Feed the World? (5 minute read) How will we feed perhaps ten billion people in 2076? It sounds like an enormous challenge. The world's population has already passed eight billion, climate change is making some traditional farming areas hotter and drier, and hundreds of millions of people still do not always have enough to eat. Yet when I look at how agriculture has changed during my own lifetime, I find myself surprisingly optimistic. We are becoming much better not only at producing food,...
12 days ago • 6 min read
The Future of Work and Money (5 minute read) What would you do if you no longer needed to work forty hours a week to afford a comfortable life? Would you spend more time with your family? Travel? Exercise? Study something because it interested you? Start a business, write a book, volunteer, create music or simply spend longer sitting in the garden? For most of human history, that question would have seemed absurd. People worked because the alternative was hunger. They planted crops, cared for...
19 days ago • 7 min read
Will Eighty Be the New Fifty by 2076? (5 minute read) As part of this series looking from America’s founding in 1776 toward its 300th birthday in 2076, I want to turn this week to health, ageing and longevity. What might medicine achieve during the next fifty years? Before looking forward, however, it is worth remembering how extraordinary the journey has already been. What would you rather be: wealthy and powerful in Revolutionary America, or an ordinary person living today? At first, the...
26 days ago • 7 min read
Will Robots Transform the World by 2076? (5 minute read) When I was a boy, the future seemed wonderfully clear. By the year 2000, we expected flying cars to fill the skies, robots to work in every home and permanent bases to stand on the Moon. Science fiction magazines, television programmes and films showed a world transformed by technology, and it often felt as though all of it was only a few decades away. Then the year 2000 arrived, and although computers and the internet had changed our...
about 1 month ago • 7 min read
Climate Change and the Energy Revolution (5 minute read) Could global warming eventually destroy all life on Earth? Several readers have written to me asking versions of that question. They see the heatwaves sweeping across Europe, the increasingly destructive wildfires, the floods, droughts and violent storms, and wonder whether humanity has already pushed the planet beyond the point of recovery. It’s not an unreasonable fear. Europe is now warming more than twice as quickly as the global...
about 1 month ago • 10 min read
What Will the World Look Like Fifty Years From Now? (4- 5 minute read) What will the world look like when America celebrates its 300th birthday in 2076? That question occurred to me during this year's 250th anniversary celebrations, and the more I thought about it, the more I realised that before we can predict where we're going, we first need to understand the extraordinary journey that brought us here. Over the coming weeks I'd like to try something a little different from my usual...
about 2 months ago • 6 min read
Will China or the USA Win the Space Race? (5-6 minute read) If Christopher Columbus returned today, what do you think he would regard as humanity's greatest achievement? I don't think it would be skyscrapers, the internet or artificial intelligence. I think he would look up, beyond the clouds and into space. But… he would also wonder why we stopped. For most of the last fifty years, human spaceflight has advanced more slowly than almost anyone expected. We landed astronauts on the Moon in...
about 2 months ago • 8 min read
How Much Privacy Would You Trade for Safety? (4-5 minute read) If you could reduce violent crime by 80% simply by allowing AI to watch every public street, would you do it? It's an uncomfortable question because there isn't an obvious right answer. Most of us value our privacy. We don't particularly like the thought of cameras following us everywhere we go or computers quietly analyzing our movements. At the same time, most of us also want to live in safe communities where our children can...
2 months ago • 6 min read
The Galaxy Is Becoming More Crowded (5 minute read) When I was growing up, astronomers didn't know whether there were any planets orbiting other stars. That sounds extraordinary now, but it was true. Science fiction writers happily filled the galaxy with alien worlds, strange civilizations, and exotic planets circling distant suns, yet nobody knew whether any of those places could actually exist. The stars above us might have been surrounded by countless worlds, or they might have been...
2 months ago • 7 min read