2900 possible for GM's?

who will be the first GM to beat the 2900 ? Yeah, Carlsen is The Man for this i guess

I don't think that is very likely

It will happen, probably within a decade. The first person there might well not even be a GM yet though, so don't worry about that question too much.

Now the real question is "will a 2900 in 2021 be a 100 points stronger than a 2800 today or will it be primarily rating inflation?"

Is it possible to estimate rating inflation over the years? If so, that should help to answer the question above.

Carlsen has played four top tournaments in 2011, won the last three and performed 2850+ in the last two. But reaching 2900 should be impossible for him and all other players for a long time. It's not enough to keep performing 2850+, it must be 2900+ in every event for years to climb from the 2820s to 2900. I think many years will pass before someone can achieve something similar to Carlsen, with 3000+ performance, #1 and 2800+, as well as repeated wins in top tournaments like Wijk, Nanjing, London and Bazna already as a teenager. So my guess is that the first player to reach 2900 won't do it this side of year 2050. 

It's a non-trivial problem. How much of Kasparov being rated higher than Fischer is due to some innate ability that Kasparov has, how much is due to having stronger competition against which to test himself, how much is due to having access to advances in chess knowledge, and how much is due to playing against a higher rated pool of players in the first place?

Some of those things are related to inflation (the rating of the pool of players) some to the passage of time (the available theory) and some are all about the player (innate ability, chess ability realtive to the rest of the playing pool).

But to ask about how long it should take:

Fischer hit 2785 in 1972

Kasparov hit 2800 in 1990

Kasparov hit 2849 in 2001

So, once 2800 was broken, it took another 10 years to get half way to 2900.

But another Kasparov won't turn up in a long time. I think Carlsen alone of today's players is capable of reaching Kasparov's 2851 but it won't be easy to do it. As late as in January 2009 there were no 2800 players and Fischer's 2785 from almost 40 years back would still have been quite competitive. It's still a very long way to 2900.

By the same token, when Fischer was around, the next closest rating was Karpov at almost 100 points lower, around 2690. Today how many players have a rating of 2600 or more?

Yeah. I'm not sure if the play has gotten better or if the rating was really inflated. Of course, it's likely that both things happened, but at the same time it would make sense to believe that, because of all the opening theory, databases, and the ability to learn from past players and games and positions in general, that the players of today are able to find better moves, even if they don't necessarily have better natural ability.

Nakamura will soon improve with his new teacher.

Is there actual evidence for rating inflation?

There is good evidence of ratings inflation: http://members.shaw.ca/redwards1/ and http://members.shaw.ca/redwards1/update.html

If you look at the first graph, you see an extremely sudden onset of rating increase, and it increases at a constant rate after that.

I think you misunderstood him. I am pretty sure he meant that the first person to break 2900 may not a GM at this date. I don't think he meant that the person will not be a GM at the time of breaking 2900 which I think you took it to mean.

Exactly, some really good 15 year old IM might be a world beater in 10 more years.

"World beaters" were usually GMs by 15, some of them even earlier.

The question regarding 2900 is hard to answer since we are living in a very unstable world. Will our civilization exist in, let's say, 20 years, and in what form?

Of the current players no one seems to have the potential to reach 2900.

Wow, we have some optimists in this thread. :)

No player seems to reach 2900 in the nearest future . This may be due to three counts.  

1.  players' performance is not stable.

2.wins and defeats  fluctuate from time to time and

3.when a high rated player is defeated, his points get minus .

That is why i am of openion that it may not possible to reach 2900 in the nearest future.Probably it may be possible after two or three decades.

This is very similar to running 100 metres, there is a limit to human endurance and smaller and smaller amounts ( excluding drugs) are knocked off these records.

The professional chess circuit is an endurance test and I believe we are reaching the limits of human endurance even with exceptionally gifted players.

Not so with computers that are constantly being improved but it may be that they also will reach a limiting skill.

Telescopes were being made with larger and larger mirrors and they had reached their limit. The break through came when we put one into space, namely the Hubble.

Physics probed deeper and deeper into the atom but now limiting factors are becoming evident and we enter impossible worlds of speculation.

   'Would you the spangle of existence spend

   About the secret quick about it friend'

It's getting to the point where optimism is just another illusion.