The World in 50 Years

Women (and pro-social men). In the 1980s there was a research study on savanna baboons, where, by chance, the most aggressive males died from stealing and eating rotten meat from a dump in the territory of neighboring baboons. The less aggressive surviving males and higher female ratio shifted the culture of generations of baboons, creating a more cooperative, happier population. While I don’t advocate poisoning, I do advocate pro-social leadership.

I think that in many marvelous and troubling ways, the physical and digital spaces will converge, and that this will really shift what we imagine are the gaps between us as human beings. I think people will avoid large, mass-targeted social networks and be much more deliberate about where they say what, choosing even more closed and niche chambers for privacy. I also think that there may be a quiet comeback to more analog methods to escape the multiple surveillances we’re increasingly under.

I’m really convinced that we’re going to figure out a way for “the matrix” to exist, where we can actually physically share virtual experiences. In many ways, the video game industry may be what will push the world over that edge.

Also, art. There are new people and new times, and so there will always be new ways and methods to say the same old things: that we hate one another, that we love one another, that we want to connect, and that we want to escape this reality and find new spaces in the universe in which we can try and start over, to do life differently. We’ll be swimming nonstop in these grand contradictions, as we always have.

Broadly speaking, the future is going to be delicious, if for no other reason than that more and more people are going to demand food with flavor and nutrition, and food with a story. There is no turning back to the food I grew up with in the 1970s and 1980s, which was about overly processed and packaged foods. More specifically, the future is going to bring plant breeders into the conversation. We’ve become more in tune with where and how our food is grown, but we have turned a blind eye to the source of it all: seeds. Plant breeders, the people who create new varieties of fruits, vegetables, and grains, are the real architects of our food system. Unfortunately, much of their work is dictated by the handful of agricultural giants who control the seed industry. That means selecting for yield and uniformity above all else—a seed planted in New York is expected to perform the same as it does in Mexico or even China. In the future, we will be breeding fruits and vegetables that are better suited for their local ecology, better adapted for organic farming systems, and of course, for better flavor.

Fresh and organically-grown food will really become a luxury, even more than now. The Jetsons-style add-water-and-stir nightmare will be sold as affordable and convenient, while real texture and flavor may become things only real money can buy. They’ll be grown where there is land to grow them, and then shipped off to those that can afford them. It’s also possible, with people now making lab-grown meat, that lab-grown substitutes for everything can be grown. As such, perhaps the real luxury will be food that can rot.

In much more spiritual, subjective, and intangible ways, like astrological synastry, using ancestor communications through seances, etc. Matchmaking by professionals who understand compatibilities (not so much by parents to align family interests, even though this will also resurge) and arranged pairings will also become even more popular. I also think that Zillenials and those who come after them will be less and less invested in blood as a way of forming family: People will do much more choosing in that regard, from much earlier on in life.

I think more people will use the internet/tech to find love and I think people will fall in and out of love much quicker. The internet/technology will allow us to connect with people with similar beliefs, interests, and preferences before actually meeting them in person. Improved connectivity will also mean that the pool of potential suitors has widened. More people may decide to date in perpetuity.

Stories of delight, war, love, survival, and of what used to happen before the internet. 

Audiovisual content will still be king in many different ways—I think different populations of people are now in a space where they are looking for content that reminds them of themselves, and that will become even more focused and deliberate. At the same time, there are parts of the world that have not met each other yet, especially in the South. All our diasporas scattered across the world have such stories to tell. That will be an interesting place for content and narratives to explore.

I have a friend who says that today, as things are, is the easiest we’re ever going to have it, as far as border security is concerned. It gets more intense by the day. With more fear and conservatism with regard to resources and their spread, borders will be even tighter and more dramatic than they already are.

People with money will have ventured onto other planets, for sure. The labor of building and terraforming, though, will have to be done by those accustomed to manual labor, and a lot of money will have to be invested in making sure those people can be fed and housed as they terraform. So for now, perhaps, people with money will just do fly-bys, and the rest of us will follow them on Instagram. 

That’s if we’re looking at it scientifically. Perhaps science is not the only way we can venture beyond planet Earth into the Milky Way, and to the rest of the known and unknown universes. So there’s that to consider as well.

Our most valuable resource will be phosphorous, an instrumental element used in modern agriculture. We’ll need phosphate (the form of phosphorus that plants can absorb) to grow the amount of food we’re currently producing; however, it’s a non-renewable resource and we are rapidly depleting it. Scientists are predicting that we’re going to run out of it in less than 100 years. What happens then? We won’t be able to grow enough food to feed the planet.  
 
This impending crisis can be avoided. Plants can only uptake a small fraction of the phosphate they get in fertilizer, so most of it gets washed out of the topsoil into bodies of water, creating dead zones. We know our stores of phosphate are limited and yet we’re unnecessarily drowning our plants in it and polluting the environment. If we’re hoping for food security in the future, we’ll have to dramatically reduce our phosphorus consumption now.

I keep saying it will be trust, which seems very kumbaya. But I do think that, because the centralities of state and big corporations are more fragile, and because economic situations are dire, in many ways it is easier to profit from scamming someone than by being nice and coming through for them. So people do that and the betrayals are truly not personal. The things that are actually valuable because they are personal—care, loyalty, and intimacy, which can be real factors in surviving and thriving—will be key. Without them we can’t have good relationships, which are becoming rarer by the day.

I believe inequality will have gotten better. When you have more and more people fighting for finite resources, there will be more crime and uprisings. At some point, the top 1% will need to see that inequality will threaten their own lives and livelihood. While I would like to think that humans are more likely to help other humans “out of the kindness of their hearts,” I believe that we will see a bigger push from the top 1% simply as a form of self-preservation. People will be forced to innovate and come up with solutions to problems that are caused by inequality.

Inequity would be eradicated or significantly diminished when humanity has achieved breakthroughs that accelerate a hopeful future for all. This future does not belong to one gender, ethnicity, socio-economic status, age group, nationality or sexual orientation. It belongs to everyone, and we need to work together to create a world in which we can all thrive.

I predict that the people who are teenagers and pre-teens today—the ones who are organizing nationwide marches against gun violence and walking out of school to raise awareness about climate change and taking brave, sometimes lonely stands for what they believe—will succeed in their fight to build the more just and hopeful world they deserve.