpoints in the Republican Party right now...of ‘those’ Cheneys. The ‘lie into war in Iraq’ Cheneys. Another leading figure is a former corporate ‘asset strip the company, and drive it into bankruptcy’ raider. Those are the best the Republicans have to offer.
Apparently, some ‘30% of Americans’/’60% of Republicans’ have experienced a psychotic break and are living in a world that only has a passing similarity to the physical universe most of humanity inhabits. Apparently, some ‘30% of Americans’/’60% of Republicans’ are technically insane. I’m hoping I wake up in the hospital having dreamed the last decade, but that doesn’t seem likely...neither does much of the last decade, so I remain hopeful.
A true civil war is still less likely than not, but a big uptick in political violence is almost certain. The Democrats are making the right kind of noises about doing good, popular things, and daring the Republicans to stop them, so that’s a nice change - of course the Democrat Senators Munchen and Sinema are giving the Republicans a hand. No one watching the McConnell hypocrisy-athon the last few decades would expect anything positive or beneficial out of the Republicans - but it would be nice if the Democrats stopped shooting at their own net.
It looks like things still need to get worse before it can get better - yes, even after 2020, it still needs to get worse before it can get better...Gods save us all (I wouldn’t limit yourself to just praying to any one God. Pray to every God anyone has ever heard of, just in case).
Funny thing on the economics. If the Democrats succeed in getting a $15 minimum wage, and get the economy to recover well, they will face inflation. Pay people who spend money more, and inflation happens. An unemployment rate like the US had going into the pandemic is unlikely to be achievable (at a living wage) without inflation. Paying most of your population a living wage puts a lot more pressure on prices. See the 1970’s. That’s ok, you just target a slightly higher unemployment rate and tolerate a bit more inflation (5% is a safer number than 2%).
If the Fed lays off for a while (as they are promising), the surge of inflation will flatten as the economy adjusts to the one off increase in wages. As long as everyone else doesn’t ask for more money (since those at the bottom get more) it won’t cycle into an inflationary spiral and will just be a one off thing that mellows with time. If the Fed and financial market freak out with the first sign of inflation, bad things will happen and it will ‘prove’ that you shouldn’t pay people a living wage. In early 2022 there will be pressure to raise rates, and slow the economy. Avoid the pressure. Don’t learn the wrong lessons, America.
World Politics
China and Russia gain lots of good will giving out vaccines (now), and keeps international politics dangling on a cliff. Russia is an annoyance, and China is a threat. The West gains some good will by giving out vaccines after The West has taken care of themselves, and keeps being less effective than they should be, and lost to distractions. Parts of Eastern Europe are further lost to authoritarianism, and the rest of Europe gets tied up dealing with that. India and parts of South America continue to follow those parts of Eastern Europe down rhyming trajectories. South East Asia tries to mitigate bad China stuff and is distracted. America gets lost in their own navel gazing for a while longer and freedom takes a hit. Scandinavia, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia (and some even smaller places) try to keep momentum going, but they don’t weigh much...
This will get worse before it gets better too. Hopefully China won’t feel encouraged by their success in Hong Kong and reach for Taiwan. The next topic resonates unpleasantly with this topic. Keep that list of Gods at hand for helpful prayers here, too.
Climate
More and more obvious ‘bad things’ happen. The world talks a good game, but dithers. Progress is made, but continuing and intensifying wide scale migrations and conflict reduce the scope for international cooperation. Luckily, somewhere during the next decade, it all gets real and mankind mostly pulls together (no, really!).
Some of that pulling together could come out the barrel of a gun, but hopefully that’s only a teeny bit around the edges. Some of that pulling together will be too slow, but better late than never (probably). Some of that pulling together is likely to include huge, international atmospheric modification projects, and we engineers never make mistakes the first time we do anything, so we don’t even need to worry about prayers here!
Other Science stuff
Possibly hurried along by virus related urgency, people are going to start toying with custom, deliberate mutations of the human genome. Some of that may already be underway in dark corners of major governments, or dark basements of billionaire’s mansions. Good stuff will be proven out with a few missteps in the first really careful trials, and bad stuff will happen in the first not very careful trials.
The debate will churn, but unless viral pressures or climate collapse encourage reckless behavior, good things may occur eventually. Little things soon, and big things in decades - maybe many decades. If someone wants to try to fix SBMA (Kennedy’s disease) I’ll volunteer, but I might change my name to Frankenstein, just in case. Scientists make even fewer missteps then engineers the first time they try something, so no need for Gods and prayers here, either.
In the longer term, Better and faster innovation in the fields of AI and VR make it more and more plausible that we could set up a pleasant Matrix-like existence if the prayers don’t pan out with the disease, climate or politics things. We can have robots take care of our needs as we live in an artificial world. Wouldn’t it be nice to wake up tomorrow and find out you could change the settings?
Hey! Maybe we’ve killed off the earth and are all sleeping on sublight generation ships to solar systems with high probability of habitable planets (or ‘...teeny possibility of…’, whatevs). Maybe I’ll wake up to find I’ve been woken early to patch a horrible radiation leak or to stop a nasty alien from planting eggs in sleeping humanity, and I’ll have a chance to change the ‘icky stuff’ setting I chose on the inflight entertainment system for the rest of the flight! There is always a brighter possibility if you keep your imagination churning!
Personal
Predicting has stopped being fun, so I’ll stop there. Personally, I’m just going to drift into my own delusional universe and stop paying attention to the outside world altogether. Every few months, under cover of darkness, I’ll peek out between the curtains, and quickly run back under the covers where it’s safe. 2020 has been an excellent pilot project for never leaving the safety of a tightly controlled environment and living in a delusional parallel universe, so I’m confident I can. Most of the Republican party is doing it - as a proof of concept - but I’m going to pick a better delusion than Q has.