What I see happening in the next 50 years

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2007 - 2016 The Millennial Depression - AKA The Second Great Depression, AKA The Time of Woes, AKA The Time of Troubles
2016 US lands a the first Lunar Team on the Moon since the 1970s, rushed into action by Chinese successes the ARES V and ARES I rockets manage to propel the US Landers to the Moon a full 6 years before any other nation - a mineral exploration treaty is signed the next year under western power auspices
2017-2019 WWIII, AKA the Third World War, or at the time known as The Awaiting Thermonuclear Exchange - China and Russia, largely left out of the treaty for exploitation of the Moon's vast resources, are enraged at the Western Powers, and mobilize for war. The Western Powers counteract this by launching a conventional first strike within months, triggering WWIII, and resulting in an entirely conventional war that lasts 2 years and costs the lives of 300 million. Though the war ends in a rough stalemate, the US tests new weapons within a month of the end of the war that sends terror down the spine of every person on the planet - the Eastern Coalition surrenders within the month, unconditionally.
2016 - the US tests the first nanotechnological weapon, NANTO, in effect a bomb made up of short lived nanites that can reduce everything within its blast radius to a pile of ash within seconds. Convinced of the effectiveness of the warhead contents, they wished to inprove delivery, and in 2019, a scalar form weapon system, capable of generating blast waves carrying the NANTO on it, was developed, with a blast radius covering hundreds of square miles. Fearing imminent use of the weapon, which has is in effect an instantaneous beam weapon compared, the Eastern Coalition surrendered within a month of the first effective test of the weapon.
2024 - 2032 - The New Era is born.
2029 - First manned fusion powered spacecraft. 2036 - first warp powered flights.
2038 - first contact with an alien race
2035 -> the Era of Continual Growth, a period in which economics has changed due to the influx of raw materials from space and several new markets.
2043 - no more oil
2039 - World War IV, AKA The Petroleum Wars, a grouping of several wars all linked to oil running out.
2041 - US and West intervene in petroleum wars, by this time over 1 billion dead, wounded, or captured
2043 - Petroleum wars end with the signing of the Multiparty Treaty of 2042. Most of the nations involved in the wars were very poor the begin with, had large populations, and were very unstable. By the end of the wars, the map had been redrawn. NATO had even enlisted the help of a few new found alien allies to fight the war, on a very limited scale. Humanity lost a fifth of its population to the war - over 1.7 billion people died. Nearly a billion were wounded and survived. At the end of this, most nations that were involved in the start of the war temporarily lost national sovereignty to the assisting foreign powers - NATO feared so much that such a war may happen again it wished to rebuild these nations in a form that would see them fossil free and stable for generations. In the end, this turned into a downside, as NATO turned into NEE (National Electorate of Earth) which, created 5 years after the treaty, turned into the Solidarity Empire of Earth, and so the end came.

I'm just surprised that you believe there WILL still be a US in the year 2041.

... warp flight by 2032....?

NOT GONNA HAPPEN...

we cant even sustain a fusion reaction let alone use it for thrust...

"I'm just surprised that you believe there WILL still be a US in the year 2041."

I'm surprised anybody wouldn't. The US has a GDP four times greater than any other nation, with a manufacturing sector about that of the next nation's GDP. Militarily speaking, the US can knock out all ICBM's on the planet with its actual missile defense shield, and the US has such a better military that nations like China attempt to steal random technology from defense contractors in order to just build something half-way decent. We've survived nothing but wars since this country was created. We've nearly been wiped out twice, had Washington burned to the ground in one of those wars, and yet had both wars ended on at least equal terms or in some circumstances on our own terms. We fought what can generally be considered the first modern war in history, the Civil War, and we fought in both world wars, won both, and came a hair from winning Vietnam if we didn't have a bunch of dumbasses here at home telling us to restrain and leave, putting political pressure on military commanders where none should exist. Seriously, I love this nation, and this nation will go on for a long time. It is the most powerful entity in the world, UN, NATO, EU, included, and don't kid me, we aren't invicible, but there is hardly anything that can destroy this nation, and I doubt there will be some grand revolution to come.

"... warp flight by 2032....?

NOT GONNA HAPPEN...

we cant even sustain a fusion reaction let alone use it for thrust..."

I actually got a research opportunity with a person who wants to build a toy model fusion probe to go around the Earth and to the Moon by 2014. He has worked out the figures, done his math, and it should work perfectly. By the way, we have SUSTAINED several a fusion reaction, we just cannot get sustainable power out of it (it takes more energy to create the fusion than we get out). But, a fusion propulsion device isn't being used to power homes. We only care that we get thrust, and it doesn't matter that we get more energy than we put into the device, just that it has a higher thrust to weight ratio than a conventional chemical rocket. See???

As per warp flight, I have a sketch of a couple on my desk, and I skipped out of working with the guy on the fusion engine to work on a gravity team instead, because their research leads directly to both a power source and also to the propulsion system itself. Actually, if my plans go right we'll have a warp flight sometime next decade, and we'll have some power source better than fusion implemented before then ~ 2016 - 2019 range. Its more a matter of being driven to do this.