essay on the future of the world

• Show search

Magazine Articles

A More Sustainable Path to 2050

Science shows us a clear path to 2050 in which both nature and 10 billion people can thrive together.

August 30, 2019

Written for The Nature Conservancy Magazine Fall 2019 issue by Heather Tallis, former lead scientist for TNC.

A few years ago The Nature Conservancy began a process of reassessing its vision and goals for prioritizing its work around the globe. The resulting statement called for a world where “nature and people thrive, and people act to conserve nature for its own sake and its ability to fulfill and enrich our lives.”

That sounds like a sweet future, but if you’re a scientist, like I am, you immediately start to wonder what that statement means in a practical sense. Could we actually get there? Is it even possible for people and nature to thrive together?

Our leaders had the same question. In fact, when the vision statement was first presented at a board meeting, our president leaned over and asked me if we had the science to support it.

“No,” I said. “But we can try to figure it out.”

There is a way to sustain nature and 10 billion people.

Explore the path to a better world. Just 3 changes yield an entirely different future.

Ultimately, I assembled a collaborative team of researchers to take a hard look at whether it really is possible to do better for both people and nature: Can we have a future where people get the food, energy and economic growth they need without sacrificing more nature?

Modeling the Status Quo: What the World Will Look Like in 2050

Working with peers at the University of Minnesota and 11 other universities, think tanks and nonprofits, we started by looking into what experts predict the world will look like in 2050 in terms of population growth and economic expansion. The most credible projections estimate that human population will increase from about 7 billion people today to 9.7 billion by 2050, and the global economy will be three times as large as it is today.

Our next step was to create a set of mathematical models analyzing how that growth will influence demand for food, energy and water.

We first asked how nature will be doing in 2050 if we just keep doing things the way we’ve been doing them. To answer this, we assumed that expanding croplands and pastures would be carved out of natural lands, the way they are today. And we didn’t put any new restrictions on the burning of fossil fuels. We called this the “business as usual” scenario. It’s the path we’re on today. On this current path, most of the world’s energy—about 76%—will come from burning fossil fuels. This will push the Earth’s average temperature up by about 5.8 degrees Fahrenheit, driving more severe weather, droughts, fires and other destructive patterns. That dirty energy also will expose half of the global population to dangerous levels of air pollution.

Dig into the Research

Explore the models behind the two paths to 2050 and download the published findings.

We first asked how nature will be doing in 2050 if we just keep doing things the way we’ve been doing them.

Meanwhile, the total amount of cropland will increase by about the size of the state of Colorado. Farms will also suffer from increasing water stress—meaning, simply, there won’t be enough water to easily supply agricultural needs and meet the water requirements of nearby cities, towns and wildlife.

In this business-as-usual scenario, fishing worldwide is left to its own devices and there are no additional measures in place to protect nature beyond what we have today. As a result, annual fish catches decline by 11% as fisheries are pushed to the brink by unsustainable practices. On land, we end up losing 257 million more hectares (about 10 Colorados) of our native forests and grasslands. Freshwater systems suffer, too, as droughts and water consumption, especially for agriculture, increase.

Overall, the 2050 predicted by this business-as-usual model is a world of scarcity, where neither nature nor people are thriving. The future is pretty grim under this scenario—it’s certainly not a world that any of us would want to live in.

We wanted to know, “does it really have to be this way?”

Modeling a More Sustainable 2050

Next, we used our model to test whether predicted growth by 2050 really requires such an outcome. In this version of the future, we allowed the global economy and the population to grow in exactly the same manner, but we adjusted variables to include more sustainability measures.

The 2050 predicted by the business-as-usual model is a world of scarcity, where neither nature nor people are thriving. The future is pretty grim under this scenario—it’s certainly not a world that any of us would want to live in.

We didn’t go crazy with the sustainability scenario. We didn’t assume that everyone was going to become a vegan or start driving hydrogen cell cars tomorrow. Instead, the model allowed people to continue doing the basic things we’re doing today, but to do them a little differently and to adopt some green technologies that already exist a little bit faster.

In this sustainable future, we limited global warming to 2.9 degrees Fahrenheit, which would force societies to reduce fossil fuel consumption to just 13% of total energy production. That means quickly adopting clean energy, which will increase the amount of land needed for wind, solar and other renewable energy development. But many of the new wind and solar plants can be built on land that has already been developed or degraded, such as rooftops and abandoned farm fields. This will help reduce the pressure to develop new energy sources in natural areas.

We also plotted out some changes in how food is produced. We assumed each country would still grow the same basic suite of crops, but to conserve water, fertilizer and land, we assumed that those crops would be planted in the growing regions where they are most suited. For example, in the United States we wouldn’t grow as much cotton in Arizona’s deserts or plant thirsty alfalfa in the driest parts of California’s San Joaquin Valley. We also assumed that successful fishery policies in use in some places today could be implemented all over the world.

Under this sustainability scenario, we required that countries meet the target of protecting 17% of each ecoregion, as set by the Convention on Biological Diversity. Only about half that much is likely to be protected under the business-as-usual scenario, so this is a direct win for nature.

What 2050 Could Look Like

The difference in this path to 2050 was striking. The number of additional people who will be exposed to dangerous levels of air pollution declines to just 7% of the planet’s population, or 656 million, compared with half the global population, or 4.85 billion people, in our business-as-usual scenario. Air pollution is already one of the top killers globally, so reducing this health risk is a big deal. Limiting climate change also reduces water scarcity and the frequency of destructive storms and wildfires, while staving off the projected widespread loss of plant and animal species (including my son’s favorite animal, the pika, that’s already losing its mountain habitat because of climate change).

In the sustainability scenario we still produce enough food for humanity, but we need less land and water to do it. So the total amount of land under agricultural production actually decreases by seven times the area of Colorado, and the number of cropland acres located in water-stressed basins declines by 30% compared with business as usual. Finally, we see a 26% increase in fish landings compared to 2010, once all fisheries are properly managed.

Although the land needed for wind and solar installations does grow substantially, we still keep over half of nearly all the world’s habitat types intact, and despite growth in cities, food production and energy needs, we end up with much more of the Earth’s surface left for nature than we would under the business-as-usual scenario.

Our modeling research let us answer our question. Yes, a world where people and nature thrive is entirely possible. But it’s not inevitable. Reaching this sustainable future will take hard work—and we need to get started immediately.

3 Sustainable Changes To Make Now

That’s where organizations like TNC come in. The Conservancy is working on strategies with governments and businesses to adopt sustainable measures, providing near- and long-term benefits to society as a whole. Our research shows there’s at least one path to a more sustainable world in 2050, and that major advances can be made if all parts of society focus their efforts on three changes.

First, we need to ramp up clean energy and site it on lands that have already been developed or degraded. In the Mojave Desert, for instance, TNC has identified some 1.4 million acres of former ranchlands, mines and other degraded areas that would be ideal for solar development. We need to do much more to remove the policy and economic barriers that still make a transition to clean energy hard. Technology is no longer the major limiting factor. We are.

The most critical action each of us can take is to support global leaders who have a plan for stopping climate change in our lifetimes.

Second, we need to grow more food using less land and water. One way to do that is by raising crops in places that are best suited for them. The Conservancy has been piloting this, too. In Arizona, TNC partnered with local farmers in the Verde River Valley to help them switch from growing thirsty crops like alfalfa and corn in the heat of the summer to growing malt barley, which can be harvested earlier in the season with less draw on precious water supplies. This is not a revolutionary change—the same farmers are still growing crops on the same land—but it can have a revolutionary impact.

Finally, we need to end overfishing. The policy tools to do so have been available for many years. What we must do now is get creative about how we get those policies adopted and enforced. One example I have been impressed by is our work in Mexico, where TNC is involved in looking at the root causes of what’s limiting good fishing behavior. The answer is unexpected: social security debt that many fishers have accrued by being off the books for many years. The Conservancy is exploring an ambitious partnership and a novel financial mechanism that could forgive this debt and persuade more fishers to report their catch and adopt sustainability measures.

The Most Important Change Now: Clean Energy

These are just a few examples from North America. There are many more from around the world. To achieve a more sustainable future, governments, industry and civic institutions everywhere will have to make substantial changes—and the most important one right now is to make a big investment in clean energy over the next 10 years. That’s a short timeline, but not an impossible one. I don’t like what I’m seeing yet, but I’m hopeful. It took the United States just a decade to reach the moon, once the country put its mind to the goal. And solar energy is already cheaper (nearly half the price per megawatt) than coal, and outpacing it for new capacity creation—something no one predicted would happen this fast.

We need to do much more to remove the policy and economic barriers that still make a transition to clean energy hard. Technology is no longer the major limiting factor. We are.

How will we get there? By far the most critical action each of us can take is to support global leaders who have a plan for stopping climate change in our lifetimes. Climate may not feel like the most pressing issue at times—what with the economy, health care, education and other issues taking up headlines. But the science is clear: We’ve got 10 years to get our emissions under control. That’s it.

We’ve already begun to see the impacts of climate change as more communities face a big uptick in the severity and frequency of droughts, floods, wildfires, hurricanes and other disasters. Much worse is on the way if we don’t make the needed changes. It’s been easy for most of us to sit back and expect that climate change will only affect someone else, far away. But that’s what the people in Arkansas, California, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Washington, the Dominican Republic, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Mexico, the United Kingdom, the Philippines, India and Mozambique thought. Every one of these places—and many more—have seen one of the worst disasters on its historic record in the past 10 years.

There are so many paths we could take to 2050. Clearly, some are better than others. We get to choose. Which one do you want to take?

Stand up for a More Sustainable Future

Join The Nature Conservancy as we call on leaders to support science-backed solutions.

Getting to Sustainability

Carbon Capture

The most powerful carbon capture technology is cheap, readily available and growing all around us: Trees and plants.

Energy Sprawl Solutions

We can ramp up clean energy worldwide and site it wisely to limit the effect on wildlife.

Fishing for Better Data

Electronic monitoring can make fisheries more sustainable.

We personalize nature.org for you

This website uses cookies to enhance your experience and analyze performance and traffic on our website.

To manage or opt-out of receiving cookies, please visit our

The future is vast – what does this mean for our own life?

If we manage to avoid a large catastrophe, we are living at the early beginnings of human history..

The point of this text is not to predict how many people will ever live. What I learned from writing this post is that our future is potentially very, very big.

If we keep each other safe – and protect ourselves from the risks that nature and we ourselves pose – we are only at the beginning of human history.

Our actions today impact those who will live in that vast future that is ahead of us.

• Our impact can be negative – for example when we degrade the environment that future generations will inherit from us, or when we develop technologies that create risks for them.
• But our impact can also be positive – by developing science that allows these future generations to live healthier lives, or by building a culture that enriches their lives in the way that our history enriches our lives.

The fact that our actions have an impact on the large number of people who will live after us should matter for how we think about our own lives. Those who ask themselves what they can do to act responsibly towards those who will live in the future call themselves 'longtermists'. Longtermism is the ethical view that we should act in ways that reduce the risks that endanger our future, and in ways that make the long-term future go well. 1

Before we look ahead, let’s look back. How many came before us? How many humans have ever lived?

It is not possible to answer this question precisely, but demographers Toshiko Kaneda and Carl Haub have tackled the question using the ​​historical knowledge that we do have.

There isn’t a particular moment in which humanity came into existence, as the transition from species to species is gradual. But if one wants to count all humans one has to make a decision about when the first humans lived. The two demographers used 200,000 years before today as this cutoff. 2

The demographers estimate that in these 200,000 years about 109 billion people have lived and died. 3

It is these 109 billion people we have to thank for the civilization that we live in. The languages we speak, the food we cook, the music we enjoy, the tools we use – what we know we learned from them. The houses we live in, the infrastructure we rely on, the grand achievements of architecture – much of what we see around us was built by them.

Our present

In 2022 7.95 billion of us are alive. Taken together with those who have died, about 117 billion humans have been born since the dawn of modern humankind.

This means that those of us who are alive now represent about 6.8% of all people who ever lived.

These numbers are hard to grasp. I tried to bring it into a visualization to put them into perspective. 4

It’s a giant hourglass. But instead of measuring the passage of time, it measures the passage of people.

Each grain of sand here represents 10 million people: each year 140 million babies are born. So we add 14 grains of sand to the hourglass. Every year, 60 million people die; this means 6 grains pass through the hourglass and are added to the large number of people who have died. 5

Our potential future

How many people will be born in the future?

We don’t know.

But we know one thing: The future is immense, and the universe will exist for trillions of years.

We can use this fact to get a sense of how many descendants we might have in that vast future ahead.

The number of future people depends on the size of the population at any point in time and how long each of them will live. But the most important factor will be how long humanity will exist.

Before we look at a range of very different potential futures, let’s start with a simple baseline.

We are mammals. One way to think about how long we might survive is to ask how long other mammals survive. It turns out that the lifespan of a typical mammalian species is about 1 million years. 6 Let’s think about a future in which humanity exists for 1 million years: 200,000 years are already behind us, so there would be 800,000 years still ahead.

Let’s consider a scenario in which the population stabilizes at 11 billion people (based on the UN projections for the end of this century) and in which the average life length rises to 88 years. 7

In such a future, there would be 100 trillion people alive over the next 800,000 years.

The chart visualizes this. Each triangle represents 7.95 billion people – it is the green triangle shape from the hourglass above and corresponds to the number of us alive today.

Each row represents the birth of half a trillion children. For 100 trillion births there are 200 rows.

If you disagree with the numbers I use in my scenario it is easy for you to see how different numbers would lead to different futures. Here are two examples:

• If you think the world population will stabilize at a level that’s 50% higher than in my calculation, then the number of future births will be 50% higher. The chart would be 50% wider. It would show the births of 150 trillion children.
• If you think the world population will have a size of just one billion people, then the chart would be only an eleventh as wide and would show 9.1 trillion births. 8

The chart shows how many children might be born in the next 800,000 years, a future in which humans survive for as long as a typical mammalian species.

But, of course, humanity is anything but “a typical mammalian species.”

One thing that sets us apart is that we now – and this is a recent development – have the power to destroy ourselves. Since the development of nuclear weapons, it is in our power to kill all of us who are alive and cause the end of human history .

But we are also different from all other animals in that we have the possibility to protect ourselves, even against the most extreme risks. The poor dinosaurs had no defense against the asteroid that wiped them out. We do. We already have ​​effective and well-funded asteroid-monitoring systems and, in case it becomes necessary, we might be able to deploy technology that protects us from an incoming asteroid. The development of powerful technology gives us the chance to survive for much longer than a typical mammalian species.

Our planet might remain habitable for roughly a billion years. 9 If we survive as long as the Earth stays habitable, and based on the scenario above, this would be a future in which 125 quadrillion children will be born. A quadrillion is a 1 followed by 15 zeros: 1,000,000,000,000,000.

A billion years is a thousand times longer than the million years depicted in this chart. Even very slow-moving changes will entirely transform our planet over such a long stretch of time: a billion years is a timespan in which the world will go through several supercontinent cycles – the world’s continents will collide and drift apart repeatedly; new mountain ranges will form and then erode, the oceans we are familiar with will disappear and new ones open up.

But if we protect ourselves well and find homes beyond Earth, the future could be much larger still.

The sun will exist for another 5 billion years. 10 If we stay alive for all this time, and based on the scenario above, this would be a future in which 625 quadrillion children will be born.

How can we imagine a number as large as 625 quadrillions? We can get back to our sand metaphor from the first chart.

We can imagine today’s world population as a patch of sand on a beach. It’s a tiny patch of sand that barely qualifies as a beach, just large enough for a single person to sit down. One square meter.

If the current world population was represented by a tiny beach of one square meter, then 625 quadrillion people would make up a beach that is 17 meters wide and 4600 kilometers long. A beach that stretches all across the USA, from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast. 11

And humans could survive for even longer.

What this future might look like is hard to imagine. Just as it was hard to imagine, even quite recently, what today might look like. “This present moment used to be the unimaginable future,” as Stewart Brand put it.

Our responsibility is vast

A catastrophe that ends human history would destroy the vast future that humanity would otherwise have.

And it would be horrific for those who will be alive at that time.

The people who live then will be just as real as you or me. They will exist, they just don’t exist yet. They will feel the sun on their skin and they will enjoy a swim in the sea. They will have the same hopes, they will feel the same pain.

‘Longtermism’ is the idea that people who live in the future matter morally just as much as those of us who are alive today. 12 When we ask ourselves what we should do to make the world a better place, a longtermist does not only consider what we can do to help those around us right now, but also what we can do for those who come after us. The main point of this text – that humanity’s potential future is vast – matters greatly to longtermists. The key moral question of longtermism is ‘what can we do to improve the world’s long-term prospects?’.

In some ways, many of us are already longtermists. The responsibility we have for future generations is why so many work to reduce the risks from climate change and environmental destruction.

But in other ways, we pay only little attention to future risks. In the same way that we work to reduce the risks from climate change, we should pay attention to a wider range of potentially even larger risks and reduce them.

I am definitely frightened of these catastrophic and existential risks. 13 In addition to nuclear weapons, there are two other major risks that worry me greatly: Pandemics, especially from engineered pathogens, and artificial intelligence technology. These technologies could lead to large catastrophes, either by someone using them as weapons or even unintentionally as a consequence of accidents. 14

Large risks are not only a problem in the future — they are a reality now

We don’t have to think about people who live billions of years in the future to see our responsibilities. The majority of today’s children can expect to see the next century. Some of our grandchildren might live long enough to see the 23rd century. A catastrophe in the next decades would be horrific for people very close to us.

The focus of this text is the long-term future, but this shouldn’t give the impression that the risks we are facing are confined to the future. Several large risks that could lead to unprecedented disasters are already with us now. The use of the nuclear weapons that exist at this moment would kill millions immediately and billions in the ‘nuclear winter’ that follows (see my post on nuclear weapons). Not enough people have registered how the situation we are in has changed. AI capabilities and biotechnology have developed rapidly and are no longer science fiction; they are posing risks to those of us who are alive today. 15

Similarly, this text focuses mostly on the loss of human lives, but there would be other losses too: nuclear war would devastate nature and the world’s wildlife; existential catastrophes would destroy our culture, our civilization.

The point is that even if we only consider the impact of these risks on the present generation and only consider the potential loss of lives, they’re among the most pressing issues of our time. This is much more the case if we consider their impact beyond mortality and their impact on future generations.

The reduction of existential risks is one of the most important tasks of our time, yet it is extremely neglected

The current pandemic has made it clear how badly the world has neglected pandemic preparedness. This illustrates a more general point. By reducing the risk of the catastrophes which would endanger our entire future – for example, the very worst possible pandemics – we would also reduce the risk of smaller, yet still terrible, disasters, such as COVID-19.

As a society, we spend only little attention, money, and effort on the risks that imperil our future. Only very few are even thinking about these risks, when in fact these are problems that should be central to our culture. The unprecedented power of today’s technology requires unprecedented responsibility.

Technological development made the high living standards of our time possible . I believe that a considerable share of the fruits of this growth should be spent on reducing the risks and negative consequences of particular technologies.

More researchers should be able to study these risks and how we can reduce them. I would love to see more artists who convey the importance of the vast future in their work. And crucially I think it needs competent political work. I imagine that one day countries will have ministries for the reduction of catastrophic and existential risks and some of the world’s most important institutions will be dedicated to the far-sighted work that protects humanity.

It will be too late to react once the worst has happened. This means we have to be proactive; we have to see the threats now.

The current situation in which these risks are hardly receiving any attention is frightening and depressing. But it is also a large opportunity. Because these risks are so very neglected, a career dedicated to the reduction of these risks is likely among the best opportunities that you have if you want to make the world a better place.

Our opportunities are vast too

So far I’ve only spoken about the risks that we face. But our large future means that there are large opportunities too.

Problems are solvable. This is for me the most important insight that I learned from writing Our World in Data over the last decade.

Compared to the vast future ahead, the two centuries shown in this chart here are only a brief episode of human history. But even in such a short period, we have made substantial progress against many large problems.

Given enough time we can end the horrors of today. Poverty is not inevitable; we can achieve a future where people are not suffering from scarcity. Diseases that are incurable today might be curable in just a few generations; we already have an amazing track record in improving people’s health . And we can achieve a world in which we stop damaging the environment and achieve a future in which the world’s wildlife flourishes .

Our children and grandchildren can continue the progress we are making, and they may create art and build a society more beautiful than we can even imagine.

The point of this text was to see that the future is big. If we keep each other safe the huge majority of humans who will ever live will live in the future.

And this requires us to be more careful and considerate than we currently are. Just as we look back on the heroes who achieved what we enjoy today, those who come after us will remember what we did for them. We will be the ancestors of a very large number of people. Let’s make sure we are good ancestors.

For this, we need to take the risks we are facing more seriously. The risks we are already facing are high. Giving this reality the attention it deserves is the first step, and only very few have taken it. The next step will be to identify what we can do to reduce these risks and then set about doing that.

Let’s also see the opportunity that we have. Those who came before us left us a much better world; we can do the same for the many who come after us.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Charlie Giattino, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, Anders Sandberg, Edouard Mathieu, Hannah Ritchie, and Will MacAskill for their very helpful comments on this essay.

The text and title were last updated on August 10, 2022.

Recommendations on what to read on our long-run future and the risk of existential catastrophes

There are some excellent books and resources:

• On longtermism and the vast future ahead of us I recommend ‘What We Owe The Future’, the new book by philosopher Will MacAskill.
• For a broad overview of existential risks and how we can reduce them, I recommend Toby Ord’s extraordinary book ‘ The Precipice ’. It is one of the most important books I have read.
• On the risks and opportunities of artificial intelligence, I recommend Brian Christian’s book ‘ The Alignment Problem – Machine Learning and Human Values ’.
• The research team of the non-profit “80,000 Hours” focuses on the question of what you can do with your career to make the world a better place, the reduction of large risks is one of their key recommendations. A starting point on existential risk reduction is this overview written by Benjamin Todd.
• Other overviews of longtermism include its Wikipedia page , this BBC article , and this explainer by Fin Moorhouse . Some objections to longtermist ideas are discussed in this essay .

The future will not just happen to us, it is we who create the world we will live in. Isaac Asimov saw it like this: 16

“There are no catastrophes that loom before us which cannot be avoided; there is nothing that threatens us with imminent destruction in such a fashion that we are helpless to do something about it. If we behave rationally and humanely; if we concentrate coolly on the problems that face all of humanity, rather than emotionally on such nineteenth-century matters as national security and local pride; if we recognize that it is not one’s neighbors who are the enemy, but misery, ignorance, and the cold indifference of natural law—then we can solve all the problems that face us. We can deliberately choose to have no catastrophes at all.” – Isaac Asimov

Continue reading on Our World in Data:

Nuclear weapons: Why reducing the risk of nuclear war should be a key concern of our generation

Appendix to ‘ the future is vast’, how many people have ever lived.

My main data source is the long-run estimate by demographers Toshiko Kaneda and Carl Haub (reference below).

From 200,000 BCE until 2020 they calculate that 116,761,402,413 people were born. 7,772,850,162 of these people were alive in 2020.

Of course the error margins around both of these numbers – especially the historical one – are large, which Kaneda and Haub clearly acknowledge. I’m not using their point estimates – neither in the text nor in the chart – because I think that these estimates, down to the individual person, would suggest a wrong sense of precision.

Older estimates of how many people have ever lived were published by Goldberg (1983) and Deevey (1960). They arrived at lower estimates – of 55 billion and 81 billion respectively. Previously it was thought that modern humans emerged only much later and earlier estimates assumed better health conditions, i.e. lower mortality, of people in the distant past.

I believe the more recent work by Kaneda and Haub is the best estimate that is available. But the large uncertainties and the wide range of different estimates that were published in recent decades should be emphasised.

• Toshiko Kaneda and Carl Haub (2021) – How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth? . Published by the Population Reference Bureau.
• Goldberg (1983) – How many people have ever lived? In Probability in Social Science .
• Deevey (1960) – The Human Population. In Scientific American .

My update of Kaneda and Haub:

Kaneda and Haub published estimates up to mid-2020.

I updated the figures from Kaneda and Haub for mid-2022 by adding the births in the following 2 years. According to the UN there were 139,975,303 births in 2020 and 139,821,086 births in 2021 (these were estimates published before the pandemic and are not precise observations, but the imprecision of these estimates is small relative to the large uncertainties in the other relevant figures).

This means the total number of people ever born up to 2022 is 116,761,402,413 + 139,975,303+139,821,086 = 117,041,198,802 births

According to the UN 7,953,952,577 people are alive in 2022.

People who died between 200,000 BCE and 2022: 116,921,736,195 - 7,953,952,577 = 108,967,783,618 deaths

Share of people alive today among all people ever born: (7,953,952,577 / 117,041,198,802) * 100 = 6.8%

Calculations for drawing the hourglass visualization: Humanity’s past and present in grains of sand

Each grain of sand represents 10 million people.

Grains to represent today’s population : 7,953,952,577 / 10,000,000 = 795 grains

Grains to represent the dead: 108,967,783,618/ 10,000,000 = 10,897 grains (to not suggest a false sense of certainty around this number I rounded it to 10,900 grains in the visualization).

How large would humanity’s future be if we survived as long as a typical mammal?

The scenario shown in the chart on humanity’s potential future:.

Estimates for the average lifespan of mammalian species: Estimates for the average lifespan of mammalian species range from 0.6 Million years (Barnovsky et al, 2011) to 1.7 million years (Foote and Rap 1996).

As a rough midpoint between these two estimates I follow Toby Ord and use 1 million years.

Remaining length of humanity’s existence: As about 200,000 years of history are already behind us we would have close to 800,000 years left.

Size of humanity’s population: According to the UN projections , the global population will continue to increase for the rest of this century, but by the end of the century population growth will be close to zero. The UN demographers expect the world population then to be 10.9 billion people. I’m assuming that population growth continues a bit further into the 22nd century and will then stabilize at 11 billion people.

As emphasized throughout the text I am thinking of this as an illustrative scenario that makes it possible to understand the dimensions we are concerned with. It is not a prediction and as with all scenarios about the far distant future, the reality could turn out to be very different; population growth might continue further or the world population could decline.

Life expectancy in the future: The UN demographers project that many countries will have life expectancies higher than 90 years by the end of the century. The world average life expectancy is projected to be 82 years then. If we assume that the rest of the world population can catch up to the healthiest countries in the period after 2100, then an average life expectancy of more than 90 or 100 years is possible (especially for the more distant future, extremely long life expectancies are imaginable).

I assume a life expectancy of 88 years in my projection. This is higher than the projected global average, but lower than the life expectancies projected for the best-off countries. It is certainly a rather conservative estimate if we consider that we could achieve a future in which health continues to improve.

So these are my assumptions for this scenario:

• 800,000 years remaining for our species
• 11,000,000,000 people living at any one time
• 88 years of life expected for the average person

Taking this together, how many children will ever be born after the year 2022?

(800,000 years / 88 years per person) * 11,000,000,000 people =

100,000,000,000,000 people =

100 trillion people will be born in the next 800,000 years

When will the 1000th generation be born?

In the second chart I added this information as an annotation. One has to make several assumptions to estimate this point in time. Here are my assumptions:

In a world in which the population is stable, every 2 people have on average 2 children who live long enough to have children themselves. This would mean that within each 88 year period there will be as many births as there are people.

For simplicity we can assume that one generation is 22 years long (i.e., on average future people have children when they are 22 years old). This is a nice assumption because it means that each generation is a quarter as long as the life length of people in this scenario.

In this world each generation would be a cohort of 11 billion / 4 = 2.75 billion people.

This means that the 1000th generation from today would be born in 22,000 years from today. (This isn’t exactly correct because there will be population growth in the next century, i.e. it would take a little longer than 22,000 years.)

In these 1000 generations there will be 2.75 billion * 1000 = 2,750 billion births.

That means the number of births in the next 1000 generations would be 346-times larger than today’s world population (2,750 billion / 7.95 billion = 345.9).

How long will it take until as many babies are born as there are people today?

In the second chart I added this information as an annotation.

According to the UN projections there will be 8,036,352,977 children born between 2022 and 2079. This means that there will be as many children born in the next 57 years as there are people alive today.

Calculations for the ‘triangles-chart’:

Humanity’s past, present and future in multiples of each other.

The future in multiples of all people ever: 100,000,000,000,000 / 117,000,000,000 = 855-times

The future in multiples of the present: 100,000,000,000,000 / 7,953,952,577 = 12,572-times

The past in multiples of the present:

(117,041,198,802 - 7,953,952,577) / 7,953,952,577 = 13.7 = rounded to 14

One trillion in multiples of the present: 1,000,000,000,000 / 7,953,952,577 = 125.724 = rounded to 126 (This is what I use as the number of triangles per row.)

The number of future births over the next 5 billion years in multiples of today’s population:

625 quadrillion people would be born in this scenario in the next 5 billion years: 625,000,000,000,000,000 people

People alive in 2022: 7,953,952,577 people

625,000,000,000,000,000 / 7,953,952,577 = 78,577,285

How large could humanity’s future be if we survived for even longer than a typical mammal?

1.5 million years remaining: if homo sapiens survives as long as homo erectus.

How long has Homo Erectus existed?

Homo erectus is an extinct species of archaic humans. It is  among the first recognizable members of the genus Homo. It was also the first human ancestor to spread throughout Eurasia,

Homo erectus survived for at least 1.7 million years. The oldest fossils regarded as Homo Erectus are the Dmanisi specimens from present-day Georgia, dated to 1.8 million years ago (Lordkipanidze et al, 2006). The most recent fossils are from present-day Indonesia, and have been dated to 0.1 million years ago (Yokohama et al., 2008).

How large was humanity’s future if we survived as long as Homo erectus?

If we – Homo sapiens – survive as long as Homo erectus we would have 1.5 million years left. Our future would be almost twice as large as shown in the chart in the main text.

Almost 190 trillion children would be born into this world.

This is the calculation:

• 1,500,000 years
• 11,000,000,000 people
• And the average person lives for 88 years

(1,500,000 years / 88 years per person) * 11,000,000,000 people =

187,500,000,000,000 people =

187.5 trillion people would be born in the next 1.5 million years

[Alternatively you could see this by considering that 1,500,000 years is 1.875-times longer than 800,000 years.]

1 billion years: If Homo sapiens survives as long as the earth is habitable

How long will Earth remain habitable? How long will our sun exist?

Astrophysicist Jillian Scudder, Anders Sandberg, and Toby Ord suggest that our planet will remain habitable for roughly a billion years.

• Toby Ord’s ‘The Precipice’, especially footnote 40 in the first chapter.
• Jillian Scudder (2015) – The sun won’t die for 5 billion years, so why do humans have only 1 billion years left on Earth?
• Anders Sandberg’s text for the BBC: The greatest long-term threats facing humanity . He also explains what will happen when and why.

Based on the scenario above this would be a future in which 125 quadrillion children will be born.

• 1,000,000,000 years

(1,000,000,000 years / 88 years per person) * 11,000,000,000 people =(1,000,000,000 / 88) * 11,000,000,000 = 125,000,000,000,000,000 people = 125 quadrillion people would be born in this scenario in the next billion years.

A quadrillion is a one followed by 15 zeros (1,000,000,000,000,000).

125 quadrillion is 125 thousand trillion people (According to the short scale ).

5 billion years – as long as the sun exists

If humanity survived for as long as the sun exists, 5 billion years.

• 5,000,000,000 years

(5,000,000,000 years / 88 years per person) * 11,000,000,000 people =625,000,000,000,000,000 people =

625 quadrillion people would be born in this scenario in the next 5 billion years.

625 quadrillion is 625 thousand trillion people.

How to imagine 625 quadrillion births?

625 quadrillion relative to 100 trillion

Over the next 5 billion years: 625 quadrillion = 625,000,000,000,000,000

Over the next 800,000 years: 100 trillion = 100,000,000,000,000

625,000,000,000,000,000 / 100,000,000,000,000 = 6,250

Two ways to illustrate this:

• The chart would not fit on one page, but would need 6,250 pages.
• If the chart for the 100 trillion people is 30 cm high, then a chart that shows the future that is 6250-times as long would be 62.5 metres high.

625 quadrillion relative to today’s population

The ratio between today’s world population and the future world population:

The ratio between future people and all people alive today would be 78.6 million to one.

78,577,285 meter are 78,577 kilometer

Making the beach 17 meter wide means it would be 4,622km long (78,577/17). These are 2872 miles.

On longtermism see William MacAskill (2022) – ‘ What We Owe The Future ’ and literature referenced in the later sections and at the end of this text.

One could also choose a much earlier point in time. Recent research from the Jebel Irhoud site in modern-day Morocco suggests that it could be as early as 315,000 BCE. See: Ewan Callaway (2017) – ‘Oldest Homo sapiens fossil claim rewrites our species' history ’. Nature. doi:10.1038/nature.2017.22114.

But I should also note that for the estimates of the total number of total people it does not matter very substantially. This is because the population size of our species was very low in those early days, and at several times our species was close to extinction.

The majority of them lived very short lives: about one in two children died in the past. When conditions are so very poor and children die so quickly then the birth rate has to be extremely high to keep humanity alive; Kaneda and Haub assume a birth rate of 80 births per 1000 people per year for most of humanity’s history (up to the year 1 CE). That is a rate of births that is about 8-times higher than in a typical high-income country and more than twice as high as in the poorest countries today (see the map ). The past was a very different place.

As noted in this visualization, this is an updated adaptation of a 2013 visualization by Oliver Uberti. You find it on his website . I also recommend having a look at his books, which he co-authored with James Cheshire ; they are beautiful data visualization books.

The cited numbers are from the UN’s demographic projection published in the year 2019 for the year 2022 (see here ). With the ongoing COVID pandemic the number of deaths is likely going to be higher than expected. You can track ‘excess deaths’ during the pandemic here . In 2021 excess deaths were possibly in the range of 10 million, if the same should be true in 2022 the chart should show 7 instead of 6 grains passing through the hourglass.

All references and calculations are in the Appendix below.

To not clutter this post with footnotes, I have put all my sources and all calculations in a long appendix below this post.

1 billion is one-eleventh of 11 billion. And 9.1 trillion is one-eleventh of 100 trillion.

All references and all calculations are in the Appendix below.

All sources and calculations are in the Appendix.

Here is the calculation:

The ratio between 625 quadrillions and the current world population is 78.6 million to one.

[625,000,000,000,000,000 / 7,953,952,577 = 78,577,285]

Making the beach 17 meters wide means it is 4,622km long (78,577/17).

These are 2872 miles.

For an introduction to longtermism read Benjamin Todd (2017) – Why our impact in millions of years could be what most matters .

Existential risks are those that can cause human extinction or can permanently curtail humanity's potential so that survivors would not have sufficient means to recover.

Catastrophic risks are similar in that they are large global risks that could kill billions of people, but they retain the possibility of recovery.

See for example Future of Life Institute Existential Risks .

AI technology could have the power to transform our world in undesirable ways, either unintentionally or intentionally as a weapon. On the risks – and opportunities of artificial intelligence – I recommend Brian Christian’s book ‘ The Alignment Problem – Machine Learning and Human Values ’.

On pandemics – and Global Catastrophic Biological Risks more broadly – I recommend the relatively brief online text ‘ Reducing global catastrophic biological risks ’ written by Gregory Lewis for 80,000 Hours. In the same publication, you also find a discussion of the risks from extreme climate change: Climate change authored by Benjamin Hilton.

I consider the four risks that I mentioned – nuclear weapons, climate change, and especially pandemics and AI – to be the most dangerous known risks, but unfortunately these are not the only risks. There are several other risks that could potentially lead to large catastrophes. For a broader discussion of existential risks I recommend The Precipice by Toby Ord.

See the references in the footnote before the previous one.

“Isaac Asimov (1979) – A Choice of Catastrophes: The Disasters that Threaten Our World.

Cite this work

Our articles and data visualizations rely on work from many different people and organizations. When citing this article, please also cite the underlying data sources. This article can be cited as:

BibTeX citation

Reuse this work freely

All visualizations, data, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license . You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

The data produced by third parties and made available by Our World in Data is subject to the license terms from the original third-party authors. We will always indicate the original source of the data in our documentation, so you should always check the license of any such third-party data before use and redistribution.

All of our charts can be embedded in any site.

Our World in Data is free and accessible for everyone.

Help us do this work by making a donation.

Humanity and the World: Future Challenges Essay

In viewing the world, the pace of changes that take place in the current world makes us expound our thoughts about the world we expect in thirty seven years to come. The rate of changes tends to be accelerating exponentially. Due to the drastic changes, there is a possibility of undergoing striking changes that human beings have never experienced. To our advantage, unlike in the nineteenth and twentieth century, the majority of the people will manage to withstand the pace of changes and even end up being addicted to the influence it will impose on society. Technology will highly aid in taking control of any change we may expect. The main causes of the changes we will experience in 2050 will be a result of the consensus that will take place among the people in the society. Through involvement of consensus in decision making, the world will be better than today.

Currently there is empowerment of every living individual, and the continuity in empowering living souls in the future will contribute immensely to the shaping of the future world. By 2050, the majority of the people will have the mandate and courage of airing out their views without any problem. This will be as a result of every individual learning and exploiting their individual rights maximally. In addition, by 2050, we will have positively changed from overdependence on men to feminine inclusion in decision making, an act that will make the year 2050 be observed as the century of the women. Most aggressive organizations will have preferred networking management to hierarchical management; this is due to the acquaintance of self-management trust. Via the empowerment of every living being, the world will have the ability of coexisting peacefully; this is because people will manage to respect each person’s ideas and contributions in the society. On the other hand, high women involvement in both decision making and leadership will contribute to sharing of chores, hence doing away with the overdependence on men in meeting the demands of the society.

In order to meet our potential, all individuals in the world will work industriously; every individual’s act will be directed towards shaping the world positively. We will utilize all the library materials available to meet our goals in life. This exchange in ideas will have achieved the potential of oscillating across the worldwide web sites. Through the use of the networking system, the majority of the people will have changed spiritually and become more spiritual. Instead of emphasizing on physical products, and obvious utilizations, we will major in pursuing knowledge in order to meet our self requirement wants. We will require succeeding in life-long acquaintance of knowledge that we can deliver at any place of demand. The current distance learning program will have disappeared and another new distance learning program acquired that will aid in satisfying human demands. The advancement in technology will boost the socio-economic status of the society. This is because; most of the people will be managing their organizations from their homes. Transactions and bids in the field of economy will be carried out in individuals’ homes.

To meet our revolution goal, we will ensure we have gained positive control of the universe by advancing our brain. This will only be possible through utilization of drugs, to enable us to enhance our brain performance in doing activities. In addition, we will depend entirely on drugs to satisfy our pleasures. The drugs we will use will have passed the recommended pharmaceutical tests in various industries. Thus, the evolutionary advancement will depend entirely on the increase of implants in our brains. The chip implants in our brains will enable us to have direct communications with computer networks. Through the use of the advanced brain, we will be able to do away with the traditional monopolies and revolutionize our mode of education. Our education will mainly major on the management of the flow data between the brain and the computer networks. Through the aid of an advanced brain, we will manage to share emotions with each without directly, hence advancing the virtual industry. However, with the sharing of information among ourselves via brain connections, majority of the people will be suffering from information shutdown just like that of cracking computers. Due to complications that will be encountered in individual brains, the immortality rates will hike. On the other hand, brain association with computers will lead to advancement in the mode of thinking of people in society. Most of the decisions in life will be made rapidly, hence enhancing rapid growth of the societies economically.

In conclusion, despite 2050 seeming far from now, we need to prepare ourselves for it. We need to think of the challenges that we may undergo as early as possible in order to come up with solutions. In addition, we need to accept the probability of rapid change in the computer world, and move towards inoculating computer use in our daily activities. However, we need also to acquaint ourselves with the knowledge that could help us solve the immortality issues. Immortality cases are real, due to advancement in technology; the current world is also experiencing problems on how to manage the death rates.

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2022, February 4). Humanity and the World: Future Challenges. https://ivypanda.com/essays/humanity-and-the-world-future-challenges/

"Humanity and the World: Future Challenges." IvyPanda , 4 Feb. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/humanity-and-the-world-future-challenges/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'Humanity and the World: Future Challenges'. 4 February.

IvyPanda . 2022. "Humanity and the World: Future Challenges." February 4, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/humanity-and-the-world-future-challenges/.

1. IvyPanda . "Humanity and the World: Future Challenges." February 4, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/humanity-and-the-world-future-challenges/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Humanity and the World: Future Challenges." February 4, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/humanity-and-the-world-future-challenges/.

• Human Overdependence on Computers
• Medical Implants and Their Effects on Life Quality
• Dental Implants: Early, Immediate and Delayed Loading
• What Is Breast Implants and How Are They Used?
• Sustainable Design in 2050 in the United States
• Energy Sector in 2050: Potential Scenario
• The Realization of the UAE Energy Plan 2050
• Cochlear Implants for Children in Saudi Arabia
• Great Powers in 2050
• Caries: To Save or to Put Implants?
• Sociological Imagination and Anthropology
• A Portrait of Hispanics Living in California
• The Place of Nature in the City of Man
• The Cult of Beauty and Change Action
• American Girls' Eating Disorders and Change Action

September 1, 2016

11 min read

20 Big Questions about the Future of Humanity

We asked leading scientists to predict the future. Here’s what they had to say

Kyle Hilton

1. Does humanity have a future beyond Earth? “I think it’s a dangerous delusion to envisage mass emigration from Earth. There’s nowhere else in the solar system that’s as comfortable as even the top of Everest or the South Pole. We must address the world’s problems here. Nevertheless, I’d guess that by the next century, there will be groups of privately funded adventurers living on Mars and thereafter perhaps elsewhere in the solar system. We should surely wish these pioneer settlers good luck in using all the cyborg techniques and biotech to adapt to alien environments. Within a few centuries they will have become a new species: the posthuman era will have begun. Travel beyond the solar system is an enterprise for posthumans—organic or inorganic.” —Martin Rees, British cosmologist and astrophysicist

2. When and where do you think we will find extraterrestrial life? “If there is abundant microbial life on Mars, I suspect that we will find it within 20 years—if it is enough like our form of life. If an alien life-form differs much from what we have here on Earth, it is going to be difficult to detect. It’s also possible that any surviving Martian microbes are rare and located in places that are difficult for a robotic lander to reach. Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Titan are more compelling places. Europa is a water world where more complex forms of life may have evolved. And Titan is probably the most interesting place in the solar system to look for life. It is rich in organic molecules but very cold and has no liquid water; if life exists on Titan, it will be very different from life on Earth.” —Carol E. Cleland, philosophy professor and co-investigator in the Center for Astrobiology at the University of Colorado Boulder

3. Will we ever understand the nature of consciousness? “Some philosophers, mystics and other confabulatores nocturne   pontificate about the impossibility of ever understanding the true nature of consciousness, of subjectivity. Yet there is little rationale for buying into such defeatist talk and every reason to look forward to the day, not that far off, when science will come to a naturalized, quantitative and predictive understanding of consciousness and its place in the universe.” — Christof Koch, president and CSO at the Allen Institute for Brain Science; member of the Scientific American Board of Advisers

On supporting science journalism

If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing . By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.

4. Will the entire world one day have adequate health care? “The global community has made tremendous progress toward health equity over the past 25 years, but these advances have not reached the world’s most remote communities. Deep in the rain forest, where people are cut off from transportation and cellular networks, mortality is the highest, access to health care is the most limited and quality of care is the worst. The World Health Organization estimates that one billion people go their entire lives without seeing a health worker because of distance. Health workers recruited directly from the communities they serve can bridge the gap. They can even fight epidemics such as Ebola and maintain access to primary care when health facilities are forced to shut their doors. My organization, Last Mile Health, now deploys more than 300 health workers in 300 communities across nine districts in partnership with the government of Liberia. But we can’t do this work alone. If the global community is serious about ensuring access to health care for all, it must invest in health workers who can reach the most remote communities.” —Raj Panjabi, co-founder and chief executive at Last Mile Health and instructor at Harvard Medical School

5. Will brain science change criminal law? “In all likelihood, the brain is a causal machine, in the sense that it goes from state to state as a function of antecedent conditions. The implications of this for criminal law are absolutely nil. For one thing, all mammals and birds have circuitry for self-control, which is modified through reinforcement learning (being rewarded for making good choices), especially in a social context. Criminal law is also about public safety and welfare. Even if we could identify circuitry unique to serial child rapists, for example, they could not just be allowed to go free, because they would be apt to repeat. Were we to conclude, regarding, say, Boston priest John Geoghan, who molested some 130 children, ‘It’s not his fault he has that brain, so let him go home,’ the result would undoubtedly be vigilante justice. And when rough justice takes the place of a criminal justice system rooted in years of making fair-minded law, things get very ugly very quickly.” —Patricia Churchland, professor of philosophy and neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego

6. What is the chance Homo sapiens will survive for the next 500 years? “I would say that the odds are good for our survival. Even the big threats—nuclear warfare or an ecological catastrophe, perhaps following from climate change—aren’t existential in the sense that they would wipe us out entirely. And the current bugaboo, in which our electronic progeny exceed us and decide they can live without us, can be avoided by unplugging them.” —Carlton Caves, Distinguished Professor in physics and astronomy at the University of New Mexico

7. Are we any closer to preventing nuclear holocaust? “Since 9/11 the U.S. has had a major policy focus on reducing the danger of nuclear terrorism by increasing the security of highly enriched uranium and plutonium and removing them from as many locations as possible. A nuclear terrorist event could kill 100,000 people. Three decades after the end of the cold war, however, the larger danger of a nuclear holocaust involving thousands of nuclear explosions and tens to hundreds of millions of immediate deaths still persists in the U.S.–Russia nuclear confrontation.

Remembering Pearl Harbor, the U.S. has postured its nuclear forces for the possibility of a bolt-out-of-the-blue first strike in which the Soviet Union would try to destroy all the U.S. forces that were targetable. We don’t expect such an attack today, but each side still keeps intercontinental and submarine-launched ballistic missiles carrying about 1,000 warheads in a launch-on-warning posture. Because the flight time of a ballistic missile is only 15 to 30 minutes, decisions that could result in hundreds of millions of deaths would have to be made within minutes. This creates a significant possibility of an accidental nuclear war or even hackers causing launches.

The U.S. does not need this posture to maintain deterrence, because it has about 800 warheads on untargetable submarines at sea at any time. If there is a nuclear war, however, U.S. Strategic Command and Russia’s Strategic Missile Forces want to be able to use their vulnerable land-based missiles before they can be destroyed. So the cold war may be over, but the Doomsday Machine that came out of the confrontation with the Soviets is still with us—and on a hair trigger.” —Frank von Hippel, emeritus professor at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and co-founder of Princeton’s Program on Science and Global Security

8. Will sex become obsolescent? “No, but having sex to conceive babies is likely to become at least much less common. In 20 to 40 years we’ll be able to derive eggs and sperm from stem cells, probably the parents’ skin cells. This will allow easy preimplantation genetic diagnosis on a large number of embryos—or easy genome modification for those who want edited embryos instead of just selected ones.” —Henry Greely, director of the Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford University

9. Could we one day replace all of the tissues in the human body through engineering? “In 1995 Joseph Vacanti and I wrote for this magazine about advances in artificial pancreas technology, plastic-based tissues such as artificial skin and electronics that might permit blind people to see [see ‘ Artificial Organs ,’ by Robert Langer and Joseph P. Vacanti; Scientific American, September 1995]. All of these are coming to pass, either as real products or in clinical trials. Over the next few centuries it is quite possible that nearly every tissue in the body may be able to be replaced by such approaches. Creating or regenerating tissues such as those found in the brain, which is extremely complex and poorly understood, will take an enormous amount of research. The hope is, however, that research in this area will happen quickly enough to help with brain diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.” —Robert Langer, David H. Koch Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

10. Can we avoid a “sixth extinction”? “It can be slowed, then halted, if we take quick action. The greatest cause of species extinction is loss of habitat. That is why I’ve stressed an assembled global reserve occupying half the land and half the sea, as necessary, and in my book Half-Earth, I show how it can be done. With this initiative (and the development of a far better species-level ecosystem science than the one we have now), it will also be necessary to discover and characterize the 10 million or so species estimated to remain; we’ve only found and named two million to date. Overall, an extension of environmental science to include the living world should be, and I believe will be, a major initiative of science during the remainder of this century.” — Edward O. Wilson, University Research Professor emeritus at Harvard University

11. Can we feed the planet without destroying it? “Yes. Here’s what we need to do: reduce crop waste, consumer waste and meat consumption; integrate appropriate seed technologies and management practices; engage consumers about the challenges farmers face in both the developed and the developing world; increase public funding for agricultural research and development; and focus on advancing the socioeconomic and environmental aspects of farming that characterize sustainable agriculture.” —Pamela Ronald, professor in the Genome Center and the department of plant pathology at the University of California, Davis *

12. Will we ever colonize outer space? “That depends on the definition of ‘colonize.’ If landing robots qualifies, then we’ve already done it. If it means sending microbes from Earth and having them persist and maybe grow, then, unfortunately, it’s not unlikely that we’ve done that as well—possibly on Mars with the Phoenix spacecraft and almost certainly inside the Curiosity rover, which carries a heat source and was not fully baked the way Viking had been.

If it means having humans live elsewhere for a longer period of time, but not reproduce, then that’s something that might happen within the next 50 years or so. (Even some limited degree of reproduction might be feasible, recognizing that primates will be primates.) But if the idea is to construct a self-sustaining environment where humans can persist indefinitely with only modest help from Earth—the working definition of a ‘colony,’ according to the various European colonies outside of Europe—then I’d say this is very far in the future, if it’s possible at all. We currently have a very inadequate understanding of how to build closed ecosystems that are robust to perturbation by introduced organisms or nonbiological events ( Biosphere 2 , for example), and I suspect that the contained ecosystem problem will turn out to be much more challenging than the vast majority of space colonization advocates realize. There are a wide range of technical problems to solve, another being air handling. We haven’t bothered to colonize areas underwater on Earth yet. It’s far more challenging to colonize a place where there’s hardly any atmosphere at all.” —Catharine A. Conley, NASA planetary protection officer

13. Will we discover a twin Earth? “My money’s on yes. We’ve found that planets around other stars are far more abundant and diverse than scientists imagined just a couple of decades ago. And we’ve also found that the crucial ingredient for life on this planet—water—is common in space. I’d say nature seems to have stacked the deck in favor of a wide range of planets, including Earth-like planets. We just have to look for them.” —Aki Roberge, research astrophysicist focusing on exoplanets at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

14. Will there ever be a cure for Alzheimer’s? “I am not sure if there will be a cure, per se, but I am very hopeful that there will be a successful disease-modifying therapy for Alzheimer’s disease within the next decade. We have now started prevention trials that are testing biological interventions even before people show clinical symptoms of the disease. And we don’t have to cure Alzheimer’s—we just need to delay dementia by five to 10 years. Estimates show that a five-year delay in the terrible and expensive dementia stage of the disease would reduce Medicare dementia costs by nearly 50 percent. Most important, that would mean that many older people could die while out ballroom dancing rather than in nursing homes.” —Reisa Sperling, professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and director of the Center for Alzheimer Research and Treatment

15. Will we use wearable technologies to detect our emotions? “Emotions involve biochemical and electrical signals that reach every organ in our bodies—allowing, for example, stress to impact our physical and mental health. Wearable technologies let us quantify the patterns in these signals over long periods of time. In the coming decade wearables will enable the equivalent of personalized weather forecasts for our health: 80 percent increased probability in health and happiness for you next week, based on your recent stress/sleep/social-emotional activities. Unlike with weather, however, smart wearables can also identify patterns we might choose to change to reduce unwanted ‘storm’ events: Increase sleep to greater than or equal to nine hours per night and maintain current low-moderate stress, for a 60 percent reduced likelihood of seizure in the next four days. Over the next 20 years, wearables, and analytics derived from them, can dramatically reduce psychiatric and neurological disease.” —Rosalind Picard, founder and director of the Affective Computing research group at the M.I.T. Media Lab

16. Will we ever figure out what dark matter is? “Whether we can determine what dark matter is depends on what it turns out to be. Some forms of dark matter allow detection through small interactions with ordinary matter that have so far evaded detection. Others might be detectable through their influence on structures such as galaxies. I’m hopeful we will learn more through experiments or observations. But it’s not guaranteed.” —Lisa Randall, Frank B. Baird, Jr., professor of science in theoretical physics and cosmology at Harvard University

17. Will we get control of intractable brain diseases like schizophrenia or autism? “Diseases like autism and schizophrenia remain elusive because neuroscience hasn’t found a structural problem to fix. Some interpret this to mean future answers lie purely in biochemistry, not neural circuits. Others argue the key is for the neuroscientist to start to think in terms of overall brain architecture—not specific neural failures. Still, when thinking about the future, I am reminded of the Nobelist Charles Townes’s remark that the wonderful thing about a new idea is you don’t know about it.” —Michael Gazzaniga, director of the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind at the University of California, Santa Barbara

18. Will technology eliminate the need for animal testing in drug development? “If human organs on chips can be shown to be robust and consistently recapitulate complex human organ physiology and disease phenotypes in unrelated laboratories around the world, as suggested by early proof-of-concept studies, then we will see them progressively replace one animal model at a time. That will eventually lead to significant reductions in use of animal testing. Importantly, these devices also will open up new approaches to drug development not possible with animal models today, such as personalized medicines and development of therapeutics for specific genetic subpopulations using chips created using cells from particular patients.” —Donald E. Ingber, founding director, Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University

19. Will gender equality be achieved in the sciences? “Gender equality can be achieved, but we can’t just sit back and wait for it to happen. We need to ‘fix the numbers’ by recruiting more women into science and technology. We need to fix the institutions by implementing dual-career hiring, family-friendly policies, and new visions of what it means to be a leader. And, most importantly, we need to fix the knowledge by harnessing the creative power of gender analysis for discovery and innovation.” —Londa Schiebinger, John L. Hinds Professor of History of Science at Stanford University

20. Do you think we will one day be able to predict natural disasters such as earthquakes with warning times of days or hours? “Some natural disasters are easier to see coming than others. Hurricanes approach over days, volcanoes often build up to an eruption over days to hours, tornadoes strike within a few minutes. Earthquakes are perhaps the greatest challenge. What we know about the physics of earthquakes suggests that we will not be able to predict earthquakes days in advance. But what we can do is predict the damaging ground shaking just before it arrives and provide seconds to minutes of warning. Not enough time to get out of town, but enough time to get to a safe location.” —Richard M. Allen, director, Berkeley Seismological Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley

*Editor's Note (8/22/16): This biographical note was edited after posting to correct an error in Ronald's title. 

Home / Essay Samples / Philosophy / Future / The Future of Our World: Challenges and Opportunities

The Future of Our World: Challenges and Opportunities

• Category: Philosophy
• Topic: Future

Pages: 3 (1252 words)

• Downloads: -->

Climate Crisis and Environmental Sustainability

Technological advancements and automation, global health and pandemics, social inequality and injustice, political stability and international relations, education and lifelong learning, sustainable resource management, the power of collective action.

--> ⚠️ Remember: This essay was written and uploaded by an--> click here.

Found a great essay sample but want a unique one?

are ready to help you with your essay

You won’t be charged yet!

Ethos Essays

Truth Essays

Future Essays

Free Will Essays

Human Nature Essays

Related Essays

We are glad that you like it, but you cannot copy from our website. Just insert your email and this sample will be sent to you.

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service  and  Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Your essay sample has been sent.

In fact, there is a way to get an original essay! Turn to our writers and order a plagiarism-free paper.

samplius.com uses cookies to offer you the best service possible.By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .--> -->