What will the world look like in 2050?

According to RCO News Agency, The Roman philosopher Marcus Aurelius said that we should never let the future disturb us. But he had never discussed the state of the world in 2050 with futurist Nick Bostrom.

According to Nature, Bostrom says in an email: “There is a high probability that by 2050, all scientific research will be done by super-intelligent artificial intelligence instead of human researchers.” Some people may pursue science as a hobby, but they will no longer make a useful contribution.

Nature magazine has a long history of dealing with predictions, estimates and indications about the possible direction of research in the coming decades. In particular, the magazine marked the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century with a dedicated appendix on scientific prophecy, and with a bold prediction from then-editor Philip Campbell: that by 2100, a form of life based on something other than DNA would be discovered.

Setting aside peer review and in line with Nature’s stated goal of reviewing and interpreting current and future scientific trends, this report takes a cautious look at the horizon of 2050. A horizon that can be accompanied by technological leaps, progress in solving the mystery of dark matter, and the expansion of human studies on an unprecedented scale; Studies that may lead to the containment or elimination of many diseases.

hot days

“In terms of climate change, things are going to be worse than we expect,” said Guy Brasseur, a climate modeler at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany.

He says that by 2040, the world will pass the critical threshold of a 2°C increase in average temperature compared to pre-industrial times. In order to prevent it, due to the inertia of the climate system, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that global emissions of greenhouse gases should have peaked by 2025 and then decreased dramatically. As a result, by 2050, the political controversy about the existence of global warming is likely to decrease significantly.

Instead, the debate may be about whether to try to cool the planet; Probably by injecting shiny particles into the upper layers of the atmosphere to prevent sunlight from reaching the earth’s surface. Although this method of climate engineering is not proven and has not been tested on a large scale, severe climatic consequences by 2050 may encourage an affected country or even a company to implement such an intervention in the atmosphere.

Some countries may use it unilaterally, just thinking it will solve their own problem, regardless of the consequences for others, says Brasseur. This intervention could change precipitation patterns and disrupt other aspects of the climate, perhaps even making things worse. “I think it should be banned,” says Brasseur.

Geopolitical tensions mean that forecasting the future climate until 2050 must take into account factors beyond the physics of the atmosphere; A topic that Brasseur and his colleagues mentioned in a study in 2025. A decade ago, climate scientists welcomed global recognition of climate change with the Paris Agreement. Today, in the United States, they have been forced to remove the term from government reports and websites. Meanwhile, other priorities have taken its place.

He says: If we talk about climate science, people don’t want to hear anymore, because they are more afraid of other issues. They want food, they want peace. All this suggests that the world in 2050 will face the prospect of an increase of 3 degrees Celsius or more by the end of the century.

But there is a more optimistic scenario. By 2050, removing carbon dioxide from the air could become a business opportunity, as companies find ways to reduce this greenhouse gas and make a profit.

Elina Hiltonen, a future researcher at the National Defense University in Helsinki, says: “We make different materials from carbon dioxide; It can be plastic, fuel or medicine. But all of them are produced from air.

future shock

The deep chasm between these two possible scenarios presents a dilemma for futurists and others trying to chart the path forward and the risks beyond the next election cycle. To what extent can the future be predicted from current trends? To what extent will disruptive events and inventions that are now unlikely or even unimaginable shape it? And at what point do predictions become simply ridiculous?

Richard Watson, co-author of The Children’s Book of the Future and a former futurist at Imperial College London and Cambridge University, says a systematic, interdisciplinary study of future trends works best in the 10- to 15-year time frame.

The year 2050 is an attractive time point and deadline for those who want to set goals and direct investments towards it. For example, space agencies typically plan so far in advance that it can take up to two decades for a mission to be designed, approved, built, and launched.

The European Space Agency has already asked the research community to submit ideas for 2050 projects. Proposals include an orbital antimatter detector, returning frozen samples from the icy body of a comet to Earth, and landing a rover on the surface of Mercury.

Then the question of traveling to Mars is raised. US President Donald Trump earlier this year reiterated NASA’s goal of sending humans to Mars before 2050, while Elon Musk claimed SpaceX could send an unmanned spacecraft as early as 2026 as part of a plan to send humans to the Red Planet in the 2030s.

The rise of cars

Any picture of the future must take into account the continuous growth of artificial intelligence. But at what speed?

Alex Ayad, one of the founders of Outsmart Insight, a research and foresight company in London, says: I can provide a fairly accurate picture of the state of artificial intelligence in 2027 or 2028. But I’m not sure I can talk about 2030 with confidence.

Beyond that, the picture gets much murkier. However, some in the field of artificial intelligence believe that by 2050, machine learning systems will be able to conduct Nobel Prize-winning research.

Even without the mastery of a superintelligence, artificial intelligence could drastically transform the science process by 2050. According to Ayad, along with robotic experimenters, automated systems based on algorithms will seek to solve biotechnology problems around the clock in “silent laboratories.” Labs where no human is present.

This is an example of a future shaped by technologies that enable new types of scientific research. In many cases, the knowledge that is generated leads back to the development of better technologies; A symbiotic relationship that makes successively newer science possible.

Advances in quantum science and cosmology could also make big leaps by 2050. Juan Carlos Hidalgo, a physicist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, says researchers are developing methods to detect very weak changes in magnetic and electric fields caused by single-electron and nuclear spins.

Using these quantum sensors in gravitational wave detectors could allow cosmologists to detect smaller objects than is currently possible, including the primordial black holes. These objects, which formed shortly after the Big Bang, may carry mass that has not yet been calculated in the universe.

These findings could help shed light on the nature of dark energy, or even dark matter, and perhaps eventually provide an alternative to the Standard Model of cosmology, Hidalgo says.

He also cautiously adds that nuclear fusion may finally reach maturity by 2050. Nuclear fusion has definitely advanced more than fifty years in the last five years.

External factors

Scientific progress of the past 75 years has been the result of widespread public support for research, but this trend may not continue.

The promise of speed for complex problems can make it difficult for the next generation of scientists to justify the years of patient work that seem to underlie rapid advances.

Continued pressure on public spending in sluggish economies, combined with political attacks on the value of science, may force researchers more than ever to justify the costs of their work.

This process can also upset the ever-fragile balance between basic and applied research in favor of sciences that governments see as serving limited political goals. As populations in many countries age, governments are likely to increase investment in medical research to treat and prevent chronic diseases. But technological progress alone is not enough.

Addressing this data gap requires volunteers who are willing to provide their time and health information for research without significant personal gain, and this will not happen quickly.

In an optimistic scenario, such public participation could lead to the identification of new biomarkers for better diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric and neurological disorders.

Perspectives of life

Another way to build a scenario for 2050 is to look for “weak signals”; Ideas and technologies in the early stages that can grow in many different directions and some of them will surprise everyone.

The first big, heavy cell phones were the weak signals of today’s smart phones.

Science-fiction writers often describe these weak signals and their impact on future society; For this reason, many futurists take this genre seriously.

The use of small, single-use drones in the Ukraine war surprised many, but was predicted in a 2016 US military exercise.

One current weak signal that it may dominate by 2050 is the emerging field of “clitronics”: programmable materials consisting of swarms of microscopic robots that can change shape and function as needed. For example, a chair can be reprogrammed into a table.

Beyond shape-shifting furniture, advances in clitronics could shape the future of research in a wide range of areas, from materials science to making samples of diseased organs to plan and test treatments.

And of course, science fiction stories often deal with one of the biggest questions of humanity; A question that even artificial intelligence may not be able to answer until 2050: Are we alone in the world?

Scientists may have identified about 100 million planets by 2050. Will any of them have signs of life in their atmosphere? Some exoplanet hunters think so. An informal survey in 2019 showed that many believe that researchers in this field will win the Nobel Prize for the discovery of extraterrestrial life by 2050.

However, René Heller, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, is more cautious. He says: I doubt that in the next 25 years we will have both the technical power and the theoretical power required to present these extraordinary evidences.

He expects claims to be made, but not accepted. There may be candidates, but many of them will be rejected or at least disputed.

In any case, the confirmation of the existence of extraterrestrial life can be followed by decades of debate.

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