I'm actually excited about... fake meat. I think this has huge potential to reduce the amount of land and resources we need to use for agriculture. Of course, with that, will probably come an explosion in population...<p>Any of the genetic/medical things will (IMHO) have annoyingly slow progress. The body is an incredibly complex system (duh), one I think that will defy efforts to "reverse engineer" is (so to speak).<p>Put it this way: we need massive amounts of computing power just to figure out the shape of proteins, which is important to figure out what they react to and how. Extending that to figuring out the interactions and it gets even more complicated.<p>I also believe that nothing will replace the convenience of (largely) non-volatile fuels to the point where considerable effort will be spent to make artificial fuels viable. Giant tubs of algae making them, fuel trees (Anathem), that sort of thing.<p>As much as I like the idea of a space elevator, I'm not sure how viable it is. Firstly, just to create a material strong enough to withstand the forces involved is still something largely theorized about (buckeyballs notwithstanding). It will also be incredibly costly to produce. Imagine what acts of terror could do to that.<p>I see the future of mass long-distance travel being underground vacuum trains. It's a huge engineering effort but would solve so many problems (eg air congestion, travel times).<p>And as much as it depresses me I don't see a big future in space. The economics are terrible (particularly for interstellar travel). IIRC I read that getting one ton of spacecraft to the nearest star system accelerating to 10% of the speed of light would require roughly 10^18 joules of energy or roughly 1kg (being 0.1% of the total mass) of matter being converted to energy perfectly. And this assumes you've solved the reaction mass problem.