The excellent Infosthetics blog, which usually focuses at the intersection between information and art, today linked to this Timeline of Trends and Events ranging from 18th century to now and includes projections of the future for a number of variables: political power, economic development, wars, ecology and environment. I have always been impressed by such integrative attempts, for example the synchronoptical summaries of world history, or Karl Hartig's charts.
Although you might find the display cluttered, the wealth of information is worth it. Of course, it would be nice to have an interactive system for zooming into such time series, aligning them, reordering them, superimposing different time series, and so on. It is just a question of time. Moreover, with the abundance of data, our ability to model many kinds of it, the future of history may lie in statistical-graphical summarization.
[Added Karl Hartig's charts]
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