It has been said that making predictions is difficult, especially about the future, and clearly it is especially challenging for fast-moving fields like marine microbial ecology and microbial oceanography. The pace of discovery and the vitality of these fields are evident in the preceding articles of this special issue and to anyone reading Science and Nature (not to mention the plethora of specialized journals) or attending the countless meetings relevant to the study of marine microbes. So, at first, discussing the future seemed daunting to us, and we thought that no reader would like any of our predictions, except the self-evident one: that the future of marine microbial science is bright. But then, seven other predictions became obvious to us. We are confident that all readers will like these predictions and will agree that all of them will be 100% fulfilled ten years from now.

Kirchman, D.L., and C. Pedrós-Alió. 2007. Predictions for the future of microbial oceanography. Oceanography 20(2):166–171, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2007.62.

This is an open access article made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format as long as users cite the materials appropriately, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate the changes that were made to the original content. Images, animations, videos, or other third-party material used in articles are included in the Creative Commons license unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If the material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission directly from the license holder to reproduce the material.