[xrange]

>Or 1000 years from now terrorists dirty-bomb everyone.

...Well, on a more optimistic note, a dirty-bombs, while they may destroy property values and cause cleanup issues, don't really kill any more than a conventional/kinetic bomb. I think they may be one of the best-case scenarios when it comes to a terrorist strike, since the causalities will be low, but there will be a lot of "frenzy" about the invisible radiation. (I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong, or if there are silent aerosolized short-half-life "bombs" in existence that are "detonated" secretly inside of buildings so that people are accumulating long term exposures unknowingly).

Also, I wouldn't be surprised if room-ish temperature superconductors appear much sooner than 1,000 years from now. And it will definitively be interesting to see how high of energy densities SMES (Superconducting Magnetic Energy Storage) will get to in the next 20 years with existing cryogenic superconductors.

http://snf.ieeecsc.org/abstracts/stp443-high-field-hts-smes-...

[ck2]

Look at all the cancer from 9/11 and that was just fine particles in the air.

Now imagine radioactive fine particles with half-life of decades.

Sure, the death isn't instantaneous. But the suffering and early death will be massive. After the US nuked Japan (twice) the real damage was to those left living for the short time afterwards and all the radioactivity an slow death.