2026年7月2日 / 美国东部时间上午11:24 / 哥伦比亚广播公司新闻（CBS News）
马克·奥斯本 撰稿
就在签署《独立宣言》四年后、但在殖民地赢得独立战争之前，本杰明·富兰克林就已经在思考未来了。
1780年，富兰克林写信给他的密友、发现氧气的科学家约瑟夫·普里斯特利，感慨自己诞生于科学革命之初。他不仅畅想了美国和世界250年后的模样，还构想了1000年后的图景。
“真正的科学如今正以惊人的速度发展，这让我有时会遗憾自己出生得太早。人类驾驭物质的力量，在一千年后所能达到的高度，是无法想象的，”富兰克林写道。
或许在美国建国的250年里，无人能比富兰克林更称得上多栖人才：政治家、外交官、发明家、记者、邮政总长，甚至还是利弊清单的首创者。
但他在写给朋友的信中对1000年后的预测表明，他本身就是一位未来学家——尽管“未来学家”这个术语当时还未出现。
在信中，他预见了磁悬浮列车的出现，写道：“我们或许能够学会消除大型物体的重力，赋予它们绝对的轻性，以便于便捷运输。”他还认为所有疾病都将“被预防或治愈，甚至包括衰老”。
话虽如此，人工智能、基因编辑人类以及太空控制权的争夺，在他当年构想的250年后的美国，并未出现在他的设想中。
如同两个多世纪前的富兰克林，CBS新闻采访了三位未来学家，探讨他们眼中美国未来数个世纪的模样。
但关于未来的对话往往也会谈及过去。美国建国百年之际居住在波士顿的少年乔治·桑塔亚那后来写道：“那些不能铭记过去的人，注定会重蹈覆辙。”
如今美国正处于近年来最分裂的时期之一，人们很容易根据当下的氛围来预测未来。
“当你身处某个时代，会觉得这是美国作为一个国家经历的非凡事件，”地缘政治未来研究所创始人、《未来100年》与《平静前的风暴》作者乔治·弗里德曼说道，“但当你回顾历史，看看其他时期，现在的情况并不比尼克松时代糟糕多少。没错，我们会遇到奇怪的总统，但认为我们目前处于前所未有的分裂状态的想法是错误的。”
医疗健康
富兰克林曾写道人类可以活到1000岁—— Specifically， surpassing the ages of Biblical figures like Methuselah and Noah. 虽然这至今尚未实现（公平地说，距离富兰克林设定的时间线还有750年），但自18世纪70年代以来，医疗技术已经取得了长足进步。
未来今日战略集团创始人、《创世机器：合成生物学时代我们改写生命的探索》一书作者艾米·韦伯表示，2020年新冠疫苗的快速开发就是一个绝佳例证。
“首款新冠疫苗的基因序列仅用约两天就在计算机上完成设计，”她通过电子邮件对CBS新闻说道，“这简直令人难以置信。我们跨过了一道门槛——生物学终于实现了可读、可编辑、可编写的访问权限，而mRNA技术奏效了！”
尽管mRNA疫苗前景广阔，但它们遭到了现任政府及美国卫生与公众服务部部长小罗伯特·F·肯尼迪的审查。肯尼迪在2025年8月取消了约5亿美元的mRNA疫苗研究拨款。肯尼迪称这些疫苗“弊大于利”，但这一说法并未得到科学界的支持。
![2025年12月19日，法国中西部维埃纳省普瓦捷附近圣朱利安-拉尔的一家药房柜台上，放着一管Comirnaty LP.8.1 mRNA新冠疫苗。让-弗朗索瓦·福尔/汉斯·卢卡斯/法新社通过盖蒂图片社拍摄]
尽管如此，韦伯仍将不断发展的技术与医疗保健的融合前景称为“非同寻常”。
“想象这样一个系统：它能在症状出现前就检测出疾病，你的浴室可以兼作诊断实验室，而治疗方案是根据你的基因组而非统计平均值量身定制的，”她说。
韦伯将生物学的未来描述为“一门工程学科”。
“我们将像现在编写软件一样培育材料、制造药物和生产食品。可以想象：可编程、迭代、去中心化，”她说，“这将把大量行业从资源开采转向培育，并改写自工业时代以来一直稳定的供应链。”
如果你觉得这听起来有点像1997年科幻电影《千钧一发》中的基因工程未来，那你离真相并不遥远。
“我长期关注的一件事是，生物学与技术之间的壁垒何时会被打破，”亚利桑那州立大学作家兼未来学教授布莱恩·戴维·约翰逊说道，“有时我们称之为合成生物学，也有人称之为基因工程，但核心思想是能够毫无阻碍地在数字领域与物理领域之间来回穿梭。”
“模拟生命然后能够构建生命，这意味着什么？”约翰逊问道，“从物质的角度来看，做到这一点又意味着什么？……我认为这些时刻会突然改变我们对人类生活和日常生活的看法。对我来说，这是那些重大变革之一，而且它正在到来。”
太空
开国元勋约翰·亚当斯几乎以缺乏热情著称，他在1787年写下了一段关于美国未来的名言：“展望美国的未来，就像用赫歇尔的望远镜眺望苍穹。那些规模和运动都令人惊叹的天体从四面八方映入眼帘，让我们充满惊叹！”
亚当斯用天文学家威廉·赫歇尔的突破性望远镜作为隐喻，来形容美国未来可能有多辉煌。赫歇尔在殖民地赢得独立的同年（1781年）发现了天王星。即便亚当斯本人也是一名业余天文学家，他可能也无法想象太空会在美国的未来中扮演如此重要的角色。
美国目前正处于一场新型太空竞赛中，尽管这场竞赛大多在幕后进行——低地球轨道上已有数千颗卫星。
“看看6G（移动通讯技术）、边缘计算，还有天基通信，”约翰逊说道，“我们正在推进这些领域的建设，构建一个更加强大的网络。”
![2026年4月29日，SpaceX猎鹰重型火箭从肯尼迪航天中心39A发射台升空，将Viasat 3-F3卫星送入地球同步转移轨道。曼努埃尔·马赞蒂/NurPhoto通过盖蒂图片社拍摄]
SpaceX目前在低地球轨道上拥有超过10000颗卫星，且几乎每周都会发射更多卫星。杰夫·贝佐斯的亚马逊“利奥计划”（Amazon Leo）也计划在未来几年发射数千颗卫星，Planet Labs和Maxar Technologies等美国同行企业也在进行类似布局。
“随着（低地球轨道）卫星推动太空私有化……当我们实现这种全方位360度连接时，这将成为一个非常非常有趣的新前沿，对吧？”约翰逊说道。
弗里德曼表示，这也改变了战争形态。
“乌克兰战争证明，战争不再像第二次世界大战那样进行，”他说，“所有战争的根本基础都是情报，因此低地球轨道上的卫星可以识别目标，将数据传输给诸如‘高机动性炮兵火箭系统’等武器……并触发攻击。过去的问题是‘谁控制海洋？’，现在则变成了‘谁控制低地球轨道？’”
人工智能
2026年，几乎每天都能听到有关人工智能及其将如何改变世界的讨论。至于这将是好事还是坏事，仍是一个激烈争论的话题，但没人再质疑它将在未来几个世纪深刻重塑美国。
“人工智能推动我们从根本上重新评估如何看待人类劳动，以及如何评价人类劳动的价值，”曾在IBM担任未来学家的约翰逊说道，“我指的不仅是经济意义上的劳动，还包括我们作为人类的身份和所做的事情。”
约翰逊和弗里德曼都认为，人工智能将从根本上改变美国社会。但他们都认为这不过是一个熟悉的循环。
“我们之前经历过这种情况。流水线做到了这一点，互联网也做到了……其影响相当巨大，”约翰逊说，“我是个乐观主义者，对吧？所以我会想，让我们重新重视作为人类的意义……因为如果机器人和人工智能能完成某项工作，那就让机器人和人工智能去做吧……然后我们就能围绕如何评价人类的价值重新调整方向。”
![2025年5月3日，伦敦，苹果iPhone屏幕上显示着ChatGPT、DeepSeek、Gemini、Copilot、Grok、Claude等人工智能图标。alexsl/Getty Images]
对韦伯来说，事情并非如此简单。她认为“这个循环无法与旧有的循环完美对应”。
“我们给自己讲的一个令人安心的故事是，人类总能适应，每一次技术革命起初都令人恐惧，但最终我们都会变得更好，”她说，“这是一个值得珍视的信念，但也是一个危险的信念。”
公元2276年
在美国建国500周年之际，至少会有一些事物看起来与现在无异。
这是因为美国政府将在费城独立国家历史公园下掩埋一个时间胶囊，里面装有来自50个州以及国会、最高法院和NFL、NBA、MLB等体育联盟的物品。根据国会命令，这个时间胶囊要到2276年才能打开。
但韦伯表示，当下的挑战是在快速变化的社会中为长期未来做好准备。
“2026年的核心问题是，当我们的现任领导人的规划仅着眼于18至24个月时，一个社会如何为未来50年、100年或250年做打算？从50年的视角来看，这意味着他们正在优化的世界将不复存在，”韦伯说道。
弗里德曼表示，美国正处于重塑政府的时期，“但我们的文化以丑陋的方式进行重塑”。
“首先，你会打破旧有体系，然后重新构建，但仅此而已。我们文化的各个层面，我们都会这么做。所以当我观察这一切时，我不认为这是一场危机。我认为这是美国体系的常态，”他说。
加入CBS的“美国伟大街区派对250”活动，这是一场7月4日周六的黄金时段特别节目，由CBS《晚间新闻》主持人托尼·多库皮尔和《娱乐今夜》的尼谢尔·特纳主持，将带来现场音乐表演、全国范围的庆祝活动，以及首都上空有史以来规模最大的烟花表演。7月4日美国东部时间晚上8点，可在CBS电视台收看，也可通过Paramount+和CBS News 24/7流媒体平台观看。
America 500? 3 futurists predict what the U.S. will be like in the centuries ahead
July 2, 2026 / 11:24 AM EDT / CBS News
By Mark Osborne
Just four years after he signed the Declaration of Independence, but before the colonies would win the war that granted their freedom, Benjamin Franklin was already thinking about the future.
Franklin wrote a letter in 1780 to his close friend Joseph Priestley, the scientist who discovered oxygen, lamenting being born at the beginning of the scientific revolution. He dreamed not just of what the United States and the world would look like in 250 years but 1,000 years.
“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.
Maybe no man in the country’s 250 years 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 predictions of what could happen 1,000 years from when he jotted them down in a letter to a friend showed he was also something of a futurist — even if the term didn’t yet exist.
In the letter, he presaged maglev trains, writing, “We may perhaps learn to deprive large Masses of their Gravity & give them absolute Levity, for the sake of easy Transport.” He also believed all diseases would be “prevented or cured, not excepting even that of Old Age.”
That being said, artificial intelligence, genetically engineered humans and a battle for the control of space were not on his menu like they are now, 250 years into the country Franklin helped form.
Like Franklin over two centuries ago, CBS News spoke to three futurists about what they think the U.S. will look like in the centuries ahead.
But conversations about the future often also discuss the past. It was George Santayana, a teen living in Boston at the time of the American centennial, who later wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
With the U.S. in one of its most fractured time periods in recent memory, it might be easy to use the current climate to portend the future.
“When you live during a time, it makes you feel that this is an extraordinary event in the United States as a nation,” said George Friedman, the founder of Geopolitical Futures and author of “The Next 100 Years” and “The Storm Before the Calm.” “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.”
Health
Franklin wrote about people living for 1,000 years — specifically, surpassing the ages of Biblical figures like Methuselah and Noah. While that hasn’t come to pass yet (to be fair, we still have 750 years left on Franklin’s timeline), advances in medical technology have come a long way since the 1770s.
The fast development of the COVID-19 vaccine in 2020 is a prime example of that, said Amy Webb, founder of the Future Today Strategy Group and author of “The Genesis Machine: Our Quest to Rewrite Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology.”
“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 the scrutiny of the current administration and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who canceled about $500 million in grants for research on mRNA vaccines in August 2025. Kennedy said the vaccines caused “more risk than benefits,” an argument not supported by the scientific community.
A vial of Comirnaty LP.8.1 mRNA COVID-19 vaccine sits on the counter of a pharmacy in Saint-Julien-l-Ars near Poitiers, in the Vienne department in west-central France, on Dec. 19, 2025. Jean-François FORT/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images
Regardless, Webb called the promise of the developing blend of technology and healthcare “extraordinary.”
“Imagine 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 said.
Webb 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,” she said. “That moves whole swaths of business from extraction to cultivation, and it rewrites supply chains that have been stable since the industrial era.”
If you’re thinking this is starting to sound 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, which 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, some would call it 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?” Johnson asked. “What does it mean from a material standpoint to be able to do that? … 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.”
Space
Founding father John Adams, hardly known for his boundless enthusiasm, famously wrote on the future of America in 1787, saying, “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 he discovered Uranus the same year the colonies won their independence (1781), as a metaphor for just how amazing the future of America could be. Even as an amateur astronomer himself, Adams probably didn’t know how much space would play a role in the country’s future.
The U.S. is currently in a new type of space race, even though it has been happening largely in the background — with thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit.
“You look at 6G (mobile phone technology), you look at edge computing, you look at space-based communications as well,” Johnson said. “And we’re going through and building this out, we’re building a much more robust network.”
SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket lifts off from launch pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center, carrying the Viasat 3-F3 satellite into geostationary transfer orbit, on April 29, 2026. Manuel Mazzanti/NurPhoto via Getty Images
SpaceX currently has more than 10,000 satellites in low Earth orbit, and launches more just about every week. Jeff Bezos’ Amazon Leo operation plans to launch thousands in the coming years and fellow American companies like Planet Labs and Maxar Technologies are doing the same.
“As we start to see the privatization of space with the (low Earth orbit) satellites … that becomes a really really interesting little frontier of what does that mean when we’ve got this sort of 360 (degree) connectivity all around, right?” Johnson said.
It’s also changed warfare, Freidman said.
“The Ukraine war demonstrated that war is not fought as it was in World War II,” he said. “The fundamental basis of all warfare is intelligence, so satellites in low Earth orbit can identify targets, send data down to things like a weapon called (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System) … and trigger an attack. So it used to be the question, ‘Who controlled the oceans?’ Now, it’s the question, ‘Who controls low-Earth orbit?’”
Artificial intelligence
Hardly a day goes by in 2026 when you don’t hear something about artificial intelligence and how it will transform the world. Whether that will be for the good or bad is still a hotly debated topic, but there’s no one left arguing it won’t overmake America in the next several centuries.
“What AI is pushing us to do is to fundamentally revalue how we think about human labor and how we value human labor,” Johnson, who previously worked as a futurist for IBM, said. “And I mean labor in the economic sense, but I also just mean who we are as humans and what we do.”
Johnson and Friedman both believe AI will fundamentally change American society. But they don’t believe it’s anything more than 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, right? So I’m like, well, let’s value what it means to be human. … Because if the robots and AI can do it, well, let the robots and AI go do it. … Then you sort of reorient around how we value human beings.”
Apple iPhone screen with Artificial Intelligence icons ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Gemini, Copilot, Grok, Claude, etc., in London, May 3, 2025. alexsl/Getty Images
It’s not so simple for Webb, who believes “this cycle doesn’t map cleanly onto the old ones.”
“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.”
In the year 2276
On the 500th anniversary of the United States, there will at least be a few items that look the same.
That’s because the U.S. government is burying a time capsule under Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia with items from all 50 states as well as Congress, the Supreme Court and sports leagues like the NFL, NBA and MLB. By order of Congress, it will not be reopened until 2276.
But, the challenge now is preparing for a long-term future in a rapidly changing society, Webb said.
“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? On a 50-year horizon, that means they are optimizing for a world that will no longer exist,” Webb said.
Friedman says America is in a period of reinventing government, “but our culture does it in ugly ways.”
“First, you bust it down, then you build it up, but that’s it. All layers of our culture, something we do, so when I look at that, I don’t see a crisis going on. I see the norm of the American system,” he said.
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 in the skies 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.
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