It would be foolhardy to venture technological predictions for 2050. Even more so to predict social and geopolitical changes. The most important advances, the qualitative leaps, are the least predictable. Not even the best scientists predicted the impact of nuclear physics, and everyday consumer items such as the iPhone would have seemed magic back in the 1950s.
But there are some trends that we can predict with confidence. There will, barring a global catastrophe, be far more people on Earth than today. Fifty years ago the world population was below 3 billion. It has more than doubled since then, to 6.7 billion. The percentage growth rate has slowed, but it is projected to reach 9 billion by 2050. The excess will almost all be in the developing world where the young hugely outnumber the old.
If population growth were to continue beyond 2050, one can’t be other than exceedingly gloomy about the prospects. And the challenge of feeding such a rapidly growing population will be aggravated by climate change.
The world will be warmer than today in 2050; the patterns of rainfall and drought across the world will be different. If we pursue “business as usual”, concentration levels of carbon dioxide will reach twice the pre-industrial level by around 2050. The higher its concentration, the greater the warming — and, more important still, the greater the chance of triggering something grave and irreversible: rising sea levels due to the melting of Greenland’s icecap; runaway release of methane in the tundra.
Some technical advances — information technology, for instance — surprise us by their rapidity; others seemingly stagnate. Only 12 years elapsed between the launch of Sputnik and Neil Armstrong’s “one small step” on the moon. Many of us then expected a lunar base, even an expedition to Mars, within 30 years. But it’s more than 36 years since Jack Schmitt and Eugene Cernan, the last men on the moon, returned to Earth. Since that time, hundreds of astronauts have been into orbit, but none has ventured further.
The Apollo program now seems a remote historical episode: young people all over the world learn that the US landed men on the moon, just as they learn that the Egyptians built the pyramids; the motivations seem almost as bizarre in the one case as in the other. The race to the moon was an end in itself — a magnificent “stunt” driven by superpower rivalry. Thereafter, the impetus for manned flight was lost. But, of course, we now depend on space in our everyday lives (GPS, weather forecasting and communications). And robotic exploration has burgeoned. Unmanned probes to other planets have beamed back pictures of varied and distinctive worlds.
I hope that by 2050 the entire solar system will have been explored and mapped by flotillas of tiny robotic craft. Robots and “fabricators” may enable large construction projects, using raw materials that need not come from Earth. But will people follow them? The practical case for sending people into space gets ever weaker with each advance in robots and miniaturization. But I’m nonetheless an enthusiast for manned missions — to the moon, to Mars and even beyond — simply as a long-range adventure for (at least a few) humans.
Each mobile phone today has far more computing power than was available to the whole of NASA in the 1960s. And advances proceed apace. Some claim that computers will, by 2050, achieve human capabilities. Of course, in some respects they already have. For 30 years we’ve been able to buy calculators that can hugely surpass us at arithmetic. IBM’s Deep Blue beat Garyy Kasparov, the world chess champion. But not even the most advanced robot can recognize and move the pieces on a real chessboard as adeptly as a five-year-old child.
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