Fast Forward - World in 2050

Some of the alternatives to conventional transport in the future include:. Industrial designers have been helping automakers with some stunning concept vehicles that harness solar energy on the move, an approach which also betters the performance of the vehicle. They will not have their own on-board power plant like the SolarWorld GT, but they can be recharged with Sun-Carports or with the solar power plant on your own roof. Replacing internal combustion engines with silent electric motors allows designers to come up with concept vehicles that can change their shape according to conditions.

If stuck in a traffic jam, these vehicles can reduce their size for better maneuverability and if speed and performance are desired, they can alter their shape accordingly. The CityCar is a foldable, electric, sharable, two-passenger vehicle for crowded cities. Wheel Robots—fully modular in-wheel electric motors—integrate drive motors, suspension, braking, and steering inside the hub-space of the wheel. This drive-by-wire system requires only data, power, and mechanical connection to the chassis.

With over 80 degrees of steering freedom, Wheel Robots enable a zero-turn radius; they also enable the CityCar to fold by eliminating the conventional engine and drive-train. Imagine a future in which icons flash on your car windshield, hologram style, as your car approaches restaurants, stores, historic landmarks or the homes of friends. Simply point your hand at them, and the icons open to show real-time information: The AR display will overlay information on top of what a driver is seeing in real life.

Mercedes-Benz showed off their vision of the future of driving — complete with augmented-reality and gesture-controlled features — this January at the International Consumer Electronics Show. We already know about the driverless cars using autonomous driving technologies. Automotive Analysts say the next step is for the car to not just drive autonomously, but to think autonomously — because every road will be equipped with wireless communication sensors, and cars with LIDAR Light Detection And Ranging sensors, you can sit back and relax while the car drives.

Magnetic levitation maglev can create frictionless, efficient, far-out-sounding technologies. While regular high-speed trains can travel at miles per hour, maglev trains reach speeds faster than miles per hour while hovering a few inches above the rail. By eliminating friction, maglev trains use less energy and can significantly reduce costs. A handful of maglev trains already exist in Asia and Europe, and several new projects may be in the works. It also has distance sensors that keep you from colliding with other vehicles on the road. Inventors, innovators, engineers, and everyone in between have been working to make the flying car dream a reality for many years now.

It can be driven to the nearest airfield and take off just like any other airplane. Amphibious vehicles have never really taken off due to a wide range of factors such as cost, rust, practicability and the issue of what the cars would run on above and below the sea line. There have been several attempts made to address the balance by two companies Rinspeed and Gibbs, leading to amphibious cars being created and experimented with. A tube can travel from New York to Beijing in two hours, and make a round-the-world trip in just six hours.

German aerospace research institution Bauhaus Luftfahrt last month released details of its concept for a zero-emissions seat aircraft which could potentially enter service in Bauhaus Luftfahrt says forecasts on battery technology suggest a nautical miles 1,km range should be achievable by The electric motors and power-transmission wiring would include high-temperature superconducting technology, raising the power-to-weight ratio.

As these long-range cruisers continually fly looping tracks that cross oceans and take them over major population centers, shorter-range aircraft would bring up passengers and cargo that would ride on the cruiser until they reach their destinations, where they would transfer to other short-range aircraft and fly down to land.

Taking off from conventional airports, flying to and landing on the cruiser, the transport would be optimized for take-off, climb and landing, with no need to cruise. The travelers would hop aboard smaller passenger planes, dock with a larger cruiser aircraft that would loop endlessly through the sky above major airports, carrying vast numbers of passengers — in the region of 3, — to their destinations. In order to power these large sky-cruisers, low-energy nuclear reaction LENR technology could potentially be utilized.

The YeZ Concept photosynthesizes — by absorbing carbon dioxide from the air and emits oxygen back into the atmosphere. The solar crystal films on the leaf are able to rotate towards the sun for higher efficiency of solar energy collection, and the four wheels are wind power generators. Simulating green plants, it captures carbon dioxide and water molecules in the air, releases electrons under the action of microorganisms, and generates electric current.

I am now moving up the ladder of abstraction to look at some intangible issues beyond the more tangible questions of income, employment, climate damage, and energy costs. The first issue concerns intergenerational equity, and it is particularly relevant in the industrial and emerging economies where the old ways of solving rights and obligations between the generations and sexes have been most dramatically changed over the last couple of generations.

In the rich world, particularly, the first generation that has rung up a huge national debt and established a huge unfunded pension scheme is about to retire. The interesting, to say the least, question is whether the next generation will be willing to carry this burden and peacefully pay the debt and peacefully pay the pensions.

Fast forward to the year 2050.

I repeat my answer: If they choose not to and stand shoulder to shoulder, there is little the elderly can do. The old will lose the intergenerational war if push comes to shove. The second reason is that we can already see that the burden is being shed. In forward-looking, well-organized countries, pension schemes have already been revised—in order to lower future payments.

Greece was the first country to shed the sins of the fathers—and got the rest of the world to pay for one-half of the debt of the old generation. Former homeowners in the United States have started the struggle to get back some of the wealth that ended up in the financial institutions. These processes will continue, I believe, although it is hard to tell what will be perceived as the equitable balance point in the distribution of well-being among the generations. But there is little doubt that the current situation read: If we add impending climate damage into the intergenerational perspective, my generation looks even worse.

Because then it is not only the current young but also the unborn future generation who are losing out. Many argue that this does not matter because we are leaving for future generations a whole lot of capital, infrastructure, and technology. In short, the current generation has tried to load too much onto the next generations. This will be undone. The young, I predict, will not take over the burden unabridged. It depends on who you are.

Once more, you should try to decide how my answer is going to affect your own well-being. The starting point here is my belief that China will be the world leader in In China will have a population three and a half times bigger than that of the United States. China will be the premier driving force on the planet. In some ways this is already the case. Current China is capable of acting in a manner that far exceeds the maneuverability of the two competitors for global supremacy: The United States still has the biggest muscle the U.

Militarily the United States is still more powerful outside U. This equals ownership of more than one month of the total output of the U. My view is that China has sufficient coal and shale gas to run the economy in the transition stage, enough sun to fuel it in the long run, sufficient understanding of the climate threat to work up front to reduce the loss, and a sufficient tradition of Chinese independence to be willing to develop internally the resources it does not currently hold.

But most important is the willingness and the ability of the Chinese to govern investment flows so as to achieve their goals. It should also be remembered that in the long run, China will no longer need all the energy and resources it currently uses for the production of export goods. In the long run it will suffice to have a sustainable interior supply of energy and resources sufficient to provide for the Chinese population, which will peak at 1. Clearly things can go wrong for China, but I think this will take time. The alignment of the interests of the Chinese Communist Party and the great mass of Chinese is near perfect.

Both need rapid growth in per capita consumption. Both will applaud when it is achieved. Both will hurt when it fails, and try once more. There is, of course, at any time a group that would like to emphasize values other than material growth, but I believe they will be in the minority for a long time just like in the United States , and their softer goals suppressed.

To do more with less will be the mantra of Chinese growth, in order to continue the goal of the last two thousand years, namely, to be a self-sufficient China independent of the barbarians from outside the Middle Kingdom. Increased energy and resource efficiency will be pursued with enthusiasm. Since both are achievable in principle, through the planned use of money and manpower, they will be achieved. So what will the Americans do when the Chinese hegemony further exposes its full body?

I believe in a friendly resolution of the potential conflict between China and the United States, because the United States also has enough resources inside its boundaries to run a self-sufficient shop for its inhabitants. It is true that the country currently depends on vast oil imports from abroad, but like China, the United States has enough coal and shale gas to run its economy for a long time assuming little real GDP growth in the country over the next 40 years, as I do.

It has large agricultural muscle more than sufficient for its domestic population—and if Americans decide to eat more healthily, also for quite a bit of biofuels. Furthermore the United States has some space that will be livable after climate change. Water may be a problem where it is currently needed, but activities can and will be moved if that is required to have enough water.

And GMO crops will be used large-scale to reduce water scarcity, despite their drawback. If the American democracy finally decides to try to solve its obvious societal problems in a collaborative manner, the U. I think the latter sentence contains the essence of the U.

MIT Media Lab fast-forwards to at The Future of People conference – The Daily Free Press

The United States could maintain its hegemony if it decided to do so. Quick, bipartisan decision making is certainly not a U. And I see little that will change this fact on a year horizon. Since the country is already rich, and the resources are there at least for living at a slightly lower footing, the United States can allow itself to slide into a secondary role, as a provincial and self-content country.

Much like Europe smoothly moved down to second rank after the two World Wars. Both China and the United States will be bothered by climate change.

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But both countries are big enough to include places that are relatively less affected. Their starting points are very different, the United States being rich and China much poorer GDP per person today is one-sixth of the U. But their governance systems differ, will differ, and will help China move fast when the United States will be floundering.

Over the next couple of decades the world will be facing new problems in addition to the well-known challenges of creating economic growth and maintaining social stability , some of which cannot be easily solved by the market. The prime example is the climate challenge. It is a truly global problem: And it is a truly long-term problem: The temperature will not react that is, deviate from its current path until 30 years after the initiation of the effort as long as that effort is of realistic proportions.

Even the most diehard liberalists appear to agree that redistribution is something that is not automatically undertaken by the market by itself, but needs to be done via political action such as through taxation. There is need for collectively agreed action in order to remove explosive inequity as a potentially destabilizing factor in the economy.

A third reason why the time might have come for stronger government is the historical fact that the world currently is a full 25 years into a period of increasing liberalization. This makes it likely that we have solved most of the problems that are easily solvable by the free market. If we try to extend the current era of liberalization, we will end up in a situation where the market has solved all the problems it can solve, so we are left facing only those problems that the market cannot solve.

Sometime before this point, society will start exploring again societal solutions based on policy rather than relative prices. So, in some nations, we will see a demand for a stronger state, capable of cutting through the democratic to-and-fro and making clear and effective policy, even if that implies less democracy and less market freedom. How fast will this happen? I think we are near a turning point in the slow societal oscillation between liberalism and a strong state. Over the next 20 years, we will see more frequent instances where the state intervenes and makes the necessary decisions rather than waiting for the market to lead the way.

It is hard to guess where stronger states will emerge first, but likely candidates are those nations that have pushed the liberalist thinking all the way to the brink, and those that have a tradition of successful government. Meanwhile, strong centralist authorities like that of Singapore will look increasingly good, as long as they manage to handle the tendency toward greater inequity.

Curbing corruption is a first and very important step in that direction. To avoid misunderstanding I would like to clarify what I mean by strong government, through a simple example. A strong government, for instance, would be able to shift a nation from cheap and dirty fossil energy to more expensive solar energy—before the latter is competitive. It is a government that would act in the long-term interest of the people, even if they do not agree in the short term.

It is a government that is capable of withstanding not only the opposition from the existing energy business, but also the opposition from the voting majority who will want the cheapest possible energy in the short run. A strong government would also be capable of convincing the people to wait for a better solution and pay for its development while waiting.

I agree that there is always the risk that the government may choose the wrong solution and that the market might not have made the same mistake. But the risk can be reduced, for example, by letting the government define the goal and put up the money while allowing the market to choose the technique through a bidding process. Will strong government come in time to solve the climate problem?

As you have seen from my forecast, I think not. But by the acceptance and belief in strong government will far exceed that of today, and some of the obvious solutions will be well on their way. The answer depends on your age, profession, nationality, and, probably, family situation. And again, the answer does not rest solely on whether disposable income will be higher, but on whether your general satisfaction with life will have increased. There will be huge differences between people. All eight billion will have some level of Internet access, be much better informed, and be increasingly helped by local solar energy.

They will have many fewer children.

MIT Media Lab fast-forwards to 2050 at The Future of People conference

They will be largely urban except for the minority still living off the land. They will grapple with overall effects of climate damage, but those in dense urban areas will likely have little firsthand experience with the damage caused by the erratic weather though plenty of secondhand information via electronic media. They will live with the unpleasant knowledge that even more climate impacts lie ahead.

So, materially speaking the answer is probably yes—on average the world will be a better place.

To save agriculture from climate change, we need better weather forecasting

From a psychological perspective, probably no, because the future prospects in will be grim. That could change, though, if there is hope. If those experiencing the impacts of climate change have the comforting knowledge that, somewhere on the planet, some resourceful and well-run countries are putting tremendous effort into stopping global warming, they can maintain the hope of a better future world. Again, it boils down to whether these groups will have more or less life satisfaction than they do today—a very subjective question, based on how they view their own well-being.

For more information about this book, visit www. Mircea Bezergheanu , ftelkov , stripped pixel via Shutterstock ]. By Jorgen Randers long Read.

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Let me answer some of your likely questions about the next 40 years as I expect them to unfold. Will I Be Poorer? Some of us will, others will not. Will There Be Enough Jobs? Will the Climate Problem Hurt Us? Yes, but not critically before Will Energy Be More Expensive?