Eminent scientists deploy cheesegraters

"Brilliant Minds Predict The Next 50 Years" is a part of New Scientist's 50th anniversary issue has been linked by loads of people (e.g. Kottke, BoingBoing, Slashdot). I read them all. Mostly, the great minds only try to think of the greatest breakthrough of the next half century in their field. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail; when all you have is a cheesegrater, everything looks like cheese. Stephen Wolfram thinks the action will be in cellular automata; a tentative Stephen Pinker plumps for cognitive neuroscience; Djerrasi picks a fertility one; Kurzweil a machine consciousness one. Shame. There are some notable exceptions (Carlo Ravelli thinks big, Robert May thinks broad, an overwrought Simon Conway Morris, a few others) but I like primatologist Frans De Waal best of all because he jumps out of his speciality, lays his cards on the table, and makes a measurable prediction:

[W]e need a deeper understanding of human nature, and this can be achieved only if the social sciences replace their ideology-laden, fragmented approach with objective science grounded in a unitary theory of behaviour. There is only one such theory around, which is why I predict that 50 years from now every psychology and sociology department will have Darwin's portrait on the wall.

I already made my prediction on the next big breakthrough: we will find the biosphere extends into the stratosphere.