"Happy New Year!" Ubiquitous holiday greeting; "May you live in interesting times." Ancient Chinese curse. Your choice...

Welcome to the first Roundtable for 2017!

2016 was so very complicated. Even the number! It can be factored as 2*2*2*2*2*3*3*7 (bet you didn't see the seven in there, did you?), or expressed as 2^5*3^2*7; whereas 2017 is a Prime Number. How simple, how clean, how hopeful. It is with great relief and trepidation that we bid a collective goodbye to 2016. Relief because it has been a fraught year - the loss of many an icon(CNN), of cherished norms, and of respect for others. But we enter 2017 with great expectations and nary a roadmap. It appears unprecedented in so many ways.

TIME Magazine named Donald Trump 2016 Person of the Year: [Linked Image from timedotcom.files.wordpress.com] (How dark, how brooding, how scary!) Trump called it "a great honor." Um, he perhaps did not know what the criteria for the cover is: “the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or ill, and embodied what was important about the year.”
Quote
A lot of news is bad news and a lot of people who make bad news are very powerful people. TIME’s editors aren’t immune to that reality. Famously, they named Hitler in 1938 and Stalin in 1939 and again in 1942. These were men who had a huge impact, not just in those years but over the entire century.
TIME. Is Trump going to be like Hitler or Stalin or Khomeini? Or like Obama or Roosevelt or Ghandi? TIME will tell...

So, Janus, what can we expect for 2017? Rolling Stone suggests, Think 2016 Was Bad? 2017 Will Almost Surely Be Worse. Scientists see reasons for optimism in space flight, artificial intelligence, gene editing, virtual reality and transportation - from self-driving vehicles, to personal transportation devices; as well as trepidation from political realities and science-averse leaders. Trump: The most anti-science president ever? - Newsweek.

It's a great time for predictions: 2017 Crystal Ball - CNN; 10 Terrifying Predictions For 2017 - Listverse; Seven science stories we can't wait to follow in 2017 - LA Times (subscription). So, what say you, Ranters? What are your predictions for 2017?

Or, is it?