I read (a fairly long time ago) about a guy who joined the air force and ended up flying the same B-52 that his father had flown. One has to wonder if at this point his son isn't flying that same plane.

His grandson will be saying the same thing.

In a post appocalyptic world great-great-grandsons of B-52 pilots will inherit those planes, the same airframes their ancestors flew in the 50s.

Impressive service life time, especially that since then nobody came up with something better then the B-52.

Necessity is the mother of invention and the US Military hasn’t had the necessity for anything newer.

While on the other hand the need to stealthily deliver smaller payloads into protected airspace went away with the end of the cold war, for now. It might become again a necessity in the future.

On the delivery large bomb payloads into dominated airspace the B-52 is unbeatable so far.

I think a modified and militarized Boeing 777 (or 767) would be the ideal replacement for the B-52, though I realize a lot more goes into bomber design than just selecting a successful airframe.