America at 500: What the U.S. Could Look Like in Another 250 Years
Just four years after signing the Declaration of Independence — and before the colonies had won the war that secured their freedom — Benjamin Franklin was already gazing centuries ahead. In a 1780 letter to his close friend Joseph Priestley, the scientist who discovered oxygen, Franklin lamented being born at the dawn of the scientific revolution. He dreamed not only of what the United States and the world would look like in 250 years, but in 1,000.
“The rapid Progress true Science now makes, occasions my Regretting sometimes that I was born so soon. It is impossible to imagine the Height to which may be carried in a 1000 Years the Power of Man over Matter,” Franklin wrote. His predictions included something akin to maglev trains — “We may perhaps learn to deprive large Masses of their Gravity & give them absolute Levity, for the sake of easy Transport” — and the belief that all diseases would be “prevented or cured, not excepting even that of Old Age.”
Perhaps no figure in the nation’s 250-year history was more of a multi-hyphenate than Franklin: politician, diplomat, inventor, journalist, postmaster general, and even the originator of the pros-and-cons list. But his letter also revealed him as a futurist avant la lettre. Two and a half centuries later, the topics he didn’t foresee — artificial intelligence, genetically engineered humans, and the battle for control of space — have become central to America’s trajectory.
To mark the nation’s semiquincentennial, CBS News spoke with three futurists about what the U.S. might look like in the centuries ahead. Conversations about the future often also revisit the past. As George Santayana — a teenager living in Boston during the American centennial — later wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” With the country in one of its most fractious periods in recent memory, it’s tempting to use the current climate to forecast doom. But George Friedman, founder of Geopolitical Futures and author of “The Next 100 Years,” pushes back. “When you live during a time, it makes you feel that this is an extraordinary event in the United States as a nation,” he said. “When you look back in history and take a look at the other times, this isn’t anything much worse than Richard Nixon. So yeah, we get strange presidents, but the idea that we are in a uniquely divided position at this point is false.”
Franklin wrote about people living for 1,000 years — specifically, surpassing the ages of biblical figures like Methuselah and Noah. That hasn’t come to pass yet (we still have 750 years left on Franklin’s timeline), but medical technology has advanced dramatically since the 1770s. The rapid development of the COVID-19 vaccine in 2020 is a prime example, said Amy Webb, founder of the Future Today Strategy Group and author of “The Genesis Machine.” “The genetic sequence for the first COVID vaccine was designed on a computer in about two days,” she told CBS News via email. “This was just mindbogglingly incredible. We crossed a threshold – biology was something we had read-edit-write access to, and mRNA worked!”
Despite the promise of mRNA vaccines, they have come under scrutiny from the current administration and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who in August 2025 canceled about $500 million in grants for mRNA vaccine research. Kennedy said the vaccines caused “more risk than benefits,” an argument not supported by the scientific community. Webb, however, called the developing blend of technology and healthcare “extraordinary.” She envisions “a system that detects disease before symptoms appear, where your bathroom doubles as a diagnostic lab, and therapies are tailored to your genome rather than the statistical average.” She described the future of biology as “an engineering discipline”: “We will grow materials, manufacture drugs, and produce food the way we now write software. Think: programmable, iterative, decentralized. That moves whole swaths of business from extraction to cultivation, and it rewrites supply chains that have been stable since the industrial era.”
If that sounds like the genetically engineered future from the 1997 sci-fi film “Gattaca,” you’re not far off. “One of the things that I’ve been looking at for a long time is when the wall between biology and technology begins to fall,” said Brian David Johnson, an author and futurist professor at Arizona State University. “Sometimes we call it synthetic biology, sometimes gene engineering, but it’s that idea of being able to move back and forth between the digital realm and the physical realm with very little friction. What does it mean to model life and then be able to build life? … I think those moments are things all of a sudden where it really changes how we think about human life and our daily life. And to me, that’s one of those big things and it is coming.”
Founding father John Adams, hardly known for boundless enthusiasm, wrote in 1787: “A prospect into futurity in America, is like contemplating the heavens through the telescopes of Herschell. Objects stupendous in their magnitudes and motions strike us from all quarters, and fill us with amazement!” Adams used astronomer William Herschel’s groundbreaking telescopes — with which Herschel discovered Uranus in 1781, the same year the colonies won their independence — as a metaphor for America’s potential. Even as an amateur astronomer, Adams probably didn’t know how much space would come to define the country’s future.
The U.S. is now in a new kind of space race, unfolding largely in the background with thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit. “You look at 6G, edge computing, space-based communications,” Johnson said. “We’re going through and building this out, building a much more robust network.” SpaceX currently operates more than 10,000 satellites in low Earth orbit, launching more almost weekly. Jeff Bezos’ Amazon LEO operation plans to launch thousands in the coming years, and fellow American companies Planet Labs and Maxar Technologies are doing the same. “As we start to see the privatization of space with the LEO satellites … that becomes a really interesting little frontier,” Johnson said. “What does that mean when we’ve got this 360-degree connectivity all around?”
It has also changed warfare, Friedman noted. “The Ukraine war demonstrated that war is not fought as it was in World War II. The fundamental basis of all warfare is intelligence, so satellites in low Earth orbit can identify targets, send data down to things like HIMARS … and trigger an attack. It used to be, ‘Who controlled the oceans?’ Now it’s, ‘Who controls low-Earth orbit?’”
Hardly a day goes by in 2026 without news about artificial intelligence and how it will transform the world. Whether for good or ill remains hotly debated, but few argue that AI won’t reshape America in the coming centuries. “What AI is pushing us to do is to fundamentally revalue how we think about human labor and how we value human labor,” said Johnson, who previously worked as a futurist at IBM. “I mean labor in the economic sense, but also who we are as humans and what we do.” Johnson and Friedman both believe AI will fundamentally change American society, but they see it as part of a familiar cycle. “We’ve done it before. Assembly lines did that, the internet did that … and the impact is quite large,” Johnson said. “I’m an optimist. Let the robots and AI do it … then you reorient around how we value human beings.”
Webb is less sanguine. “The comforting story we tell ourselves is that humans always adapt, that every technological revolution looks scary at first and then we all come out better on the other side,” she said. “That’s a cherished belief, and it’s a dangerous one.” She argues that “this cycle doesn’t map cleanly onto the old ones.”
On the 500th anniversary of the United States, at least a few things will look the same. The U.S. government is burying a time capsule under Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia with items from all 50 states, Congress, the Supreme Court, and sports leagues like the NFL, NBA and MLB. By order of Congress, it will not be opened until 2276. But the challenge now is preparing for a long-term future in a rapidly changing society. “The core issue in 2026 is that how can a society plan for its next 50, 100, or 250 years when our current leaders plan only 18-24 months out?” Webb said. “On a 50-year horizon, that means they are optimizing for a world that will no longer exist.”
Friedman sees America in a period of reinventing government, “but our culture does it in ugly ways. First, you bust it down, then you build it up. All layers of our culture – something we do. So when I look at that, I don’t see a crisis. I see the norm of the American system.”
Join CBS for “The Great American Block Party 250,” a primetime special on Saturday, July 4, hosted by CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil and Entertainment Tonight’s Nischelle Turner, featuring live musical performances, celebrations around the country, and the largest fireworks show in history over the nation’s capital. Tune in July 4 at 8 p.m. ET on CBS and stream it on Paramount+ and CBS News 24/7.