Imagine it is 2029, and the International Exchange Center is celebrating its 40th anniversary. To mark the occasion, it is offering a unique (and naturally free) trip to a few lucky individuals who used the company's services back in 2010. You are among those lucky few.
The essence of this trip is as follows: the participant must choose a place they have never been to and a year they wish to travel to. The only limitation is that the year must be between your birth year and 2029.
Although the program sponsor guarantees the participant's safe return in exactly two weeks, the journey itself is not simple, and things could go wrong. Therefore, you begin training for various emergency situations. For example, an error occurs, and despite all checks, you are sent according to another participant's wishes.
Will you be able to determine the year you have landed in? Of course, you could ask people or buy a newspaper, but what if you try to manage without that? What would catch your eye first?
It is good if you are a fashion expert and can determine not only the region but also the year by the clothing. Or, let's say, you are a car expert and can identify where and when you are without hesitation. However, it is possible that you might end up somewhere where everyone wears hijabs, and 1960s Ladas and Cadillacs coexist on the streets. Yet, looking closely at the women in hijabs, you might notice some have iPhone 4 models, and under the wheels of the Ladas, the asphalt is perfectly smooth and remains dry even in a downpour, and even slightly heated for better traction.
The first part about the International Exchange Center and the contest was written as a small introduction (and, of course, with the goal of a little flattery =). Nevertheless, the question of what primarily changes the appearance of streets remains. If you take cities like London or Paris—those European cities that keep pace with progress and where changes happen smoothly rather than in leaps and bounds as they do in Russia—the difference between the year 2000 and 2010 would be difficult to notice, though quite possible if you look closely at the details.
Besides what changes externally, it is, of course, curious what will change internally. Humans change the world, tailoring it to themselves, and then adapt to what they have created. At the same time, a human remains a human, and in the coming twenty years, it is unlikely they will invent anything new in relationships with each other that does not exist now or did not exist before (in ancient Greece or Gomorrah). It is doubtful that flash drives with hundreds of terabytes embedded in the human body (for more efficient cooling and power, combined with nerve control) will radically change the relationship between a mother and daughter. Although new technologies may help disabled people feel and be 'persons without limited abilities'.
If we look at it on a larger scale, problems related to overpopulation and urbanization are inevitable, but I am sure that humans are quite capable of adapting to this as well.
