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Where we are right now.

Fusion energy breakthrough (13th of December 2022).

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Breakthrough in nuclear fusion energy announced

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US researchers have overcome a major barrier to achieving low-carbon nuclear fusion.

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2022-2028: Rise of biodegradeable plastic use

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2022-2028: Rise of biodegradeable plastic use

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Whilst this may seem like a solution to some of the environmental issues we have seen with plastic rubbish, some biodegradable plastics degrade into carbon dioxide, which then means the residue becomes part of another environmental problem.

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Highlights

*

Identify current publications in sustainability of biobased and biodegradable plastics.

*

Evaluate and synthesise the evidence.

*

Suggest a strategic plan for sustainability of biobased and biodegradable plastics.

*

Triple bottom line was employed to assess the sustainability of biodegradable plastic.

Abstract

Plastic usage is increasing the number of pollutants in the environment. Plastic particles and other plastic-based pollutants are found in our environment and food chain, posing a threat to human health. From this perspective, the biodegradable plastics material focuses on creating a more sustainable and greener world with a smaller environmental imprint. This assessment should consider the entire life cycle assessment of the objectives and priorities for producing a wide range of biodegradable plastics. Biodegradable plastics can also have properties similar to traditional plastics while also delivering additional benefits due to their minimised impact on the environment in terms of carbon dioxide, as long as appropriate waste management includes such as composting, are contained. The demand for cost-effective, eco-friendly materials increases to reduce waste management and pollution issues. This study seeks to comprehensively understand biodegradable plastics production and applications research, product prospects, sustainability, sourcing and ecological imprint. Academic and industry interest in biodegradable plastics for sustainability has exploded in recent years. Researchers used the triple bottom line to analyse the sustainability of biodegradable plastics (economic profit, social responsibility, and environmental protection). The research also discusses the variables that influence the adoption of biodegradable plastics and a sustainable framework for improving biodegradable plastics' long-term viability. This study provides a thorough yet simple theoretical design of biodegradable plastics. The research findings and future research endeavours provide a new avenue for further research and contribution to the area.

Keywords

And triple bottom line (TBL)

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Sustainability of biodegradable plastics: New problem or solution to solve the global plastic pollution?

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Identify current publications in sustainability of biobased and biodegradable plastics. * Evaluate and synthesise the evidence. * Suggest a strategic plan for sustainability of biobased and biodegradable plastics. * Triple bottom line was employed to assess the sustainability of biodegradable plastic. Plastic usage is increasing the number of pollutants in the environment.

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Legislation passed in New Zealand that will come into force next year.

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New Zealand passes legislation banning cigarettes for future generations

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The legislation makes cigarettes permanently unavailable to anyone currently under the age of 14.

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2023: BAE Predicts First Major Satellite Hack.

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2023: BAE Predicts First Major Satellite Hack.

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Current reports suggest that satellite hacking is of major current concern. When combined with a Kessler Syndrome event, this could be a major crisis.

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2024: Denmark Offshore Energy Island is activated

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2024: Denmark Offshore Energy Island is activated

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This initiative has already been launched by the Danish Government. Massive investment in offshore power distribution on an artificial island is planned. This will be a resource that can be connected to other countries.

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The artificial island in the North Sea and the surrounding offshore wind farms will be established approximately 80 km off the coast of Thorsminde, a town in Jutland. The island will house electrotechnical facilities for routing electricity from the wind turbines into the electricity grid, and potentially also a harbour and service facilities for the first 3-4 GW of offshore wind farms in the North Sea. Later, the island and wind farms will be expanded to generate and distribute up to 10 GW of electricity as the demand for electricity rises and the islands are 'plugged in' to more neighbouring countries.

The wind turbines that will supply power to the island are expected to be larger than current offshore wind turbines, and they will also be established further out at sea than has been attempted before. The turbines will not be visible to the naked eye from land, but if you are flying over the North Sea, you will be able to spot large areas dotted with wind turbines surrounding the island.

Map of areas indicating the location of island and offshore wind in the North Sea. The Danish Energy Agency.
It will be up to the island's co-owners to decide the exact design and size of the island, which is why information on the specific elements on or around the island, as well as the exact size or specific buildings on the island, is not yet available. The Danish State will enter into a partnership with private sector actors on the ownership of the island, and the framework for procurement and the construction of the island will be determined in an upcoming market dialogue and procurement process. The Danish State will be the majority owner and own at least 50.1 percent of the island. The large amount of electricity sourced from the island will have implications on Denmark's security of supply. Parts of the electrotechnical facility will therefore constitute critical infrastructure.
Read more about the market dialogue with the industry on the establishment and co-ownership of the dammed island See also the procurement notice for technical consultancy services and establishment of the energy island in the North Sea The illustration is intended to serve as a visualisation of what the island in the North Sea may look like once it has been constructed. COWI on behalf of the Danish Energy Agency.
The future development of the island

To begin with, the island in the North Sea will have a capacity of 3 GW, corresponding to the electricity consumption of three million households, which is twice the amount of energy that all offshore wind turbines in Denmark combined are capable of generating today. It also corresponds to approximately half of Denmark's total electricity consumption. The capacity will be expanded in phases to a maximum of 10 GW, which could cover the electricity consumption of 10 million households and contribute to the further electrification of Denmark and its neighbouring countries.

The energy islands are one component of the development of our future energy systems, and the content of the political agreements includes an ambition to transform the electricity from the energy islands into new forms of energy (e.g. Power-to-X). This means that the green power sourced from these energy islands will contribute to the phasing-out of fossil fuels in Denmark and elsewhere in Europe. Additionally, the goal is for the islands to house equipment that can store surplus electricity when the supply of electricity from the turbines exceeds demand. It is important to emphasise, however, that technologies such as Power-to-X and electricity storage are not yet sufficiently mature to allow us to say with certainty how such technology and equipment can be deployed on the islands. There is enormous potential inherent in the energy islands, and over the course of the project, new solutions will be implemented as the technology behind them is developed. Yet the specific types of technologies the islands will house is something we will only know for certain in the years to come.
This image is solely intended as an illustration of what the island in the North Sea may look like once it has been built. COWI on behalf of the Danish Energy Agency.

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The world's first energy islands will be constructed in Denmark, exploiting our immense wind resources in the North and Baltic seas. The energy islands will serve as hubs that can create better connections between energy generated from offshore wind and the energy systems in the region around the two seas.

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2025: World could face lithium shortages

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2025: World could face lithium shortages

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Lithium can only be mined in certain locations around the world. The amount available is not sufficient to solve the world's battery needs and without alternatives, it will provide a monopoly to certain countries.

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Batteries

Global lithium supplies are under strain as demand for electric vehicles rises. Image: Unsplash/CHUTTERSNAP

Senior Writer, Formative Content

Stay up to date:

Batteries

Follow

Sales of petrol and diesel cars are expected to slide quickly in this decade. Image: Statista

Numerous countries are phasing out sales of new petrol and diesel cars. Image: IEA

Lithium demand could soon exceed supply. Image: Statista

Discover

What is the Forum doing to help cities to reach a net-zero carbon future?

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Image: Integrated energy systems in cities (Source: Net Zero Carbon Cities: An Integrated Approach, 2021, World Economic Forum)

EV sales rose by 108% in 2021. Image: EVvolumes.com

License and Republishing

World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License, and in accordance with our Terms of Use.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

Global Agenda

The Agenda Weekly

A weekly update of the most important issues driving the global agenda

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The world needs 2 billion electric vehicles to get to net zero. But is there enough lithium to make all the batteries?

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Batteries Global lithium supplies are under strain as demand for electric vehicles rises. Image: Unsplash/CHUTTERSNAP Senior Writer, Formative Content Stay up to date: Batteries Follow Sales of petrol and diesel cars are expected to slide quickly in this decade. Image: Statista Numerous countries are phasing out sales of new petrol and diesel cars.

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2025: Artemis 3 returns humans to the Moon.

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2025: Artemis 3 returns humans to the Moon.

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The projected date for the Artemis 3 mission which will land on the Moon.

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There are four main phases of the Artemis Moon missions. These include:

Orion spacecraft

Equipped with life support systems and shuttle interfaces, Orion is the command module needed to transport the astronauts through space.

Lunar Gateway

The Lunar Gateway is a small space station orbiting the Moon, designed to be a flexible platform for missions to the Moon and beyond.

The Orion module will dock with Gateway, and from here the astronauts will transfer into the lunar landing module.

Unlike the International Space Station (ISS), the Lunar Gateway won't be permanently occupied, but will serve as a platform where astronauts can live and undertake research for short periods. It will also be able to continue scientific research even between human lunar missions.

International partners such as the European Space Agency are working with NASA on the design for the Lunar Gateway.

Moon Landing Module

The lunar landing vehicles will take cargo and humans from the Lunar Gateway to the Moon's surface. NASA is working alongside commercial companies to develop both a human landing system (known as HLS) and a series of other vehicles for robotics and cargo.

Where Apollo's Lunar Module was designed to be used for one return journey to the Moon's surface, the landing systems for the Artemis missions are set to be used for multiple missions.

Space Launch System (SLS)

Tying together all these elements is the launcher that will carry them beyond Earth's atmosphere and into space. This super heavy-lift rocket can carry almost 180,000 kg and will cost over $800 million per launch. When complete, the SLS will be the most powerful rocket in the world, rivalling the original Saturn V launcher that first took astronauts to the Moon.

The launcher has been in development at NASA for most of the last decade, enduring multiple delays and rising costs. In March 2022, the rocket and spacecraft for Artemis I was moved to the launchpad at Kennedy Space Center.

Will going to the Moon help humans land on Mars?

While the journey to the Moon takes three days, reaching Mars is a far lengthier and more complicated goal. NASA sees Artemis as laying the foundation for both international space agencies and private companies to build a lunar settlement and economy, and from there eventually send humans to Mars.

NASA Artemis mission timeline

Artemis 1

Formerly called Exploration Mission-1, this uncrewed mission is an extensive test of the Space Launch System (SLS) and the Orion module.

The SLS will take off from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, and once in space the Orion module will detach and travel to the Moon. Its orbit will take it 62 miles above the lunar surface before it continues 40,000 miles beyond the Moon. After a travel time of 20 to 25 days, the module will splash down in the Pacific Ocean near California.

Artemis 2

This will be a pioneering crewed spaceflight for the Artemis Program, taking humans further than they've ever been in space.

After being launched into space by the SLS rocket, the four-person crew will fly the Orion module 8889 km beyond the Moon, complete a lunar flyby and return to Earth. The mission will take between eight to ten days and collect valuable flight test data.

Artemis 3

The third mission to the Moon is set to be the first Moon landing since Apollo 17 in 1972.

Building on the Artemis 2 mission, four astronauts aboard the Orion module will dock with the Lunar Gateway and remain in space for 30 days. The human landing system will then take two astronauts down to the Moon's South Pole, a region previously unvisited by humans. The astronauts are expected to spend a week exploring the surface and perform a variety of scientific studies, including sampling water ice - first detected on the Moon in 1971.

Artemis 4,5,6 and more?

NASA are currently focusing their attentions on Artemis missions 1 to 3. If these prove successful, NASA has ambitions for further crewed missions on an annual basis. One expectation is for future astronauts to begin establishing a base on the surface of the Moon, with a view to eventually using the satellite as a staging post on the journey to Mars.

Could I become a NASA astronaut?

In 2020 NASA launched a recruitment drive for new astronauts who will be tasked with taking humans to the Moon, Mars and beyond.

Each candidate had to be a US citizen and have at least a Master's degree in a STEM field (science, technology, engineering or maths). The deadline for the next intake closed on 31 March 2020, and the new 'Artemis Team' was revealed in December.

You can find out more about the original application process and NASA's astronaut requirements here.
(Main image and graphics courtesy of NASA)

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Artemis Program: what you need to know about NASA's Moon mission

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There are four main phases of the Artemis Moon missions. These include: Orion spacecraft Equipped with life support systems and shuttle interfaces, Orion is the command module needed to transport the astronauts through space. Lunar Gateway The Lunar Gateway is a small space station orbiting the Moon, designed to be a flexible platform for missions to the Moon and beyond.

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Current discussions on Space sustainability are considering this issue. There are cascading destruction incidents going on at certain altitudes already.

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NASA space debris expert Don Kessler observed that, once past a certain critical mass, the total amount of space debris will keep on increasing: collisions give rise to more debris and lead to more collisions, in a chain reaction. So Clean Space is seeking not just to cut debris production from future ESA missions but to reduce the total mass of current debris, such as the robotic salvage of derelict satellites. The task is an urgent one: debris levels have increased 50% in the last five years in low orbit.

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NASA space debris expert Don Kessler observed that, once past a certain critical mass, the total amount of space debris will keep on increasing: collisions give rise to more debris and lead to more collisions, in a chain reaction.

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Conflict arising from specific information walls. The Story "Crisis Actors" by Greg Egan illustrates this. And we have seen several isolated incidents over the last few years where individuals have been radicalised by the information they are obtaining from the internet. There are movements present in our society that perpetuate an internalised alternative narrative. This issue will reach a peak crisis in the late 2020s.

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Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism

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DOI: 10.60625/risj-etxj-7k60

Executive summary ↑

Terms like echo chambers, filter bubbles, and polarisation are widely used in public and political debate but not in ways that are always aligned with, or based on, scientific work. And even among academic researchers, there is not always a clear consensus on exact definitions of these concepts.

In this literature review we examine, specifically, social science work presenting evidence concerning the existence, causes, and effect of online echo chambers and consider what related research can tell us about scientific discussions online and how they might shape public understanding of science and the role of science in society.

Echo chambers, filter bubbles, and the relationship between news and media use and various forms of polarisation has to be understood in the context of increasingly digital, mobile, and platform-dominated media environments where most people spend a limited amount of time with news and many internet users do not regularly actively seek out online news, leading to significant inequalities in news use.

When defined as a bounded, enclosed media space that has the potential to both magnify the messages delivered within it and insulate them from rebuttal, studies in the UK estimate that between six and eight percent of the public inhabit politically partisan online news echo chambers.

More generally, studies both in the UK and several other countries, including the highly polarised US, have found that most people have relatively diverse media diets, that those who rely on only one source typically converge on widely used sources with politically diverse audiences (such as commercial or public service broadcasters) and that only small minorities, often only a few percent, exclusively get news from partisan sources.

Studies in the UK and several other countries show that the forms of algorithmic selection offered by search engines, social media, and other digital platforms generally lead to slightly more diverse news use - the opposite of what the "filter bubble" hypothesis posits - but that self-selection, primarily among a small minority of highly partisan individuals, can lead people to opt in to echo chambers, even as the vast majority do not.

Research on polarisation offers a complex picture both in terms of overall developments and the main drivers and there is in many cases limited empirical work done outside the United States. Overall, ideological polarisation has, in the long run, declined in many countries but affective polarisation has in some, but not all, cases increased. News audience polarisation is much lower in most European countries, including the United Kingdom. Much depends on the specifics of individual countries and what point in time one measures change from and there are no universal patterns.

There is limited research outside the United States systematically examining the possible role of news and media use in contributing to various kinds of polarisation and the work done does not always find the same patterns as those identified in the US. In the specific context of the United States where there is more research, it seems that exposure to like-minded political content can potentially polarise people or strengthen the attitudes of people with existing partisan attitudes and that cross- cutting exposure can potentially do the same for political partisans.

Public discussions around science online may exhibit some of the same dynamics as those observed around politics and in news and media use broadly, but fundamentally there is at this stage limited empirical research on the possible existence, size, and drivers of echo chambers in public discussions around science. More broadly, existing research on science communication, mainly from the United States, documents the important role of self-selection, elite cues, and small, highly active communities with strong views in shaping these debates and highlights the role especially political elites play in shaping both news coverage and public opinion on these issues.

In summary, the work reviewed here suggests echo chambers are much less widespread than is commonly assumed, finds no support for the filter bubble hypothesis and offers a very mixed picture on polarisation and the role of news and media use in contributing to polarisation.

Introduction ↑

In this literature review, we examine evidence concerning the existence, causes, and effect of online echo chambers and consider what related research can tell us about scientific discussions online and how they might shape public understanding of science and the role of science in society.

We discuss online echo chambers in the context of a set of related concerns around the possible links between the rise of the internet and various digital platforms (search engines, social media, messaging applications, news aggregators, etc.) and polarisation in our societies.

Much of the existing research is focused on the United States, which is in many ways an extreme outlier among high income democracies, as political elites, the media system, and public opinion is more polarised there than in otherwise similar countries.

Thus, while we consider findings from the United States, these insights are not universally applicable. We therefore pay particular attention to comparative studies that can help capture differences and similarities across various national contexts and the situation in the United Kingdom specifically.

We seek to identify (a) areas where we believe there is a clear majority view in academic research, (b) areas where there are some empirical studies but not necessarily convergent interpretations, and (c) areas where there is at this point little evidence to help us understand a situation that is rapidly evolving in terms of both media structure and media substance (as the constant evolution of the digital media environment as well as communications around the coronavirus pandemic has shown).

Research in this area is extensive in some respects, almost non-existent in others. To avoid an overlong review, we focus our efforts on recent studies primarily in the social sciences that have a direct bearing on the possible links between media use and how the public understands the world around them. Most of the work we summarise has been peer reviewed. To be able to present an up-to-date review including work done during the coronavirus pandemic, we also draw on some empirical reports and preprints from academics working at universities and with established social science methods.

In the literature review we aim to summarise relevant empirical research and clarify the meaning of terms that are used both in public and policy debate and in more specialised scientific research, and not always in the same way. Terms like "echo chamber" and "filter bubble" have exploded into public discourse in recent years and the Hansard official record shows how these terms are increasingly used by elected officials in UK Parliamentary debates. Needless to say, public and political use of these terms are not always aligned with, or based on, scientific work. And even among academic researchers, there is not always a clear consensus on exact definitions of these concepts.

Some of the issues we discuss - around echo chambers, polarisation, and inequality - for example, raise moral and political questions and sometimes capture serious societal challenges. Our purpose here is not to outline normative positions on these but to summarise the relevant evidence. This is important to keep in mind because analytical terms such as echo chambers and polarisation often have a negative ring, but their implications of course depend on the substantive nature of the information echoed or the issues that polarise opinion.

Basic descriptive facts about media use ↑

For context, it is important to recognise some basic, often overlooked, descriptive features of contemporary media use.

First, in high income democracies, we live in increasingly digital, mobile, and platform-dominated media environments. Digital media use accounts for more than half of time spent with media, mobile accounts for more than half of time spent with digital media, and the most popular products offered by a few large US-based platform companies, most importantly Google (through e.g., Google Search and YouTube) and Facebook (through the eponymous social network, Instagram, and WhatsApp) account for a large share of time spent with digital media (Hindman 2018; Nielsen and Fletcher 2020).

Second, there is an abundant supply of news online, but on average, people spend a limited amount of time with it and many internet users do not regularly actively seek out online news. Estimates based on web tracking - where representative panels of internet users voluntarily agree to have their internet use passively recorded - show that the share of time spent online with UK news media ranges from about three percent to about six percent (see e.g., Fletcher et al. 2020c; Hindman 2018). In addition, evidence from survey data - where representative samples are asked to describe their media use - shows that just half of UK internet users in 2021 reported they had gone directly to a news website or app (e.g., BBC News, Guardian, Mail Online, HuffPost) in the past week, with the rest relying on offline sources and/or news accessed via platforms such as search or social media (Newman et al. 2021).

Third, given the ease of accessing news online and the abundant supply, differences in individuals' active choices and regular habits play a defining role in the overall distribution of news use, tending towards greater inequalities, with a large minority of news lovers, about 22% of UK internet users, engaging with many different news sources on a regular basis across many different offline and online platforms, a majority of daily briefers (55%) who use a few different sources of news and a large minority of more casual users (23%) who often do not access news daily. Differences in news use are partially aligned with differences in age, gender, education, and income, both in general (Kalogeropoulos and Nielsen 2018) and around, for example, coronavirus information (Fletcher et al. 2020b).

These descriptive features are documented through a combination of surveys relying on nationally representative samples (e.g., Newman et al. 2021) and passive tracking of large parts of the online behaviour of large samples of internet users (e.g., Fletcher et al. 2021a). Though many studies are based on quantitative data from nationally representative samples, it is important to recognise that (a) there is no single-source ground truth that captures all media use (online tracking data struggles to capture behaviour inside apps such as Facebook, does not capture offline use, and can have a hard time separating meaningful from superficial engagement), (b) surveys in particular are dependent on respondents accurately remembering and describing their media use (something many people struggle to do), and (c) news and information involve an irreducibly subjective component, as there is no objective standard for what does or does not constitute, for example, news as opposed to opinion or impartiality as opposed to partisan news, and sometimes no broad-based inter-subjective consensus either, complicating measurements. (Fox News is the single most widely used source of news in the United States, and relatively highly trusted by many on the political right - at the same time, research reported in, for example, the New York Times and Wired have treated it as if everything it publishes is misinformation or "fake news".)

Echo chambers, filter bubbles, and polarisation↑

Social scientists use the term echo chamber to describe a particular situation some people are in as a result of media supply, distribution, and/or their own demand - namely one where they occupy what Jamieson and Capella in their influential book Echo Chamber defined as "a bounded, enclosed media space that has the potential to both magnify the messages delivered within it and insulate them from rebuttal" (2008, p. 76). The magnification part is typically taken to be a preponderance of attitude-consistent information (e.g., people on the left seeking out information that reinforces their pre-existing views) and the insulation part about the absence of cross-cutting exposure (e.g., people on the right not coming across centrist or left- wing perspectives that challenge their pre-existing views).

Because echo chambers are about the media space a given individual or a group occupies, echo chambers necessarily cannot be identified by analysing behaviour on or data from a single platform. In the UK, one might read exclusively partisan newspapers, which might magnify some messages, while also watching the BBC or ITV, which would mean these messages would be unlikely to be insulated from rebuttal. Or one might primarily engage with a very partisan community on Twitter, which might magnify some messages, while also coming across news from Sky News and the local newspaper on Facebook, meaning that these messages were unlikely to be insulated. To establish whether people are truly inside echo chambers - enclosed media spaces - we have to consider all the different media and sources of news they rely on, offline and online, and across different online means of discovery (direct access, social, search, etc.).

In principle, echo chambers could concern any topic and could magnify any messages one can think of - ambiguous, benign, or malign; widely accepted or controversial; evidence-based or demonstrably false, and anything in between. In practice, social scientists have primarily researched one specific type of echo chamber, namely politically partisan news echo chambers where some people exclusively get news and information from sources that are very clearly on one side of the political spectrum.

In public and policy debate the term echo chamber is sometimes used interchangeably with the term filter bubble, but it is important to distinguish between the two.

The term filter bubble was coined by the activist and entrepreneur Eli Pariser in his book of the same name, to capture his concern that the increasing use of personalisation in the ranking of search engine results and social media feeds would create "a unique universe of information for each of us" (2011, p. 10) eroding the possibility of a relatively shared common ground - as we might be shown more and more of things we like, while things we are not prone to like are hidden from us - on the basis of data-driven display decisions dictated by platform companies' commercial interests rather than our own active choices.

The difference between the two terms is important. An echo chamber is a form of bubble, but the term does not prejudge why some people might live in such bubbles - it is possible, for example, that some actively chose to, that the situation is a result of demand more than distribution or supply. A filter bubble, on the other hand, is an echo chamber primarily produced by ranking algorithms engaged in passive personalisation without any active choice on our part, a possible outcome of specific aspects of how news and information is distributed online.

Thus, there are distinct questions of outcomes (how many people live in echo chambers versus more diverse media spaces?) and contributing causes (what is the relative importance of active users' choices versus algorithmic filtering in determining the diversity of sources people access?). Supply, distribution, and demand can all contribute to the formation of echo chambers.

Commentators and analysts typically worry about echo chambers and filter bubbles because they fear they will fuel polarisation, diminish mutual understanding, and ultimately lead to a situation where people are so far apart that they have no common ground - effectively inhabiting different realities. Polarisation can take substantially different forms. The most important forms for the purposes of this review are the following. First, ideological polarisation, which refers to the degree to which people disagree about political issues. Second, affective polarisation, which refers to people's feelings about the 'other side' - those they disagree with on a given issue. Third, news audience polarisation, which refers to the degree to which audiences for news outlets in a given country are generally more politically partisan or politically mixed.

Beyond this, the classical focus of much political science research is elite polarisation (which in turn can have very significant consequences for other forms of polarisation, an issue we return to below), and it is important to remember that while news and media use may contribute to relative increases or decreases in polarisation, many other factors are often seen by social scientists as more important - including the role of political parties in providing partisans with various cues to navigate public issues, as well as degrees of social homophily shaped by changing patterns in how and where we live, including how diverse our primary social groups are (Guess et al. 2018; Tucker et al. 2018; McPherson et al. 2001; Mason 2015).

Evidence of the existence and prevalence of echo chambers ↑

Social scientists have primarily relied on surveys, passive tracking data, and social media data to analyse the existence and prevalence of echo chambers. Of these sources of data, only surveys and tracking data can give a broader sense of what media space people occupy, as findings based on data from a single social media platform - virtually never used in isolation - cannot establish whether people inhabit a bounded, enclosed media space that magnifies messages while insulating them from rebuttal. Twitter data, for example, is often used for analysis because it is easier to access but is necessarily limited to Twitter specifically and says nothing about individuals' wider media use, let alone anything about the large majority of the population that does not use Twitter. In the UK, just 31% say that they use Twitter, with only around half of these saying they use it for news (Newman et al. 2021).

Across a range of different countries, including the highly polarised United States, several cross-platform studies - both those reliant on survey data and those reliant on passive tracking data - have found that few people occupy politically partisan online news echo chambers.

One recent study (Fletcher et al. 2021b), that includes the UK, used survey data from 2020 to assess the number of people in politically partisan online news echo chambers in Austria, Denmark, Germany, Norway, Spain, the UK, and the US by looking at how many people only use news sources with left- or right-leaning slants (measured in terms of the overall ideological slant of each outlet's audience).

In the UK, the proportion of people estimated to be in a left-leaning echo chamber is around 2% and the proportion in a right-leaning echo chamber is around 5% (Fletcher et al. 2021b). This is slightly lower than in most of the other countries covered in the study. In most other cases, a minority of around 5% of people only use news sources with ideological slants in one direction. The US is the main outlier among the seven and the only one where more than 10% of the respondents are estimated to rely only on partisan news sources. In every country covered by this study, many more internet users consume no online news at all on a regular basis than inhabit politically partisan echo chambers.

The UK results from this study are broadly similar to a previous analysis, also based on survey data, that, using a more indirect measure of diversity of news use, found that around 10% in the UK said they almost never see political content on social media that they disagree with (Dubois and Blank 2018).

These findings are consistent with several other studies of other European countries. In Sweden, for instance, Dahlgren et al. (2019, p. 170) found that while some people did engage in selective exposure to partisan news sources, rates were low overall, "suggesting a pattern of cross-cutting exposure more than isolated echo chambers." The authors note that "citizens who are frequent users of online news from one side of the ideological spectrum also tend to be more frequent users of news from the other side" (p. 170). Similarly, in Spain, Masip et al. (2020) did not find strong evidence for widespread news echo chambers and observed that most people accessed "non-like-minded media" at least sometimes. In the Netherlands, Bos et al. (2016) found some evidence of partisan selective exposure to news but noted that the formation of echo chambers was largely undercut by people's common use of relatively impartial public service broadcasting. This is also an important factor in the UK, where the BBC News website is by far the most widely used online news source (Fletcher et al. 2021b).

Even in the United States, researchers have long found that echo chambers are smaller and less prevalent than commonly assumed. Gentzkow and Shapiro (2011, p. 1831) observe that "internet news consumers with homogeneous news diets are rare," and Garrett (2013, p. 248) similarly argues that the notion that large numbers of people are cocooned in pure ideological news echo chambers, cut off from other points of view, is exaggerated and wrong.

Studies based on passive tracking that automatically log people's behaviour on one or more platforms have similar findings to analyses of survey data from nationally representative samples, though there are fewer such studies from outside the United States.

In the UK, Fletcher et al. (2020c) find a relative dearth of partisan online news echo chambers in the UK, using web tracking data collected during the 2019 General Election and show that the proportion of people in like-minded echo chambers in the UK during the election was 2% among Labour voters and 4% among Conservative voters - very similar to the results of survey-based work in the UK cited above.

Similarly, in Israel, Dvir-Gvirsman et al. (2016), using web tracking data collected around the time of the 2013 election, estimate that 3% of people were in an entirely one-sided partisan media echo chamber and that, in most cases, people in Israel had either relatively diverse media diets or did not consume online news at all.

In addition to people's common use of relatively impartial public service broadcasting undercutting the existence of partisan echo chambers, we should keep in mind that - at least online - their potential size is limited by the fact that many people do not consume much online news in the first place. In the UK, around 25% of internet users say they access no online news at all each week (Newman et al. 2021).

Related research - often not specifically aiming to measure the size of echo chambers - often arrives at broadly similar conclusions by analysing patterns of media use. Again, even in the polarised United States, the results are largely similar. Using network analysis and combining TV and internet tracking data, Webster and Ksiazek (2012) find high degrees of audience overlap across news sources and concentration of audiences on large mainstream outlets. Guess (2016, pp. 17-18) observes, based on analysis of tracking data, that there is a "remarkable degree of balance in respondents' overall media diets regardless of partisan affiliation.

Whether Democrat, Republican, or independent, the large bulk of these individuals' media diets cluster around the center of the ideological spectrum." Similarly, Nelson and Webster (2017) find that audiences are concentrated on a few popular political news sites and that, in general, political news sites, irrespective of popularity, have ideologically diverse audiences.

Yang et al. (2020), working with desktop and mobile data from Comscore's panels, also observe that ideologically diverse US audiences converge on mainstream news outlets online, find little evidence of ideological selective exposure and, contrary to what some have suggested, find increasing co-exposure to news sources over time. Reinforcing the results from survey data, the authors also note that many more internet users consume no online news at all than rely solely on partisan sources.

Single-platform studies are, as noted, of limited value in identifying echo chambers, but there are several important studies that identify like-minded communities formed on individual social media platforms - whether through algorithmic selection, self-selection, or some combination thereof (Bakshy et al. 2015; Barberá et al. 2015; Kaiser and Rauchfleisch 2020; Vaccari et al. 2016). Even these, however, often conclude, like Barberá (2015, p. 28), that "most social media users receive information from a diversity of viewpoints." And in the absence of evidence on what other media the individuals involved use in addition to the social media platform in question, these studies simply cannot establish whether people inhabit a bounded, enclosed media space where specific messages are magnified and insulated from rebuttal.

In summary, studies in the UK and several other countries, including the highly polarised US, have found very similar results whether relying on survey data or passive tracking data. Most people have diverse media diets, those who rely on only one source typically converge on large sources with politically diverse audiences such as commercial or public service broadcasters, and only small minorities, often only a few percent, exclusively get news from partisan sources.

Who might end up in echo chambers and why? ↑

Though a large number of empirical studies from different countries and relying on various kinds of data find that echo chambers are smaller and less prevalent than often assumed, it is still important to consider who might end up in echo chambers and why.

To understand what news and information people see, media researchers typically seek to consider the interplay between media supply, media distribution, and media demand(Webster 2014).

While the term "echo chamber" has sometimes been used to describe the news institution as a whole as "the media echo chamber" (Bennett et al. 2007), in a liberal democracy with a diverse media system and a multitude of independent voices expressed online, it is hard to see how, on most issues of importance, supply alone could lead to the formation of echo chambers. Information supply has grown enormously in recent years thanks to the growth of the internet. The data and analytics company Comscore tracks more than one thousand news and information providers online in the UK alone, and that is without counting the variety of information people can access from activists, authorities, educational institutions, political parties, scientists, and many, many other sources available online.

This leaves distribution and demand as the main possible causes for the formation of echo chambers.

In terms of distribution, algorithmic selection by digital platforms such as search engines and social media that make personalised display decisions for countless users using automated systems might, some fear, generate filter bubbles by reducing the diversity of information people come across, serving them more attitude- consistent news and resulting in less cross-cutting exposure.

But empirical studies, whether based on survey data or passive tracking data, have generally found the opposite. They demonstrate that reliance on secondary gatekeepers such as search engines and social media - whatever other problems might be associated with them - is in most cases associated with more diverse news use.

This is a consistent finding across a growing number of survey-based studies (DuBois and Blank 2018; Fletcher and Nielsen 2018a; Fletcher and Nielsen 2018b; Beam et al. 2018) and studies based on various forms of passive tracking data (Flaxman et al. 2016; Cardenal et al. 2019; Fletcher et al. 2021a; Sharkow et al. 2020; Wojcieszak et al. 2021). These findings also hold across different countries (including the United Kingdom and the United States), across different digital platforms (search engines, different social media platforms, and news aggregators), and across different methods and modes of analysis. These avenues particularly increase exposure for people who are less likely to otherwise visit news sites directly (Fletcher and Nielsen 2018a; Wojcieszak et al. 2021). We are not aware of any comparable studies that have found support for the filter bubble hypothesis that algorithmic ranking leads to echo chambers (see Bruns 2019 for a more detailed overview).

To understand why algorithmic selection is consistently found to lead to more diverse news diets, not narrower diets (let alone echo chambers), it is important to remember that the median number of different sources of news that people in the UK use on a weekly basis offline is two, and just one online (Newman et al. 2021). Search engines and social media do not vastly expand this number and it is not the case that people who use these platforms have very diverse and balanced news diets. Rather, they lead people to slightly more, and slightly more diverse, sources of news than what they seek out of their own volition.

The two main drivers of this are automated serendipity, where ranking algorithms may return a result in, for example, a search query from a source that people might not normally access directly (Fletcher and Nielsen 2018b), and incidental exposure, where people come across and read news articles while on, for example, a social media site they primarily use for other purposes (Fletcher and Nielsen 2018a). (Both effects are broadly aligned with the commercial self-interest of platform companies - automated serendipity creates an experience of variety, and incidental exposure can increase time spent on social media as people come across the occasional interesting article.)

These effects are not equally strong for everyone. Passive personalisation based on past behaviour may well make algorithms more likely to recommend more news to those who already engage with a lot of news (Thorson 2020), but they are particularly important - and arguably more beneficial - for those least likely to actively seek out a lot of news on their own, such as younger people and those with lower interest in news (Fletcher and Nielsen 2018a; Wojcieszak et al. 2021).

The role of interest leads us to demand, the final factor we will consider in this section. The main possible causal mechanism here is self-selection: that some people actively opt into echo chambers because they prefer news that aligns with and reinforces their pre-existing views (selective exposure to attitude-consistent information) or actively seek to avoid counter-attitudinal information (selective avoidance of cross-cutting exposure).

Research on self-selection is predominantly a mix of survey and passive tracking studies akin to those discussed above, which often have high external validity but can have limited internal validity, and experimental studies that have higher internal validity but often limited external validity because of the difficulties of creating a situation akin to what media users face outside the experiment.

Broadly, a number of studies find that while many people do engage in some degree of selective exposure, they do not necessarily engage in selective avoidance (Bos et al. 2016; Garrett 2009; 2013; Garrett and Stroud 2014; Jang 2014; Johnson et al.

2011; Kim and Lu 2020; Trilling and Schoenbach 2015). As Weeks et al. (2016, p. 263) write of the US context, "although partisans exhibit some preference for like- minded sources, we find no evidence that they avoid disagreeable information but rather continue to rely mostly on a common set of mainstream, general interest news outlets. These more mainstream sources provide information that at times challenges both Republicans' and Democrats' positions, yet neither make an attempt to avoid them."

This means, for example, that while those with highly partisan political views are significantly more likely to use partisan news media with a similar orientation, they are not necessarily less likely to use other news media with a different orientation.

Evidence from selective exposure experiments - which show different people's tendencies to select content they agree or disagree with - has indicated that the people most likely to choose pro-attitudinal content are those who have stronger partisan/ideological beliefs, are more certain about their beliefs, or who are more politically interested/engaged (Iyengar and Hahn 2009; Knobloch-Westerwick and Meng 2009; Kim and Lu 2020). Similarly, studies focused on specific social media also find that people most likely to be deep into like-minded communities are strong partisans (Barberá 2015; Boutyline and Willer 2017).

But, importantly, many people do not have particularly strongly held political views and do not primarily approach news and media through a political lens (Bos et al. 2016; Yang et al. 2020). Often, basic interest, in turn partly aligned with levels of education and income, is a more important factor.

In Europe, public service media often help bridge these gaps, with differences between those with low interest and high interest being smaller in countries like the UK that have widely used public service media (Castro-Herrero et al. 2018). But many people self-select away from politics and news, choosing entertainment content instead (Prior 2005), and people with more limited levels of formal education and lower levels of income generally use less news than more privileged parts of the population (Kalogeropoulos and Nielsen 2018).

This is a reminder that, while of great interest to politicians and political scientists, politics is not the only, or even main determinant of news and media use. Media use is often more shaped by habits that in turn reflect a mix of instrumental uses and preferences anchored in social contexts that often exhibit more significant homophily in terms of social class than in terms of politics (Bos et al. 2016; Dahlgren 2019; Dubois and Blank 2018; Garrett et al. 2013; Johnson et al. 2011; Skovsgaard et al. 2016; Van Aelst et al. 2017; Yang et al. 2020).

In summary, studies in the UK and several other countries, have found that algorithmic selection generally leads to slightly more diverse news use - the opposite of what the filter bubble hypothesis posits - but that self-selection, primarily among a small minority of highly partisan individuals, can lead people to opt in to echo chambers, even as the vast majority do not, and document that limited news use remains far more prevalent than echo chambers are.

Media use and polarisation ↑

Polarisation, in social science, refers to divisions between groups. It can be used to describe a situation where divisions are already sufficiently large to be considered polarised, or a process whereby divisions are becoming larger over time (even though they may still be quite small). Polarisation can take many forms and is not always intrinsically problematic (some things are worth disagreeing over, see Kreiss 2019).

Just as many assume that echo chambers are pervasive and filter bubbles are real - despite evidence to the contrary - there is widespread public and political concern over polarisation in many countries. Some surveys which aim to measure perceived polarisation suggest much of the public feel that the UK is more divided today than in the past.

Social scientists examine a range of different kinds of polarisation of the public, including ideological polarisation, affective polarisation, and news audience polarisation. As with any attempt to measure a change over time, decisions about what time frame to consider will influence conclusions, and often, there is little consistent data allowing for rigorous longitudinal analysis.

Ideological polarisation, sometimes termed issue polarisation, has been a long- standing focus of political science and focuses on divisions in public opinion on a range of different policy issues. Looking back several decades, comparative research based on the World Values Survey has found some support for the idea that Left/Right polarisation has decreased in many high-income democracies and electoral volatility increased, even as other divisions, sometimes over so-called "post-material" issues, have become more important (Dalton 2006; Ingelhart 2017). However, divisive elections in the last two decades have led to a resurgence of interest in whether political partisans' views have become more polarised again (Abramowitz 2010; Fiorina and Abrams 2008; Iyengar et al. 2012), with one summary in the United States concluding that while public opinion overall on many issues has not become markedly more polarised in recent years on average, it has increased among the most politically engaged (Prior 2013; see also Mason 2013). In the UK, in the longer term, the polarisation of party supporters has declined since the 1970s, as have both perceived polarisation and expert evaluations of polarisation (Rehm and Reilly 2010). Other analyses have also found declines in polarisation in the UK (Adams et al. 2012a; Adams et al. 2012b), but many of these studies are from before Brexit and other recent divisive political discussions.

Affective polarisation refers to how much opposing partisans dislike one another. Most research on affective polarisation has been conducted in the United States and, in contrast to ideological polarisation, affective polarisation clearly seems to be on the rise - as one team of researchers find that ordinary Americans increasingly dislike and distrust those from the other party (Iyengar et al. 2019; see also Mason 2013). In the UK, there is evidence that affective polarisation exists between Labour and Conservative voters and also around opinion-based groups that either support or oppose Brexit (Hobolt et al. 2021). Comparative work on affective polarisation is in its infancy, but a few studies have been published recently. They find that levels of affective polarisation vary greatly by country (complicating the notion that polarisation is pronounced everywhere) and document considerable variation in patterns over time (belying the notion that a single universal cause - for example the spread of the internet - is driving polarisation everywhere) (Gidron et al. 2019; Boxell et al. 2020; Reiljan 2020). In several of these studies, Britain is found to have higher levels of affective polarisation than multiparty political systems in other parts of Northern and Western Europe, though one of these studies actually suggests affective polarisation in the UK may have declined since the 1980s (Boxell et al. 2020).

News audience polarisation, finally, refers to the structure of aggregate public attention to news media, to whether a country is home to large news outlets with both strongly left- and strongly right-leaning audiences, as opposed to outlets with mostly mixed or centrist audiences (Fletcher et al. 2020a). Again, the situation in the United States - where highly partisan news brands including, most importantly, Fox News play an important role - has led some to suggest that news media use is increasingly fragmented and polarised. Despite the very real importance of some highly partisan brands (Benkler et al. 2018), even in the United States, Nelson and Webster's (2017) analysis of Comscore tracking data found that, despite huge choice, most people tend to congregate around a few popular news outlets and that all news sites - including partisan ones - attract reasonably ideologically diverse audiences. Comparative work based on survey data from a sample of 12 high-income democracies suggests that cross-platform (online and offline) news audience polarisation is highest in the United States but lower within Europe. The UK has relatively high levels of news audience polarisation by European standards - largely thanks to widely used partisan newspapers - but overall levels are still low (Fletcher et al. 2020a).

There is an extensive literature in political science and sociology about the drivers of polarisation, with considerable attention to elite cues from politicians (Rogowski and Sutherland 2016; Iyengar et al. 2012) and to social dynamics including social homophily and various kinds of social sorting - all predominantly rooted in our offline lives, where we work, who we spend time with, where we live (see e.g., Guess et al. 2018; McPherson et al. 2001; Mason 2015).

There is also some work on media, including media reporting about polarisation. US studies find that exposure to like-minded partisan media under experimental conditions can strengthen the views of already partisan individuals (Levendusky 2013). Panel survey work, which measures the same people's media use and attitudes at different points in time, has also found that using like-minded partisan media in the US can increase anger toward the 'other side' and make people more willing to share political information on social media (Hasell and Weeks 2016). At the same time, cross-cutting exposure, at least on social media, also seems to be able to increase polarisation, at least among political partisans (Bail et al. 2018).

Furthermore, experimental work finds that exposing people to media coverage about political polarisation may in itself increase perceptions of polarisation and contribute to increased dislike for the opposition (Levendusky and Malhotra 2016).

Work in the United States stresses that these factors are sometimes asymmetrical, in terms of the degree to which individual political leaders actively seek to polarise the public, and in terms of the role of individual news media - there is a growing literature documenting the impact of Fox News specifically (DellaVigna and Kaplan 2007; Hopkins and Ladd 2013). Furthermore, broader changes in both news supply and media use, suggesting a relative decline in coverage of and attention to local politics and more focus on often more divisive national politics, also seems to be a possible contributor to polarisation in the United States (Martin and McCrain 2019).

There is much less work from outside the United States and no clear overall set of convergent findings. Experimental work from the Netherlands, for example, has found that while people might have a tendency to engage in selective exposure, this does not necessarily polarise people's attitudes (Trilling et al. 2017). Yet Wojcieszak et al. (2018), analysing panel survey data in the Netherlands, found that people with strong opinions about the EU polarised in their views after being exposed to news about the EU.

In summary, the picture on polarisation is complex and research is often limited outside the United States. Overall, ideological polarisation has, in the long run, declined in many countries, but affective polarisation has in some cases, but not all, increased. News audience polarisation is much lower in most European countries, including the United Kingdom. Much depends on the specifics of individual countries and what point in time one measures change from, and there are no universal patterns, suggesting country-specific factors drive national developments, including most importantly the behaviour of political elites and social dynamics.

When it comes to media, there is limited research outside the US and this work does not always find the same patterns as those identified in the US but, at least in the specific context of the United States, it seems that exposure to like-minded political content can potentially polarise people or strengthen the attitudes of people with existing partisan attitudes, and that cross-cutting exposure can potentially do the same for political partisans.

Digital media and public discussions around science ↑

Virtually all the studies reviewed above on echo chambers, filter bubbles, and polarisation are concerned with the interplay between politics, news, and media use.

This work provides a set of basic findings about the dynamics of contemporary news media use, the relative importance of algorithmic ranking versus self-selection in shaping it, and how engagement with some forms of information can further strengthen already strongly held beliefs.

Many of these dynamics may also be relevant for understanding the role that digital media play in public discussions around science topics. But research in this area is largely separate from the political communication and media research traditions discussed above that have usually focused on politics specifically, or news and media use as a whole, rather than specific topics. And while terms like echo chambers, filter bubbles, and the like are beginning to feature in discussions among scientists and science communication scholars, these discussions, when research- based, are generally based on the research reviewed above (see e.g., Scheufele et al. 2017; Scheufele and Krause 2019; West and Bergstrom 2021). Empirical research specifically on the possibility of echo chambers and the like in online scientific discussions is still very limited.

There are different strengths and weaknesses of either looking at media use as a whole or focusing on discussions around different topics - and this can sometimes lead to different results and interpretations. Scholarship on selective exposure and polarisation around various science issues illustrates how the concepts, theories, and methods the research reviewed so far relies on can also shed light on science discussions but also underlines that dynamics are not always the same with these topics as with, say, party politics.

In the US, some studies have examined selective exposure around various science issues like genetically modified foods, nanotechnologies, stem cell research, and fracking (Jang 2013; Knobloch-Westerwick et al. 2015; Yeo et al. 2015). These studies have found evidence of selective exposure for some topics but, in general, the preference for like-minded information is less clear than it is for partisan political topics, it varies by subject, and sometimes shows opposite patterns in which people seek out opposing views (see Stroud 2017 for a review). Indeed, in the US, "not all science topics cohere with partisan perspectives" (Stroud 2017, p. 379) and it is likely that the strength and direction of these associations varies not only by topic but also from one country to the next.

That said, there are growing concerns about selective exposure in scientific domains that have become politically aligned, emotionally loaded, and more explicitly and actively politically polarised in some countries (e.g., Nisbet et al. 2015).

Elite cues seem critically important here. In making sense of how climate change became a more ideologically polarised issue in the United States over time, even as the scientific consensus grew stronger, Merkley and Stecula (2018) analysed news items over more than three decades and found that while Democratic politicians consistently acknowledged climate change in the media over time, Republican messages were ambiguous - and polarisation increased as more Republican-elected officials began actively and publicly denying climate change. They suggest that Republican voters' rejection of climate science may have been in part a direct response in opposition to cues from Democratic elites these voters regard with scepticism, a proposition they provide further evidence for in a separate study based on more than 200 surveys between 1984 and 2014 (Merkeley and Stecula 2020).

Similarly, Brulle et al. (2012, p. 185) argue "the most important factor in influencing public opinion on climate change [is] the elite partisan battle over the issue," and they show how US public opinion on the threat of climate change has been moved more by elite cues - in particular, Republican politicians' opposition to climate change bills - than by media coverage, which by and large mirrored those cues while also presenting the Democrats' position.

Analogous arguments have been made in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, where research in the US has shown polarisation in elite communication about the issue, with Democrats emphasising threats to public health and American workers, and Republicans placing greater emphasis on China and businesses early on in the pandemic (Green et al. 2020; see also Hart et al. 2020). Hamilton and Safford (2021) used survey data to show that trust in science agencies like the CDC declined rapidly among Republicans in the US but not Democrats, following Donald Trump's changing views toward the CDC, views that were in turn amplified by conservative media including Fox News. This further underlines how top-down cues from political elites, including most prominently the President, were crucial to the deep partisan divide that formed around the subject.

The relative absence of similar levels of polarisation in discussions around and public opinion on issues such as climate change and the coronavirus in many countries where political elites have behaved differently is a reminder of how important country-specific factors are, even as wider changes in the media system may be broadly similar. Content-analysis based research has in the past shown how, for example, news coverage of climate change is broadly based on the scientific consensus in countries where most elected officials recognise it but features climate change deniers and their views more prominently in countries where some politicians or even whole political parties have embraced these views (Painter and Ashe 2012). Work from Canada (Merkley et al. 2020) demonstrates the importance of cross-party consensus elite cues in shaping the public's perception of and response to COVID-19, just as work from Brazil (Gramacho et al. 2021) shows how very differently things developed in Brazil as Jair Bolsonaro's most avid supporters took their cues from the President.

A growing body of research has also sought to better understand the dynamics of public discussions around science online. Much of this work is not concerned with echo chambers, filter bubbles, and polarisation as defined here, but it can help us understand some of the ways in which digital media are used to discuss science.

In general, much of this research has documented a tendency for social media groups that actively discuss scientific issues to be made up of somewhat homogenous, segregated, and often polarised communities of interest with limited intersections between groups holding opposing views, and the vast majority of users on any given platform not taking any active role in any of these discussions of science. This is similar to broader dynamics online where communities of interest tend to coalesce, often around perfectly benign shared interests but sometimes around more ambiguous activities and, of course, in some instances, around shared interest in views that are demonstrably false and activities that are potentially harmful (Philips and Milner 2017).

Some of this research has compared differences between groups that form around science versus conspiracy news (Del Vicario et al. 2016a; Del Vicario et al. 2016b), whereas other research has focused on specific topics like vaccines (Cinelli et al. 2021; Cossard et al. 2020; Dunn et al. 2015; Schmidt et al. 2018), abortion (Cinelli et al. 2021), climate change (Williams et al. 2015), and most recently COVID-19 (Wang and Qian 2021).

In line with studies of political discussions online, people identified as active in these online discussions are often relatively small minorities who have strong attitudes on the subject (Williams et al. 2015), potentially skewing the online debate toward the more extreme attitudes of these active, vocal, opinionated minorities. In their analysis of the Italian vaccination debate on Twitter, Cossard et al. (2020) found differences in the structures of the polarised groups. Vaccine sceptics tended to form smaller but louder groups that were more tightly connected, whereas vaccine advocates tended to organise in a more hierarchical fashion around certain authoritative actors. Elsewhere, scientists have studied alternative media ecosystems involving websites and various other actors who repeatedly share the same disinformation, often across a wide variety of issues and topics, advancing political conspiracies alongside content such as climate science denial, anti-vaccine pseudoscience, and flat earth theory and trying to promote these on social media platforms such as Twitter to reach beyond those already actively involved in the communities in question (Starbird 2017; Starbird et al. 2019).

These studies are important and valuable for understanding online social dynamics and well-suited to provide evidence for self-selection, homophily, and polarisation dynamics between groups that focus on controversial topics (and how they may vary from one platform to another), but they are less helpful in examining the phenomenon of echo chambers as understood here - despite the occasional use of the term "echo chambers" in a broader sense of people being actively engaged in an online community of like-minded people. Because many of these are single- platform studies based on data from one social network, and often deliberately study already highly engaged and therefore unusual communities (rather than nationally representative samples or exhaustive studies of all users), we should be cautious about (a) generalising to the population at large, (b) generalising to discussion of other less divisive topics, and (c) whether they accurately describe the vast majority of social media users who are not engaged in these discussions, or have only the most peripheral contact with them.

In summary, public discussions around science online may exhibit some of the same dynamics as those observed around politics - with an important role for self- selection, elite cues, and small highly active communities with strong views in explaining the dynamics of these debates - but fundamentally, while important studies have been published, mostly from the US, there is at this stage limited empirical research on the possible existence, size, and drivers of echo chambers in public discussions around science. More broadly, years of research document the role political elites play in shaping both news coverage and public opinion around science issues as well.

Conclusion ↑

In this review, we have examined evidence concerning the existence, causes, and effects of online echo chambers and have considered what related research can tell us about scientific discussions online and how they might shape public understanding of science and the role of science in society.

There are a number of areas where our review suggests that there is a clear majority view in academic research, including most notably:

Politically partisan online news echo chambers are generally small - much smaller than is often assumed in public and policy debate.

Automated serendipity and incidental exposure mean that relying on search engines, social media, and other digital platforms using algorithmic ranking leads people to slightly more diverse news - the opposite of what the filter bubble hypothesis posits.

Self-selection, both along partisan lines and, importantly, in terms of levels of interest, plays a significant role in shaping news and media use.

There is no single uniform trend towards greater polarisation - ideological polarisation has declined in some countries, affective polarisation has increased, news audience polarisation varies greatly, and in every case, country-specific factors seem decisive, not a single global trend like the rise of the internet.

Elite cues continue to play an important role in shaping both news coverage and public opinion, with the behaviour of political parties and individual prominent politicians often contributing to polarisation, whether around ideological issues or science issues such as climate change.

Given the amount of research on these issues arriving at broadly similar conclusions, the burden of proof now, in our view, is on those arguing for alternative interpretations to provide systematic evidence.

Furthermore, there are several areas where there are some empirical studies but not necessarily convergent interpretations, or only convergent interpretations supported by data from a single or a few countries. These areas include, most notably:

News audience polarisation is higher online than offline in some but not all countries.

Engagement with partisan news and media can increase polarisation.

Cross-cutting exposure may also increase polarisation among partisans.

Relatively small minorities of unusually active and opinionated individuals often animate online debates, even as the vast majority of internet users pay little or no attention to these partisan discussions.

There is evidence for all these, but it is either mixed or exclusively from one country, so we cannot necessarily assume these findings apply everywhere.

Finally, there are many areas where there is at this point little empirical research to help us understand a situation that is rapidly evolving. These include, among other things:

Whether echo chambers and the like work broadly in the same ways around science issues as around more conventionally political issues.

How self-selection driven by forms of opinion other than political ones operate and how self-selection based on partisanship and/or interest shapes engagement with news and information around science.

The extent to which dynamics identified in studies of online news sites/apps and established digital platforms including search engines and social media are similar on less studied but potentially important platforms including messaging applications, video sites, and new social media platforms.

In closing, let us make three final points.

First, a large number of empirical studies documenting that echo chambers are smaller than commonly assumed, and a growing amount of research rejecting the filter bubble hypothesis should not be confused with a Panglossian belief that we live in the best of all possible worlds or that our increasingly digital, mobile, and platform-dominated media environment does not come with any serious societal challenges. There are many, including the frequently overlooked fact of pronounced inequality in news and information use documented by many of the studies reviewed here, as well as a multitude of others, such as widespread online harassment and abuse, various kinds of misinformation, often invasive data collection by dominant platforms, a serious disruption of the established business of news and market concentration, and many more issues beyond the scope of this review.

Second, the risks associated with people primarily seeking out attitude-consistent information, let alone living in bounded media spaces where their pre-existing views are rarely challenged, can be much smaller than many believe while still being present, and it is clearly possible for people to come to hold very polarised views - sometimes views that are contradicted by the best available scientific research - without living in echo chambers or filter bubbles. Sometimes minorities, however small, play an important role in driving public and policy debate and decision making. (As Guess (2021, p. 12) puts it, in the US context, "even if most Americans do not exist in online echo chambers, they are subject to the political influence of those who do.") And sometimes confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and social reinforcement from the communities we spent most of our offline lives with will mean we have very strong views, even as we also see a wide range of different kinds of information via news and media.

Third, research in this area is extensive in some respects, almost non-existent in others. Among other things, there is often a dearth of research outside the United States, much less research on scientific issues specifically than on politics and media use more generally, and little work on several important established platforms and many newer and smaller platforms - and all this work could be greatly facilitated if academic researchers had better access to data in a privacy compliant and secure way from platform companies.

Footnotes

Beyond the definitions we rely on here, the terms "echo chamber" and "filter bubble" are used in a variety of other often broad and ambiguous ways, both by academics and in public debate, and there is limited consensus on singular clear definitions.

And indeed, evidence from the US has shown that some who experience little or no cross-cutting exposure on Twitter still encounter opposing views via television news - suggesting that analysis of echo chambers based on Twitter data alone will overestimate their size (Eady et al. 2019).

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This literature review was published with the support of the Royal Society.
This report can be reproduced under the Creative Commons licence CC BY. For more information please go to this link.

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Echo chambers, filter bubbles, and polarisation: a literature review

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DOI: 10.60625/risj-etxj-7k60 Terms like echo chambers, filter bubbles, and polarisation are widely used in public and political debate but not in ways that are always aligned with, or based on, scientific work. And even among academic researchers, there is not always a clear consensus on exact definitions of these concepts.

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NASA wants to design and demonstrate a working nuclear thermal rocket by 2027.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson introduced the project on Tuesday (Jan. 24) during a presentation at the 2023 American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) SciTech Forum and Exposition held in National Harbor, Maryland. Nelson said that the agency will partner with the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency ( DARPA) in order to "develop and demonstrate advanced nuclear thermal propulsion, a revolutionary technology that will allow the United States to expand the possibilities for future human spaceflight missions."

Under the agreement, NASA will join DARPA's Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations, or DRACO, a program that began in 2021. The program seeks to develop a nuclear thermal engine that will be used by an experimental spacecraft designed by DARPA. DARPA will develop the nuclear reactor and engine for this nuclear rocket, which the agency and NASA hope to fly in an in-space demonstration as early as 2027. Nelson called the partnership an "exciting investment in the future of human space exploration" and "a major investment in getting to Mars."
Related: US military wants nuclear rocket ideas for missions near the moon
"DRACO will be a critical part of evaluating the technologies that will take us deeper into the solar system," NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy said during the presentation. "Our intent is to lead and develop a blueprint for human exploration and sustained presence throughout the solar system. That is a very important goal. And we think that these advanced technologies will be a critical part of it."

NASA and DARPA released an interagency agreement (opens in new tab) outlining the roles and responsibilities of each agency; the agreement grants NASA final authority over the nuclear thermal rocket engine's development and fabrication. However, the agreement grants DARPA authority over the "experimental NTR vehicle (X-NTRV)," the spacecraft that will be powered by the planned nuclear rocket engine, and DARPA will be responsible for operating and disposing of the X-NTRV in orbit.

"NASA has a long history of collaborating with DARPA on projects that enable our respective missions, such as in-space servicing," Melroy said. "Expanding our partnership to nuclear propulsion will help drive forward NASA's goal to send humans to Mars."

This vision for a nuclear rocket dates back decades (opens in new tab). NASA's Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application, or NERVA program, sought to launch a crewed Mars mission in 1979 powered by a nuclear rocket. The program was canceled in 1972 due to budget cuts and worries of escalating the Cold War.

Sending humans to Mars has become one of the primary spaceflight goals of government space agencies and private spaceflight firms alike. NASA's Artemis program is part of the agency's "Moon to Mars" vision that will leverage what NASA will learn from its planned lunar exploration to work toward establishing a human presence on the Red Planet.
Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: community@space.com.
SpaceX, meanwhile, says it will soon launch orbital flight of its Starship vehicle that the company plans on eventually landing on Mars; other private space companies are working to beat that goal.

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NASA and DARPA will build a nuclear rocket by 2027

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NASA wants to design and demonstrate a working nuclear thermal rocket by 2027. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson introduced the project on Tuesday (Jan. 24) during a presentation at the 2023 American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) SciTech Forum and Exposition held in National Harbor, Maryland.

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2028: Planned Deep Space Mission to Oumuamua

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2028: Planned Deep Space Mission to Oumuamua

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One of the most iconic mysteries of the last few years. The unusual shape of the object still fascinates people,. The possibility that Oumuamua could be an alien space ship cannot be discounted until we investigate it with a remote deep space probe.

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If launched by 2028, a spacecraft could catch up with 'Oumuamua in 26 years

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In October 2017, the interstellar object 'Oumuamua passed through our solar system, leaving many questions in its wake. Not only was it the first object of its kind ever observed, but the limited data astronomers obtained as it shot out of our solar system left them all scratching their heads.

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Rolls-Royce has received funding from the UK Space Agency to develop a nuclear reactor for a moon base.

The project will look into how nuclear power could be used to support a future base on the moon for astronauts.

Scientists and engineers at the British company are working on the microreactor programme to develop technology that will provide power needed for humans to live and work on Earth's natural satellite.

All space missions depend on a power source, to support systems for communications, life-support and science experiments.

Experts suggest nuclear power could dramatically increase the length of lunar missions.

The UK Space Agency has announced £2.9m of new funding for the project, which will deliver an initial demonstration of a UK lunar modular nuclear reactor.

This comes after a £249,000 study funded by the UK Space Agency in 2022.

The science minister George Freeman said: "Space exploration is the ultimate laboratory for so many of the transformational technologies we need on Earth: from materials to robotics, nutrition, cleantech and much more.

"As we prepare to see humans return to the moon for the first time in more than 50 years, we are backing exciting research like this lunar modular reactor with Rolls-Royce to pioneer new power sources for a lunar base.

"Partnerships like this - between British industry, the UK Space Agency and government - are helping to create jobs across our £16bn space tech sector and help ensure the UK continues to be a major force in frontier science."

Rolls-Royce plans to have a reactor ready to send to the moon by 2029.

It will work with a variety of collaborators including the University of Oxford, University of Bangor, University of Brighton, University of Sheffield's Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC) and Nuclear AMRC.

Compared with other power systems, a relatively small and lightweight nuclear microreactor could enable continuous power regardless of location, available sunlight and other environmental conditions.

Abi Clayton, director of future programmes for Rolls-Royce, said: "This funding will bring us further down the road in making the microreactor a reality, with the technology bringing immense benefits for both space and Earth.

"The technology will deliver the capability to support commercial and defence use cases alongside providing a solution to decarbonise industry and provide clean, safe and reliable energy."

Dr Paul Bate, chief executive of the UK Space Agency, said: "This innovative research by Rolls-Royce could lay the groundwork for powering continuous human presence on the moon, while enhancing the wider UK space sector, creating jobs and generating further investment."

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Rolls-Royce secures funds to develop nuclear reactor for moon base

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Rolls-Royce has received funding from the UK Space Agency to develop a nuclear reactor for a moon base. The project will look into how nuclear power could be used to support a future base on the moon for astronauts.

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The widespread sharing of information has been the mission of the internet. The ability for people to find knowledge and seek out what they want to know, learning from a vast global repository was the ambition of the earliest internet pioneers. It is possible that by the end of the 2020s we will reach a point where everyone will have access if they want it, through some facility - either a mobile network or a publicly allocated terminal, or a right to a connection at home. The right of access will begin to become enshrined in national laws.

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Why Internet Access Needs to Be Considered a Basic Human Right

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The internet has become an important tool in accessing many human rights.

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2029: First two stages of Surburban Rail Loop in Melbourne completed.

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2029: First two stages of Surburban Rail Loop in Melbourne completed.

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Suburban Rail Loop (SRL) is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to shape the future liveability, productivity and connectivity of Melbourne.

The 90km rail line will link every major rail line from the Frankston Line to the Werribee Line via Melbourne Airport, better connecting Victorians to jobs, retail, education, health services and each other.

Three transport super hubs at Clayton, Broadmeadows and Sunshine will connect regional services, so passengers outside Melbourne won't have to travel through the CBD to get to employment, world-class hospitals and universities in the suburbs.

Following the release of the comprehensive SRL Business and Investment Case and a detailed Environment Effects Statement, work is progressing on SRL East from Cheltenham to Box Hill.

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Suburban Rail Loop (SRL) is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to shape the future liveability, productivity and connectivity of Melbourne. The 90km rail line will link every major rail line from the Frankston Line to the Werribee Line via Melbourne Airport, better connecting Victorians to jobs, retail, education, health services and each other.

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Completion date is projected to be between 2029 and 2033.

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Britain's high-speed rail infrastructure project was given the go-ahead by the prime minister in February 2020 but ambitions for the extent of the scheme have since been curtailed .
What is HS2?
HS2 is a planned high-speed rail network initially set to link London and the West Midlands, with a further phase extending to Manchester and the East Midlands.

Britain's biggest infrastructure project has had support from governments of all stripes since it was first mooted more than a decade ago but it could be the 2040s before passenger services are operating on the full network.

HS2's inception follows the development of HS1, the high-speed line between London and Kent connecting the UK to routes on the European continent.

The aim is to run 18 trains an hour in each direction to and from London - at speeds of up to 224mph.

It involves the construction of more than 300 bridges and 70 viaducts for the London-West Midlands phase alone.

The project is designed to meet the long-term growth in demand for rail services, improve the reliability of the network, boost connectivity by making journeys faster and easier, and help economic growth across the UK.
What is the route?
Stations on the first phase of the line will be London Euston, Old Oak Common in west London, Birmingham Interchange and Birmingham Curzon Street.

The second phase will see trains head northwest to Manchester Airport and Manchester Piccadilly via Crewe.

They had also been planned to go northeast from Birmingham towards an East Midlands hub at Toton from where they would continue on the HS2 line to Leeds.

But the Leeds section has now been scrapped and the Toton plan abandoned, meaning the high-speed line will instead stop at the existing East Midlands Parkway station, with trains then running into Nottingham and Derby.

It is estimated that when these sections are complete, a journey from London to Manchester will take one hour and 11 minutes, while London to Nottingham will be 57 minutes.
Where did it all begin?
In 2009, under Labour transport secretary Geoff Hoon, the government set up a company, HS2 Ltd, to look at proposals for a new high-speed line.

The following year, the Department for Transport (DfT) set out plans for a Y-shaped network connecting London and the cities in the North.

Later under the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, it was confirmed that the line would be built in two phases.

Phase 1 would run from London to the West Midlands, beginning in 2026.

Phase 2, extending from the West Midlands to cities in the North, would start in 2032-33.
What's the hold up?
By July 2019, the government accepted that timetable was no longer feasible and the expected completion dates were pushed back.

Reasons for the delay include a year spent revising cost and schedule estimates for Phase 1 and more time being needed for construction at various sites.

In August 2019, the government announced an independent review of the programme to advise on whether to proceed.

Meanwhile, the government's Infrastructure Projects Authority (IPA) has flagged serious concerns about the project.

In its 2020-21 annual report, the IPA gave Phase 2b of the scheme - comprising extensions to the north - a red rating meaning successful delivery "appears to be unachievable".

Phase 1 has an amber/red rating meaning delivery is "in doubt, with major risks or issues apparent in a number of key areas".

Phase 2a - the section from the West Midlands to Crewe - has an amber rating meaning it is "feasible" but that "significant issues already exist requiring management attention".
What has changed since 2020?
The Leeds extension fell victim to the government's integrated rail plan (IRP), which reconsidered the earlier plans partly because of rising costs.

It decided instead to upgrade existing lines serving the region as part of a wider £96bn strategy focused on the Midlands and the North.

Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, said it would mean passengers seeing real improvements a decade earlier than they would have expected.

Phase 1 of HS2 remains pencilled in for completion between 2029 and 2033 and Phase 2a to Crewe "by around 2035".

But the completion of high-speed links to Manchester and the East Midlands are bracketed as something customers "could see" by the early to mid 2040s - having previously been estimated at 2036-40.
How much is it going to cost?
At the time of the 2010 election, estimates of the cost of HS2 ranged upwards of £20bn.

By January 2012, when the broad route of the proposed scheme was in place, this had risen to £32.6bn.

In June 2013, the coalition government increased the overall cost to £42.6bn and in November 2015, when the figures were updated, in line with inflation, to £55.7bn.

In early 2021, the DfT's latest estimate of the cost of HS2 has spiralled even higher stood and early in 2021 stood at between £72bn and £98bn.

Lord Berkeley, former deputy chairman of the government's independent review into the project, had said it could climb to £107bn.

The curtailment of HS2's eastern leg looks likely to curb costs but to what extent remains unclear from figures published in the IRP.

They showed that costs for the first phase and western extension of the project, added to money already spent, were now estimated to total just under £68bn, with an unspecified part of £12.8bn in "eastern core network" spend also going on HS2.

That appeared to suggest a total of around £70bn.
What are the arguments for and against?
Governments have insisted that HS2 - whose cost will largely be borne by the taxpayer - is a good investment for the country.

They say it will deliver growth, particularly in the English regions, and have a positive impact on jobs.

Those opposed to it dispute those claims, saying that the money would be better spent on improving rail capacity elsewhere, and that it will blight homes and damage the environment where the route is to be built.
Why have the costs risen so much?
A report in January 2020 by the National Audit Office (NAO) - the spending watchdog - said HS2 Ltd had not accounted for the level of uncertainty and risk in the plans.

It used a method for calculating how much extra might be needed "that was not appropriate for a programme at such an early stage of development".

Among the factors causing higher costs were commitments to increase the length of tunnelling and to erect noise barriers.

The NAO said the government and HS2 Ltd had "not adequately managed risks to taxpayer money".

More money was needed for building bridges, tunnels and stations than first thought.

Complex issues involving the discovery of asbestos and archaeological remains, and the need to divert more gas and power lines than expected, have caused problems too.

Extra cash was also needed to buy up properties to make way for the rail line.

Even after these have been accounted for, there is further uncertainty about the cost of extending London's Euston station to accommodate high speed trains.
What has actually been done so far?
Construction began in September 2020.

The government said in October 2021 that work was "well under way" at 340 sites between London and the West Midlands

As of that time, £15.5bn had been spent on the project.

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HS2 explained: What is it, how much will it cost, and what's changed?

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Britain's high-speed rail infrastructure project was given the go-ahead by the prime minister in February 2020 but ambitions for the extent of the scheme have since been curtailed . What is HS2? HS2 is a planned high-speed rail network initially set to link London and the West Midlands, with a further phase extending to Manchester and the East Midlands.

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2030: Compressed air battery storage in China reaches 30%

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2030: Compressed air battery storage in China reaches 30%

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Alternatives to lithium battery technology are being worked on. One of these, compressed air battery storage is an industrial energy solution.

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WORLD RECORD energy tech displacing lithium ion!

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2030s: Hydrogen Fuel Cell Technology Must Prove Itself.

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2030s: Hydrogen Fuel Cell Technology Must Prove Itself.

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In the early 2030s, hydrogen fuel cell power generation systems need to prove their worth as a viable alternative to fossil fuels. Current research indicates that the process is very inefficient and the multi-staged system does not allow opportunities to improve this.

Petroleum companies and vehicle manufacturers have invested huge amounts of money in this technology. If this fails, this might be the reason why these companies lose their monopoly on the transport industry.

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Car manufacturers these days seem to be in two camps when it comes to their views about the feasibility of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. Some companies are currently selling FCVs and they expect their popularity to increase in the future, while others are openly shunning the tech, with no plans to ever get in on that market.

Among hydrogen fuel cell vehicles' strongest proponents are Toyota, Hyundai and BMW, but names such as Renault, Daimler or GM are also working on practical applications for FCV powertrains. These are some of the industry's most important companies, as well as electrification leaders, and they seem very committed to the hydrogen cause.

AutoTrader UK published a video trying to bring some more clarity on this often controversial topic. According to the presenter, Rory Reid, hydrogen vehicles do make sense, and the reason they have not become more mainstream is quite complicated and nuanced.

First he explains how a hydrogen fuel cell is able to produce electricity, and we have to say this is one of the better explanations that we've come across, so if you're not completely sure you know how this tech works, you might want to pay closer attention around the video's two-minute mark.

Another very important point raised in this video has to do with the electricity needed to produce hydrogen through water electrolysis. Hydrogen is very abundant, but we also need to expend energy in order to obtain it in a pure form, and that requires electricity - how that electricity is produced ultimately determines the environmental impact of the vehicle that uses.

This is usually quite a hot topic of debate, so let us know in the comments what your thoughts on the topics raised in the video are, or if you think something was missed and needed to be said.

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Video Analyzes Whether Hydrogen Cars Are A Dead End

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Car manufacturers these days seem to be in two camps when it comes to their views about the feasibility of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. Some companies are currently selling FCVs and they expect their popularity to increase in the future, while others are openly shunning the tech, with no plans to ever get in on that market.

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2030: Completion of Hydrogen Gas Pipeline between France and Spain

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2030: Completion of Hydrogen Gas Pipeline between France and Spain

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Hydrogen is useful for a variety of different processes. The development of a direct gas pipeline between France and Spain provides opportunities for collaborative development of hydrogen based (and hydrogen use) technology.

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The undersea pipeline between Barcelona and Marseille is to only carry hydrogen and should be completed by 2030, leaders said on Friday.

The H2MED project, agreed upon between the leaders of France, Portugal and Spain in October, was initially meant to first carry natural gas.

But speaking following a trilateral meeting ahead of a summit of EUMED leaders in Alicante, Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa confirmed that the new corridor will be "exclusively dedicated to green hydrogen".

The pipeline should cost around €2.5 billion, according to Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, and enable the transport of two million tonnes of hydrogen per year.

French President Emmanuel Macron, for his part, confirmed that the three countries will submit the project to the European Commission before by December 15 to have it declared as a "project of common interest". This would enable it to claim up to 50% of its cost from EU funds.

Macron also estimated that it should be completed by 2030.

The EU has made hydrogen the cornerstone of its strategy to reach carbon neutrality by 2050 with the share of hydrogen in the bloc's energy mix seen reaching up to 20% by mid-century.

It has also responded to Russia's war in Ukraine by unveiling a €210 billion plan, called RePowerEU, to speed up the energy transition, diversify energy supplies and boost connections between member states.

"The Russian war against Ukraine has made it quite clear that we need to reinforce our energy security in Europe. Obviously, this security entails increasing our ability to produce energy without relying on third parties. And also, even if we are forced to import some energy, it's important to drive diversify the sources and routes taken by energy imports. The more diversification, the less dependency we will have," Costa told reporters.

Also present at the meeting in Alicante, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the H2MED project "goes in the right direction" as it "has the potential to help us build a real European hydrogen backbone."

"We will produce ten million tonnes of renewable hydrogen in the EU by 2030 and we plan to import in addition another 10 million tonnes. Hydrogen that will have to reach our industry. This is why we also identified a series of strategic corridors including one crossing Europe from West to East, via the Iberian Peninsula."

"This is why today I warmly welcome this agreement between France, Spain and Portugal," she said.

Portugal currently produces the most affordable renewable hydrogen in the EU, according to a report by Hydrogen Europe, which also estimated that decarbonisation with hydrogen will require $15 trillion between 2022 and 2050.

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Hydrogen pipeline between Spain and France to be complete by 2030

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The undersea pipeline between Barcelona and Marseille is to only carry hydrogen and should be completed by 2030, leaders said on Friday. The H2MED project, agreed upon between the leaders of France, Portugal and Spain in October, was initially meant to first carry natural gas.

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2030s: Universal Basic Income Crisis Point

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2030s: Universal Basic Income Crisis Point

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There is a political divide over the provision of a state's welfare to it's citizens. This divide is focused around one of the individualist principles of capitalism - the idea that we make the most of opportunities and better ourselves economically through individual achievement.

This divide is reinforced by inter-generational experience. Why should young people 'get a hand out' when older people did not?

When manufacturing and automation reaches a certain point, and the cost of means testing state benefits becomes demonstrably more expensive than providing a basic income to all citizens of a nation, there will be a change. This change will require a shift in cultural perceptions in some societies, particularly the United Kingdom.

In some nations, it will be in the economic interests of the public and private sector to support citizens with a share of state revenue. The detail of these plans will be different in different locations, but once a successful model is adopted in a nation state, others will see the benefit.

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Brits support universal basic income by 20-point margin

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Exclusive: A majority of voters in the UK support a guaranteed monthly income from the state in every region, in both major social classes and in all age groups under 65.

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2030s: Battery storage solutions deployed to supplement 'National Grid' infrastructures. 

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2030s: Battery storage solutions deployed to supplement 'National Grid' infrastructures. 

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A variety of different battery storage technologies will be deployed to support home energy generation and storage. The dependency on Lithium storage will be phased out as nations look to ensure they are not dependent on a single source and single state or corporate provider.

Alternative sources may include, ionised sodium, green hydrogen, lithium sulphur and solid state batteries.

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The world needs more power, preferably in a form that's clean and renewable. Our energy-storage strategies are currently shaped by lithium-ion batteries - at the cutting edge of such technology - but what can we look forward to in years to come?
New generation of advanced li-ion batteries is expected to be deployed before the first generation of solid state batteries. They'll be ideal for use in applications such as Energy Storage Systems for renewables and transportation ( marine, railways, aviation and off road mobility) where high energy, high power and safety is mandatory.

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Three battery technologies that could power the future

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The world needs more power, preferably in a form that's clean and renewable. Our energy-storage strategies are currently shaped by lithium-ion batteries - at the cutting edge of such technology - but what can we look forward to in years to come?

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2030: United Kingdom's Position as a Top Ten Economy Under Threat.

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2030: United Kingdom's Position as a Top Ten Economy Under Threat.

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Economic projections indicate that the United Kingdom will be overtaken by members of the 'Emerging Seven' economies.

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China and India will overtake the US as the world's largest economies by 2030, with the UK falling out of the top ten entirely, according to a major new report by Standard Chartered.

Using a combination of purchasing power parity (PPP), exchange rates and nominal GDP, analysts at the bank predict China will most likely become the world's biggest economy by some point in 2020.

Experts are divided on whether GDP by PPP, which accounts for diverging purchasing power between rich and poor countries, is a better indicator of economic wellbeing compared to simple market exchange rates.

"Some economists argue market exchange rates give a better indication of the relative importance of national economies in the global trade and financial system", says Ben Chu in The Independent, "but other economists argue that PPP gives a better indication of shifts in a developing country's domestic consumer demand."

By using PPP, Standard Chartered have estimated that by 2030, the size of China's economy will be $64.2 trillion, with India's at $46.3 trillion and the United States' just $31 trillion.

" India will likely be the main mover, with its trend growth accelerating to 7.8% by the 2020s partly due to ongoing reforms, including the introduction of a national goods and services tax (GST) and the Indian Bankruptcy Code (IBC)," the bank said.

"India's rise will also reflect a growing trend of Asia becoming the dominant region of the planet economically speaking as the size of its output starts to match the size of its population," says Business Insider.

By 2030 seven of the 10 largest economies will be in Asia. Asian GDP will account for roughly 35% of global GDP, up from 28% last year, and just 20% in 2010; the equivalent to the output of both the eurozone and the US combined.

Much of this has been driven by the rise of the global middle class, which Standard Chartered predicts will encompass a majority of the world's population by 2020.

The big losers from this shift in the global balance of power will be historic western powerhouses. The UK and France will fall out of the top ten largest world economies altogether, with Indonesia, Turkey and Egypt taking their place.

The World Bank expects Egypt to grow by 5.6% this year, making it the fastest growing economy in the Middle East and North Africa, reports Xinhua.

"Yet assuming an uninterrupted catch-up path for poorer countries is questionable," says Chu.

"Crises are inevitable. A few years ago many economists were projecting rapid growth in Brazil, but instead the country fell into a savage recession. One cannot rule out such a temporary reversal for China or India," he writes.

Standard Chartered's top 10 economies by nominal GDP using PPP in 2030 (in trillions of dollars):

1. China $64.2

2. India $46.3

3. US $31.0

4. Indonesia $10.1

5. Turkey $9.1

6. Brazil $8.6

7. Egypt $8.2

8. Russia $7.9

9. Japan $7.2

10. Germany $6.9

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UK to 'drop out of top 10 world economies by 2030' | The Week UK

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China and India will overtake the US as the world's largest economies by 2030, with the UK falling out of the top ten entirely, according to a major new report by Standard Chartered. Using a combination of purchasing power parity (PPP), exchange rates and nominal GDP, analysts at the bank predict China will most likely become the world's biggest economy by some point in 2020.

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Current investment projects are identifying the early 2030s as the time for a 6G network to be established in the UK. This will enable greater data bandwidth, allowing live streaming of a variety of more complex applications.

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Everything you need to know about 6G mobile connectivity

Yes, you read that right - 6G. It might seem like only yesterday that 4G was the new kid in town, or that the promise of 5G was all anyone could talk about, but now the hype is building about the next big thing in mobile connectivity. But while there is a lot of buzz around 6G, what do we actually know about it so far?

What does 6G mean?

6G is the sixth generation of wireless mobile technology. It has five predecessors, starting with 1G, which was still analogue technology, and followed by 2G, which was digital and made text messages possible. 3G enabled the smartphone and video calls, and 4G, the current standard worldwide, brought with it the capabilities to support our modern-day, digital lifestyles. The latest available generation, 5G, is still being rolled out all over the world. It can deliver the faster data transfer speeds and low latency needed to keep up with emerging technologies such as AR and the ever-expanding Internet of Things.

As with the generations before it, 6G will improve on the capabilities of its predecessors, offering faster and more advanced mobile broadband for its users. However, we don't yet know exactly what form that will take.

What will 6G be used for?

There are currently no standards set for 6G as it's in the very early stages of research and development. But that's not to say there's nothing to talk about here - after all, 5G was well on its way to becoming a usable technology before solid standards were agreed by the GSMA.

One main feature of 6G is it will be fast. While 5G is already considered to be pretty speedy, with a 20 Gbits/sec peak data rate, 6G could offer peak data rates 50 times faster, at 1,000 Gbits/sec. That's according to Samsung at least, which is already working to develop this next generation of communications technology.

This company first announced it was starting research into 6G in mid-2019 and in July 2020 its Advanced Communications Research Center published a whitepaper - The Next Hyper-Connected Experience for All. In it, the company says both machines and humans will consume 6G equally, and that it will facilitate high-fidelity mobile holograms and "truly immersive extended reality", among other breakthroughs.

Others have described it as delivering information "instantly" or at the speed of human thought.

Theodore S. Rappaport, founder of NYU WIRELESS, told CNN Business in February: "Work at New York University shows that by 2035, 6G will usher in the ability to send wireless signals at the rate of human computation.

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"Dubbed 'wireless cognition' by researchers, 6G could mean that human intelligence could eventually be sent over the air instantaneously. Remote control robots and artificial intelligence applications with human-like capabilities could be enabled over 6G cellphones (sic)."

When will I get 6G?

Before you get too excited by the thought of wireless cognition or being able to download nearly 150 movies to your mobile device in a second, it's important to note that 6G remains very much in the early stages of research.

Finland's University of Oulu says "fundamental research is 10-15 years ahead of industrial standards". This chimes with statements from others researching the technology, including Samsung and Ericsson, that 6G won't come to market until 2030 at the earliest.

Although you may start to see 6G technology making headlines - for example, there are reports of China having sent "the world's first 6G satellite" into space - we will not know until the telecoms industry agrees on the specifications of 6G whether these technologies actually meet the standards.

And considering how slow the roll-out of 5G has been, both in terms of network infrastructure and handset availability, it's unlikely 6G will become commonplace before 2035.

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What is 6G and how far are we from rollout? | IT PRO

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Everything you need to know about 6G mobile connectivity Yes, you read that right - 6G. It might seem like only yesterday that 4G was the new kid in town, or that the promise of 5G was all anyone could talk about, but now the hype is building about the next big thing in mobile connectivity.

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A planned return to the Moon is part of a detailed economic strategy towards making space a viable market. A permanent base on the Moon provides a starting point for additional exploration of our solar system.

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The US wants to build a long-term human outpost on the moon by around 2030. Here is all the tech that will be needed, from a space station in lunar orbit to a way to avoid 'space hay fever'

The most powerful rocket ever built sits on a launchpad in Florida. Over an intercom, crowds of onlookers listen to the countdown - "4, 3, 2..." - and then the bottom of the rocket begins to rumble. The vibrations first travel through the soles of the watchers' feet and then hit their bodies like an ocean wave. Jets of steam and fire ricochet off the concrete, and suddenly the rocket is blasting skyward. The astronauts within watch the countryside shrink below them as they begin their journey to the moon.

This scene could be from six decades ago - or it could be from just a few years in the future. The launches of the Artemis missions that the US hopes will soon return people to the moon will look very similar to the Apollo launches of the 1960s. But that is where the similarities end. "Apollo was awesome, but a lot of it was to just prove that we could do it," says NASA's Steve Creech. "I'm not saying it wasn't important, but this time we want to do it in a way that's sustainable and that leads to next steps." In other words, this isn't just about going back to the moon. It is the first glimmerings of what many hope will be a sustained campaign of human space exploration.

This article is part of a special package in which we explore:

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NASA is planning a permanent moon base. What will it take to build it?

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The US wants to build a long-term human outpost on the moon by around 2030. Here is all the tech that will be needed, from a space station in lunar orbit to a way to avoid 'space hay fever' The most powerful rocket ever built sits on a launchpad in Florida.

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2032: Emerging Space Manufacturing Industry

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2032: Emerging Space Manufacturing Industry

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There are significant advantages to manufacturing certain items in space. The vacuum and lack of gravity provides an environment that can be useful when developing certain products.

Additionally, there are significant resources available in the solar system which may become accessible once this industry emerges.

Manufacturing in space will require significant levels of automation. It is hoped that the developing industries around orbital deployment and missions to the Moon and Mars will encourage the creation of facilities for manufacture and assembly in orbit and beyond.

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VP of manufacturing, technology and innovation at . Over 20 years of experience helping global teams deploy cutting-edge manufacturing.
The idea of manufacturing in space is not that far out - and I mean that literally and figuratively.

In the '60s, the concept certainly was, as factories in space were limited to Spacely Space Sprockets or Cogswell's Cogs from the TV series The Jetsons. Fast-forward to today, we're getting closer and closer to the reality that space is open for business, and the potential is much greater and more lucrative than anything Cosmo Spacely or W.C. Cogswell ever could imagine.

Earthly advances in manufacturing automation and smart, "lights out" factories will be right at home when transplanted into outer space - at least that's the growing sentiment of manufacturing experts and space enthusiasts. After all, the International Space Station (ISS) has been using 3D printing since 2014, setting the stage to support long-term space expeditions where on-demand digital manufacturing can immediately produce whatever tools, parts and products are needed.

Innovators should not be limited to the tools they are given - or the planet they are on. That said, on earth, we are limited to what we can engineer according to gravity, as well as the laws of nature and physics. But what can be manufactured in an environment that is not constricted in those ways? Let your imagination take flight.
Emerging In-Space Economy
Made in Space, Inc. has been delivering next-gen manufacturing capabilities in orbit to support exploration objectives and national security priorities. Last September, the company sent the first ceramic manufacturing facility to the International Space Station. The goal: demonstrate the ability to make turbine components with "higher strength and lower residual stress, due to a reduction in defects caused by gravity." If successful, this effort will dramatically increase the commercial value of the ISS.

A multitude of technologies can benefit dramatically if made in space. Take fiber optic cabling, for instance. While ZBLAN is considered the most stable and popular fluoride glass because it offers one-tenth the signal loss of silica-based fibers, it's tricky to make. At least on earth, where gravity can cause small crystals to form that lessen signal strength when turned into long cables. Making these fibers in space, however, eliminates the crystals altogether, so the space-age version promises to transmit more data over much longer spans.

Many innovative materials with scientific applications are being designed on earth, but the laws of nature apply limits. Taking them to a brand-new workplace facility - one not constrained by gravity and gas composition - represents a major boost to the emerging in-space economy. Manufacturing in microgravity and in manufacturing environments with unique gaseous compositions should improve the manufacturing of metal alloys, for instance, as elements can combine more consistently and efficiently to yield superior products with novel structures and properties.
Addressing Manufacturing Megatrends
According to Erik Kulu, a systems engineer who runs the Factories in Space website, mining materials from asteroids is poised to become a $1 trillion business. He expects in-space manufacturing to be 10 times as lucrative, thanks to the novel materials and products that can be made in space's unique microgravity environs.

Other manufacturing innovators envision a move to space as an excellent strategy for extending supply chain resiliency beyond current global boundaries. Bringing in a steady supply of electronic components and materials from earth to outer-space manufacturing plants is an opportunity to expand current footprints without the risk of climate-changing pollutants that are impacting earth. There's also a groundswell of interest in harnessing limitless solar power, as well as greater security and care using nuclear energy to further transform manufacturing in space.

Last October, the Saudi Space Commission hosted the inaugural meeting of space agency leaders that belong to G20 countries to explore the final frontier. The United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) both participated in the meeting, which addressed a variety of themes and megatrends, including:

* Space as an enabler of green economies.

* Connectivity and communication in space (low-earth orbit satellites).

* The power of space to help society and world economies respond to pandemics.

* Commercial transportation services, space stations, etc.

* Asteroid mining and space resources advances.

* Increasing momentum for space exploration and settlement.

* Space tourism.

* Deep-space missions.

The same manufacturing rigor applied on earth will be needed to support these megatrends, all of which are poised to jumpstart the in-space economy. However, we cannot simply migrate well-controlled and proven manufacturing processes to space and expect they will produce the same or improved outcomes.
Sound Business Planning Spurs Innovation
There are potential unknowns everywhere. Hopefully, artificial intelligence, along with predictive analytics and machine learning, will help by distilling massive amounts of data, extracting meaningful business insights.

So, what's the best way to turn space into manufacturing's new frontier? It comes down to what most manufacturing innovators do best: constantly push the technology envelope without losing sight of strategic business priorities. I'm reminded of some great stories shared by Burt Rutan, who was a keynote speaker when our company opened its Blue Sky Innovation Center in San Jose in 2015.

We were focused on the future of manufacturing, and Rutan was full of anecdotes and advice collected from his exploits in designing game-changing spacecraft, including SpaceShipOne. As the first privately funded spacecraft to enter space in 2004, Rutan blazed the way for devotees of modern-day space exploration, including Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

Clearly, this kind of space mission is going to require cooperation among fearless explorers and forward-thinking organizational leaders. The prospects for manufacturing in space seem as big as the galaxy itself. While the ideas might be in outer space, our mindsets and methodologies must be firmly based on the best practices and world-class manufacturing principles developed on earth.

The opportunity to extend the boundaries of traditional manufacturing into space is compelling and exciting on so many levels. Someday soon, it will not matter whether your factory is on the moon, Mars or Milwaukee - because when it comes to manufacturing in space, the sky is no longer the limit.

Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?

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Council Post: Manufacturing In Outer Space: Not Such A Far-Out Idea

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The prospects for manufacturing in space seem as big as the galaxy itself. While the ideas might be in outer space, our mindsets and methodologies must be firmly based on the best practices and world-class manufacturing principles developed on earth.

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Robots to do 39% of domestic chores by 2033, say experts

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Researchers quizzed 65 AI experts on which tasks robots are likely to do in the near future.

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After the Moon, comes Mars. A landing on the red planet is notionally identified as being an event in the 2040s.

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When NASA sends humans to the moon for the first time in more than half a century, one lucky astronaut will go down in history for becoming the first woman on the moon. Then it won't be long before we see the first woman on Mars, and she just might beat the first man there, according to NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine.

"We could very well see the first person on Mars be a woman," Bridenstine told reporters on Friday (Oct. 18) during a news conference about the first all-woman spacewalk. "I think that could very well be a milestone," he added.

NASA currently has no concrete plans for landing humans on Mars - the moon is the agency's first priority - but Bridenstine has said that the first crewed Mars landing could happen sometime in the 2030s. Meanwhile, the private spaceflight company SpaceX is working on its Starship Mars-colonizing rocket, which could help NASA send those astronaut pioneers to the Red Planet.
Related: Women in Space: A Gallery of Firsts
"If my 11-year-old daughter has her way, we'll have a woman on Mars in the not-too-distant future," Bridenstine said, adding that whoever ends up going to Mars is probably too young to have already been selected to join NASA's astronaut corps at this time. However, the soon-to-be first woman on the moon will likely be selected from NASA's current pool of active astronauts.
Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: community@space.com.
NASA has not yet announced who will be the first woman on the moon, but whoever she may be, she's scheduled to land in 2024. That moon landing mission is part of NASA's Artemis program, which is the agency's precursor to establishing a permanent human presence on and around the moon - something that may help pave the way to Mars.

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The 1st Human on Mars May Be a Woman, NASA Chief Says

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When NASA sends humans to the moon for the first time in more than half a century, one lucky astronaut will go down in history for becoming the first woman on the moon. Then it won't be long before we see the first woman on Mars, and she just might beat the first man there, according to NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine.

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2035: ‘Acute’ lithium shortages forecast by 2035, as battery supply chains expand.

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2035: ‘Acute’ lithium shortages forecast by 2035, as battery supply chains expand.

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The profusion of different battery technologies being worked on should provide a selection of alternatives to Lithium-Ion. However, if not, by this point, the world's supply of lithium will be running out.

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Released earlier this week, BCG's report on lithium supply chains looks at the projected rise in lithium demand as the use of lithium-ion batteries grows worldwide, both for large-scale storage applications and for the electrification of transport. It predicts a sharper rise than previously expected, amid the rush to end Russian fossil fuel import use in many geographies, primarily Europe.

The report outlines how 90% of the grid-scale energy storage batteries installed to date have been lithium-ion, predicting that this will remain the most popular energy storage technology for more than a decade despite a scaling-up of less commercially mature alternatives.

Increased electric vehicle (EV) production is named as the other major driver for increasing lithium demand over the next 12 years. BCG estimates that 59% of all cars, vans and other light vehicles sold globally in 2035 will be battery-electric - either fully electric or hybrid with a battery.

"Of course, alternatives to lithium-ion batteries as storage options for vehicles and power grids are in development," the report states. "For the foreseeable future, however, none of these will offer the combination of cost, weight, and volumetric energy density of lithium-ion batteries. Nor is their production reaching the scale needed for the massive volumes that will be required."

The report predicts that expanding mining projects and increased recycling will enable global lithium supply to continue exceeding demand until at least 2025, and potentially 2030. However, it states that the most likely case-scenario in 2030 is a 4% shortfall between supply and demand.

This shortfall, BCG forecasts, is likely to become far more severe and become "chronic" by the mid-2030s. It forecasts that supply in 2035 could be 24% lower than demand. The report outlines that "dramatically" increasing production of virgin lithium is unlikely to be possible, using existing mining approaches. This is because it is concentrated in a handful of places and because mining poses environmental challenges such as soil and water pollution.

Regarding the concentration of lithium mines, McKinsey estimates that 98% of all global production in 2020 took place in China, Latin America and Australia. Scenes of pollution from Chile's Atacama salt flat, and similar locations in Bolivia, Mexico and Argentina, have been in the headlines recently. Because production is so concentrated, the supply chain is vulnerable to disruption, BCG's report explains.

Some private firms in the US are keen to enter the lithium mining sector, but have faced fierce opposition. Similar stories are also unfolding in Serbia and Portugal. BCG is warning that the discovery of new large lithium deposits will not guarantee new supply, with residents and governments increasingly concerned about the potential environmental impact of extraction.

However, other nations are likely to emerge as new lithium producers, it concludes, due to legislation already in the pipeline. The US Government's Inflation Reduction Act provides incentives for EVs built locally, but the incentive package is greater for manufacturers using critical minerals from domestic sources of nations with which the US has free-trade deals. BCG also floats the potential of lithium production in Europe and India.

The report also highlights the opportunity for established lithium-producing nations such as China to become leaders in recycling. It spotlights how national governments will need to collaborate with the finance sector, automotive firms, mining companies and waste management experts to expand this nascent market.

"Meeting the explosive growth in demand for lithium products in the coming years poses a host of daunting challenges," the report summarises, "but these challenges must be met if the transition to renewable energy and the global fight against climate change are to stay on course."

Earlier this year, through our innovation partnership with Springwise, we covered progress on work to extract lithium from granite quarries in Cornwall. You can read that article here.

© Faversham House Ltd 2022 edie news articles may be copied or forwarded for individual use only. No other reproduction or distribution is permitted without prior written consent.

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'Acute' lithium shortages forecast by 2035, as battery supply chains expand - edie

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Released earlier this week, BCG's report on lithium supply chains looks at the projected rise in lithium demand as the use of lithium-ion batteries grows worldwide, both for large-scale storage applications and for the electrification of transport. It predicts a sharper rise than previously expected, amid the rush to end Russian fossil fuel import use in many geographies, primarily Europe.

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2035: United States Deploys Sixth Generation Jet Aircraft (NGAD)

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2035: United States Deploys Sixth Generation Jet Aircraft (NGAD)

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The American NGAD jet fighter is due to be deployed in the 2030s.

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Latest Asian, Middle-East, EurAsian, Indian News

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In what could be seen as a stark departure from its traditional practice, the US Navy's proposed budget for the 2024 Fiscal Year includes almost $1.53 billion for developing a Next-Generation Fighter aircraft, popularly known as the F/A-XX.
The US Department of Navy officially published its budget proposal for the fiscal year 2024 on March 13, including budget requests for the US Marine Corps.

The FA-XX program stands out because, unlike the US Air Force (USAF), which has been more forthcoming about its NGAD, the US Navy's F/A-XX remains a secret. For instance, the service chose to keep the costs of developing the F/A-XX classified in the last three budget cycles.

Last year, media reports indicated that the Navy was spending more money on developing the sixth-generation fighter jet, raising concerns about how the service will convince the taxpayers without divulging meaningful details about the program.

At the time, Rear Adm. John Gumbleton, the Navy's deputy assistant secretary for budget, said, "Although NGAD is a classified line, investments do go up over the [Future Years Defense Program] somewhat dramatically for NGAD." He was referring to the Pentagon's five-year budget outlook.

The Navy revealed NGAD spending lines in its FY 2020 budget books, asking for about $20.7 million in research and development funds. To fund the program, the Navy anticipated needing $255.59 million in FY 2023 and $371.9 million in FY 2024. However, the predicted figures have been surpassed in the recent request.

Much like the USAF Next Generation Air Dominance aircraft, the US Navy's sixth-generation aircraft is expected to be a stealthy fighter operating with uncrewed aircraft in a manned-unmanned teaming mode.

The FY 2024 budget request further comes at a time when the service is faced with a potential fighter jet shortage.

In March 2022, the service informed the media that it planned to prevent a fighter jet shortage into the 2030s. The plan called for fully fielding the F-35C Joint Strike Fighter, creating the F/A-XX manned fighter for the Next Generation Air Dominance program, and giving existing F/A-18E/F Super Hornets an additional 4,000 flying hours of service life.

Vice Adm. Kenneth Whitesell said the F/A-XX must be fielded between 2030 and 2035. He warned that this must be done on schedule. Otherwise, the service will lose jets without replacements, creating a shortage.

The F/A-XX is expected to replace the Super Hornets that will start leaving the inventory by 2030 onward, if not sooner.

Further, in May 2022, Navy officials told Congress in a written testimony that the F/A-XX program is meant to expand the range for carrier-based operations.

A joint testimony from Department of Navy acquisition officials stated, "The NGAD [family of systems] will replace the F/A-18E/F Block II aircraft as they begin to reach the end of service life in the 2030s and leverage Manned-Unmanned Teaming (MUM-T) to provide increased lethality and survivability.

"F/A-XX is the strike fighter component of the NGAD FoS that will be the 'Quarterback' of the MUM-T concept, directing multiple tactical platforms at the leading edge of the battlespace."

The US Navy's F/A-XX Program On Track

The Navy continues withholding information about how much money it received for this program from previous budgets.

But, the slightly more than $1.5 billion it is requesting right now for F/A-XX only accounts for 5% of its total $26.9 billion proposal for research and development for the 2024 fiscal year.

However, it still exceeds the amount the service hoped to get for the next budgetary cycle's development of its next-generation attack submarine ($545 million) and next-generation destroyer ($187 million).

There are still few details regarding what it is searching for in this aircraft and how far along the program may already be. The Navy's Next-Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) project, distinct from the Air Force's program by the same name, includes F/A-XX as a component. It's unclear precisely what the Navy's NGAD program entails yet.

In September 2022, media reports indicated that the highly classified sixth-generation fighter being developed by the US Navy was in the "concept refinement phase," with the Office of Naval Operations and Naval Air Systems Command of the service discussing with business and intelligence organizations on the design of the futuristic aircraft.

It is anticipated to replace the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, at least in part, according to an unclassified "Navy Aviation Vision" paper the service produced in 2021. It also stated that one of its primary duties would be to serve as a "quarterback" for squadrons of advanced drones.

EurAsian Times reported earlier that the concept released by US Navy shows a top-down view, depicting a lambda-wing shape design and canard foreplanes.

Further, Steve Trimble, the defense editor at Aviation Week, tweeted that the F/A-XX may have a "ruddervator" tailplane similar in broad strokes to ones seen on the Northrop-designed YF-23 stealth. Since the artwork was low in resolution, the conclusion was that the image could have more traditional twin tails.

There are few details available regarding the drones the F/A-XX is intended to operate, but we do know that the Navy plans for them to carry ordnance, electronic warfare suites, and serve as communications relay nodes, noted The War Zone.

Recently, the Air Force disclosed that it has been working closely with the Navy to hone its plans for highly autonomous sophisticated drones, which it currently refers to as Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA). The fact that the Navy is also buying additional MQ-4C Triton drones could signal some willingness for manned-unmanned teaming.

The US Navy has not yet revealed more details about its upcoming aircraft. However, the service has taken the first step by disclosing the budgetary request, and the ensuing information could be published in the foreseeable future.

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US Navy's 'Highly Secretive' F/A-XX Fighter Jet Could Be Deployed By 2030-35 That Will Replace Super Hornets

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In what could be seen as a stark departure from its traditional practice, the US Navy's proposed budget for the 2024 Fiscal Year includes almost $1.53 billion for developing a Next-Generation Fighter aircraft, popularly known as the F/A-XX. The US Department of Navy officially published its budget proposal for the fiscal year 2024 on March [...]

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2037: Potential conflicts over the remaining deposits of fossil fuels.

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2037: Potential conflicts over the remaining deposits of fossil fuels.

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Oil reserves are located in specific parts of the world. As the available resources dwindle, the remainder will become transitionary reserves. One of the largest is in Venezuela, currently an unstable state.

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Matthew Smith

Matthew Smith is Oilprice.com's Latin-America correspondent. Matthew is a veteran investor and investment management professional. He obtained a Master of Law degree and is currently located...

The aggressive push to decarbonize the world economy is forcing big oil to examine how the carbon emissions of its operations can be reduced with a goal of becoming carbon neutral. That coupled with the threat of peak oil demand has seen oil supermajors reevaluate their business strategy, with many now choosing to eschew high-cost carbon-intensive petroleum projects. This poses a major threat to Venezuela and the crisis-torn petrostate's economic recovery. The OPEC member possesses the world's largest oil reserves, estimated to be around 304 billion barrels or enough crude oil to meet global consumption for roughly 8 years. Most of Venezuela's petroleum reserves, as much as 77% or possibly more, are composed of the extra-heavy and heavy crude oil found in the Orinoco Belt in the East Venezuela Basin. That heavy and extra-heavy crude oil, most of which is very sour and has an API gravity of 10 degrees or less, is highly carbon-intensive to extract and refine. For those reasons, there is a growing likelihood that a significant portion of Venezuela's vast petroleum reserves could become a costly stranded asset. While Venezuela's oil sands are less viscous than those found in Canada, making them easier to extract, they are too deep for surface mining. Heavy crude oil in the Orinoco Belt is extracted through multilateral horizontal wells using a technique called cold heavy oil production or CHOPs. This is where sand is injected into a perforated well resulting in the development of high-permeability channels that allow the crude oil to flow to the surface either on its own or through secondary recovery techniques. The crude oil extracted in the Orinoco Belt is especially heavy and sour with a typical API gravity of 5 to 15 degrees and sulfur content between 4% and 6%. It is also high in nitrogen and contaminants. Those characteristics make it especially complex and energy-intensive to process. Upon being extracted the crude oil is blended with light oil or condensate to reduce its viscosity making it easier to transport for refining or sale.

Related: Why Are Environmentalists Angry About Biden's Infrastructure Bill? National oil company PDVSA's Petrocedeño operation (Spanish) takes the extra-heavy crude oil, which has an API gravity of 8 to 9 degrees, produced in the Junin region of the Orinoco Belt and upgrades it to a light sweet crude oil. That process occurs at the José Antonio Anzoátegui Industrial Complex which has a nameplate capacity of 180,000 barrels per day. The extra-heavy oil is diluted with light sweet petroleum varieties and/or condensate and then upgraded at the facilities improvement unit to produce Zuata Sweet, a light sweet crude oil variety with an API gravity of 32 degrees and a very low 0.07% sulfur. This is a complex and energy-intensive process that is responsible for considerable greenhouse gas emissions, explaining why TotalEnergies and Equinor chose to quit the Petrocedeño operation and hand back their share to PDVSA at a loss.

Another issue is the dilapidated state of Venezuela's petroleum infrastructure coupled with a chronic shortage of light crude oil and condensates makes it highly unlike that the Petrocedeño facility is consistently operating at full capacity. Zuata Sweet was originally introduced for the U.S. refining market but strict U.S. sanctions are preventing PDVSA from accessing global petroleum markets. Furthermore, the technology associated with the upgrader at the José Antonio Anzoátegui Complex is complicated, prone to breaking down, and requires considerable costly maintenance. It is difficult to see how PDVSA, given Venezuela's economic collapse and near bankruptcy, can obtain the necessary parts and finance crucial maintenance and refits. For those reasons, especially after accounting for Venezuela's unstable operating environment, investing in a project which produces sour extra-heavy crude oil for upgrading into a light sweet variety appears to be highly unattractive for foreign energy companies. The determined drive from most developed nations to decarbonize the global economy and meet ambitious emission targets to ensure that global warming is limited to well below two degrees Celsius makes high carbon emission oil projects almost uninvestable.

Related: Japan's Overambitious LNG Targets Could Transform The Industry

Venezuela's primary export crude oil grade is Merey a particularly sour and heavy blend with 2.45% sulfur content and API gravity of 16 degrees which is especially popular among Chinese refiners. Merey is created by blending extra-heavy 8-to-10-degree crude oil extracted in the Orinoco Belt with 42-to-52-degree condensate or extremely light crude oil. The production of Merey, which is a key Venezuelan export blend preferred by Chinese refiners, is under threat because of a chronic lack of condensate and light oil for blending. This is because of a sharp decline in domestic hydrocarbon production due to the collapse of Venezuela's petroleum infrastructure and strict U.S. sanctions which have cut the OPEC member off from condensate supplies. Data compiled by the Carnegie Endowment For International Peace Merey as one of the highest emitters of greenhouse gases, while two other Venezuelan heavy oil grades Tia Juana and Hamaca produce even greater emissions.

Venezuela's dependence on extra-heavy crude oil production is responsible for its crumbling oil industry being one of the most carbon-intensive petroleum producers globally. A 2018 Stanford University , which analyzed the number of greenhouse gases discharged at a national level by the upstream oil industry in various countries, found that Venezuela's greenhouse emissions were the second most intensive after Algeria. Other research, based on 2015 emission data, showed that Venezuela's oil industry produced more greenhouse emissions than any other country, followed closely by Canada the world's largest oil sands producer. Unlike Canada, a lack of access to capital as well as expertise, primarily because of strict U.S. sanctions, is preventing PDVSA from developing various methodologies and technology to dial down greenhouse emissions.

For those reasons, Venezuela is struggling to obtain the capital, technology, and expertise required to rebuild its shattered oil industry. The amount of investment required is tremendous, even an optimistic PDVSA believes it will take $58 billion to restore oil output to 1998 levels of over three billion barrels per day other industry, although other experts believe it will take substantially more, potentially up to $200 billion. The (Spanish) for the reconstruction of Venezuela drawn up by U.S.-recognized interim president Juan Guaidó states it will take spending of $180 billion to $200 billion for the OPEC member to pump on average two million barrels of crude oil daily. Guaidó's economic advisers believe it will take 10 years for that recovery to occur. Venezuela expert Francisco Monaldi, of the Baker Institute, stated earlier this year that investment of around $110 billion spent over a decade is required to lift Venezuela's crude oil production to 2.5 million to 3 million barrels per day.

The only source for such vast amounts of capital, as well as the technology and expertise, required to rebuild Venezuela's badly decayed oil industry is western energy majors . Regardless of Maduro's overtures to the global petroleum industry and his reforms aimed at attracting foreign energy investment, no privately owned supermajor will risk investing in Venezuela until Washington eases its sanctions. Events indicate that the Biden administration will not consider relaxing or lifting sanctions, including the crippling oil industry penalties imposed by former President Trump, until regime change occurs, which is highly unlikely . The threat of peak oil demand and the global push to decarbonize the world economy which sees big oil striving to make its operations carbon-neutral means that there is only a limited window for Venezuela to benefit from its vast petroleum reserves. Already, western energy supermajors are showing a reluctance to invest in carbon-intensive oil projects. For those reasons, it is only a matter of time before Venezuela's vast petroleum reserves transform into a stranded asset, which because of derelict oil infrastructure and vast environmental damage , will become a costly liability for an already near-failed state.

By Matthew Smith for Oilprice.com
More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: Back to homepage

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Venezuela's Oil Reserves Doomed To Become The World's Largest Stranded Asset | OilPrice.com

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Matthew Smith Matthew Smith is Oilprice.com's Latin-America correspondent. Matthew is a veteran investor and investment management professional. He obtained a Master of Law degree and is currently located... The aggressive push to decarbonize the world economy is forcing big oil to examine how the carbon emissions of its operations can be reduced with a goal of becoming carbon neutral.

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2040: Antibiotic treatment reaches a crisis point.

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2040: Antibiotic treatment reaches a crisis point.

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The continuing growth of bacterial resistance to antibiotic treatments has led to a losing race as scientists struggle to discover and refine new antibiotics faster than older treatments become outmoded.

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Antibiotics are becoming obsolete. A recent United Nations report on drug resistance predicted that antibiotics could be useless within 30 years. If so, 10 million people could die each year due to simple bacterial infections. But researchers at Kent State University have entered the arena to combat this imminent crisis, and their weapon is completely novel.

"The pessimistic estimate is that by 2050, antibiotics could be obsolete,'' said Songping Huang, Ph.D., professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry in the College of Arts and Sciences. "We only have 30 years." A pit of resistant bacteria is growing and more and more ineffective antibiotics are falling into it.

Huang and his Kent State team, including Min-Ho Kim, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, are working on closing that chasm with the development of new antimicrobials.

In late September, Huang and Kim published their research on the synthesis of a new compound derived from the plant-based molecule, lawsone, to hinder the development of antibiotic-resistance to methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).

"The lawsone molecule exhibits antimicrobial activity, and we focused on this unique characteristic," Kim said. "The way this compound kills bacteria is totally different from the way existing antibiotics kill bacteria."

Kim, who specializes in biomedical engineering, explains that the compound, derived from lawsone, attacks bacteria with a multifaceted front. Their research outlines how the compound acts by perforating the bacterial cell membrane as well as altering metal levels within the bacterial cell.

Kim said that the lawsone compound also packs a heavier punch, with two modes of action to work against bacterial cells, rather than "one trick pony" antibiotics.

"Our compound can kill bacteria with more than two modes of action," Kim said. "Typically conventional drugs can kill bacteria using one mode of action. With more than two modes of action there is a synergistic effect."

Antibiotics took over in 1928, after Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin. Since then they have become staples of the medical industry. The CDC reports that in 2016, over 270 million prescriptions were written for antibiotics.

"Alexander Fleming's discovery was a major breakthrough," Huang said. "It's hard to imagine life without antibiotics, we definitely would not have had the civilization that we have now."

Synthetic antibiotic developments like Kim and Huang's lawsone compound serve as reinforcements for the weakening antibiotics of today, which cannot keep up with rapidly mutating bacterial strains.

"The problem with bacteria is that they divide and produce rapidly. Within a few hours it produces many generations, and this shows you the timescale of drug resistance," Huang said. "When you kill bacteria with antibiotics you actually trigger some genes in their gene pool to fight back, and they will alter structure or change in some way to counteract the antibiotic drug action."

Huang warns that the rate of new development and discoveries is not enough to adequately defend ourselves from the rapid development of drug-resistant bacteria.

"After 70 years of exhaustive investigations, we could not produce any more antibiotics from soil-dwelling microorganisms. We have reached the end of finding new antibiotics from nature," Huang said. "We are facing a healthcare crisis."

Huang explains that a decrease of funding for synthetic antimicrobial research has hindered our ability to protect ourselves from a widening field of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

"The system of reimbursement and pay for drugs made the pharmaceutical companies bow out of antibiotic drug development," Huang said. "Antibiotics are mostly a one time drug, you either cure the patient or they die of an infection, you don't refill your prescription. Antibiotics are not a money making business for pharmaceutical companies, like drugs for arthritis or painkillers."

Huang explained that continual synthetic antibiotic research is needed to ensure back-ups for our back-ups as resistance continues to eliminate antibiotics.

"It's called the antibiotic pipeline. Drug development, from discovery to the marketplace, can sometimes be a decade," Huang said. "That's why you need a pipeline; you need compounds in discovery, you need there to be compounds in research and compounds in development, something at every stage."

"There are very few antibiotics in the pipeline," Huang said. "With only about a few dozen, it paints a very bleak picture."

Huang explains that there are different ways to develop new antibiotics. Of the 42 antibiotics in clinical trials right now, half are derivatives of existing antibiotics.

"One of the several approaches is to modify the structure of the existing antibiotics," Huang said. "When you change the drug structure, the bacteria sometimes does not know how to react to the drug immediately, so they have to activate certain genes to do further mutations."

Huang said this approach is a quick one because it's built upon so much existing knowledge of antibiotics. However, this approach still leads to eventual drug resistance, as the new drug relies on the same mechanism of attack as the antibiotic it's derived from. The lawsone-derivative compound that Kim and Huang have cultivated differs from this method and is rather uncommon on the antibiotic front.

"This one is brand new," Huang said. "There is no analog within existing drugs or of drugs in clinical trials. We started from scratch."

"This mode of action of the lawsone-derivative does not overlap with the existing mode of action of antibiotics," Kim said. "Most conventional antibiotics are produced by microorganisms in nature and bacteria can easily find a way to escape and evade them, our compound is different."

Huang and Kim have put Kent State on the map for their contributions in the war against antibiotic drug resistance with the successful synthesis of a half dozen more novel antimicrobial lead compounds, a feat Huang said he is proud of.

"This is a new frontier for Kent State," Huang said. "We are so proud to be a player, we are a small player, but we are in the game."

Learn more about Kent State's Department of Biological Sciences.

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Kent State Researchers Challenge the Growing Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria Problem With New Compound

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Kent State Researchers Challenge the Growing Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria Problem With New Compound | Division of Research & Sponsored Programs, Advanced Materials and Liquid Crystal Institute, Brain Health Research Institute , KENT STATE TODAY Research & Science, Brain Health Research Institute, Advanced Materials and Liquid Crystal Institute, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Department of Biological Sciences, College of Arts and Sciences, Institutes and Initiatives | "The pessimistic estimate is that by 2050, antibiotics could be obsolete,'' said Songping Huang, Ph.D., professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry in the College of Arts and Sciences.

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2041: Solar power from space, beamed down to Earth

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2041: Solar power from space, beamed down to Earth

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An ambitious project to harness the power of the sun from space to supply power on Earth is being proposed by scientists.

The European Space Agency (ESA) - which includes the UK - is discussing plans to create a in orbit at a two-day conference in Paris.

The SOLARIS project aims to collect sunlight over a wide area in space, convert it to microwave energy (similar to high frequency radio waves found in a microwave oven), then transmit it down to Earth.

A large number of antennas on Earth would pick up the beams and the energy would be converted to electricity.

The advantages of Space Based Solar Power (SBSP) are huge because the microwaves can penetrate cloud in Earth's atmosphere and sunlight in space is also available constantly - not just during the day - and the light is more intense.

But the UK also has its own separate proposals. Funding worth £6m has been made available to develop SBSP technologies aimed at contributing to the UK's net zero ambition.

According to research commissioned by the government from consultants Frazer-Nash, an "operational system could be developed by 2040" and it could deliver "a substantial percentage of the UK's energy needs by the early 2040s".

But it would also come at a huge cost - as much as £17.3 billion.

Dr Mamatha Maheshwarappa, payload systems lead at the UK Space Agency, told Sky News: "This must be a joint (public and private) venture. Government can fund some of the initial de-risking activities but it would later need to be supported by private investments."

More from Sky News:
UK Space Agency examines space-based solar power

The principle of SBSP has already been demonstrated on a small scale.

In September, Airbus beamed microwaves between two points over a distance of 36 metres, producing green hydrogen and bringing a model city to life.

But there are challenges too.

Jean-Dominique Coste from the team at Airbus said: "If satellites were to collect the sunlight, they would need to measure about 2 kilometres across to achieve the same power level as a nuclear power plant."

And the ESA admits large amounts of energy could be lost during the conversion and "beaming" process, although scientists still think it would be economically viable even if only 10% reached Earth.

Meanwhile experts will need to alleviate health concerns from beaming microwaves into the atmosphere - an effect that's not been fully explored - by carrying out tests to ensure there are no risks to plants and animals.

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Scientists discuss using satellites to 'beam' solar energy collected in space to Earth

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An ambitious project to harness the power of the sun from space to supply power on Earth is being proposed by scientists. The European Space Agency (ESA) - which includes the UK - is discussing plans to create a in orbit at a two-day conference in Paris.

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2042: Widespread use of domestic battery power.

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2042: Widespread use of domestic battery power.

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Possible introduction of Fusion Power as a domestic energy source, along with ionised sodium battery technology. Populations will be mostly off grid, with industry relying on grid power.

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2043: Most Meat is now synthetically produced

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2043: Most Meat is now synthetically produced

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If the appetite for meat remains in the global population, an alternative may be produced at an affordable scale.

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Most of the meat people eat in 2040 will not come from slaughtered animals, according to a report that predicts 60% will be either grown in vats or replaced by plant-based products that look and taste like meat.

The report by the global consultancy AT Kearney, based on expert interviews, highlights the heavy environmental impacts of conventional meat production and the concerns people have about the welfare of animals under industrial farming.

"The large-scale livestock industry is viewed by many as an unnecessary evil," the report says. "With the advantages of novel vegan meat replacements and cultured meat over conventionally produced meat, it is only a matter of time before they capture a substantial market share."

The conventional meat industry raises billions of animals and turns over $1tn (£785bn) a year. However, the huge environmental impacts have been made plain in recent scientific studies, from the emissions driving the climate crisis to wild habitats destroyed for farmland and the pollution of rivers and oceans.
Avoiding meat and dairy is 'single biggest way' to reduce your impact on Earth
Companies such as Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods and Just Foods that use plant ingredients to create replacement burgers, scrambled eggs and other products are growing rapidly. AT Kearney estimates $1bn has been invested in such vegan products, including by the companies that dominate the conventional meat market. Beyond Meat raised $240m when the company went public in May and its shares have more than doubled since.

Other companies are working on growing meat cells in culture, to produce real meat without needing to raise and kill animals. No such products have yet reached consumers, but AT Kearney predicts cultured meat will dominate in the long term because it reproduces the taste and feel of conventional meat more closely than plant-based alternatives.

"The shift towards flexitarian, vegetarian and vegan lifestyles is undeniable, with many consumers cutting down on their meat consumption as a result of becoming more conscious towards the environment and animal welfare," said Carsten Gerhardt, a partner at AT Kearney. "For passionate meat-eaters, the predicted rise of cultured meat products means that they still get to enjoy the same diet they always have, but without the same environmental and animal cost attached."
World's first lab-grown steak revealed - but the taste needs work
The report estimates 35% of all meat will be cultured in 2040 and 25% will be vegan replacements. It highlights the far greater efficiency of the alternatives to conventional meat.

Almost half the world's crops are fed to livestock, but only 15% of the plant calories end up being eaten by humans as meat. In contrast, the report says, cultured meat and vegan meat replacements retain about three-quarters of their input calories.

Potential customer uneasiness about cultured meat will not be a barrier, the report says, citing surveys in the US, China and India: "Cultured meat will win in the long run. However, novel vegan meat replacements will be essential in the transition phase."

Rosie Wardle of the Jeremy Coller Foundation, a philanthropic organisation focused on sustainable food systems, said: "From steaks to seafood, a full spectrum of options is emerging to replace traditional animal protein products with plant-based and cell-based meat technologies.

"The shift to more sustainable patterns of protein consumption is already under way, driven by consumers, investors and entrepreneurs, and even pulling in the world's biggest meat companies. If anything, predictions that 60% of the world's 'meat' will not come from slaughtered animals in 20 years' time may be an underestimation."

However, a National Farmers' Union spokesman said: "Innovation and new technology has always been central to the progress of British livestock farming. Although the science of lab-grown meat is interesting, the NFU believes there is great potential for livestock farming to continue its journey of producing safe, traceable and affordable food for the nation and it will continue to do so as long as the public demands it."
Topics

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Most 'meat' in 2040 will not come from dead animals, says report

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Most of the meat people eat in 2040 will not come from slaughtered animals, according to a report that predicts 60% will be either grown in vats or replaced by plant-based products that look and taste like meat.

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2045: Crisis point for space launch events.

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2045: Crisis point for space launch events.

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A lack of hydrocarbon fuels will reach a crisis point. From the mid 2040s, this will become an issue for space launch events. The commercial industry of space will need to establish an alternative, sustainable process for achieving escape velocity and leaving earth orbit.

NASA has been using Liquid Hydrogen fuel (LH2) for years. This is a sustainable fuel, but requires expensive cooling procedures. SpaceX uses kerosene and methane-based fuels. Other commercial companies use different hydrocarbon mixtures.

One of the suggested alternatives is a space elevator. However, the tensile strength of materials required to build this kind of structure are beyond our current technology in the 2020s. For this to become viable, a new affordable material must be developed that can support such a facility.

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For more than half a century, rockets have been the only way to go to space. But in the not-too-distant future, we may have another option for sending up people and payloads: a colossal elevator extending from Earth's surface up to an altitude of 22,000 miles, where geosynchronous satellites orbit.

NASA says the basic concept of a space elevator is sound, and researchers around the world are optimistic that one can be built. The Obayashi Corp., a global construction firm based in Tokyo, has said it will build one by 2050, and China wants to build one as soon as 2045. Now an experiment to be conducted soon aboard the International Space Station will help determine the real-world feasibility of a space elevator.

"The space elevator is the Holy Grail of space exploration," says Michio Kaku, a professor of physics at City College of New York and a noted futurist. "Imagine pushing the 'up' button of an elevator and taking a ride into the heavens. It could open up space to the average person."

Kaku isn't exaggerating. A space elevator would be the single largest engineering project ever undertaken and could cost close to $10 billion to build. But it could reduce the cost of putting things into orbit from roughly $3,500 per pound today to as little as $25 per pound, says Peter Swan, president of International Space Elevator Consortium (ISEC), based in Santa Ana, California.

The idea for a space elevator was first dreamed up in 1895 by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a Russian scientist who did pioneering work in rocketry. As commonly conceived today, a space elevator would consist of motorized elevator pods that are powered up and down a ground-to-space tether. The tether would stretch from a spaceport at the equator to a space station in geosynchronous orbit overhead. Centrifugal forces caused by the Earth's rotation would hold the tether aloft.

The ISS experiment, dubbed Space Tethered Autonomous Robotic Satellite-Mini elevator, or STARS-Me, was devised by physicists from Japan's Shizuoka University. It will simulate on a small scale the conditions that the components of such a system would encounter. Cameras will examine the movement of a pair of tiny "cubesats" along a 10-meter tether in a weightless environment.

"It's going to be the world's first experiment to test elevator movement in space," a spokesman from the university told Agence France-Presse.

The steel tether to be used in the experiment is too heavy to be used as a full-sized space elevator, which must, of course, extend for tens of thousands of miles. But a growing number of scientists, including Kaku, now believe that an ultra-strong carbon-based material known as graphene could be just the material needed. "On paper, it has the tensile strength to keep the space elevator anchored to the ground," Kaku says of graphene, which ounce for ounce is 200 times stronger than steel.

Small lengths of graphene are commercially available, but they're too short to be used to make a space elevator tether. "What we really need is graphene produced in very long lengths of continuous sheet," says Adrian Nixon, director of Nixor, a firm in Manchester, England, that is working to develop such a product. That can't be done yet, he says, adding that "it will be possible in the very near future.

Of course, making a suitable tether is just one hurdle that must be overcome. Another is space debris - bits and pieces of rockets and spacecraft that orbit Earth and could damage or destroy a space elevator if they smash into it.

"Avoiding space debris is not like playing dodgeball," says Michael Fitzgerald, director and chair for architectures at ISEC. "There isn't a member of our team that doesn't wonder about the problem," he adds.

Scientists remain optimistic, however. "With proper knowledge and good operational procedures, the threat of space debris is not a show-stopper by any means," Swan said. And efforts are now underway to find ways to reduce the amount of space debris, which includes more than 500,000 pieces of junk that are now being tracked by the Defense Department.

Later this year, members of ISEC will meet with U.S. military and trade officials to discuss how space elevator trips could be carefully planned to avoid orbiting debris.

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A colossal elevator to space could be going up sooner than you ever imagined

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For more than half a century, rockets have been the only way to go to space. But in the not-too-distant future, we may have another option for sending up people and payloads: a colossal elevator extending from Earth's surface up to an altitude of 22,000 miles, where geosynchronous satellites orbit.

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2045: Capture technology deployed to subarctic environments as permafrost releases huge amounts of methane.

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2045: Capture technology deployed to subarctic environments as permafrost releases huge amounts of methane.

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As the global temperature rises, thawing events in the subarctic will become more frequent. There is already practical research and assessment of the process of methane capture and some work being done to try to see if this is a viable and affordable energy source.

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When I first saw Lake Kivu in Rwanda, I was struck not just by its dazzling beauty but also by how little activity there was around its vast expanse. Normally, water bodies like this in Africa would be bustling with boats, fishermen and industrious people on its shores. I later learned why Lake Kivu, one of east Africa's Great Lakes, is so serene. It is full of methane derived from the volcanic landscape. Methane is a greenhouse gas up to 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide, trapping more heat before decaying into carbon dioxide within a few decades.

Rwanda is a world away from the Arctic. But alternative energy systems there and elsewhere in the world could spark ideas for how methane can be harnessed rather than released into the air.

Methane is the main element in natural gas, and can generate electricity or be used as cooking fuel. In the Arctic, it's becoming abundant as permafrost thaws and glaciers melt, which accelerates a destructive climate feedback loop. Forty tons of methane leak from Iceland's Sólheimajökull Glacier every day. Greenland's Leverett Glacier, releases six tons in the summer. The East Siberian Arctic Shelf off Russia holds 50 gigatons of methane.

Could all that methane be turned into energy? It's unclear, but there are some striking examples in other parts of the world. In Rwanda, American company Contour Global operates KivuWatt, a 26-megawatt plant at Lake Kivu with potential for 100 megawatts. It is the world's first lake-based methane power plant. A barge on the lake pumps deep water, extracts methane and pipes it to an onshore power plant. The precious electricity serves Rwanda and neighboring Congo in a region that sorely lacks reliable power. Local energy not only boosts the domestic economy but also reduces reliance on dirty imported fossil fuels.

Besides large power plants, there are also smaller methane energy systems, such as a Kenyan slaughterhouse where biogas animal waste is captured in canisters and sold as cooking fuel. In Rwanda, boarding schools and all prisons have biogas toilets whose methane replaces previously enormous amounts of wood used as cooking fuel.

For decades, landfills in the U.S. have captured methane - essentially biogas from rotting organic waste. They are the third-largest source of human-related methane emissions in the country. Out of 1,900 landfills in the US, about 560 of them piped methane to power plants for electricity. The Environmental Protection Agency acknowledged that landfill gas "generates revenue and create jobs in the community and beyond.".

However, market forces have derailed wider use. As natural gas becomes cheaper, some landfill methane plants have recently closed. In 2019, Exelon shut the country's third-largest facility, located in New Jersey and in operation for 20 years. Now methane is wastefully flared and burned even though it could generate electricity.

Market forces have also sidelined promising Arctic research in methane hydrates, which are gas crystals beneath the permafrost. This unexploited energy source is estimated to be larger than all the world's known coal, oil and gas reserves combined.

Mallik Methane Hydrate Site in Canada's Beaufort Sea was the first scientific research site for permafrost gas hydrates when it launched in 1998. In 2013, Japanese researchers at Mallik produced methane from offshore hydrates for the first time using new Canadian extraction techniques.

However, that same year, Canada cut $30 million of funding because low natural gas prices made hydrate research financially unattractive. In 2013 Norway, South Korea and India were still doing research. And a German-Taiwanese venture began studying methane resources in the South China Sea.

As the Arctic landscape warms and transforms, methane energy should be further assessed. But there are questions about conditions in the region. How big and stable are various methane sources in different countries? For example, shallow tundra lakes can disappear relatively quickly, unlike enormous ones like Lake Kivu. Can methane be systematically extracted from melting glaciers? What kind of equipment and infrastructure is needed to capture and transport gas over long distances? Could methane spur other sustainable businesses or help underserved communities? What financial resources are needed from governments, banks, and other institutions? Is there a role for multi-lateral agencies? What are the risks of extracting and transporting methane? What about environmental and other risks?

The cost of research and development is small compared to the cataclysmic effects of emitting more and more of this greenhouse gas. Releasing the East Siberian Shelf's methane reservoir alone would result in $60 trillion worth of human, economic and environmental damage. Harnessing methane's potential for energy instead is well worth exploring.
Amy Yee is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times and The Economist, among other publications. Find her work at amyyeewrites.com and follow her on Twitter at @amyyeewrites. This piece is one of a series of op-eds written by the student-scholars of the Arctic Innovators Program at the Harvard Kennedy School's Arctic Initiative. You can read the full series on this site. The views expressed here are the writer's and are not necessarily endorsed by the Arctic Initiative or ArcticToday, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary (at) arctictoday.com.

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Can we harness the Arctic's methane for energy? - ArcticToday

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When I first saw Lake Kivu in Rwanda, I was struck not just by its dazzling beauty but also by how little activity there was around its vast expanse. Normally, water bodies like this in Africa would be bustling with boats, fishermen and industrious people on its shores.

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Projected possible asteroid impact in 2046. Chance is recorded as being 560 to 1.

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But an impact from 2023 DW could still cause significant damage if it were to land atop a major city or densely populated area. A meteor less than half the size of 2023 DW exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, ten years ago, causing a shock wave that blew out windows across 200 square miles and injured roughly 1,500 people.

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Asteroid headed toward Earth may arrive on Valentine's Day - 2046

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But an impact from 2023 DW could still cause significant damage if it were to land atop a major city or densely populated area. A meteor less than half the size of 2023 DW exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, ten years ago, causing a shock wave that blew out windows across 200 square miles and injured roughly 1,500 people.

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Three decades from now, several crucial elements of the Antarctic Treaty will come up for possible renewal, plunging the future of the continent into uncertainty.

For six decades, the treaty has been the cornerstone of governance for our most southerly, harshest and most pristine continent. It has fostered scientific research, promoted international cooperation, ensured non-militarisation, suspended territorial claims and strengthened environmental protections. Its guardians are the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Parties (ATCPs) - chief among them the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, Norway, Germany, Chile and Argentina.

Out in the field, a new generation of robots and drones are peering under ice shelves, probing the ocean depths and monitoring glaciers, ushering in the age of the "Smart Antarctic". The ice sheets aren't exactly flourishing - the Antarctic continent has lost three trillion tonnes of the stuff since 1992 - but scientific research is thriving.

For many polar researcher this is a reason for optimism - but in the political arena, the horizon is darkening. As it stands, the Antarctic Treaty acts as a safeguard for Antarctic science: an international bulwark against commercial or political interference. But as the years tick by, the treaty - and the cooperation that accompanies it - could begin to quietly fracture or even disintegrate completely.

Riches under the ice

In 1998, seven years after it was first signed into the treaty, the Protocol on Environmental Protection came into effect. Its purpose was to " enhance protection of the Antarctic environment and dependent and associated ecosytems" - a noble if poorly defined pledge that has proven difficult to uphold. But, tucked away among the acronyms and technical terminology, Article Seven of the Protocol consisted of a single important sentence, easily missed by the careless reader: "any activity relating to mineral resources, other than scientific research, shall be prohibited". Simple and to the point. Antarctica's natural resources, whatever they may be, are to remain pristine and untouched. At least for now.

Article 25 carries a caveat: "If, after the expiration of 50 years", it reads "any of the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Parties so requests, a conference shall be held as soon as practicable to review the operation of this Protocol". In other words, 30 years from now in 2048, the ATCPs could reject anti-mining regulation and start stripping Antarctica of its mineral resources, diverting the continent towards a radically different future.

Many consider this undesirable, unworkable and unthinkable, but long-time observers know that the uncharted waters of polar politics can constantly surprise.

A changing climate

In fact, the "unthinkable" has already been thought - and half-acted upon. In the 1980s, the ATCPs drew up an international mining framework called the Convention on the Regulation of Antarctic Resource Activities, which sought to regulate any possible future resource extraction. It established property rights and gave special privileges to seven claimant states - including the UK. The framework would not function today - China and India would certainly demand far-reaching revisions - but in the 1980s it was only when France and Australia pulled out and started championing the current protocols that the convention was shelved.

Indeed, a number of states might now have issues with the treaty. Much of the governance set down by the Antarctic Treaty still dates from when it was first negotiated in the late 1950s, in a very different political, technological, legal and environmental climate. It only involved 12 states and was concluded long before China became a polar superpower. The Antarctic ice sheets were considered stable - and there was still a great deal of mystery surrounding what lay beneath them. There was little to no tourism - now it's the biggest industry operating in Antarctica.

Fast forward to 2048: the Antarctic is melting, plastics are found in the ice, and foreign species (including yet more humans) dot the continent. Drones and other automated vehicles are routinely used and the polar summer is a hive of activity, with thousands of tourists mobbing every penguin colony. Commercial fishing thrives in the Southern Ocean and permanent settlements spring up on the Antarctic peninsula and surrounding islands. The profits available from biological harvesting have made the extremes of Antarctic living a reality.

Indeed, major polar operators such as China and the US only continue to support the mining ban because their energy needs can be satisfied elsewhere. At present ACTPs are focusing on improving cold weather technology and gaining confidence in Antarctic conditions, but it might not be long until they have the capability and incentive to do more. China is already using underwater vehicles to search for gas hydrates and metallic nodules in the South China Sea. Ominously, underwater mining and deep-sea energy prospecting seem set to be growth industries over the coming decades.

A contested continent

So what could change between now and 2048? Possibly little: the ATCPs might decide to keep the Protocol and continue to prohibit mining. Or they might not.

The recent announcement of a marine protected area in the Ross Sea was a good sign for conservationists, but it required a great deal of tough negotiation. This "general protection zone" forbids fishing completely, and joins an existing "special research zone", which permits limited fishing of for toothfish and krill. These will come up for review in 2047 and 2052, adding another dimension to what could become a period of unparalled change for polar governance.

If the ATCPs decide to question the provisions of the Protocol, automated mining could begin soon after. Those in favour might argue that the Antarctic environment is continuing to degrade in a way that no amount of regional management can halt. Or they might put forward the view that the need for new sources of protein outweighs the "restrictive" conservation measures. Either way, the "special" qualities of Antarctica might not carry quite the same emotive weight in the future.

After 2048, Antarctica could be carved up between nations like every other land mass and surrounding ocean, and slowly relieved of its resources. Those who care about the future of Antarctica must keep a close eye on the continent and its surrounding seas, or risk losing them to drones, drills and desperate politicians.

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In 30 years the Antarctic Treaty becomes modifiable, and the fate of a continent could hang in the balance

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Three decades from now, several crucial elements of the Antarctic Treaty will come up for possible renewal, plunging the future of the continent into uncertainty. For six decades, the treaty has been the cornerstone of governance for our most southerly, harshest and most pristine continent.

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Here's what we already know (and some of what we hope to find out) about this pristine remnant from the early days of our solar system.

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2050: Price Waterhouse Cooper Projections

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2050: Price Waterhouse Cooper Projections

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Key findings

This report sets out our latest long-term global growth projections to 2050 for 32 of the largest economies in the world, accounting for around 85% of world GDP.

Key results of our analysis (as summarised also in the accompanying video) include:

The world economy could more than double in size by 2050, far outstripping population growth, due to continued technology-driven productivity improvements

Emerging markets (E7) could grow around twice as fast as advanced economies (G7) on average

As a result, six of the seven largest economies in the world are projected to be emerging economies in 2050 led by China (1st), India (2nd) and Indonesia (4th)

The US could be down to third place in the global GDP rankings while the EU27's share of world GDP could fall below 10% by 2050

UK could be down to 10th place by 2050, France out of the top 10 and Italy out of the top 20 as they are overtaken by faster growing emerging economies like Mexico, Turkey and Vietnam respectively

But emerging economies need to enhance their institutions and their infrastructure significantly if they are to realise their long-term growth potential.

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global economy; projections; inflation; global economic power; shift in global power

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The report sets out long-term GDP projections for 32 of the largest economies in the world over the period to 2050.

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Our climate is changing in many ways. One of the clearest signs is that the world is warming. Scientists know this through evidence compiled from satellites, weather balloons, thermometers, weather stations and more. ¹ Since 1880, average global temperatures have increased by about 1 degrees Celsius (1.7° degrees Fahrenheit). Global temperature is projected to warm by about 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7° degrees Fahrenheit) by 2050 and 2-4 degrees Celsius (3.6-7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100. ²

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), average annual global temperatures have increased steadily since the 1960s. Figure 1 shows deviations from the average global temperature depicted as the horizontal line at 0.00 degrees Celsius. Every blue bar is a year that was colder than the average temperature of the 20th century. Red bars are years that were warmer than the 20th century average. Nineteen of the 20 warmest years have occurred since 2001. It is likely that the coldest year moving forward will be warmer than the warmest year that we experienced in the 20th century.

To determine changes in Wisconsin temperature and precipitation, scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison analyzed temperature records from a statewide network compiled by the National Climatic Data Center. This dataset shows that Wisconsin has become 2 degrees Fahrenheit warmer and 4.5 inches (14 percent) wetter since the 1950s, with the greatest warming during winter and the largest precipitation increase during summer (Figure 2).

Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are increasing

Recordings of daily atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), initiated by Dr. Charles David Keeling of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, help to tell the story of increasing CO2 levels. Keeling was curious whether the increasing amounts of fossil fuel being combusted would affect atmospheric CO2 levels. So, in 1958 he began to record daily atmospheric CO2 levels at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. Mauna Loa was selected as a long-term monitoring site because it was far from other continents and vegetation that could affect the CO2 concentration. The daily recordings are considered one of the world's greatest scientific contributions.

Keeling's measurements discovered an annual planetary cycle in CO2 , in which CO2 levels rise and fall seasonally (Figure 3). This cycle is tied to photosynthesis. In the spring as plants grow, they take carbon dioxide from the air and using the energy from sunlight, convert it into carbon and release oxygen. In the fall as plants die, they release CO2 and global CO2 readings rise.

In addition to the seasonal cycling, Keeling also recorded an increase in CO2 concentration over time, from 313 parts per million (ppm) in 1958 to 415 ppm as of March 30, 2020. This rise in CO2 concentration, known as the Keeling Curve has transformed the way scientists understand the source of CO2

Increasing carbon dioxide is due to human activity

Scientists understand the source of CO2 in the atmosphere from several lines of evidence, including measurements of Antarctic ice cores that go back 800,000 years. Antarctic ice cores contain our atmosphere's history in bubbles of air that were trapped hundreds of thousands of years ago when the ice was first formed. Scientists can analyze these bubbles to determine how CO2 levels have changed over time. ³ The cores show that for the last 800,000 years, until about 1900, CO2 levels were relatively stable, fluctuating between about 150 and 280 ppm. In the early 1900s, CO2 started to increase at an unprecedented rate. Today, only 120 years later, CO2 levels are 40 percent higher than they were before the industrial revolution (Figure 4).

CO2 emissions make up the vast majority of greenhouse gases (GHG) that warm the planet. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources Air Management Program has prepared the 2021 Wisconsin Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions Inventory Report (AM-610), identifying CO2 and other GHG emissions in Wisconsin for 2005 and 2018, and describing emission trends from 1990 through 2018. Report authors used the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's State Inventory Tool populated with default data.

Downscaling Data to Predict Future Trends: What climate change means for Wisconsin

Research conducted by the Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts (WICCI), a collaboration of more than 200 scientists and practitioners, provides useful information on the impacts of climate changes, adaptive strategies and solutions to both store carbon and reduce carbon emissions. The University of Wisconsin-Madison's Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources lead WICCI.

WICCI climate scientists have been able to project local temperature and precipitation patterns for Wisconsin. The scientists took taking global climate models that simulate climate changes on a large scale (typically 100-200 miles) and downscaled them to approximately six miles. The downscaled models have allowed scientists to forecast more realistic, localized temperature and precipitation changes, and changes in extreme weather events. WICCI scientists are continuing to work with people around the state to fine-tune these models and provide forecasts for other climate factors that are important to impacts in Wisconsin.

Temperature

Wisconsin is likely to become a much warmer state over the next few decades, with average temperatures closer to southern Illinois or Missouri. Results show that Wisconsin has warmed 2 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit since 1950, and it is projected that the state will warm an additional 2 to 8 degrees by 2050 (Figure 5). We will also likely see a tripling in the frequency of extreme heat (days above 90 degrees Fahrenheit), rising from about 10 days per year in 2020 to about 30 days per year by 2050 (Figure 6).

Seasonal temperatures have also changed. Spring temperatures have increased by 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit with the onset of spring (defined as the date when daily temperatures have reached 50 degrees Fahrenheit for 10 days in a row) coming three to 10 days earlier since 1950. Wisconsin winters are becoming less cold and have warmed more than any other season in recent decades, especially in the northwestern part of the state where average temperatures have increased by as much as 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit. It is anticipated that winter temperatures will continue to increase 5 to 11 degrees Fahrenheit by 2050 meaning winters will be milder, about one month shorter than they are today, and will produce about 14" fewer inches of snow.

Precipitation

Wisconsin has become about 10 to 20 percent wetter since 1950. However, the increase is not evenly distributed geographically. Southern and central Wisconsin have experienced about 20 percent more precipitation than the annual average, while northern Wisconsin has not experienced a significant change in annual precipitation (Figure 7). Although projections of precipitation are less certain than projections of temperature, scientists report that annual average precipitation will likely increase by 2050, especially during fall, winter and spring. Further, in winter we are likely to see more precipitation as rain rather than snow.

In addition to tracking average precipitation, WICCI scientists project the frequency and intensity of storms. Extreme precipitation events have had devastating consequences in Wisconsin, and they have been increasing across the state. In the Great Lakes region, rainfall in the heaviest 1 percent of rain events increased by 31 percent between 1958 and 2007. ⁴ These kinds of extreme events are likely to become more frequent, and more severe as our climate changes. WICCI projections suggest a 30 percent increase in the frequency of 2 inch rainfall events, and a near doubling of 5 inch rainfall events (Figure 8).

Health impacts and Community Resilience

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services considers climate change such as increasing temperature, humidity, precipitation and extreme weather - one of the top public health threats of our time. Extreme heat kills more people in the U.S. than any other weather-related disaster and can disproportionately affect vulnerable populations such as elderly, socially isolated people and those with chronic health conditions such as cardiovascular disease. 5,6

FIGURE: Milwaukee County Heat Vulnerability Map. Click image to open full-sized map.

Heavy rains and flooding can overwhelm sewer and stormwater systems and increase polluted runoff to lakes and streams. Changes in temperature and precipitation can also impact disease-carrying insects such as ticks and mosquitos. Wisconsin's reported incidence of Lyme disease, a disease transmitted by ticks, is among the highest in the country. The rate of disease has doubled in the past decade. ⁷

Many studies have shown that the negative health impacts of climate change are not equally distributed. Structural racism has historically been a large factor in determining what communities are most negatively impacted by environmental health issues including climate change. For example, people of color and low-income communities are exposed to air pollution and extreme heat at higher rates. Air pollution, when combined with extreme heat caused by climate change, contributes to disproportionate rates of asthma in people of color and low-income communities.

In a study of 108 U.S. cities, researchers found that when a heatwave impacts a city, poorer neighborhoods are hotter by an average of 5 degrees, but some neighborhoods are hotter by nearly 13 degrees ⁸. Lower-income urban areas typically have more paved surfaces and fewer shade trees, parks, and green spaces, and residents typically have less access to air conditioning, increasing the risk of heatstroke. A 2020 study of 115 cities by the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Medical College of Wisconsin found lower tree canopy and higher air pollution in the poorest neighborhoods. ⁹

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Our climate is changing in many ways. One of the clearest signs is that the world is warming. Scientists know this through evidence compiled from satellites, weather balloons, thermometers, weather stations and more. 1 Since 1880, average global temperatures have increased by about 1 degrees Celsius (1.7° degrees Fahrenheit).

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2050: Sustainable Aviation Fuel Initiative

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2050: Sustainable Aviation Fuel Initiative

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This project is attempting to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050.

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2050: Huge population migrations as climate becomes significantly more volatile

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2050: Huge population migrations as climate becomes significantly more volatile

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Extreme weather, rising temperatures and damaged ecosystems are threatening the lives of millions of climate refugees. A collective effort is needed to solve the issue of climate migration and help the "world's forgotten victims" of climate change.

Climate migration is devastating people's lives. Imagine losing your home or livelihood due to a flood. Going hungry because of a failed harvest or drought. Or being forced to flee your home due to desertification, rising sea levels or a lack of clean drinking water.

This is the reality for millions and millions of climate refugees who live on the frontlines of the climate crisis. For them, climate change is real, and it is happening now. And as the threat of climate change increases globally, the number of climate migrants will grow exponentially.

According to UNHCR, the UN's refugee agency, an annual average of 21.5 million people were forcibly displaced each year by weather-related events - such as floods, storms, wildfires and extreme temperatures - between 2008 and 2016. This climate migration is expected to surge in coming decades with forecasts from international thinktank the IEP predicting that 1.2 billion people could be displaced globally by 2050 due to climate change and natural disasters.

"Climate change knows no borders," says Amar Rahman, Global Head of Climate Resilience at Zurich Resilience Solutions, speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative during Climate Week NYC. "Collective action is needed immediately to mitigate its effects, especially on those most vulnerable."

Who are climate refugees?

The term "climate refugees" has been used since 1985 when UN Environment Programme (UNEP) expert Essam El-Hinnawi defined climate refugees - also called climate or environmental migrants - as people who have been "forced to leave their traditional habitat, temporarily or permanently, because of marked environmental disruption." But the extent of the definition still causes some confusion.

For instance, when two category 4 hurricanes hit Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador in November 2020, people poured across the border into Mexico and headed towards the U.S. as torrential rains and landslides meant they lost their homes, livelihoods and access to clean water.

In this case, the cause and effect are clear. It is easy to see how unlivable conditions in their home countries caused by extreme weather led people to cross borders as climate refugees.

But Rahman believes the definition should apply to a much broader range of people. Namely, "anyone who has been impacted by disruption in their society that could somehow directly or indirectly be related to short- or long-term change in the environment."

This means acknowledging that climate change does not just pose a threat by causing immediate harm to people and infrastructure, it is also a long-term danger that can slowly destabilize societies and economies. Take for instance sea-level rise. Over the past 30 years, the number of people living in coastal areas at high risk of rising sea levels has increased from 160 million to 260 million, 90 percent of whom are from poor developing countries and small island states.

Rahman explains the situation is made worse as climate risks are interconnected and can cause a domino effect. "When temperatures rise in a country, for instance, it can reduce water availability and water quality. This may increase the spread of disease and raise the likelihood of drought leading to crop failures that will reduce incomes and food supplies. All this can potentially lead to social disruption and political instability."

How conflict worsens the climate crisis

This domino effect was felt in Syria, where the desertification of formerly fertile farming land between 2006 and 2010 meant crop yields plummeted, 800,000 people lost their income and 85 percent of the country's livestock died. As people lost their livelihoods, food prices soared, and 1.5 million rural workers moved to the city to find jobs. Those left behind facing poverty were an easy target for recruiters from the Islamic State.

These are not the only factors that led to the Syrian civil war, with the Arab Spring and strict restrictions from the Syrian government playing a key role. But societal issues caused by climate change worked to exacerbate existing tensions. The result was a conflict that fueled the world's worst refugee crisis in decades with around 6.6 million Syrians (roughly a quarter of the population) forced to flee their country.

The experience in Syria is sadly not unusual as there is a strong correlation between countries most vulnerable to climate change and those experiencing conflict or violence. According to the UNHCR's report Global Trends in Forced Displacement 2020, 95 percent of all conflict displacements in 2020 occurred in countries vulnerable or highly vulnerable to climate change.

The good news is that international governments are starting to recognize climate migration as an issue that needs to be tackled. In November 2021, U.S. President Joe Biden released the Report on the Impact of Climate Change on Migration - the White House report represents the first time the U.S. Government has officially recognized a link between climate change and migration.

The report recognizes that climate migration can have significant implications for international security, instability, conflict and geopolitics. And it calls for the development of strategies that would allow the humane, safe, and proactive management of climate migration flows.

How can we help climate refugees?

Besides fighting climate change as a priority, one way to tackle climate migration is to create economic opportunity in societies threatened by environmental change. For example, in Bangladesh floods caused by cyclones have increased the salinity of 53 percent of farmland. This means farmers are unable to grow their normal crops, which poses a deadly threat to communities who rely on agriculture to survive.

However, farmers have been able to adapt to the new conditions with support from Dutch research project Salt Solution and local NGOs who are teaching them to grow salt-tolerant crops, including potatoes, carrots, cabbages and coriander. So far 10,000 farmers have received training, resulting in two to three extra harvests per year.

Bangladesh is also home to almost 1 million Rohingya refugees from neighboring Myanmar, many of whom live in refugee camps. To prevent these political refugees becoming climate refugees, the UNHRC is working with local partners to plant fast-growing trees in parts of refugee camps that are prone to landslides during monsoons to stabilize the ground.

This all requires investment. But at COP27 in November 2022, a breakthrough agreement was reached to provide "loss and damage" funding for vulnerable countries hit by climate disasters. This could help climate refugees internally displaced within their own country. Details of the new funding arrangements were not decided, but countries agreed to operationalize them at COP28 in Dubai. It marks an important first step that acknowledges the people and countries least responsible for climate change are being affected first and most severely.

The White House report also highlights the need for climate financing - from U.S. foreign aid and international financial institutions, for example - to support vulnerable communities to respond to, prepare for, and adapt to climate and migration risks. It also urges the U.S. government to establish an interagency working group on climate migration to coordinate its efforts to address the challenge. It would oversee the drafting of U.S. policy, strategies and budgets to help those impacted by climate change and migration, either domestically or internationally.

Protected status for climate refugees

But another issue is protected status. Most experts argue climate change refugees need access to the same protected status offered to other refugees, such as those who have escaped conflict.

In March 2018, the UN Human Rights Council found that many climate refugees do not fit the definition of "refugees" and called them "the world's forgotten victims." This means they cannot access legal protections to their human rights, which could protect them from threats like deportation.

To rectify this, governments and legal bodies must reframe conditions caused by climate change as a threat to human rights and recognize the deadly threat that climate refugees face - even if that threat is not always as immediate as the dangers faced by refugees fleeing war.

Even the White House report says current legal instruments to protect refugees "do not readily lend themselves to protect those individuals displaced by the impacts of climate change, especially those that address migration across borders." One of its key legislative suggestions is for the U.S. to expand use of its migrant protection program known as Temporary Protected Status.

But the ultimate solution is to curtail climate change by achieving the goals set out in the Paris Agreement to limit temperature increase to well below 2 degrees Celsius (°C) and ideally to 1.5°C.

"Society is measured by how it treats its most vulnerable," adds Rahman. "We need to take every measure - as policy makers, corporations and individuals - to fight climate change and protect those that are the first to be impacted by its effects."

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There could be 1.2 billion climate refugees by 2050. Here's what you need to know

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Learn more about causes of climate migration, the issues facing climate refugees and solutions that can help solve this growing issue.

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2050: Introduction of Nuclear Fusion Reactors

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2050: Introduction of Nuclear Fusion Reactors

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Innovations in nuclear fusion technology may make this a via power generation system by 2050.

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2051: Changes in the Gulf Stream radically changes climate in Northern Europe.

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2051: Changes in the Gulf Stream radically changes climate in Northern Europe.

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Climate scientists have detected warning signs of the collapse of the Gulf Stream, one of the planet's main potential tipping points.

The research found "an almost complete loss of stability over the last century" of the currents that researchers call the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC). The currents are already at their slowest point in at least 1,600 years, but the new analysis shows they may be nearing a shutdown.

Such an event would have catastrophic consequences around the world, severely disrupting the rains that billions of people depend on for food in India, South America and West Africa; increasing storms and lowering temperatures in Europe; and pushing up the sea level off eastern North America. It would also further endanger the Amazon rainforest and Antarctic ice sheets.

The complexity of the AMOC system and uncertainty over levels of future global heating make it impossible to forecast the date of any collapse for now. It could be within a decade or two, or several centuries away. But the colossal impact it would have means it must never be allowed to happen, the scientists said.

"The signs of destabilisation being visible already is something that I wouldn't have expected and that I find scary," said Niklas Boers, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, who did the research. "It's something you just can't [allow to] happen."

It is not known what level of CO2 would trigger an AMOC collapse, he said. "So the only thing to do is keep emissions as low as possible. The likelihood of this extremely high-impact event happening increases with every gram of CO2 that we put into the atmosphere".

Scientists are increasingly concerned about tipping points - large, fast and irreversible changes to the climate. Boers and his colleagues reported in May that a significant part of the Greenland ice sheet is on the brink, threatening a big rise in global sea level. Others have shown recently that the Amazon rainforest is nowemitting more CO2 than it absorbs, and that the 2020 Siberian heatwave led to worrying releases of methane.

The world may already have crossed a series of tipping points, according to a 2019 analysis, resulting in "an existential threat to civilisation". A major report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, due on Monday, is expected to set out the worsening state of the climate crisis.

Boer's research, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, is titled " Observation-based early-warning signals for a collapse of the AMOC ". Ice-core and other data from the last 100,000 years show the AMOC has two states: a fast, strong one, as seen over recent millennia, and a slow, weak one. The data shows rising temperatures can make the AMOC switch abruptly between states over one to five decades.

The AMOC is driven by dense, salty seawater sinking into the Arctic ocean, but the melting of freshwater from Greenland's ice sheet is slowing the process down earlier than climate models suggested.

Boers used the analogy of a chair to explain how changes in ocean temperature and salinity can reveal the AMOC's instability. Pushing a chair alters its position, but does not affect its stability if all four legs remain on the floor. Tilting the chair changes both its position and stability.

Eight independently measured datasets of temperature and salinity going back as far as 150 years enabled Boers to show that global heating is indeed increasing the instability of the currents, not just changing their flow pattern.

The analysis concluded: "This decline [of the AMOC in recent decades] may be associated with an almost complete loss of stability over the course of the last century, and the AMOC could be close to a critical transition to its weak circulation mode."

Levke Caesar, at Maynooth University in Ireland, who was not involved in the research, said: "The study method cannot give us an exact timing of a possible collapse, but the analysis presents evidence that the AMOC has already lost stability, which I take as a warning that we might be closer to an AMOC tipping than we think."

David Thornalley, at University College London in the UK, whose work showed the AMOC is at its weakest point in 1,600 years, said: "These signs of decreasing stability are concerning. But we still don't know if a collapse will occur, or how close we might be to it."

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Climate crisis: Scientists spot warning signs of Gulf Stream collapse

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A shutdown would have devastating global impacts and must not be allowed to happen, researchers say

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2051: The Suburban Rail Loop planned to be operational in Melbourne

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2051: The Suburban Rail Loop planned to be operational in Melbourne

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Suburban Rail Loop (SRL) is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to shape the future liveability, productivity and connectivity of Melbourne.

The 90km rail line will link every major rail line from the Frankston Line to the Werribee Line via Melbourne Airport, better connecting Victorians to jobs, retail, education, health services and each other.

Three transport super hubs at Clayton, Broadmeadows and Sunshine will connect regional services, so passengers outside Melbourne won't have to travel through the CBD to get to employment, world-class hospitals and universities in the suburbs.

Following the release of the comprehensive SRL Business and Investment Case and a detailed Environment Effects Statement, work is progressing on SRL East from Cheltenham to Box Hill.

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Suburban Rail Loop (SRL) is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to shape the future liveability, productivity and connectivity of Melbourne. The 90km rail line will link every major rail line from the Frankston Line to the Werribee Line via Melbourne Airport, better connecting Victorians to jobs, retail, education, health services and each other.

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Changes in farming will be necessary to feed the world in a sustainable way. The use of land for algae farming provides an opportunity for nations to develop their own resources that can feed their populations with less environmental impact.

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Correction: This post has been updated since it was published on June 15, 2018, to reflect how Royal Dutch Shell and Department of Energy grant was used, the attributes of algae and the uses of algae through those studies.

and member of the Charles Greene is a climate scientist who looks at the impact of climate on marine ecosystems. He's a Professor of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Cornell University Marine Algae Industrialization Consortium (MAGIC) which has a grant from the Department of Energy to look into the commercial viability of algal biofuels.

In February 2018, Greene presented his views on how algae could provide solutions to the grand global challenges of the 21st century (energy, climate, and food security) at the American Geophysical Union's biannual ocean sciences meeting, in Portland, Oregon.

What's so great about algae? It grows 10 times more rapidly than terrestrial plants, and less than a tenth of the land is needed to produce an equivalent amount of biomass. It grows on non-productive and non-arable land, so it doesn't compete with other crops for land. Because it doesn't require fresh water, it can be fertilized more efficiently than land crops, and you can avoid the intensive water usage, wasteful fertilizer runoff, and downstream eutrophication associated with modern agriculture.

"Microalgae grow much faster than land plants and can be a source of biofuel that makes sense environmentally and economically if valuable co-products are produced simultaneously," said Greene.

Greene believes that algae could be the answer to all of those challenges providing a valuable source of carbon-neutral fuels, aquafeeds for the agriculture and aquaculture industries, and high-protein food products for direct human consumption.
Global view
"Over the last decade, Greene and his colleagues were funded by Royal Dutch Shell and the Department of Energy to look for a commercially viable way to produce biofuels using microalgae.

"We asked ourselves what was the environment going to be like when we couldn't use fossil fuels anymore. Finding out that producing algae just for biofuels would be too expensive, we looked at co-products that could be created simultaneously while producing the fuel," said Greene. "After you remove the lipids from the algae, we looked at what you could do with what's left and discovered you could use the 'defatted' algal biomass as a highly nutritional supplement in aquafeeds for salmon and white shrimp and animal feed for chicken and swine."

"Then we asked ourselves if we wanted to produce all of the fuels that the world currently needs, then how much land would we need, and how much protein could we co-produce?" said Greene. "On a global scale, we could meet the current liquid fuel demands by growing algae in an area slightly less than three times the size of Texas. At the same time, we could also produce 10 times the amount of protein as produced with soy from all over the world."

"By 2050 we will have 9.5 to 10 billion people in the world, and with algae, we've found a way to feed those people by producing a large amount of protein. Maybe we won't convince the Western world to change its diet immediately, but we do have a way to combat malnutrition in the developing world, and that alone makes it interesting," said Greene.

Greene takes both a fuel-based and environmental approach to algae.

"If you look at this from a carbon neutral perspective - not introducing any new Co2 into the atmosphere - times have changed, and energy markets continue to evolve," adds Greene. "Most of the light vehicle fleet will be electrified by 2030 to 2050, and there won't be as much of a need for liquid fuels, on the other hand, there will still be a need for jet aviation and shipping in the foreseeable future, and of course there will always be a need for food."

"Regarding other global challenges, like food security and maintaining biodiversity, if we have the potential to produce higher quality, more nutritious food in less area to meet
our needs with algae rather than terrestrial plants, then this has huge implications of land use," said Greene. "The demand for clearing rainforests to grow soy and palm in places like Brazil and Indonesia would disappear, then why wouldn't we choose that path?"

We can produce the same amount of food and more from the land that's already developed and gain several environmental advantages at the same time, that's huge," added Greene.

"Many high-value, niche-market products are already being produced because algae possess unusual nutritional, anticarcinogenic, and anti-inflammatory properties. People have been selling these kinds of specialty algal products for a while, but these markets are relatively small. In contrast, we are looking at commodity markets that are large and will scale together. That is the only way that we will be able to solve global-scale problems," said Greene.

"We have about 10-15 years left to address our global climate, energy, and food security problems because it will take two to three decades to implement them at the necessary scale to solve these global challenges, then it's game over," added Greene.

"One 2,500 acre commercial algae production facility will cost about 500 million dollars to build, so you can't just go to Silicon Valley to make that happen. Right now companies are growing algae at R& D or demonstration scale, and small, niche-market companies are growing algae at comparable scales, but no one is doing it large scale appropriate for commodity markets," said Greene.

Mariliis Holm is the co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Nonfood, an early stage startup based in Los Angeles with an agenda to create sustainable algae-based foods that reduce agriculture's resource and carbon footprint. Holm is taking the matter into her own hands at a micro level.

Nonfood's first product is the Nonbar, an algae-based snack bar that contains 37% algae and aquatic plant ingredients, already higher than any other ready-to-eat food product on the market which stands around 1-2%, by adding Spirulina. It has micro and macronutrients, nine grams of clean protein, antioxidants, vitamin A, calcium and absorbable iron.

"Algae is the most efficient group of organisms on Earth turning CO2, sunlight, and water into densely nutritious food for all living animals for more than 3.5 billion years," said Holm. "The future I envision consist of individuals and communities growing their own algae that can be eaten directly, blended into products or used as a feed for cellular agriculture."

Holm has her own photobioreactor developed by Spira Inc. a DC-based start-up which was founded by Elliot Roth. She says that since 2016, she's been working with the challenge of how to feed planet Earth and Mars in 2050 sustainably and maintain the pleasure of eating.

"Last summer (in 2017), after growing Spirulina, trying the green stuff fresh and using it to develop new food products at the focusing on Climate Change at NASA's Singularity University's Global Solution Program Ames Research Center, I was convinced that I've finally found the solution," said Holm.

"So to accelerate the sustainable and delicious future of food I co-founded Nonfood [..] to create radically sustainable future foods made from algae," said Holm. "I believe that truly innovative and successful food products need to fulfill all of the four following criteria: tackle planet Earth's health, improve human health through nutrition, be affordable and above all taste delicious."

"Based on a decade of food science studies, research and entrepreneurship in Estonia, Singapore, France, Ireland, Netherlands and US, I am convinced that algae have the highest potential to fulfill all of those," added Holm.
Neutriceuticals
"Algae farming is an extension of what we can do already with conventional agriculture - it isn't a replacement of other crops, but a highly nutritious addition to what we are already doing," says Dr. Rebecca White, Vice President of Operations, Qualitas Health.

Qualitas Health grows and operates algae farms for its consumer-facing brand which sells algae-based supplements. iWi, which is owned by Qualitas Health has been making algae-based supplements like Omega-3 supplements since 2017.

The company produces Nannochloropsis (a genus of algae grown for its potential as a source of food, feed, and fuel) at commercial scale on open ponds on farms it owns and operates in Imperial, TX and one in Columbus, New Mexico, owned by Green Stream Farms. There is an extraction facility (where the Omega-3 oil is extracted from the algae) in Mexico.

"Our algae, Nanno, is a great source of protein - it's about 40% protein by mass, with all the essential and branch chained amino acids, and we can produce more per acre than other plant-based sources such as soy or peas," said White. "Most consumers get their Omega-3 from fish-based supplements, but algae farming opens up new nutritional sustainable food sources and caters to the increased demand for plant-based protein and nutrient-rich food products versus relying on over-fished marine ecosystems.

"As consumers continue to demand more sustainable and nutritious dietary options, algae is poised to play a larger role in everyday health. iWi's call to action is to create sustainable, healthy, tasty food solutions that people want to eat - solutions that are compatible with existing and future consumer needs," adds White.

White notes that supplements are undoubtedly just the beginning - protein will be much bigger, and maybe the more critical product.

According to a 2018 report by ReportLinker on the global algae market, the algae products market is projected to be around $4.0 billion in 2018 and grow to $5.2 billion by 2023. The report also notes that during this same time period, 2018 to 2023, algae protein and the nutritional and dietary supplement segment is projected to have the highest growth rate. According to the report, the demand for algae-based food and beverage products is growing. Ice cream manufacturers are starting to add algae to their products to increase the nutritional value of the product.

"Currently, companies are producing a huge range of products from algae - antioxidants, protein, flavors, colorants, etc.," said White. "You can now find algae-based products in the most exclusive restaurants around the world as part of their menus, in cosmetic creams, and in many other products as well."

"Within the next three to five years we are going to find algae in many of our everyday products, turning algae into a multi-billion dollar industry," said White.

White says that for algae businesses seeking to succeed, a primary challenge for Qualitas is to produce economically at scale.

"We're committed to overcoming this challenge with technology and smart farming practices," said White. "To move forward faster, we have focused on collaborating with other companies - both inside the algae industry and outside of it - to find affordable, enabling technologies (such as the harvesting technology) that have become available in recent years, and we have built on the significant amount of work that the algae industry has accumulated in the last six [..] decades."

"For the consumer, we are concerned with not just functionality, but also the best organoleptic properties (flavor, smell, texture)," added White. "For our planet, we are concerned with environmental and social sustainability."
The Bioinnovators
According to Bill Liao, General Partner, SOSV, and Founder, RebelBio.co, microalgae are finally yielding their secrets for efficiently turning light and water into useful materials and foods.

"This is powerful in both mass applications like protein manufacture and also with deep technology players like Microsynbiotix who are manufacturing edible vaccines via microalgae," said Liao. "Microsynbiotix believes that aquaculture is the future of sustainable food production."

Allied Market Research predicts that the aquaculture market will reach $242 billion by 2022 up from $169 billion in 2015.

"The future of all materials, is likely biobased, from alternatives to petroleum-based products that can all be brewed, fermented through to better materials, like Adidas latest prototype, spider silk shoes which have about a 10x stronger than steel strength per weight," said Ryan Bethencourt, CEO, WildEarth and Partner, Babel Ventures. "Where it gets fascinating are the new applications we haven't yet explored like, carbon-based nanowires that can replace metal based wires (originally derived from bacteria) or use new bio-polymers for B2B applications."

Bethencourt references Algiknit, a seed-stage biomaterials company, funded by SOSV that integrates science and design into textile production. The company wants to push the fashion industry into the circular economy with compostable, durable, kelp-driven yarns.

"The fashion industry is the second most polluting industry on earth, and this has got to change," said Aaron Nesser, Founder, AlgiKnit.

"We aim to operate in a closed loop product lifecycle, utilizing materials with a significantly lower environmental footprint than conventional textiles that also remain biodegradable and even edible, all to bring sustainable bio-based textile alternatives to the footwear and apparel industries," added Nesser.

"Algae are some of the most productive organisms on Earth. They're able to transform the suns energy into a huge range of useful compounds all while absorbing run-off, sequestering CO2, and improving marine ecosystems when grown in coastal waters," said Nesser. "The nascent kelp farming industry has great potential to improve the coastal ecosystems and economies in areas where overfishing has taken its toll."

"This is the beginning of a whole new range of bio-based materials which are going to transform both consumer fashion including shoes and apparel. We've seen with both Bolt Threads that uses spider's silk and mushroom leather; Modern Meadow (printed leather) and Geltor, that makes a leather-bound book for clean meat that's brewed collagen-based leather," adds Bethencourt.

"I believe that almost all of the major challenges that the world faces, including the need to find solutions to challenges related to power and energy, the need to address aging populations and aging economic infrastructure, the need to address challenges in education and human development, the need to provide sufficient and safe food and water for a growing world population, the need to address challenges of urbanization, the need to address emerging security threats, and the need to promote global economic opportunity will all require technological solutions," said Jim Jeffries, 2018 President and CEO of The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

Greene states that the problems the world is facing require significant investments from countries and multi-national corporations.

"In 2007, Royal Dutch Shell put $110 million into our biofuel project which is a lot for R&D in scientific circles, but a drop in the bucket," adds Greene. "We need the big energy companies to think about what it's going to take for them to be in business 15 to 20 years from now. If they don't begin the transition now, then they'll end up with stranded assets and go bankrupt which will have a huge impact on the global economy."

"If we get hit with that, it will be questionable if we still have the financial resources to go forward. If we make a smooth transition away from fossil fuels and to fossil-free energy sources during the next couple of decades, then our kids and future generations will inherit a much healthier society," added Greene.

Greene says that if we're trying to solve the most significant challenges that society faces then we have to do that in an integrated way.

But Mariliis Holm puts it another way.

"If I had one silver bullet for the future of sustainable food, it would be green and loaded with algae," added Holm.

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Correction: This post has been updated since it was published on June 15, 2018, to reflect how Royal Dutch Shell and Department of Energy grant was used, the attributes of algae and the uses of algae through those studies.

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This document offers some indicators for a variety of resource and environmental factors. Usage and change are tracked until 2052.

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A worldwide review of global rainfall data led by the University of Adelaide has found that the intensity of the most extreme rainfall events is increasing across the globe as temperatures rise.

In the most comprehensive review of changes to extreme rainfall ever undertaken, researchers evaluated the association between extreme rainfall and atmospheric temperatures at more than 8000 weather gauging stations around the world.

Lead author Dr Seth Westra said, "The results are that rainfall extremes are increasing on average globally. They show that there is a 7% increase in extreme rainfall intensity for every degree increase in global atmospheric temperature.

"Assuming an increase in global average temperature by 3 to 5 degrees Celsius by the end of the 21st century, this could mean very substantial increases in rainfall intensity as a result of climate change."

Dr Westra, a Senior Lecturer with the University of Adelaide's School of Civil, Environmental and Mining Engineering" and member of the Environment Institute, said trends in rainfall extremes were examined over the period from 1900 to 2009 to determine whether they were becoming more intense or occurring more frequently.

"The results show that rainfall extremes were increasing over this period, and appear to be linked to the increase in global temperature of nearly a degree which also took place over this time.

"If extreme rainfall events continue to intensify, we can expect to see floods occurring more frequently around the world," Dr Westra said.

The strongest increases occurred in the tropical countries, although some level of increase seems to be taking place at the majority of weather gauging stations.

Dr Westra said, "Most of these tropical countries are very poor and thus not well placed to adapt to the increased risk of flooding, which puts them in a larger threat of devastation."

This work is being published in the Journal of Climate and can be seen online.

The research also involved researchers from the University of New South Wales, Australia and the University of Victoria, Canada.

Contact Details

Associate Professor Seth Westra
Email: seth.westra@adelaide.edu.au
Head, Intelligent Water Decisions
School of Civil, Environmental and Mining Engineering
The University of Adelaide
Business: +61 8 8313 1538
Mobile: +61 414 997 406

Adriana Russo
Email: adriana.russo@adelaide.edu.au
Marketing and Communications Officer
Environment Institute
The University of Adelaide
Business: 08 8313 3670
Mobile: 0422 210 189

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Increases in extreme rainfall linked to global warming

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A worldwide review of global rainfall data led by the University of Adelaide has found that the intensity of the most extreme rainfall events is increasing across the globe as temperatures rise. In the most comprehensive review of changes to extreme rainfall ever undertaken, researchers evaluated the association between extreme rainfall and atmospheric temperatures at more than 8000 weather gauging stations around the world.

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2055: World Population reaches 9.7 Billion.

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2055: World Population reaches 9.7 Billion.

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The global population is projected to reach 8 billion on 15 November 2022, and India is projected to surpass China as the world's most populous country in 2023, according to World Population Prospects 2022, released today on World Population Day.

"This year's World Population Day falls during a milestone year, when we anticipate the birth of the Earth's eight billionth inhabitant. This is an occasion to celebrate our diversity, recognize our common humanity, and marvel at advancements in health that have extended lifespans and dramatically reduced maternal and child mortality rates," said UN Secretary-General António Guterres. "At the same time, it is a reminder of our shared responsibility to care for our planet and a moment to reflect on where we still fall short of our commitments to one another," he added.

The global population is growing at its slowest rate since 1950, having fallen under 1 per cent in 2020. The latest projections by the United Nations suggest that the world's population could grow to around 8.5 billion in 2030 and 9.7 billion in 2050. It is projected to reach a peak of around 10.4 billion people during the 2080s and to remain at that level until 2100.

World Population Prospects 2022 also states that fertility has fallen markedly in recent decades for many countries. Today, two-thirds of the global population lives in a country or area where lifetime fertility is below 2.1 births per woman, roughly the level required for zero growth in the long run for a population with low mortality. The populations of 61 countries or areas are projected to decrease by 1 per cent or more between 2022 and 2050, owing to sustained low levels of fertility and, in some cases, elevated rates of emigration.

More than half of the projected increase in the global population up to 2050 will be concentrated in eight countries: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and the United Republic of Tanzania. Countries of sub-Saharan Africa are expected to contribute more than half of the increase anticipated through 2050.

"The relationship between population growth and sustainable development is complex and multidimensional," said Liu Zhenmin, UN Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs. "Rapid population growth makes eradicating poverty, combatting hunger and malnutrition, and increasing the coverage of health and education systems more difficult.

Conversely, achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, especially those related to health, education and gender equality, will contribute to reducing fertility levels and slowing global population growth."

In most countries of sub-Saharan Africa, as well as in parts of Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean, the share of population at working age (between 25 and 64 years) has been increasing thanks to recent reductions in fertility. This shift in the age distribution provides a time-bound opportunity for accelerated economic growth per capita, known as the "demographic dividend". To maximize the potential benefits of a favourable age distribution, countries should invest in the further development of their human capital by ensuring access to health care and quality education at all ages and by promoting opportunities for productive employment and decent work.

The share of global population at ages 65 and above is projected to rise from 10 per cent in 2022 to 16 per cent in 2050. At that point, it is expected that the number of persons aged 65 years or over worldwide will be more than twice the number of children under age 5 and about the same as the number under age 12. Countries with ageing populations should take steps to adapt public programmes to the growing numbers of older persons, including by establishing universal health care and long-term care systems and by improving the sustainability of social security and pension systems.

Global life expectancy at birth reached 72.8 years in 2019, an improvement of almost 9 years since 1990. Further reductions in mortality are projected to result in an average global longevity of around 77.2 years in 2050. Yet in 2021, life expectancy for the least developed countries lagged 7 years behind the global average.

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all three components of population change. Global life expectancy at birth fell to 71.0 years in 2021. In some countries, successive waves of the pandemic may have produced short-term reductions in numbers of pregnancies and births, while for many other countries, there is little evidence of an impact on fertility levels or trends. The pandemic severely restricted all forms of human mobility, including international migration.

"Further actions by Governments aimed at reducing fertility would have little impact on the pace of population growth between now and mid-century, because of the youthful age structure of today's global population. Nevertheless, the cumulative effect of lower fertility, if maintained over several decades, could be a more substantial deceleration of global population growth in the second half of the century," added John Wilmoth, Director of the Population Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs.

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World population to reach 8 billion on 15 November 2022 [EN/AR/ZH] - World

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The global population is projected to reach 8 billion on 15 November 2022, and India is projected to surpass China as the world's most populous country in 2023, according to World Population Prospects 2022 , released today on World Population Day.

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Join the Future Timeline community!

2059

The end of the oil age

For most of the 20th century, prospectors discovered far more oil than industrial societies could consume. This was an era of cheap and plentiful energy that saw huge growth in the world's economy and population. By 1970, however, a major slowdown in discoveries was observed. This continued into the 21st century and the industry now faced competition from renewables. By the late 2050s, the end of the 200-year oil age is being witnessed, as the final dregs of economically viable reserves are extracted.* Plastics and other oil-based products have been replaced by alternatives, such as bioplastics.

Mars has a permanent human presence by now

By the end of this decade, a permanent team of scientists is present on Mars.** This comprises a highly international mix of people. The first civilian tourist has also arrived. Travel to Mars is now cheaper and faster thanks to new forms of propulsion, cutting journey times from six months to just a few weeks.*

The base will soon be expanded with additional facilities providing more energy, food production and recycling systems, along with mining equipment and other tools.* Vehicles are being supplied too, improving the astronauts' mobility and enabling them to roam hundreds of miles. More sophisticated long term bases are now being planned to accomodate larger teams of scientists, as well as corporate interests.

The habitat modules are constructed partially underground, giving protection from the Sun's ultraviolet glare. Radiation-absorbing materials based on advanced nanotechnology are used in spacesuits, as well as on the exterior of the vehicles. These same materials have filters to block even the tiniest particles of dust, providing long term protection against the environment outside.

All of the above is providing the critical mass needed for self-sufficiency. Operations will soon be conducted entirely independent of Earth. In the coming years, the first children will be born on Mars.

Credit: NASA

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2059 Future Timeline | Timeline | Technology | Singularity | 2020 | 2050 | 2100 | 2150 | 2200 | 21st century | 22nd century | 23rd century | Humanity | Predictions | Events

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Join the Future Timeline community! 2059 The end of the oil age For most of the 20th century, prospectors discovered far more oil than industrial societies could consume. This was an era of cheap and plentiful energy that saw huge growth in the world's economy and population.

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The iterations and development of quantum computing and artificial intelligence creates an context where existing encryption standards will be under threat.

Information provides access. By recording existing encryption states and existing protocols, organisations can create archives for machine learning systems to be trained when they  created. These archives will be powerful educational tools for these new computer applications.

Many depictions of artificial intelligence warfare involve the deployment of autonomous drone soldiers, aircraft and submersibles. However, the nature of this conflict is likely to be less about physical combat, but more about disruption activities that target key infrastructure.

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Cybersecurity

Quantum computing is on the horizon. The emerging computing architecture renders possible a form of 'super parallel processing' based on quantum physics that can rapidly solve problems beyond the scope of what a classical computer can achieve.

The technology is fast advancing, with governments investing billions and blue-chip technology heavyweights prioritizing the technology.

Advances in quantum computing risk unraveling data encryption, bringing far-reaching implications for data security to the fore.

"If we see ... major advances in quantum computing, very quickly, then all of our attempts to encrypt our data may actually collapse." - Wendell Wallach, Yale University's Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics

What this means is that quantum computers will be incredibly effective at hacking into encrypted data - rendering sensitive data and critical infrastructures, as well as Internet of Things and 5G networks, vulnerable to attack.
'Download now, decrypt later'
Although the technology is not yet commercially deployed, the security threats are already here.

The 'download now, decrypt later' attack vector already sees actors downloading existing encrypted data, to be cracked open once the technology arrives.

"Now, it's not a matter of if it will happen," said Mark Jackson of Cambridge Quantum Computing during a panel discussion on AI, quantum technologies and new cyber threats at the recent AI for Good Global Summit. "It's only when... and you don't want to wait 10 years before you upgrade your security. You should be doing it now, because it takes time to make this transition."
'Quantum-safe' solutions
Quantum-safe solutions already exist. Technologies such as Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) and Quantum Random Number Generator (QRNG) have been proven to be quantum-safe and ready for large-scale deployment.

"I actually want to take this opportunity to thank the ITU because, this year, they've done a great job of creating standards for quantum technologies related to encryption and security." - Mark Jackson, Cambridge Quantum Computing

However, their use will not be possible without standards to support trust and interoperability across large-scale networks such as 5G and IoT. ITU is building an ecosystem of quantum specialists collaborating to develop standards on the security aspects of quantum technologies.

"There's a much bigger threat than a lot of people realize, for their current security systems," says Mr Jackson. "I actually want to take this opportunity to thank the ITU because, this year, they've done a great job of creating standards for quantum technologies related to encryption and security. And I think this is doing a great job to kind of elevate the importance to people to show that it's important enough that we have to create standards ... the technology already exists, and they need to take it seriously."

ITU's standardization arm, ITU-T, has welcomed a range of new members interested in influencing the development of ITU standards on security aspects of quantum technologies.

The home of ITU standardization work on security aspects of quantum technologies is ITU-T Study Group 17 (SG17), the expert group responsible for 'building confidence and security in the use of ICTs'. Networking aspects of quantum key distribution are under study in ITU-T Study Group 13 (SG13), the expert group responsible for 'future networks and cloud'.

Beyond the threats, quantum computing - more specifically, quantum machine learning - has the potential to address challenges faced by society today.

Jackson detailed how quantum machine learning's unique properties, such as its ability to generate provably random number sequences and identify unseen patterns, can potentially help with data integrity verification and content authentication.
Convergence and unpredictability
Concern about the convergence and unpredictability of emerging technologies was echoed throughout the panel at the AI for Good Global Summit.

"We're facing right now an era of hybrid emerging cyber threats produced by the combination of powerful dual-use technologies. AI is one of them - AI converging with bio- and cybertech," said Eleonore Pauwels, Research Fellow on Emerging Cyber-technologies at UN University's Centre for Policy Research.

"We have absolutely no idea what rate which breakthroughs will take place, or in what order." - Wendell Wallach, Yale University

Pauwels voiced particular concern for the potential for malware to automate and spread data manipulation in healthcare systems and disintegrate trust in governing institutions. "What is at stake is really the power to manipulate the integrity of data and strategic intelligence within the functioning of countries' political processes, economic infrastructures, and even now operations, bodies and minds," said Pauwels.

Looking forward, panelists highlighted the need to employ foresight to address issues before it is too late.

"Foresight, and especially integrating a diversity of knowledge and experiences ... would also help us to actually shift the technological design before that's decided, and before it's deployed," said Pauwels. "I'm a big believer in doing foresight anticipation in cooperation with diverse actors."
An 'ethical-legal gap'?
"These technologies are appearing at a rapid rate, and they're converging. We have [a] serious ethical-legal gap - what's sometimes called the pacing problem - between our ability to put in place policies to attend to the negative consequences," says Wendell. "Many times, the technologies are so embedded in our society, by the time we recognize what can go wrong ... we don't have effective ways of addressing it."

Wendell remarked on a global sense of a loss of agency, and drew a metaphor between the state of the world today and the self-driving car. "Technology is in the driver's seat as a primary determinant of human destiny. And we seem to be deploying technologies because they're feasible, without necessarily allowing citizens to have an active participation in the world that we're creating."
By Pamela Lian, ITU News

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AI, quantum technologies and new cyber threats - are we prepared?

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Cybersecurity Quantum computing is on the horizon. The emerging computing architecture renders possible a form of 'super parallel processing' based on quantum physics that can rapidly solve problems beyond the scope of what a classical computer can achieve. The technology is fast advancing, with governments investing billions and blue-chip technology heavyweights prioritizing the technology.

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Calculations are made to determine the risk to different nations owing to climate change. Some of these are disproportionate related their proximity to recent events.

By 2060, climate change will have caused significant migration away from areas of the world that have become difficult for humans to inhabit. This may need to countries being completely depopulated, either through flooding or temperature rises causing catastrophic droughts.

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¿Cuáles son los países más amenazados y vulnerables por el cambio climático?

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Durante la celebración de la COP25 en Madrid el instituto Germanwatch presentó los resultados del Índice de Riesgo Climático (IRC) Global 2020. Según este análisis, basado en los impactos de los eventos climáticos extremos y las pérdidas socioeconómicas que provocan, Japón, Filipinas y Alemania son los lugares más afectados por el cambio climático en la actualidad.

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Current projections indicate that the ozone layer recover will be complete by 2060.

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Ozone layer finally healing after damage caused by aerosols, UN says

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Upper layer above northern hemisphere should be completely repaired in 2030s

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2065: First generation of Archival Discs will become unusable

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2065: First generation of Archival Discs will become unusable

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Archival Disks were introduced as a reliable data storage solution. At this point, these disks will be exhausting their shelf life.

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Sony, Panasonic develop 300GB to 1TB ‘Archival Disc’ for 50 year-plus storage

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Discs based on the format will last decades longer than magnetic tapes and hard drives, the companies said

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2065: Climate Change leads to New Trade Routes

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2065: Climate Change leads to New Trade Routes

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PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] - With climate change rapidly warming the world's oceans, the future of the Arctic Ocean looks grim. Climate models show that parts of the Arctic that were once covered in ice year-round are warming so quickly that they will be reliably ice-free for months on end in as few as two decades. The Arctic's changing climate will endanger countless species that thrive in sub-zero temperatures, scientists say.

Another critical consequence of melting ice in the Arctic? The potential for shorter, more eco-friendly maritime trade routes that bypass the Russian-controlled Northern Sea Route.

In a new study, a pair of climate scientists at Brown University worked with a legal scholar at the University of Maine School of Law to predict how Arctic Ocean ice melt could affect the regulation of shipping routes over the next few decades. They projected that by 2065, the Arctic's navigability will increase so greatly that it could yield new trade routes in international waters - not only reducing the shipping industry's carbon footprint but also weakening Russia's control over trade in the Arctic.

The study was published on Monday, June 20, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"There's no scenario in which melting ice in the Arctic is good news," said Amanda Lynch, the study's lead author and a professor of Earth, environmental and planetary sciences at Brown. "But the unfortunate reality is that the ice is already retreating, these routes are opening up, and we need to start thinking critically about the legal, environmental and geopolitical implications."

Lynch, who has studied climate change in the Arctic for nearly 30 years, said that as a first step, she worked with Xueke Li, a postdoctoral research associate at the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, to model four navigation scenarios based on four likely outcomes of global actions to halt climate change in the coming years. Their projections showed that unless global leaders successfully constrain warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius over the next 43 years, climate change will likely open up several new routes through international waters by the middle of this century.

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Melting Arctic ice could transform international shipping routes, study finds

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PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] - With climate change rapidly warming the world's oceans, the future of the Arctic Ocean looks grim. Climate models show that parts of the Arctic that were once covered in ice year-round are warming so quickly that they will be reliably ice-free for months on end in as few as two decades.

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2060-2070: Tokamak Nuclear Fusion reactors introduced

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2060-2070: Tokamak Nuclear Fusion reactors introduced

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If current oil usage is maintained, then in forty-seven years time, we are predicted to run out of oil.

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Summary Table

World Oil Reserves
See also: List of countries by Oil Reserves
There are 1.65 trillion barrels of proven oil reserves in the world as of 2016.

The world has proven reserves equivalent to 46.6 times its annual consumption levels. This means it has about 47 years of oil left (at current consumption levels and excluding unproven reserves).

History of World's Proven Oil Reserves

World Oil Consumption
See also: List of countries by Oil Consumption

The world consumes 35,442,913,090 barrels of oil as of the year 2016, equivalent to 97,103,871 barrels per day.

Global oil consumption per capita is 5 barrels of oil (199 gallons) per person yearly (based on the 2016 world population of 7,464,022,049 people) or 0.5 gallons per capita per day.

History of Global Oil Consumption

Sources

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Summary Table See also: List of countries by Oil Reserves There are 1.65 trillion barrels of proven oil reserves in the world as of 2016. The world has proven reserves equivalent to 46.6 times its annual consumption levels. This means it has about 47 years of oil left (at current consumption levels and excluding unproven reserves).

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What does this look like? Energy allowance, Free Time. Social credit conformity system. Aspirations of future citizens?

Following the introduction of universal basic income in some nations during the 2030s, by the 2070s, this will be more widespread.

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Universal Basic Income (UBI) could be designed to reduce poverty, improve income security and boost well-being, but could be expensive and challenging to introduce. Many of its goals could be achieved through changes to the existing social security system and addressing the underlying causes of inse…

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2070: Islam Predicted to be the World's Largest Religion

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2070: Islam Predicted to be the World's Largest Religion

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Muslims will outnumber Christians by 2070, ending two millenniums of Christian dominance going back to the birth of Jesus Christ, projections released Thursday by the Pew Research Center show.

Islam is projected to grow more than twice as fast as any other major religion over the next half century because of a higher fertility rate. While Christianity will remain a dominant global religion, it will lose majority religious status in countries such as the United Kingdom, France and Australia.

Such a dramatic change raises questions about whether global conflicts between radical Muslim groups and Western nations with Christian majorities will become more inflamed in the decades ahead.

A slight shift by one major world religion to numerical dominance may not, by itself, create problems, but underlying factors of rapid population growth in poor countries can drive economic hardship, migration and political unrest, says David Voas, professor of population studies at England's Institute for Social and Economic Research. Such conditions can give rise to extremist violence, he says.

"The very rapid growth of population, combined with limited opportunities even for the educated young people, but particularly for less educated ones, has created social and therefore political tensions and that has fueled things like immigration to Western countries, political upheaval," Voas say.

The world's two largest religions will be near parity by 2050. Christians are predicted to be 31.4% of the planet's population vs. 29.7% who follow Islam, researchers say. Christians made up the same 31.4% in 2010; Muslims 23.2%.

"We can be quite confident that Muslims are going to grow rapidly in the decades ahead," said Conrad Hackett, demographer and lead author of the report.

The engine of growth for both Christianity and Islam will be sub-Saharan Africa where high fertility and large Muslim and Christian populations will increase global numbers for both religions, Pew demographers say.

Christianity will remain the dominant religion for the United States but lose some of its share to the unaffiliated - those who claim no particular religion or who are atheists or agnostic. By 2050, one in four Americans will fall into this non-religious category, up from 16.4% in 2010, the analysis shows.

While the populations of nearly all the world's religions will grow, youth and high fertility among Muslims will fuel a dramatic 73% jump in numbers in just over a generation. The number of Christians during that same period will increase by 35%, the study shows.

By midcentury, global population will swell by a third from 6.9 billion in 2010 to 9.3 billion.

Fertility rates are key to the growth rate of religions, according to the report. Populations remains static with a birthrate of 2.1 children per mother, and a few world religions during the next four decades fall below that mark. Buddhists, for example, have a rate of 1.6, so their numbers will remain largely unchanged by 2050, the report says.

Jews and Hindus have higher fertility rates, but still fall below the world average of 2.5. Christians surpass that average with a rate of 2.7, but Muslims soar beyond it with 3.1 children per mother.

For followers of Islam to outnumber Christians by 2070 would be a milestone for mankind, many scholars say. Pew researchers say experts they consulted assert that since Christianity began six centuries before Islam, followers of Christ have always outnumbered Muslims.

Other findings in the study:

* India will surpass Indonesia as having more Muslims than any country by 2050. However, because of India's explosive growth - it will house the world's largest population by then - Muslims will remain outnumbered by Hindus.

* Muslims will make up 10.2% of Europe's population by 2050, up from 5.9% in 2010. Their percentage within the U.S. will more than double to 2.1% and they will for the first time outnumber Jews in America.

* While the number of atheists, agnostics and others who do not affiliate with any religion will, as a group, be a smaller share of the world's population by 2050, they will be the largest, outnumbering Christians, for nations such as France, New Zealand and the Netherlands.

* Christianity is expected to suffer the largest net loss among those switching beliefs by 2050, winning over 40 million new adherents while losing 106 million, mostly to those unaffiliated with religion.

* A potential wild card in the projections is China. Those unaffiliated with religion make up more than half the population there. But some scholars believe many of those could be Christians too fearful to make their faith known. Should they become more open in the decades ahead it could change the calculations regarding worldwide Muslim numerical supremacy, Pew researchers say.

To establish the projections, Pew researchers culled through and analyzed 2,500 sources of data including censuses, demographic surveys and other studies.

"You might say only God knows how many people are believers," said Nicholas Eberstadt, a political economist and demographer with the American Enterprise Institute. "But to the extent we mortals who try to use statistical methods and data can try to quantify these very difficult questions, they've done a tremendous, tremendous job."

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Islam projected to be world's largest religion by 2070

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Muslims will outnumber Christians by 2070, ending two millenniums of Christian dominance going back to the birth of Jesus Christ, projections released Thursday by the Pew Research Center show. Islam is projected to grow more than twice as fast as any other major religion over the next half century because of a higher fertility rate.

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2071: Autonomous Police cars used in Law Enforcement.

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2071: Autonomous Police cars used in Law Enforcement.

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Professor Noel Sharkey of the University of Sheffield predicts that by the 2070s, autonomous vehicles will appear on the streets of cities in the developed world.

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Domestic power at this stage will be a variety of battery solutions with grid power for industry and backup/charging. Vehicles will be used as an additional energy storage system that supports home battery setups.

Universal Basic Income will be available to all individuals who are between 18 and 65.

The world will be substantially warmer. A global migration will be underway and this change to population demographics will be a source of tension in some countries.

At this point, we will need an active multinational organisation to regulate global initiatives and discoveries.

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2070

Islam is the world's dominant religion

By 2070, Islam has overtaken Christianity to become the dominant religion.* More than a quarter of the world's population was Muslim by the 2020s* and this growth continued in subsequent decades. Most of the increase has occurred in sub-Saharan Africa with its high fertility rates, although these are beginning to stabilise now.* While the numbers of non-religious have continued to increase, when measured as a percentage of the global population their share has declined from 16.4% in 2010, to 13.2% in 2050 and less than 12% in 2070. Christians and Muslims each comprise about 32.3% by 2070, with Christians set to reach 33.8% and Muslims 34.9% by 2100.* India has overtaken Indonesia as the country with the largest number of Muslims - though India's even larger population of Hindus continue to outnumber Muslims in the region.*

© Aiconimage | Dreamstime.com

Fusion power is widespread

Most leading countries now have at least one fusion plant either commercially operational, or in the process of construction.* These reactors offer a clean, safe and abundant supply of energy.

Fully automated homes

Buildings in developed nations have become highly automated and self-sufficient. In addition to robots, a typical new home now includes the following:

A localised power supply. Energy can be generated by the building itself, via a combination of photovoltaics and piezoelectric materials. Walls, roofs and windows can absorb almost all wavelengths of light from the Sun with organic solar technology, turning it into heat and electricity. Friction generated by the occupant's footsteps - and various other kinetic processes - can also produce energy. This is converted and stored in any number of ways, from hydrogen to batteries. In countries where sunlight is less frequent, microturbines may be used in place of solar.

On-site water production and waste management. Rain is captured by external guttering, then stored and converted into drinking water using nanofiltration systems. This is especially useful in regions prone to drought (which includes a substantial portion of the world by this time). If local water is in short supply, houses can serve as miniature reservoirs and filtration systems. Meanwhile, plastics and other kitchen waste can be placed in recycling machines, ground into extremely fine powder, then later re-used in nanofabricators.

A multi-layered building envelope which provides a variety of dynamic effects. Windows can self-adjust their size and position - as well as their opacity - to optimise the level of natural light. In some of the more upmarket properties, the entire façade can morph its texture and appearance. Depending on the tastes of the occupant, this could transform into an art deco style, a classic Victorian building, or something entirely different. This form of "programmable matter" can even be designed by the occupant themselves and changed on demand.

Air purification systems. Air within the home is kept fresh, purified and completely free of dust and microbes.

Interactive surfaces. Holographic generators cover the whole interior of the property - including walls, doors, worktop surfaces, mirrors and shower cubicles. These intelligent surfaces can track the position of the occupant and display information whenever and wherever necessary. A person can read emails, see news reports and access the online world using virtually any surface in the house as a touch screen or mind control interface.* Detailed, real-time information on their health, personal lifestyle and daily schedules can also be displayed. This system has a variety of other functions, e.g. it can be used to locate personal items which may have been misplaced.

Intelligent/self-maintaining appliances. Appliances that don't repair or maintain themselves in some way have become largely obsolete by now. It is very rare for a human engineer to be called to the house.

A modest size. The world is becoming an ever more crowded place, with available land continuing to shrink due to overpopulation and environmental decline. In city centres, apartments tend to be highly minimalist and compact, with small footprints utilising every inch of space. Full immersion virtual reality is one method of adapting to this. Another is flexible room layouts that reconfigure themselves on demand. In earlier decades, this was achieved in some homes by using a sliding wall system.* Today, it can be done with morphable materials.

© Sellingpix | Dreamstime.com

Five-year survival rates for liver cancer are approaching 100%

In the early 21st century, liver cancer was the third most common cancer death in the world. Nearly 700,000 people died from the disease in 2008, accounting for 9% of all cancer deaths. Major risk factors included chronic infection with hepatitis B and C (accounting for 54% and 31% of cases, respectively), consumption of foods contaminated with aflatoxin, and heavy alcohol consumption. It was nearly three times more common in men than in women.

In 2009, Japanese researchers began efforts to map the complete genome of liver cancer.* This paved the way for blood tests to spot tumours earlier, whilst also yielding new drug targets. The increasing use of nanoparticle carriers - and eventually nanobots giving precise control and delivery of drugs - also greatly improved survival rates.

Despite the global chaos unfolding at this point in history, scientific knowledge continues to advance incrementally. By 2070, five-year survival rates for liver cancer are reaching 100% in many countries.**

2072

Advanced nanotech clothing

Decades have now passed since the first appearance of nanotech clothing. During that time it has made extraordinary improvements in utility, power and sophistication. Modern fabrics have built upon the abilities of previous generations, perfecting many of the technologies involved. Today, a complex blend of nanotechnology, biotechnology, claytronics, metamaterials and other components has yielded a type of clothing previously confined to the realm of science fiction. Though mostly restricted to specialised personnel, government forces and elites, a number of these suits are finding their way into the mainstream.

Construction via self-assembling nanotechnology has been around for a number of decades. Until now, the process was only practical using bulky and/or conspicuous machinery, nanofabricators, or objects suspended in tanks of catalytic fluids.* However, recent advances in nanorobotics have allowed for more subtle and rapid construction of macro-scale objects in a more compact form-factor and with less impact on Earth's natural resources. As happened with early nanotech adoption in the 2020s, one of the easiest and most common applications has been in fabrics. Today, a high-end home "closet" may consist of simply a thin surface or pad built into the wall or floor, concealing a mass of nanobots and molecular building materials. A user can stand on or touch this surface and issue instructions to the machine (through voice command or virtual telepathy) for what to create. Each nanobot is then programmed with the final clothing design and set into motion.

The process begins with each nanobot organising and categorising each building molecule, based on the aggregate material needed and where each piece will be located in the finished product. The nanobots - also called "foglets" - then begin interlocking with themselves, forming a basic "skeleton" on which building molecules can be attached.*

As more and more nanobots and molecules are added on, thousands of individual fibres begin to form out of the machine's surface. These grow up and around the person's body, crossing each other to create a weave pattern, before finally taking the shape of traditional clothing. The result is a basic structure around which nanobots then construct the more advanced and customised features. Depending on the outfit's function, the original fibres can be interlaced with photovoltaics, piezoelectric nanowire, carbon nanotubes, metamaterials, claytronics or any number of other useful materials. Tiny electronic devices can be added for communication or medical purposes. This whole process is completed in a matter of seconds.

With such detail and control, fabric of this nature confers the wearer an array of conveniences. In earlier decades, this technology was limited to relatively simple functions, like colour and texture modifications.* Today, it is almost indistinguishable from magic. Complete wardrobes are no longer necessary, since one garment performs the function of many, transforming into an endless variety of styles and shapes. Most outfits are self-cleaning, self-fragrancing and rarely if ever need to be washed.** They can instantly adjust themselves in emergencies - becoming harder than steel to stop a knife or bullet; cushion-like in the event of accidents or falls. If a person is injured, the fabric can administer life-saving drugs and medical nanobots, or contract to seal a wound.* A drowning person can be made safe. Fire-fighters and other rescue workers are completely protected from hazards such as fire or radiation. This is also useful in space, protecting people from sudden changes in air pressure, micrometeorites, cosmic rays and other hazards. Medical devices included in these outfits monitor for disease at all times, catching the earliest signs of cancer or infection and alerting the wearer before any damage is done.* Whatever power is needed for the various functions is supplied by a combination of piezoelectric and photovoltaic components embedded throughout the clothing material.

Some of these aforementioned comforts had already been available in earlier decades, but were simpler and fewer - usually limited to just one, or a small number within each item of clothing. Today, however, all of them can be fully integrated and combined together into a single suit, created and maintained via swarms of intelligent foglets. As this technology evolves further, it becomes a permanent part of some peoples' physiology, almost like a second skin.*
Click to view animation
Picotechnology is becoming practical

Technology on the scale of trillionths of a metre (10⁻¹²) is becoming practical now.* Known as "picotechnology", this is orders of magnitude smaller than nanotechnology of earlier decades.* Among other applications, it allows the structure and properties of individual atoms to be altered via manipulation of energy states within electrons. This can produce metastable states with highly unusual properties, creating new and exotic forms of matter.

2073

Plastic recycling rates are approaching 100% worldwide

By the early 2070s, plastic recycling is ubiquitous globally. Although some of the most rural and isolated areas still lack the required infrastructure and facilities, they now represent a negligible percentage.

Belgian chemist Leo Baekeland invented the world's first synthetic plastic, Bakelite, in 1907. Improvements in chemical technology led to an explosion of new types of plastic, with mainstream adoption beginning in the 1940s and 50s. Production expanded at a phenomenal rate during the second half of the 20th century - from two million tons annually in 1950, to more than 200 million tons each year by 2000. With no end in sight to this upward trajectory and in light of concerns over its slow decomposition after disposal, as well as its toxicity, recycling emerged as a solution from the 1980s onwards. This was more environmentally friendly than incineration, or waste-to-energy methods, which had also begun some years before.

However, even with both recycling and waste-to-energy systems in place, handling the mountains of plastic waste generated each year was proving to be a formidable challenge. Researchers noted the appearance of a "Great Pacific garbage patch", a gyre of marine debris in the north central Pacific Ocean estimated to contain over 1.8 trillion plastic fragments. By the early 21st century, this was having a substantial impact on seabirds, fish and other life in the food chain with implications for human health too. In 2019, plastic even appeared at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, during a deep ocean expedition. Scientists calculated that plastic waste could exceed fish biomass by 2050, unless major international efforts reversed this trend.

More ominously, plastic pollution was found to harm the growth, photosynthesis and oxygen production of Prochlorococcus - the ocean's most abundant photosynthetic bacteria - responsible for 10% of oxygen breathed by humans.

This bleak picture was reinforced by wildlife television documentaries, such as those narrated by the popular naturalist David Attenborough, broadcasting the uncomfortable reality to millions of viewers. The public was becoming more and more awake to the scale and urgency of this crisis.

Recycling proved to be surprisingly popular, with a growing number of countries willing to introduce policies. In addition to routine collections of household waste by local governments, more ambitious measures were being adopted at regional and national levels. Gradually, the percentage of discarded plastic began to fall, while the recycled proportion increased. This trend continued through the 21st century.*

Japan was among the world leaders in plastic recycling. Its plastic waste utilisation rate increased from 39% in 1996, to 73% in 2006 and then 90% by the end of the 2010s. This figure approached 100% by the mid-2020s, making Japan one of the first nations to recycle essentially all of its plastic waste. Key to Japan's success was the passing of several recycling laws from the late 1990s onwards, mandating businesses and consumers to separate plastic waste, along with public awareness and education campaigns on the benefits of recycling. This occurred in response to a shortage of landfill space, with Japan being a relatively crowded nation of high population density. New technology also helped to convert an increasingly wide range of waste products into reusable items, such as PET bottles.

European Union (EU) member states were making progress too, with more than 40% of their plastic packaging waste recycled in 2016, easily surpassing the EU's minimum target of 22.5%. Among EU member states, the Czech Republic ranked on the top with a recycling rate of 51% in 2014, followed closely by Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and Ireland. The European Circular Economy Package (CEP) targets were set at 50% by 2025 and 55% by 2030 - alongside a goal of 100% for packaging, specifically - with a ban on various other single-use products made of plastic where alternatives existed.*

In the UK, charges were introduced for plastic carrier bags, leading to a nearly 90% drop in single-use bags. The manufacture and sale of cosmetics and personal care products with microbeads (solid plastic particles of less than a millimetre in their largest dimension) was banned, followed by plastic straws and cotton buds. Dozens of companies, including supermarket giant Asda, signed up to the UK Plastics Pact aiming to cut plastic pollution by 2025. Meanwhile, the government pledged to eradicate all "avoidable" plastic waste throughout the country by 2042.*

In the United States, no federal law existed to mandate recycling, with state and local governments introducing their own requirements. Only around 10% of plastic was recycled as of 2020, but a long-term plan by the American Chemistry Council proposed 100% of plastics packaging to be re-used, recycled or recovered by 2040. To achieve this, plastic resin producers would focus on six key areas: designing new products for greater efficiency, recycling and reuse; developing new technologies and systems for collecting, sorting, recycling and recovering materials; making it easier for more consumers to participate in recycling and recovery programs; expanding the types of plastics collected and repurposed; aligning products with key end markets; and expanding awareness that used plastics are valuable resources awaiting their next use.

An increase in public recycling bins, plastic bottle banks, reverse vending machines (with voucher or cash incentives), office workplace recycling schemes and other such measures all contributed to the ongoing, upward trend in global recycling. At the same time, new production methods were allowing bioplastics to be manufactured without the need for fossil fuels and to biodegrade easily. Thanks to advances in science and technology, this was becoming possible even for some types of plastic that had traditionally been regarded as extremely difficult to break down, convert and reuse. Automation, robotics, AI and machine learning helped to improve the filtering and sorting capabilities at waste treatment plants. However, even low-tech solutions were able to combat the plastic problem: supermarkets in Thailand and Vietnam, for example, used banana leaves as a packaging alternative.* By 2050, most countries had either substantially reduced or even eliminated plastic entering landfills.

This left the problem of incineration, which had grown in parallel with recycling at a similar rate during the late 20th and early 21st century. New regulations and international treaties to restrict emissions from plastic incineration were combining with even greater improvements in waste collection and separation. This led to the percentage of recycled plastic overtaking that of incinerated material. Networks of orbiting satellites - equipped with powerful sensors and ultra-high resolution and zoom capabilities - kept a watchful eye on ground activities, to monitor emissions and ensure compliance. Gradually, plastic waste incineration disappeared from both developed and developing countries as the economic, social and environmental benefits made more and more sense.*

Other advances have emerged in recent years. Among them are a new generation of domestic appliances for dealing with household waste, now able to deconstruct and recycle a seemingly infinite variety of plastic products. Inexpensive, compact and easy to use, these are typically desktop machines in the same form-factor as a 3D printer, offering the dual functions of assembly and disassembly. As well as being popular in the home, they are found in many public venues and workplaces. Alongside these high-tech machines are regular drone and robotic patrols in towns and cities, which can identify and pick up discarded litter - often within a matter of minutes. The world of 2073 is a cleaner and tidier place.

Challenges remain outside human-inhabited areas, however. The world's oceans, for example, remain in a dire state, being much more difficult to access and taking longer to restore. Those fragments of plastic that lie undiscovered will persist in ecosystems for another 500 years.

The number of trillionaires in the world exceeds 10

The world's first trillionaire had emerged in the 2030s. The entire top 10 of the Forbes rich list is now composed of such individuals.* Due in part to inflation, 20% of the global adult population now possesses a net worth of US$1 million or more. The rich have also become younger, more female and less Western.

2075-2080

The first space elevator is becoming operational

The idea of a space elevator had been around as early as 1895, when Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky first explored the concept. Inspired by the newly-built Eiffel Tower, he described a free-standing structure reaching from ground level into geostationary orbit. Rising some 36,000 km (22,000 mi) above the equator and following the direction of Earth's rotation, it would have an orbital period of exactly one day and thus be maintained in a fixed position.

A number of more detailed proposals emerged in the mid-late 20th century, as the Space Race got underway and manned trips to Earth orbit became increasingly routine. It was hoped that a space elevator could drastically reduce the cost of getting into orbit - revolutionising access to near-Earth space, the Moon, Mars and beyond. However, the upfront investment and level of technology required meant that such a project was rendered impractical for now, confining it to the realm of science fiction.

By the early decades of the 21st century, the concept was being taken more seriously, due to progress being made with carbon nanotubes. These cylindrical molecules offered ways of synthesising an ultra-strong material with sufficiently high tensile strength and sufficiently low density for the elevator cable. However, they could only be produced at extremely small scales. In 2004, the record length for a single-wall nanotube was just 4 cm. Although highly promising, further research would be needed to refine the manufacturing process.

Major legal and financial hurdles also needed to be overcome - requiring international agreements on safety, security and compensation in the event of an accident or terrorist incident. The insurance arrangements were of particular concern, given the potential for large-scale catastrophe if something went wrong. In the interim, smaller experimental structures were built, demonstrating the basic concept at lower altitudes. These would eventually pave the way to a larger and more advanced design.
Click to enlarge
By the late 2070s,*** following 15 years of construction,* a space elevator reaching from the Earth's surface into geostationary orbit has become fully operational. The construction process involves placing a spacecraft at a fixed position - 35,786 km (22,236 mi) above the equator - then gradually extending a tether down to "grow" the cable towards Earth. It also extends upwards from this point - to over 47,000 km (29,204 mi) - a height at which objects can escape the pull of gravity altogether. A large counterweight is placed at this outer end to keep it taut. Locations that are most suitable as ground stations include French Guiana, Central Africa, Sri Lanka and Indonesia.

As with most forms of transport and infrastructure in the late 21st century, the space elevator is controlled by artificial intelligence, which constantly monitors and maintains the structure throughout. If necessary, robots can be dispatched to fix problems in the cable or other components, from ground level to the cold vacuum of space. This is rarely required, however, due to the efficiency and safety mechanisms in the design.

A major space boom is now underway, as people and cargo can be delivered to orbit at vastly reduced costs, compared with traditional launches. Over 1,000 tons of material can be lifted in a single day, greater than the weight of the International Space Station, which took over a decade to build at the start of the century.*

Although relatively slow - taking many hours to ascend* - the ride is much smoother than conventional rockets, with no high-G forces or explosives. Upon leaving the atmosphere and reaching Low Earth Orbit, between 160 km (99 mi) and 2,000 km (1,200 mi), cargo or passengers can be transferred to enter their own orbit around Earth. Alternatively, they can be jettisoned beyond geosynchronous orbit, in craft moving at sufficient speed to escape the planet's gravity, travelling onward to more remote destinations such as the Moon or Mars.

In the decades ahead, additional space elevators become operational above Earth, the Moon, Mars and elsewhere in the Solar System,* with a considerable reduction in costs and technical risks. Construction is also made easier by lower gravity: 0.16 g for the Moon and 0.38 g on Mars. Further into the future, space elevators are rendered obsolete by teleportation and similar technologies.

2075

The distribution of birds in the United States has been altered substantially

By 2075, a combination of global warming, land use and land cover changes has led to substantial environmental impacts in the United States. This has caused disruption to many animal species in terms of how they live, feed and breed. The habitat ranges of birds have been particularly affected. Not all of these changes have been negative, as some species have actually benefited and seen major increases in their traditional ranges. However, despite the extra room for expansion, these winners now face renewed competition and territorial contests from other species, as well as new predators.

Generally speaking, higher temperatures have pushed the overall range of species further north. Desert-dwelling birds now have increased habitat, while those preferring cold weather conditions have seen a decrease. In contrast to the broad, sweeping influence of climate change, the effects of landscape changes resulting largely from human activity have been more scattered and focussed, with a very high loss of habitat at certain local and regional scales. Urban growth, deforestation, mining and other resource use has been at least as impactful on ranges as climate change.

The Thames Barrier is upgraded

London is the latest of many cities to upgrade its flood defences in the wake of devastating storm surges and sea level rises.* The original barrier was raised a total of 62 times between 1983 and 2001. It was raised with increasing frequency as the decades went by. Towards the end of this century its successor will need to be raised over 200 times each and every year.*

2076

Accurate simulations of viruses

Thanks to advances in lattice quantum chromodynamics, the vast majority of viruses have now been accurately modelled and simulated down to the quantum level.* This provides what is essentially a complete picture of these tiny organisms, which average 20-300 nanometres in size, with millions of different types. As this area of science continues to advance, ever larger and more detailed simulations become possible,* providing new insights into the nature of matter.

Unmanned probes to Sedna

Sedna is a trans-Neptunian "dwarf planet", similar in size and composition to Pluto.* Discovered in 2003, it became the most distant object yet observed in the Solar System, and the largest solar body to be found in over 70 years. Its orbit is highly elliptical, going from 76 AU to about 975 AU over the course of 12,000 years. In 2076, it reaches perihelion (its closest point to the Sun) and unmanned probes are sent to explore it.

2078

The world's electricity has been fully decarbonised

Electrical phenomena had been studied since antiquity, but progress in theoretical understanding remained slow until the 17th and 18th centuries. Even then, practical applications for electricity were few. It would not be until the late 19th century that engineers were finally able to put it to industrial and residential use. The rapid expansion in electrical technology at this time transformed society and was a driving force behind the Second Industrial Revolution. The extreme versatility of electricity provided an almost limitless set of applications including transport, heating, lighting, communications and computation. It became the backbone of modern industrial society.

In the late 1870s, cities began installing large-scale electric street lighting systems based on arc lamps. After the development of a practical incandescent lamp for indoor lighting, Thomas Edison switched on the world's first public electric supply utility in 1882.

Subsequent discoveries and inventions would include the first electromagnetic waves (1888), the fuse (1890), wireless telegraphy systems (1894), a radio receiver to detect lightning strikes (1894), X-Rays (1895), the first successful intercontinental telegram (1896), the first cathode ray oscilloscope (1897), fluorescent lamps (1901), diodes (1904), triodes (1906) and superconductivity (1911).

The 1920s saw rapid growth in demand for domestic applications of electricity. Public exhibitions featured "homes of the future", and in 1926, the Scottish inventor John Logie Baird gave the first demonstration of a television system in London, launching a revolution in communication and entertainment.

By the 1930s, around 50% of people in the United Kingdom and 70% in the United States had access to electricity and these figures reached almost 100% within the next 30 years. The Second World War saw tremendous advances in electronics, especially in radar and other aircraft systems.

Following the war, Bell Telephone Laboratories developed the first working transistor, in 1947. With rising household incomes, consumer devices became more and more widespread and included vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, washing machines, dishwashers, air conditioning, colour TV, hi-fi and other audio systems and latterly computers and microprocessors.

Until relatively recently in world history, humans had lived simple and slower-paced lives, in far smaller numbers. The Industrial Revolution marked the beginning of profound change, with a population explosion and previously unimaginable technology. To power the machines, vehicles, lighting and everything else transforming society required a vast amount of electricity. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the easiest and cheapest way to obtain this power was from the ancient stores of carbon-based materials that lay buried in the ground: fossil fuels.

While many different subtypes existed, fossil fuels could be generally divided into three main variants - coal, oil and gas. The first of these had been around for millennia in, for example, smelting and domestic heating, but became far more important during the Industrial Revolution with larger-scale applications. The first coal-fired power stations producing electricity for public use became operational in the 1880s. With enormous demand for electricity, and centuries' worth of mining reserves, a rush to acquire this valuable resource got underway. Likewise, oil became a major new commodity. By the 1920s, oil fields had been established in many countries including Canada, Peru, Poland, Russia, Sweden, Ukraine, the United States, and Venezuela. Natural gas, meanwhile, became more important during the second half of the 20th century.

Hydropower had been around since ancient times - as a way of grinding grain, for example. It spread to Europe in the Middle Ages and provided mechanical power for textiles and machines during the Industrial Revolution. It became a source for generating electricity in 1882 and expanded rapidly in the 20th century, with gigantic projects such as the Hoover Dam completed in 1936. Hydroelectric power reached 1,000 terawatt hours by the 1960s or about one-quarter of annual global electricity demand.

Nuclear electricity production was first demonstrated in 1948 and grew rapidly from the 1960s onward. However, accidents such as Three Mile Island (1979) and Chernobyl (1986) led to a subsequent stagnation. The economic costs of building plants led to further concerns about the risks of the industry.

With ongoing advances in science and technology, new forms of electricity production emerged. The American satellite Vanguard 1, launched in 1958, became the first man-made object in space to incorporate solar electric power, with a 0.1W panel. The energy crisis of the 1970s led to a groundswell of public interest in solar research, development and deployment.

The first wind turbine for electricity production was built by Scottish engineer James Blyth in 1887. While this renewable energy technology saw widespread adoption in some countries, such as Denmark, it remained a minor source of electricity on a global basis. However, the installed capacity began to grow exponentially in the closing years of the 20th century. Offshore wind production joined the mix in 1991, which had the advantage of capturing stronger and more persistent winds at sea.

At the start of the 21st century, the global electricity sources consisted of coal (39.2%), natural gas (18%), oil (7.4%), nuclear (17%), hydroelectric (17%) and renewables (1.4%). The world's population, which stood at roughly a billion in 1800, exceeded six billion. Concerns over the environmental impacts of fossil fuels - already substantial in the 20th century - now began shifting to a whole new level.

Air, land and water pollution had been issues for as far back as fossil fuels existed. Carbon now constituted a much more serious and longer-term threat in the form of global warming. It would become perhaps the greatest challenge for humanity in the modern era.

The basic physics of heat-trapping greenhouse gases were established by the work of Fourier (1824), Tyndall (1859), Arrhenius (1896) and others who showed that without carbon dioxide (CO2), the Earth would be 30°C colder. By the early 21st century, carbon isotope ratios proved that human activity had increased the atmospheric concentration of CO2 by 45% - an unprecedented change when viewed on geological timescales, matched only by catastrophic events such as large asteroid strikes. The annual output of greenhouse gases from human activity now surpassed all of the world's volcanoes by two orders of magnitude. As a result, the global average temperature had warmed by 1.0°C (1.8°F) since the Industrial Revolution and was projected to rise by as much as 6°C by the year 2100.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), established in 1988, had sought to improve the scientific understanding of climate change and facilitate the discussion of possible response options. As well as publishing reports, authored by thousands of scientists contributing on a voluntary basis, the organisation held conferences around the world every year. However, while the IPCC member states agreed that climate change was real and the current period of rapid warming was human-caused, finding solutions proved extremely challenging. The level of action needed to stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations and reverse the temperature trend was simply too great, from an economic and political standpoint. To maintain a 50% probability of keeping the global temperature rise below 2°C, at least two-thirds of known fossil fuel reserves would need to remain buried in the ground.

Even as the world continued to warm, with impacts becoming greater and more obvious, little or no progress could be achieved. Then in 2015, a significant milestone occurred at the COP21 summit. Known as the Paris Agreement, this recognised the need to keep the global average temperature rise below 2°C (generally agreed as the "point of no return"), and to pursue efforts to limit the increase to 1.5°C, and committed all countries to reduce their carbon emissions for the first time.

Despite this new consensus, actually implementing the required policies was another matter entirely. Fossil fuels were the richest and most profitable enterprise in human history, forming the bedrock of the global economy and employing millions of people. With some $500 billion in annual subsidies, industry lobbyists held considerable influence, and governments were reluctant to give up trillions of dollars' worth of resources. Russia, for example, had the largest natural gas reserves in the world; Middle Eastern countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iraq were abundant in oil; and the largest coal reserves were in the United States, Russia, China, India and Australia. Fossil fuels provided cheap and easy access to energy, helping to lift billions out of poverty.

On the other hand, shifting away from fossil fuels and into clean energy provided many opportunities, regardless of climate change. The global economic costs of air pollution amounted to $5 trillion per year as a result of productivity losses and degraded quality of life, with up to 7 million deaths. Solar and wind power - alongside their health benefits - could provide further advantages, such as new jobs, technology innovation, energy independence, local and decentralised energy protected from blackouts, less price volatility, and so on. Besides solar and wind, other alternatives were available too, in some cases provided by geography. Iceland, for example, produced almost 100% of its electricity from geothermal and hydropower.

As the political debates raged on, more and more businesses could sense the winds of change and the beginning of an energy revolution. Investment now poured into the nascent renewable sector, as the cost of solar and wind power fell dramatically. From tens of dollars per watt in the 1970s, solar had fallen to $5 per watt by the year 2000 and continued to plunge, reaching less than a dollar per watt by the early 2010s. At the same time, solar cell efficiencies were improving with new production techniques, nanotechnology materials, and other breakthroughs. Wind turbines were growing larger, some reaching skyscraper sizes, with far greater capacities than before. Meanwhile, related technologies continued to advance, such as batteries/storage, home energy efficiencies, smart grids, and electric vehicles.

The writing was on the wall for fossil fuels. However, the industry would not disappear without a fight, and continued to expand. New reserves were being exploited in the form of fracking, deepwater, and other unconventional techniques. In a rather ironic development, the Arctic became a target for drilling, even as ice cover in this region hit record lows.

By the late 2010s, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 had surpassed 400ppm - a level not seen for millions of years - and the cultural zeitgeist shifted more and more in favour of action on climate change. Support for renewables was especially strong from the younger generations, now holding large-scale protests on a regular basis in many cities around the world.

The percentage of electricity from coal had peaked worldwide at 42% and now entered a terminal decline, as the adoption of renewables continued to accelerate and surpassed 10% globally. In 2017, the cost of solar-generated electricity became cheaper than coal in India. A number of countries now pledged to eliminate coal power plants within a decade. Recognising the existential threat to their industry, coal companies had begun to research carbon sequestration methods and extolled the promise of "clean coal", but the decline continued.

Floating offshore wind - contrasted with fixed-bottom offshore wind farms - remained a niche sector throughout the 2020s. However, improvements in technology and cost competitiveness led to a major expansion in the 2030s.* This allowed offshore wind to be deployed in vastly greater areas, as opposed to shallow-water locations near coastlines.

Ongoing, exponential growth in renewables continued to eat away at the market share of fossil fuels. Coal in particular, now undergoing a full-scale collapse, contributed to a financial crisis on par with the Great Recession of the late 2000s and early 2010s. Future historians would argue that this "carbon bubble", exposing trillions of dollars in stranded assets, marked the beginning of the end for oil, gas, and coal-based electricity. Some of the richest countries were now fully decarbonising their power supplies.* Alongside this, smart cities were improving energy conservation, while innovations such as wireless power transfer became increasingly common. Many cafes, restaurants, airports and other public areas now featured "wi-tricity" for recharging electronic devices.

By the 2040s, as the global average temperature rise approached the critical 2°C threshold, the battle against climate change appeared to be lost. However, carbon sequestration - including mass reforestation programs, direct air capture, and other methods - still offered hope. Carbon taxes were now implemented by most nations, while annual subsidies to fossil fuels had dwindled substantially, making future investments ever more unattractive.*

The first solar power satellites, beaming energy down from space, provided a way of capturing sunlight 24 hours a day. This power could then be distributed to isolated locations, or disaster-hit areas with damaged infrastructure. Fusion power - another major development in the 2040s - appeared to be nearing commercial availability, with a successor to the ITER experimental reactor showing great promise.

By 2050, the percentage of electricity from renewables (excluding hydroelectric) had reached 50% globally.* Including hydroelectric and nuclear, the zero carbon figure now stood at nearly 70%. Coal was being phased out almost everywhere, except in a small number of the poorest countries. Oil, too, was on the verge of disappearing from use in electrical systems. Only natural gas remained a significant source of carbon-based electricity.

Electric and plug-in hybrids, already ubiquitous in the West, now formed the majority of cars in Africa, the Middle East, Asia and elsewhere. Large ships and even airliners were now going fully electric. Further developments included the emergence of continent-wide " supergrids" able to link together vast regions and optimise their clean energy supplies at all times of the year. The use of high-voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission, instead of traditional alternating current (AC) lines, allowed far greater efficiency, since DC lines had much lower electrical losses over long distances.

By the late 2070s, the global transition is essentially complete.* Even the poorest nations are now achieving zero carbon electricity, as the last of their natural gas power plants are finally shut down. After more than a century of research, solar cells are nearing their theoretical limit for efficiency - nanotechnology has largely perfected their internal structures. The latest generation of modules, not only cheaper and more affordable than ever, can also access a wider part of the electromagnetic spectrum (i.e. beyond visible light, into the infrared), are more sturdy and longer-lasting, and can be configured to alter their appearance and blend into existing buildings more easily. Having begun to achieve commercial viability in the 2040s, huge clusters of solar power satellites now orbit the Earth and provide 100% coverage to wherever electricity is needed. Wind and offshore wind turbine projects have continued to expand in recent decades and will soon be powerful enough to change the very air currents of Earth.* Hydroelectric has declined in terms of its overall share of the world's electricity, but remains a significant source of power, helped by new developments in wave, tidal, and ocean thermal energy.

Meanwhile, nuclear fusion has moved from the laboratory into commercial uses in a number of countries, although it remains at a low percentage of global electricity for now - partly due to the high capital investment costs. However, it sees greater usage in the 22nd century as the technology is miniaturised and increasingly used for space-based applications.

Advances in space travel and tourism

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), formed in 1958, remains in operation after 120 years.* However, the agency's funding is now negligible compared to that of the private sector, which has turned space into a multi-trillion dollar industry.*

The cost of launching people and cargo into space has declined substantially over the last century. From $85,000 per kilogram a hundred years earlier, it is now less than a dollar per kilogram.* This means that even people on relatively low incomes have access to Earth orbit - thanks to a new generation of rockets and space planes, alongside the recent development of a space elevator. Basic orbital cruises are therefore taken for granted by most people and regarded in much the same way as a long-haul airplane flight, or visit to a famous landmark; something that most people do every few years. For those with a little extra money, trips around the Moon are available, along with extended stays at a number of private hotels in cislunar space.

For the more adventurous, guided excursions on the lunar surface are possible. However, being somewhat more expensive and complicated, these are generally still reserved for those on above-average incomes. In addition, anything longer than a simple tour requires dedication and training that means it is often considered a rather extreme leisure activity, akin to mountain climbers or deep sea divers of the past. Among the most popular tour destinations are the Apollo landing sites, which have been surrounded by perimeter fencing and made into UNESCO World Heritage sites. Beyond these "tourist traps" are many areas of geological interest, which are being visited by explorers and researchers keen to claim their place in the history books.

Mars had gained a human presence some decades earlier. The first permanent base was followed by another, then another. By 2078, the population, infrastructure and self-sufficiency have all grown to such an extent that Mars will soon be ready to declare independence. Water, food and energy supplies are being handled by increasingly heavy use of robotics and general automation. Originally intended for scientists and other researchers, these stations are now experiencing a steady influx of regular citizens, keen to escape Earth and begin a new life on the Red Planet.

In addition to habitats on the Moon and Mars, a large and ever-growing number of mining operations are dotted around near-Earth objects, main belt asteroids and others, with some as far out as the Trojans of Jupiter. These are providing an abundance of previously rare metals and minerals, which has caused a dramatic fall in the price of certain commodities. The operations are almost entirely automated and overseen by powerful artificial intelligences, requiring little or no human input. A network of refuelling stations now provides a ready source of propellant - made from separating water into hydrogen and oxygen, for example - the equivalent of space-based filling stations that enable longer, cheaper and faster journeys.

With much of the inner Solar System now home to a thriving economy, attention has turned to the untapped potential of the gas giants. For government and commercial interests, by far the most promising candidate is Saturn's largest moon, Titan.*

Copyright IPGP/Labex UnivEarthS/University Paris Diderot - C. Epitalon & S. Rodriguez

The unmanned Huygens probe had landed successfully on this strange world in 2005, returning the first pictures from its surface. The journey had taken almost eight years. Subsequent probes to the outer Solar System, such as New Horizons in 2015, were of similarly long durations. In the years and decades following these spacecraft, however, advances in propulsion technology led to reduced travel times - the use of solar sails to generate a small but continuous acceleration, for example, meant that higher speeds could be achieved over time. Other notable innovations included nuclear pulse propulsion and progress with antimatter. Titan's 1.4 billion kilometre distance was no longer a significant obstacle. These and other developments were now being amplified and optimised by powerful artificial intelligences. By the 2070s, many formerly insurmountable challenges with space travel have been overcome.

One of the biggest problems encountered by earlier colonists on the Moon and Mars was how to deal with radiation. On Titan, the issue is eliminated - thanks to the satellite's protective atmosphere, which is 45% thicker than Earth's. Because of this high pressure and lack of radiation it is actually possible to walk around on the surface without a bulky, airtight space suit, instead using just an oxygen mask and heavy clothing with embedded heating elements.

Buildings can also be constructed and maintained more easily on Titan, with simpler designs that resemble polar bases on Earth. Occupants can take a somewhat more relaxed approach to keeping habitats airtight. Although leaks must be fixed, there is no immediate danger of death. A simple piece of tape can be applied temporarily until a proper repair is completed. For a cyborg or other suitably "upgraded" human, these environmental issues may be even less of a problem.

The very high ratio of atmospheric density to surface gravity also greatly reduces the wingspan needed for aircraft to maintain lift; so much so that a human can strap on wings and fly great distances while wearing a lightweight spacesuit.

Initially, the population of Titan is restricted to scientists and other government/corporate personnel - but like the Moon and Mars, it eventually grows to include regular citizens brave enough to make the voyage and start a new life. During the 22nd century it becomes a major hub for science, research, commerce and tourism in the outer Solar System.

2079

Asbestos production is ending globally

Asbestos is a group of naturally occurring silicate minerals, all of which form into long, fibrous, crystalline shapes. Viewed at the microscopic level, each fibre is composed of millions of tiny "fibrils" that can be released by abrasion or other processes.

Asbestos was first mined in ancient times, but large-scale industrial extraction only began in the 1870s. It was regarded as a revolutionary new material for its physical properties that included resistance to fire, heat and electricity, along with sound absorption and good tensile strength. Its affordability led to widespread use around the world - in applications such as electrical products, building insulation, fabric and mats, steam engines and turbines. By 1950, over a million tons were being produced globally.

However, this rapid growth was accompanied by increasing concerns about health impacts. Researchers were beginning to notice a large number of early deaths and lung problems in mining towns. It was subsequently confirmed that asbestos dust and fibres - too small for the naked eye, and often with a long period between first exposure and the onset of symptoms - were a major public health issue. By the mid-20th century, it was clear that, far from being a beneficial and sustainable material, asbestos was extremely hazardous.

The United States government and various industries were criticised for not acting quickly enough. In the late 1970s, court documents proved that asbestos industry officials had known of the dangers since the 1930s, but concealed them from the public. The continued long-term use of asbestos after harmful health effects were known or suspected, and the slow emergence of symptoms decades after exposure ceased, made asbestos litigation the longest, most expensive mass tort in U.S. history, involving more than 8,000 defendants and 700,000 claimants.

Worldwide asbestos production reached a peak of 4.8 million metric tons in 1978, before declining rapidly in the 1980s and 90s.* Many countries were now strongly regulating or outright banning its use.* After a brief plateau, production fell rapidly again, from 2.1 million tons in 2000 to 1.3 million tons by 2017.

Despite the severity of asbestos-related diseases, the material remained in widespread use during the early 21st century. Production was still high in countries such as Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Kazakhstan and Russia - fuelled by demand for cheap, mass-produced building materials in much of the developing world and supported by aggressive industry campaigns and lobbyist groups. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimated that 125 million people were being exposed to asbestos in the workplace every year.

More than 60 countries had enacted bans by 2020 - including Australia, Canada, all European Union (EU) members, Japan and South Korea, alongside a number of nations across Africa, the Middle East and South America. Although regulations existed in the United States, however, there was still no official federal ban of the carcinogen. The last domestic producer in the U.S. had ceased operations in 2002, but imports continued to meet manufacturing needs. Nevertheless, consumption in the U.S. was in terminal decline, which led to eventual obsolescence.

More and more nations continued to phase out asbestos, in response to both health and liability issues. Rising incomes in Africa, Asia and elsewhere also meant that substitutes were increasingly viable. Worldwide production was now shrinking to a fraction of its former level.

The material was persistent in terms of its long term impacts, however. One notable example was in the 2040s, when a spike in cases of lung cancer was recorded in the U.S. and New York in particular. During the terrorist attacks of September 2001, hundreds of thousands of people had been exposed to asbestos embedded in the collapsing towers' drywall, insulation, fireproofing and steel structures. Decades later, many survivors were now feeling the health effects.

While bans were successfully covering new buildings, new products and so on, vast amounts of asbestos were extant in older buildings, older items, etc. Recognising this ongoing danger, countries in both the developed and developing world worked to remove asbestos and eradicate it completely. This had traditionally been a risky and expensive process, but was gradually becoming cheaper and safer through the use of robots.

By the late 2070s, the last remaining pockets of asbestos mining have closed - 100 years after the peak in global production and 200 years after the first industrial-scale operations. Health impacts continue in some countries until the end of the 21st century, but are less of a problem than before, as the medical advances of this time can substantially improve survival rates for lung cancer, mesothelioma, asbestosis and other such illnesses. This once ubiquitous and promising material is finally consigned to history.

While asbestos was being phased out, new fears about the health impact of micro- and nano-sized particles were arising as nanotechnology began to emerge and become widespread in the early- to mid-21st century.* Graphene, carbon nanotubes and other nanostructures were providing revolutionary breakthroughs in a range of industries, but some observers noted the parallels with asbestos in its early years and viewed these developments with growing unease. Although some of these concerns were valid, they proved to be overstated. Nanotechnology applications were fundamentally different to those of asbestos, with atoms far more tightly bound and less likely to break apart or be inhaled. Industry regulations and oversight were also vastly improved between the 19th and 21st centuries,* enhanced in particular by powerful AI to monitor the slightest defects and report any problems.

Total solar eclipse in New York

A rare total eclipse is witnessed in New York City, as well as Nova Scotia in Canada, and Greenland, on 1st May 2079.*

SQL Server databases are hit by a major glitch

On 6th June 2079, the "smalldatetime" fields in SQL Server databases wrap around to January 1, 1900. Similar to the Year 2038 problem, this is caused by a limited number of possible element ranges.* There are major errors for any vintage/antique computers still using these systems, though most of the surviving examples are in museums by now. Structured Query Language is exactly a century old, having been commercially introduced in 1979.

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2070-2079 Future Timeline | Timeline | Technology | Singularity | 2020 | 2050 | 2100 | 2150 | 2200 | 21st century | 22nd century | 23rd century | Humanity | Predictions | Events

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Join the Future Timeline community! 2070 Islam is the world's dominant religion By 2070, Islam has overtaken Christianity to become the dominant religion.* More than a quarter of the world's population was Muslim by the 2020s* and this growth continued in subsequent decades.

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The end of natural gas as a resource. Based on predicted usage being maintained, we will run out of gas in fifty three years time.

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Fossil fuels running out fast

Fossil fuels are non-renewable resources. They formed millions of years ago. The Earth's heat, the pressure, and the movement of the layers decomposed plants and animals, turning them into petroleum, oil, coal, and natural gas. The deeper we dig, the more likely it is to find natural gas and oil resources.

The global demand has not reached the peak yet. Year by year, global energy consumption is getting higher, therefore the use of fossil fuels is getting higher too. We simply do not have enough renewable energy to supply our industries' and populations' full demand.

Global demand for fossil fuels

Source: https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels

Global consumption of fossil fuels is still rising by more than 1% each year. However, oil has started to 'lose' its popularity in favour of natural gas, which is good for the environment.

Learn more about environmental impacts.

Source: https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels

Natural gas is the most eco-friendly fossil fuel. We consider it as a bridge between non-renewable and renewable sources of energy.

The problem is that fossil fuels formed millions of years ago, so waiting for new fossil fuels to form is not an option with our rising demand. Our reserves will be empty soon.

How much fossil fuel is left?

Formed millions of years ago, yet only used for around 200 years, fossil fuel reserves are emptying very quickly. It is also obvious that the exact date of running out of these fuels remains unknown. It is because we continue to discover new reserves, however, the number of new

reserves is low: they cannot meet our population's needs with the current and expected future levels of usage.

Former Saudi oil minister Sheik Ahmed Zahi Yamani said: "The stone age came to an end, not for lack of stones, and the oil age will end, but not for lack of oil."

How many years of fossil fuels are left?

According to research based on 2015 data, the current statement of when our reserves will be emptied is this:

Source: https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels

Other sources estimate that we will run out of fossil fuels much earlier - for example, oil deposits will be gone by 2052.

We do not just have to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels and switch to green energy because we run out of supplies, but also because coal and oil are harming our environment badly.

Source: Forbes.com

Renewables only provide 5% of our energy needs, while nuclear energy supports our demand with 4% of energy. Nuclear power plants are also safe sources of energy, the problem is the storing of nuclear waste.

The world is more likely to take the 'green way' instead of the 'nuclear way'.

Read more about decarbonization: what can you do against climate change?

Conclusion: how long will fossil fuels last?

It is predicted that we will run out of fossil fuels in this century.

Oil can last up to 50 years, natural gas up to 53 years, and coal up to 114 years.

Yet, renewable energy is not popular enough, so emptying our reserves can speed up.

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Fossil fuels are non-renewable resources. They formed millions of years ago. The Earth's heat, the pressure, and the movement of the layers decomposed plants and animals, turning them into petroleum, oil, coal, and natural gas. The deeper we dig, the more likely it is to find natural gas and oil resources.

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The Thames Barrier will protect London from flooding until 2070, the Environment Agency has said.

A new study into London's flood defences found the barrier should work for 40 years longer than expected.

The nine concrete barriers in Woolwich Reach, south-east London, will need upgrading by 2035. By 2075, a new barrier should be built at Long Reach.

The study was based on a worst case climate change scenario with sea-levels rising to 2.7m (8.9ft).

The Thames Barrier, built in 1982, protects 45 sq miles of the capital which is at risk of flooding.

The future of the Thames Barrage and other flood defences for the capital were also outlined in plans which looks into managing flooding until 2100.

If rising sea levels destroy wildlife habitat new and alternative intertidal habitats will be created for them, the plan said.

Dr Paul Leinster, chief executive of the Environment Agency, said the launch of the study would reassure more than 1.25 million people who live in the Thames flood plain.

"Rigorous study and scientific research into the estuary, the defences, climate change and our options for the future, have culminated in a plan that will safeguard the Thames estuary, and the people, buildings and natural habitats that make this area so unique."

"If over time sea levels are found to be rising faster then expected then we are already prepared and have identified the necessary solutions."

A consultation will be held on the draft plans before they are submitted to the government in 2010.

The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites

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The Thames Barrier will protect London from flooding until 2070, the Environment Agency has said. A new study into London's flood defences found the barrier should work for 40 years longer than expected. The nine concrete barriers in Woolwich Reach, south-east London, will need upgrading by 2035.

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2076: Thousands of humans are living on Mars.

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2076: Thousands of humans are living on Mars.

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After initial settlement in 2059, the permanent colony on Mars has expanded.

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The world in 2076: Thousands of people have settled on Mars

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Overcoming all the challenges of colonising the Red Planet is a huge feat, but the pioneers won’t live a gilded existence

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The United Nations produces continual estimates on population growth trends and the predicted maximum human population that we will reach.

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The global population is projected to reach 8 billion on 15 November 2022, and India is projected to surpass China as the world's most populous country in 2023, according to World Population Prospects 2022, released today on World Population Day.

"This year's World Population Day falls during a milestone year, when we anticipate the birth of the Earth's eight billionth inhabitant. This is an occasion to celebrate our diversity, recognize our common humanity, and marvel at advancements in health that have extended lifespans and dramatically reduced maternal and child mortality rates," said UN Secretary-General António Guterres. "At the same time, it is a reminder of our shared responsibility to care for our planet and a moment to reflect on where we still fall short of our commitments to one another," he added.

The global population is growing at its slowest rate since 1950, having fallen under 1 per cent in 2020. The latest projections by the United Nations suggest that the world's population could grow to around 8.5 billion in 2030 and 9.7 billion in 2050. It is projected to reach a peak of around 10.4 billion people during the 2080s and to remain at that level until 2100.

World Population Prospects 2022 also states that fertility has fallen markedly in recent decades for many countries. Today, two-thirds of the global population lives in a country or area where lifetime fertility is below 2.1 births per woman, roughly the level required for zero growth in the long run for a population with low mortality. The populations of 61 countries or areas are projected to decrease by 1 per cent or more between 2022 and 2050, owing to sustained low levels of fertility and, in some cases, elevated rates of emigration.

More than half of the projected increase in the global population up to 2050 will be concentrated in eight countries: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and the United Republic of Tanzania. Countries of sub-Saharan Africa are expected to contribute more than half of the increase anticipated through 2050.

"The relationship between population growth and sustainable development is complex and multidimensional," said Liu Zhenmin, UN Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs. "Rapid population growth makes eradicating poverty, combatting hunger and malnutrition, and increasing the coverage of health and education systems more difficult.

Conversely, achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, especially those related to health, education and gender equality, will contribute to reducing fertility levels and slowing global population growth."

In most countries of sub-Saharan Africa, as well as in parts of Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean, the share of population at working age (between 25 and 64 years) has been increasing thanks to recent reductions in fertility. This shift in the age distribution provides a time-bound opportunity for accelerated economic growth per capita, known as the "demographic dividend". To maximize the potential benefits of a favourable age distribution, countries should invest in the further development of their human capital by ensuring access to health care and quality education at all ages and by promoting opportunities for productive employment and decent work.

The share of global population at ages 65 and above is projected to rise from 10 per cent in 2022 to 16 per cent in 2050. At that point, it is expected that the number of persons aged 65 years or over worldwide will be more than twice the number of children under age 5 and about the same as the number under age 12. Countries with ageing populations should take steps to adapt public programmes to the growing numbers of older persons, including by establishing universal health care and long-term care systems and by improving the sustainability of social security and pension systems.

Global life expectancy at birth reached 72.8 years in 2019, an improvement of almost 9 years since 1990. Further reductions in mortality are projected to result in an average global longevity of around 77.2 years in 2050. Yet in 2021, life expectancy for the least developed countries lagged 7 years behind the global average.

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all three components of population change. Global life expectancy at birth fell to 71.0 years in 2021. In some countries, successive waves of the pandemic may have produced short-term reductions in numbers of pregnancies and births, while for many other countries, there is little evidence of an impact on fertility levels or trends. The pandemic severely restricted all forms of human mobility, including international migration.

"Further actions by Governments aimed at reducing fertility would have little impact on the pace of population growth between now and mid-century, because of the youthful age structure of today's global population. Nevertheless, the cumulative effect of lower fertility, if maintained over several decades, could be a more substantial deceleration of global population growth in the second half of the century," added John Wilmoth, Director of the Population Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs.

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World population to reach 8 billion on 15 November 2022 [EN/AR/ZH] - World

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The global population is projected to reach 8 billion on 15 November 2022, and India is projected to surpass China as the world's most populous country in 2023, according to World Population Prospects 2022 , released today on World Population Day.

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2080: United States Population Reaches 531 Million

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2080: United States Population Reaches 531 Million

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Census data from the past is really hot. When the National Archives posted details from 72 years ago - the 1940 census - online recently, millions of Americans stampeded the website to try to learn more about their past.

But imagine how cool it would be if, by some twist of time, the National Archives were to make available detailed census information from nearly 70 years in the future - the 2080 census.

We asked James Dator, director of the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies, what kind of information census takers will be soliciting seven decades in the future. Dator says that possible questions might include:

--Do you have a home, or "biophysical domicile"? If so, is it on Earth, the moon, Mars or elsewhere?

--What is your current sex?

--What is your permission number for drinking water?

In a minute, we'll show you more suggested questions from Dator - along with John Sweeney and Seongwon Park, two Ph.D. candidates in the University of Hawaii at Manoa Alternative Futures program - based on their research.

- Linton Weeks
But before we delve into the "manuscript census" form - like the 1940 questionnaires that are so enthralling historians and genealogists at the moment - let's set the scene. Let's look at the aggregate information about America in 2080. How many people are there? What do homes look like? What kind of transportation is available?

In other words, when the census takers - or "enumerators," as they are called today - radiate out from Washington to gather data, what do they find in America 2080?
The 2080s

Barring any widespread cataclysm, there would be a lot more people in the United States seven decades hence. The Census Bureau projects a national population of at least 531 million in 2080. Given that U.S. life expectancies tend to trend longer and longer, however, the population could be much larger.

As envisioned by an array of scientists, researchers and science fiction writers, America in 2080 - its people, its living and working conditions, its government - is a hyperversion of today's model.

For example, in Kurt Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron," a short story set in 2081, equality has been taken to extreme levels in America. Intelligent people are dumbed down by technology. Beautiful people wear uglifying masks. Athletic people strap on weights. Equality laws - established by the 211th, 212th and 213th amendments to the Constitution - are enforced by the Office of the Handicapper General.

The 2080s, as presaged by FutureTimeline.net and other futuristic websites, are seen as a time of great flux. Superenhanced transhumans (upgraded peoplebots with elongated lifespans) co-exist with naturals (those who opt out of mechanical and biological enhancement). Manufacturing industries and agriculture enterprises are upended by robotic workers. Unemployment is rampant.

One optimistic scenario, says Joel Garreau, author of Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies - and What It Means to Be Human, allows that by 2080, "we will have conquered pain, suffering, stupidity, ignorance and death, and will have melded with our machines. And you will have unlimited abundance." He points to another just published book, Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler, which projects such a rosy future.

In Paul Verhoeven's movie Total Recall, set in 2084, some people are able to control - and reprogram - other people's memories, to the point that Arnold Schwarzenegger's character does not know exactly who he is. Or whether he is really on Earth or Mars. Under these dystopian circumstances, census-taking could prove extremely challenging.

In 70 years, of course, it is possible there will not even be a Census Bureau, for many reasons. But assuming the census is still conducted, robotic info gatherers - several generations improved from the drones in the 2054 film Minority Report - may sweep through biophysical domiciles gathering pertinent data. Permission may not be necessary.

All census info collected by the bots may be real-time fact-checked against deeply personal data maintained by some internationally owned search turbine.

Let's call it GooYahBing.
The Family
The definitions of "household" and "family" may be even more fluid and multifaceted in 2080 than they are in 2012. Perhaps animals-formerly-known-as-pets, androidal beings and who knows what else will be folded into the notion of family.

Writing in Psychology Today, Deborah Anapol, author of Polyamory in the 21st Century, suggests that "group marriage" - in which a clutch of adults live as if everyone in the group is married to everyone else in the group - could be a possible arrangement in the future. Such a configuration, she suggests, "can mean a higher standard of living while consuming fewer resources. Intimate partners are more likely than friends or neighbors to feel comfortable sharing housing, transportation, appliances and other resources."

Other growing-ever-more-complex designations include race, ethnicity and education levels.
The Home
The biophysical domicile in 2080 relies on lots of transparency - in walls and ceilings, according to research in 2011 by Zurich Insurance and Arup Associates. The typical home - replete with solar panels and gas-filled triple-glazed windows - responds to, and capitalizes on, the natural elements for heating and cooling.

"To cope with peak summer temperatures that might regularly be seven degrees higher than today," the report explains, there will be geothermal pipes "carrying cool, recycled water built into, and around, ceilings and beams."

The home may become an expandable, contractable prefabricated structure with removable rooms and collapsible walls, to adapt to the vagaries of familial and communal needs. "A biomimetic building would be made from local materials, minimizing the energy necessary to create it," the report explains, "and most of the materials deployed could be reused at the end of their life."
Work And The Workplace
Shifting demographics, a changing climate, emerging technologies and other factors - foreseen and unforeseen - will no doubt change the nature of the American workplace over the next 70 years. By the year 2080, the work year may not be 2080 hours. Telecommuting, teleconferencing, telemedicine, telemanufacturing - using advanced 3-D printers and other technologies - robotics, even personal teleportation, may render many offices, malls, retail stores, classrooms, athletic teams, hotels, restaurants, hospitals and other places of employment obsolete.
Indoor Plumbing
In 1940, according to The Associated Press, only 55 percent of homes with plumbing had what the Census Bureau deemed a "complete system," that is, hot and cold running water, a flushable toilet and a bathtub or shower. By 2010, 99 percent of the houses in America had complete systems.

Come 2080, however, water may likely be very scarce in some parts of the United States. "As global temperatures rise over the next seven decades," Discover Magazine reported in 2011, "subtropical regions like the American Southwest will get drier, while more northern areas, including much of Canada, will get wetter."

But even in the Northeastern U.S., the magazine reports, water supplies may change radically because of fierce but fewer rainstorms, and longer periods of drought. "Water suppliers should be thinking hard about managing these extremes," water resources engineer Casey Brown of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst told Discover. "It will only get worse."

So when it comes to complete plumbing systems in American homes, the statistics for 2080 could look more like 1940 than 2010.
Additional Questions For The 2080 Census
And when it comes to fashioning future census forms, what will the 2080 census questionnaire look like? In 1940, the Census Bureau reports, most people who participated in the census were asked 65 questions - 34 about population and 31 about housing. By 2010, every household in America was asked just 10 questions.

No telling how many questions will be asked 68 years from now, but the Census Bureau is already looking toward the future. "We work on the questions years ahead," says the bureau's public affairs specialist Victoria R. Glasier.

So in the spirit of time travel, we offer the bureau a few more possible questions inspired by James Dator and his students, who in turn were inspired by futurists such as Ian Pearson and Frank W. Sudia:

--Do you consider yourself to be a:

a) Homo sapiens (natural human being)?

b) Homo cyberneticus (mostly human with some external cybernetic enhancements)?

c) Homo hybridus (mostly human with some genetic enhancements)?

d) Homo machinus (slightly human but mostly machine)?

e) Other?

--How many times have you changed your sex? What categories have you experienced?

--How do you generate your own nutrient and energy supplies?

--If you do not have a biophysical domicile, where would you say "you" usually are?

Regardless of where "you" are, thank you for your participation in the 2080 census. Remember: You cannot know your planetary alliance, unless your planetary alliance knows you.

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The 2080 Census: The World As We (Don't) Know It

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Imagine how cool would it be if, by some twist of time, the National Archives were to make available detailed census information from the future. Will we have melded with our machines, as one futurist predicts? Join us on a short (round)trip to 2080.

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So winters in Minneapolis, Minnesota, will soften so they resemble the season as it currently exists in Lansing, Kansas. Spring in Wasilla, Alaska, may come as early as Marinette, Wisconsin's does today.

Warmer winters may sound nice, says Matt Fitzpatrick, an ecologist at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science and the lead author of the study. But they come with a huge cost: It's not just temperature and snow or rain that will change as climate shifts, but the whole ecological world.

"The direct effects of climate change are bad enough, but natural systems are tightly linked with climate," he says. "If these changes come rapidly, those systems are going to get out of whack-so this has potentially massive implications for forests, water supplies,farming-all kinds of things," he says.

The hunt for tomorrow

Over beers one afternoon at a bar in Tennessee, Fitzpatrick and a colleague decided to try to map out North America's future. They built a tool that outlined what a "normal" year looks like in 540 cities across the continent, temperature- and precipitation-wise. Then they looked at what models predicted those same cities would be like during each season 60 years in the future ( you can find your own city using their interactive tool).

They looked at two different scenarios. First, they considered a future where humans take hold of carbon emissions and reduce them aggressively within the next few decades-RCP 4.5, in climate policy parlance. RCP stands for "Representative Concentration Pathway" and describes how greenhouse gas emissions will proceed in the future. The 4.5 scenario is considered an intermediate pathway-not the best-case scenario (known as RCP 2.6), in which emissions drop off quickly within the next few years, but not the worst-case scenario (RCP 8.5), where greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated.

Then, they looked at that "worst-case" scenario. (Fitzpatrick points out, though, that recent estimates show that the planet is essentially tracking along this path now-meaning the "worst case" could, in fact, be even worse).

The patterns for how cities would change was similar between the two scenarios. Most places in the Northeast would get warmer and wetter, settling into a steamy humid state now commonly associated with the Southeast. In the western U.S., cities will generally get hotter and drier.

( Read about how heat waves are getting more intense-and deadly).

The difference was how much. In the better-case scenario of climate change-where emissions start slowing down soon-cities will look, on average, like ones 300 miles away from them today. But in the worst-case scenario, that distance jumps to over 500 miles.

"What we found really showed me that reducing emissions can have a big impact on how things develop," says Fitzpatrick. Only recently, he and his young daughter had hiked through the snowy mountains near his hometown in Tennessee with his young daughter. In the worst-case scenarios, it's far from certain that she'd be able to feel the same cold flakes on her cheeks by the time she's in her 60s.

Little numbers, big change

Last fall, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a report warning that even warming the planet up by, on average, 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) could induce devastating effects by as soon as 2040.

When "we're talking about one degree, 2 degrees, 3 degrees-it looks very small compared to the difference between summer and winter," says Stéphane Hallegate, a climate expert at the World Bank who was not involved in the study. That makes it tricky to understand how big a deal that much warming would be for Earth.

But just a few degrees of difference can have huge impacts. About 20,000 years ago during the height of the last ice age, when ice sheets nosed down as far south as New York City, air temperatures were only between about two to 10 degrees Celsius cooler across the planet than they are today-and the world as we know it was completely reshaped.

"So what these maps aren't showing is a lot more concerning than what they do show," says Jennifer Marlon, a scientist and science communication expert at Yale who was not involved in the study.

"We're not just talking about changing the temperature of a city, or its precipitation: We're talking about so much more," she says. "We're talking about shifting the entire climate of latitudinal bands and also about changing the variability of the weather in those places. Minneapolis-Saint Paul is going to feel like Kansas City, sure-like Kansas City but with less food, less water, a damaged grid, and all of these other systemic problems we're walking into if we don't address climate change."

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Want to know what your city will feel like in 2080? Look 500 miles south.

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So winters in Minneapolis, Minnesota, will soften so they resemble the season as it currently exists in Lansing, Kansas. Spring in Wasilla, Alaska, may come as early as Marinette, Wisconsin's does today. Warmer winters may sound nice, says Matt Fitzpatrick, an ecologist at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science and the lead author of the study.

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Professor Noel Sharkey of the University of Sheffield predicts that robots will be deployed on the streets of countries for law enforcement.

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Massive sea level changes by the 2090s. The United Kingdom is particularly affected with widespread coastal change.

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(Image: Climate Central)

Sea level rises could see large portions of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight under water towards the end of this century.

According to Climate Central's map of sea level rises, an increase of just one metre will see large parts of Portsmouth and the New Forest submerged below sea level. The map says coastal areas in Hampshire will see a rise of a metre by 2090 if carbon dioxide emissions remain unchecked.

While one metre does not sound like a lot, the interactive map by Climate Central shows large parts of Portsmouth, Gosport and Hayling Island under water by 2090. In the Royal Navy city, rising sea levels will see Southsea Common, Gunwharf Quays and the Historic Dockyard submerged.
READ NEXT: 'The worst in living memory': Filthy water at Lee-on-Solent 'like a bad latte'
Across the city, Lock Lake and Milton Lake will rise to submerge nearby streets including Great Salterns Recreation Ground. Some areas of Copnor and Farlington Marshes will also be submerged with just a one metre sea level rise.

Hayling Island is also set to be submerged, with a lot of land to the east of the area lost to water. Over in Gosport, by 2090 Haslar Marina is set to be threatened alongside Gosport & Stokes Bay Golf Club and Priddy's Hard.

Of course, the projection is much worse by 2170, when sea levels are believed to rise by five metres if carbon dioxide emissions remain unchecked. The Climate Central interactive map shows that major areas of Portsmouth, Gosport and Hayling Island will be threatened by the rising sea level.

Taking a closer look at the map, it seems like just some residential streets around Portsmouth's Kingston Road will not be threatened by the water. It also appears a small chunk of Highland Road in Portsmouth will survive.

However, it does look like both Hayling Island and Portsmouth will be cut off from the mainland and the rising water threatens the north of both areas. Similarly, the majority of Gosport is set to be threatened by 2170.

Across the county in the New Forest, rising sea levels will threaten our beautiful coastal communities. The biggest threat will be to Lymington and Milford on Sea.

Just a one metre rise, expected in 2090, will see water rise above the popular seaside destination. A close look at the map shows Keyhaven Marshes submerged, alongside the historic Hurst Castle.

Built between 1541 and 1544, Hurst Castle is one of our most treasured monuments from the era of King Henry VIII. However, the site is already having to battle extreme weather, just last year a section of the wall on the 19th-century east wing collapsed during a storm, after the sea exposed and undercut its foundations.

Lymington is not the only New Forest town threatened, further up the coast Bucklers Hard and Exbury may be at risk due to rising sea levels. Communities along the Southampton Water, like Hythe, are also threatened in sea levels rise by one metre in 2090.

Across The Solent, some communities on the Isle of Wight may also be threatened if sea levels rise by 2090. Looking at Climate Central's map, Bembridge and Hillway may become cut off from the island as waters rise around St Helens. The map also shows water levels rising near Freshwater, Newtown and Cowes.

However, what must be remembered is that this is only if carbon emissions are not curtailed in the future. The map does indicate there will likely still be sea level rises with moderate carbon cuts, but the cuts can still limit the damage.
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Hants areas that could be underwater by 2090 as sea levels rise

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Sea level rises could see large portions of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight under water towards the end of this century. According to Climate Central's map of sea level rises, an increase of just one metre will see large parts of Portsmouth and the New Forest submerged below sea level.

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2095: Global Fertility Stabilises below 2.0

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2095: Global Fertility Stabilises below 2.0

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The 2022 Revision of World Population Prospects is the twenty-seventh edition of official United Nations population estimates and projections that have been prepared by the Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat. It presents population estimates from 1950 to the present for 237 countries or areas, underpinned by analyses of historical demographic trends. This latest assessment considers the results of 1,758 national population censuses conducted between 1950 and 2022, as well as information from vital registration systems and from 2,890 nationally representative sample surveys The 2022 revision also presents population projections to the year 2100 that reflect a range of plausible outcomes at the global, regional and national levels.

The main results are presented in a series of Excel files displaying key demographic indicators for each UN development group, World Bank income group, geographic region, Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) region, subregion and country or area for selected periods or dates within 1950-2100. An online database (Data Portal) provides access to a subset of key indicators and interactive data visualization, including an open API for programmatic access. For advanced users who need to use these data in a database form or statistical software, we recommend to use the CSV format for bulk download. Special Aggregates also provide additional groupings of countries. For the first time, the estimates and projections are presented in one-year intervals of age and time instead of the five-year intervals used previously. The various datasets disaggregated by age are available in two forms: by standard 5-year age groups and single ages.

Additional outputs, including results from the probabilistic projections, and more detailed metadata will be posted soon after the initial public release.

Disclaimer: This web site contains data tables, figures, maps, analyses and technical notes from the current revision of the World Population Prospects. These documents do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of the Secretariat of the United Nations concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries.

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World Population Prospects - Population Division - United Nations

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The 2022 Revision of World Population Prospects is the twenty-seventh edition of official United Nations population estimates and projections that have been prepared by the Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat.

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2098: Forearm artery evolution in Humans

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2098: Forearm artery evolution in Humans

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Forearm artery reveals humans evolving from changes in natural selection

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Humans haven’t developed genetic mutations for telepathy or superpowers just yet, but a new study shows our species is still evolving in unique ways and changes in the natural selection could be the major reason.

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2100 - Africa becomes most populous continent

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2100 - Africa becomes most populous continent

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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/27/megalopolis-how-coastal-west-africa-will-shape-the-coming-century?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

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t has long been said that no one knows with any certainty the population of Lagos, Nigeria. When I spent time there a decade ago, the United Nations conservatively put the number at 11.5 million, but other estimates ranged as high as 18 million. The one thing everyone agreed was that Lagos was growing very fast. The population was already 40 times bigger than it had been in 1960, when Nigeria gained independence. One local demographer told me that 5,000 people were migrating to Lagos every day, mostly from the Nigerian countryside. Since then, the city has continued to swell. By 2035, the UN projects that Lagos will be home to 24.5 million people.

What is happening in Lagos is happening across the continent. Today, Africa has 1.4 billion people. By the middle of the century, experts such as Edward Paice, author of Youthquake: Why Africa's Demography Should Matter to the World, believe that this number will have almost doubled. By the end of this century, the UN projects that Africa, which had less than one-tenth of the world's population in 1950, will be home to 3.9 billion people, or 40% of humanity.

These are staggering numbers, but they do not tell the full story. We need to zoom in closer. It is in cities where most of this astounding demographic growth will occur. Once we begin to think along these lines, what is at stake becomes even clearer. Much western commentary on Africa's population growth has been alarmist and somewhat parochial, focusing on what this means for migration to Europe. The question of how African nations manage the fastest urbanisation in human history will certainly affect how many millions of its people seek to stay or leave. A recent continental survey by a South African foundation, for example, found that 73% of young Nigerians expressed an interest in emigrating within the next three years. But given its scale, this is a story with far larger implications than population movements alone, shaping everything from global economic prosperity to the future of the African nation state and the prospects for limiting climate crisis.

There is one place above all that should be seen as the centre of this urban transformation. It is a stretch of coastal west Africa that begins in the west with Abidjan, the economic capital of Ivory Coast, and extends 600 miles east - passing through the countries of Ghana, Togo and Benin - before finally arriving at Lagos. Recently, this has come to be seen by many experts as the world's most rapidly urbanising region, a "megalopolis" in the making - that is, a large and densely clustered group of metropolitan centres. When its population surpassed 10 million people in the 1950s, the New York metropolitan area became the anchor of one of the first urban zones to be described this way - a region of almost continuous dense habitation that stretches 400 miles from Washington DC to Boston. Other regions, such as Japan's Tokyo-Osaka corridor, soon gained the same distinction, and were later joined by other gigantic clusters in India, China and Europe.

But the Abidjan-Lagos stretch now stands to become the granddaddy of them all. In just over a decade from now, its major cities will contain 40 million people. Abidjan, with 8.3 million people, will be almost as large as New York City is today. The story of the region's small cities is equally dramatic. They are either becoming major urban centres in their own right, or - as with places like Oyo in Nigeria, Takoradi in Ghana, and Bingerville in Ivory Coast - they are gradually being absorbed by bigger cities. Meanwhile, newborn cities are popping into existence in settings that were all but barren a generation ago. When one includes these sorts of places, the projected population for this coastal zone will reach 51 million people by 2035, roughly as many people as the north-eastern corridor of the US counted when it first came to be considered a megalopolis.

But unlike that American super-region, whose population long ago plateaued, this part of west Africa will keep growing. By 2100, the Lagos-Abidjan stretch is projected to be the largest zone of continuous, dense habitation on earth, with something in the order of half a billion people.

"I have worked in China and in India, and that is where most of the attention on cities has been until fairly recently, but Africa is unquestionably the continent that will drive the future of urbanisation. And it is that strip along the coast of west Africa where the biggest changes are coming," said Daniel Hoornweg, a scholar of urbanisation at Ontario Tech University. "If it can develop efficiently, the region will become more than the sum of its parts - and the parts themselves are quite big. But if it develops badly, a tremendous amount of economic potential will be lost, and in the worst of cases, all hell could break loose."

he first time I travelled along this stretch of coast was in the late 1970s, on a long road trip to Nigeria from Ivory Coast, where my family then lived. My father, who ran a 20-country healthcare training programme for the World Health Organization, had a meeting to attend in Lagos, and he decided to invite my brothers and me along for the ride. At the time I was a first-year college student in the US, but it was the summer holidays, and I was excited to jump aboard a clattering old-school grey Land Rover for the trip.

He followed a route traced out on a well-worn, foldable Michelin map. It did not take long to discover that many of the routes marked on the map in red - supposedly signifying national or international highways - were little more than two-lane asphalt roads, some of which had long ago been chewed to oblivion by heavy trucking traffic, or eroded by years of seasonal rains. The secondary or tertiary roads, traced more faintly in yellow and white, signalled far greater challenges: jarring dirt paths that were more like trails than highways. These would leave our bodies aching and caked with dust. For long stretches, the west African countryside was so empty that we had to carry our own fuel in jerry cans.

One unfortunate artefact of this region's imperial history is that, while the British and French built roads and railways to transport agricultural commodities and minerals from the hinterlands of their colonies to modern ports - where they could be shipped home for great profit - in their intense imperial rivalry, they did little to connect their respective possessions. But by 1992, when I took another long drive along this coast, a stretch of highway had been built on either side of the frontier between Ivory Coast and Ghana circumventing a coastal lagoon, and relegating the old picturesque but chancy border-crossing ferry to quaint memory. Back then, few could have imagined the full scope of the changes coming to this stretch of coast - though, in retrospect, some of the signs were already clear.

As late as 1980, Lagos had still seemed like a series of modest towns barely stitched together by its highways and bridges. By the early 90s, though, it had exploded in size, and was already choking on itself. It had become notorious for some of the world's worst traffic jams, known locally as go-slows. Abidjan, the region's second-largest city, had also begun to morph. Its suburbs were expanding, thrusting toward the border with Ghana to the east. The other national and economic capitals of this region - Accra in Ghana, Lomé in Togo and Cotonou in Benin - were likewise starting to mushroom.

But it was on more recent trips, in the 2010s, that I saw the urban revolution transforming west Africa coming into full view. By then, Ivory Coast had laid down a true highway all the way from Abidjan to its border with Ghana. Abidjan had gobbled up early colonial capitals like Bingerville and the postcard-pretty but long-stagnant beach town of Grand-Bassam, turning them into dormitory communities. The roadside scenery during a drive from border to border along the Ghanaian coast bore no resemblance to the lightly peopled landscapes of earlier decades. Towns and cities were strung together one after another along nearly the entire route. For long stretches, one scarcely ever left an urban environment.

As always in this region, Lagos is where the most dramatic changes are visible. As it swells, the city is shooting thick urban tendrils west toward the border with Benin - the slender, francophone nation of 12 million people next door - rendering much of that country's economy a satellite not so much of Nigeria, but of Lagos itself. (If Lagos state were an independent country, its economy would rank as the fourth-biggest in Africa.)

Led by Lagos, as coastal west Africa's urbanisation gathers pace, and populations and regional commerce begin to surge across old imperial borders, the lives of tens of millions of people along the coastal corridor are changing in ways that neither colonial designs nor six decades of independent government seem to have remotely anticipated.

arlier this year, I returned to the coast, this time not for one long road trip, but for a series of shorter forays by car in Ghana, Togo and Benin. Everywhere I went, the speed and scale of the historic transformations under way were evident. In Ghana, I visited a place I had encountered on previous trips, Takoradi, and its conjoined twin, the railroad town of Sekondi. In 1980, the two towns together counted 197,000 people. This year, their population surpassed a threshold that only 14 American cities have ever reached: 1 million people, a more than five-fold increase in little more than a generation.

On the July morning I returned to Takoradi, it was the Islamic holiday of Eid al-Adha, or Tabaski, and the narrow downtown streets were packed with young celebrants from the local Muslim minority, all dressed colourfully in flowing laced robes. When the centre of Takoradi was built, more than a century ago, the city was Ghana's lone port. It was here that Kwame Nkrumah famously returned by ship from England in 1947, emerging from obscurity to lead his country, then a British colony known as the Gold Coast, to independence 10 years later. In their fading pastel and dreary grey tones, the verandaed buildings of the old downtown looked like the set of a period drama. Just beyond here, though, the antiquated scene gave way to an enormous construction site, where a highway flyover was rising above dusty streets. Once complete, it will allow traffic to bypass the old, outgrown centre in favour of the much larger modern periphery, where most of the city's people now live.

At Takoradi's western edge, I stopped at a new shopping mall where, on the shelves of a busy supermarket, I found South African wines, Swiss chocolates, cellophane packs of the same brand of fresh blueberries I eat every day in New York, and - an even more surefire sign of disposable income - expensive canned dog food. There were also Portuguese and Chinese restaurants, a beauty salon, mobile phone shops and a bridal gown dealer doing brisk business.

It is not immediately obvious where the income necessary to sustain this kind of commercial strip comes from. Some surely derives from work in the offshore oil business based nearby, some from a recently expanded regional port, some from a combination of old-line cocoa farming and new jobs in tech. And this points to the reality of what makes this megaregion so distinctive from earlier ones. Since at least the 18th century, as the writings of Hegel and Hume show, Africa has been widely regarded in the west as if it existed outside the flow of history - scarcely a participant in the global present, and even less relevant to the future. This has never been true, but those who cling on to such misapprehensions would do well to visit this stretch of coastline. In Lagos, Accra, Abidjan, or even in much smaller places like Takoradi, meanwhile, globalised enclaves with strong links to the rich world jostle with expanses of ragged urbanity, half hopefully striving, half congealed in poverty.

n another morning, I drove from the heart of Ghana's capital, Accra, to the city of Kasoa, less than 20 miles away. Kasoa is sometimes touted as one of the fastest-growing conurbations on the continent. When I made my first trips along this coast in the 70s, it was little more than a shambling collection of rural roadside traders' stalls. In 1984, Kasoa had 3,000 people. Scarcely a decade ago, its population was just shy of 70,000. Now it is home to roughly half a million people, equal to Edinburgh or Tucson.

The view from an overpass above Kasoa on the coastal highway is a reminder that cities throughout Africa have tended to sprawl outwards, rather than upward. There is little high-rise housing here, and few tall buildings of any kind. From up high, Kasoa has a rough-hewn, unfinished look. The newborn city lurches outward from the highway junction in all directions, its roads jammed with traffic. For many experts, this is a problematic feature of much of west Africa's urbanisation: it is almost entirely unplanned.

Kasoa's streets are frenzied with jumbles of wooden stalls and incessant trading of all kinds. In the dusty byways beyond the highway, young people were everywhere: hawking sachets of cold water, running after cars to sell mobile phone credits and cheap plastic toys, crying out the prices of sweet, puffy bread or plantain chips from beneath beach umbrellas on street corners.

Most noticeable of all were the schoolchildren walking the streets in their uniforms and backpacks. By 2050, about 40% of all the people under 18 in the world will be African, a proportion that will reach half by century's end. On the streets of Kasoa, statistics like these come to life. Everywhere there were billboards for daycare centres, kindergartens and "international schools". The only real competition for school ads came from church ads, which offer promises of success in this world as much as in the next.

Most of the people who fill the streets of places like Kasoa are recent arrivals from the countryside, and live in ramshackle cinderblock dwellings. Julius Ackatiah, a 55-year-old, recently set himself up in business here after many years in Italy, where he had already realised the African dream of emigration, legally acquiring a new nationality in a rich European country. I met him as he peered out from the unfussy sidestreet storefront where he sells secondhand housewares he has shipped from Italy.

Why had he chosen Kasoa, I asked him? Accra has recently become overbuilt and too expensive, Ackatiah said, but Kasoa was on the rise. "There are lots of people here, and they are trying to set up new homes for themselves and make new lives in this town. That makes for good business." As Ackatiah spoke on the stairs of his shop, he was engulfed by his used-goods stock in trade: cheap plastic chairs, living room couches and tables, computer monitors and household appliances, small and large, from refrigerators and microwaves to laundry irons.

ne of the biggest challenges for Africa's emerging megaregions remains its weak transport networks. In 2018, more than 40 nations agreed to create the African Continental Free Trade Area, an arrangement that economists say could boost African GDP by $450bn by 2035, mostly thanks to increased intra-African commerce. Since then, another 10 countries have joined, including Nigeria, making for a truly continent-wide agreement. "At its crux, outside the World Trade Organization, it is the biggest region of free trade in the world," said Astrid Haas, a Ugandan independent economist based in Kampala. "What it is intended to do is unlock the benefits on the continental scale for African countries to be able to trade with each other; to eliminate both tariff and non-tariff barriers."

But realising its full potential will require much more intense cooperation between neighbours, and especially on improving physical infrastructure. Algiers and Cairo remain the only African cities with underground commuter lines. (In recent years, inspired citizen designers have carefully sketched out potential subway networks for cities such as Kigali and Port Harcourt, but these remain hopeful ideas for now.) Abidjan and Lagos are building surface light urban rail systems, but both are small-scale and behind schedule. Meanwhile, the lack of decent roads continues to hold this region back. The four-lane highway between Accra and Kasoa aside, almost the entire 600-mile stretch of coast consists of an undivided two-lane road that passes slowly through small towns and villages. Drivers sometimes find themselves having to dodge daring pedestrians and errant animals.

Then there are the predatory police and soldiers who stop drivers in order to extort money under the pretext of traffic safety checks or the fight against crime. Last summer, on the outskirts of Takoradi, I was waved down by a portly, peanut-chewing police officer who asked, as if it was the most normal thing in the world: "What have you brought for me?" West African travellers face holdups like this, smiling or not, on a daily basis. On a trip in Ghana in the 90s, when I travelled 340 miles from the northern town of Bolgatanga to the central city of Kumasi, I counted 72 roadblocks. If anything, international borders in the region have long been even worse hotspots for this kind of predation.

Yet there is some reason for optimism. In May, the African Development Bank announced it had raised $15.6bn to fund the construction of a new coastal highway from Lagos to Abidjan. "We are talking about something like the road between Baltimore and New York - a toll road," said Lydie Ehouman, a transportation economist at the bank, who told me the target for completion of the highway, which will be four to six lanes wide throughout, is 2026. "It will be free-flowing, with a chip in your licence plate so you don't need to stop at toll gates. It will be a modern highway." Economists at the African Development Bank argue that the West African Highway, as the new road will be called, will increase cross-border trade among the participating countries by 36%.

"If people are confident in the availability of reliable, rapid transportation, other things will begin to change dramatically, too," said Hoornweg, the Ontario Tech professor. "Property values will rise sharply along the major transportation axes, and that will encourage people to build upward, with highrises, rather than building out with more and more sprawl. The cities will also become much more efficient and environmentally friendly, and that makes their development more sustainable."

On the ground today, a vision like this isn't so easily conjured. It's true that in Lagos a collection of impressive modern highrises is slowly taking shape. And in downtown Accra, a dazzling new real estate scheme - high-end apartment towers, office buildings, fancy shopping plazas, luxury hotels - is planned for the waterfront. But such projects are catering to the needs of the already wealthy, and not to the growing millions of people in the region who will soon urgently need housing. Here, the contrast with China, where huge clusters of residential high-rises ring every large city, could not be more striking. Rather than avatars of the future, in fact, the easiest thing to conclude from projects like these is that the region's governments are setting their sights far too low to address the sweeping demographic and social changes on their way. This may even be true about the coastal highway system.

"The best thing that could happen to west Africa would be if someone could convince these countries to seriously consider the experience of Asia," said Alain Bertaud, a senior fellow at the Marron Institute at New York University. As a former World Bank official who specialises in urbanisation, Bertaud advised China about developing one of the world's most successful megaregions, in the Pearl River delta. "Density itself does not create prosperity," Bertaud told me. "You will have to have lots more transportation, including new rail lines, new roads that link the coastal highway to the hinterlands and to small cities, where the cheaper land is." He pointed out that this requires a lot of building across national borders, which is not easy in any part of the world. "In India, we have seen that even building a corridor that crosses several states within the same country is difficult. In Africa they will need much better coordination."

Haas, the Ugandan economist, agreed. "Africa faces a need for $20-25 billion annually in infrastructure investment, plus $20bn more each year for housing. Trying to convey the scale here is very hard. We are talking about ballooning numbers, and people need to be shocked into action."

oward the end of my trip, I took a three-hour drive from Accra to the border with Togo. As we drove, Accra soon gave way to a grimy industrial zone that stretched for miles. From here all the way to the border, about 120 miles, the landscape was filled with peri-urban sprawl, its most distinctive feature being the ubiquitous roadside schools where children played sports or milled about.

At the border, as soon as I climbed out of my car I was surrounded by touts eager to sell me taxi rides, exchange currency for me or help expedite my visa and vaccination checks. I proceeded alone, expecting complications, but was pleasantly surprised at how straightforward the procedures were on both sides of the border. My first question to the driver I hired on the Togolese side was how far it was to the capital, Lomé. He laughed. "You're already in Lomé," he said. "In 15 minutes, you will be at your hotel."

The next day, a Sunday, I drove 30 minutes east from Lomé to a small town with Royce Wells, a 30-year-old American IT professional who wanted to inspect the progress on a beachside house he is building. Togo is an unusually narrow country - wedged between Ghana and Benin, it runs about 430 miles north to south, but has only 31 miles of coastline. For this reason, local elites and foreign investors alike have long dreamed of building it into a kind of entrepot trading state that profits from various kinds of arbitrage, from sharp currency fluctuations in Nigeria and Ghana to varying levels of corruption and political risk among its neighbours.

Togo maintains a democratic facade through regular elections, but has been tightly controlled by one family since 1963. In contrast to Nigeria, though, the electricity works, the internet is fast, and everyday life is not plagued by insecurity. With its commercial future in mind, Togo has built a port with capacity much larger than its domestic needs, and also produces cement, steel and other industrial and consumer goods for its larger neighbours. On this basis, Wells sees the country as a good bet, and hopes to make money building hotels there. "The places that learn how to create the right tax incentives and legal protections [for investors] will basically be able to arbitrage on Lagos and its dysfunction," he told me.

Others are much more sceptical that this vision will ever be realised. After all, it relies on canny decision-making at the top of government. Bright Simons, a prominent Ghanaian political analyst and entrepreneur, called this five-nation megaregion "one of the most administratively broken landscapes on the planet". Its governments are "unbelievably un-strategic", he said. "I am always puzzled by the enthusiasm of elites for creating chambers of commerce with Mexico, or some other distant country, rather than with their own neighbours."

Here, the needs of west Africa's booming population collide with the stubborn realities of the nation state, and specifically with contrasting colonial histories. Ivory Coast, Benin and Togo are former French colonies, and Nigeria and Ghana were colonised by Britain. This has left different official languages in place, whether English or French, as well as a currency in the French-speaking states, the CFA franc, that is a relic of colonisation - it was once tied to the French franc and is now attached to the euro. Perhaps the most important imperial legacy, though, is the insular national elites who, because of colonial history and the near-checkerboard way the countries alternate between English and French, pay scarce heed to each other. A Nigerian I met in Accra, for example, told me: "It wasn't until I started spending time in Ghana recently that I realised Ghana isn't our neighbour. Benin sits next to us, followed by Togo."

Cotonou, the economic capital of Benin (separate from but very close to its national capital, Porto-Novo), lies 20 miles from the border of Nigeria, and 76 miles from Lagos, but there is no immediate sense of the behemoth next door. The city of 700,000 (on its way to 5 million by 2100) clusters around a small and tidy administrative centre, complete with a modernist presidential palace built largely in glass, whose large size belies the diminutive nature of Benin itself, the corridor's second-smallest state. With its low-rise buildings and heavy scooter traffic, much of Cotonou feels scarcely different from a big town or village. Whether Benin likes it or not, Lagos's accelerating expansion seems destined to one day swamp this place.

When I asked a longtime acquaintance, a successful businessman from Benin, whether people in his country, including its leaders, sustain close relations with Nigeria, the answer was no. "The elite here still flatters itself with talk about being the Latin Quarter of the region, due to our French chauvinism," he said, referring to the pre-independence era when France made Benin a regional centre of colonial education. "Our leaders are very poor at thinking ahead ... If you tell the president he has nice shoes, he'll be swimming in happiness. With Nigeria next door, what we should have done long ago is make English a compulsory second language in school, but no one has ever thought of that."

This kind of pessimism, built upon a scornful assessment of governance at the national level in west Africa, is widespread. "We are going to need to have a functioning Ghanaian state, functioning states in Benin and Togo, and at least a minimally functional Nigerian government all at the same time in order to make this hugely urbanised future livable," said E Gyimah-Boadi, the 70-year-old co-founder and former CEO of the Ghana Center for Democratic Development, a thinktank.

"Part of me wants to believe that the youth of west Africa can be their own saviours, and that it is not because of the failures of my generation that they are necessarily doomed. The nation state has been a huge curse. It worked very well for some of us, but we have left very little behind for the young. Basically, we have cheated them."

Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here.

This article was amended on 27 October 2022. An earlier version named Cotonou as the capital of Benin. Cotonou is Benin's economic capital and largest city, but the national capital is Porto-Novo. This has been corrected.

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Megalopolis: how coastal west Africa will shape the coming century

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t has long been said that no one knows with any certainty the population of Lagos, Nigeria. When I spent time there a decade ago, the United Nations conservatively put the number at 11.5 million, but other estimates ranged as high as 18 million. The one thing everyone agreed was that Lagos was growing very fast.

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For example, Japanese population in 2023 is at 125 million. Projected to be at 53 million in 2100.

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Countries, including the UK, have used migration to boost their population and compensate for falling fertility rates.

However, this stops being the answer once nearly every country's population is shrinking.

"We will go from the period where it's a choice to open borders, or not, to frank competition for migrants, as there won't be enough," argues Prof Murray.

Some countries have tried policies such as enhanced maternity and paternity leave, free childcare, financial incentives and extra employment rights, but there is no clear answer.

Sweden has dragged its fertility rate up from 1.7 to 1.9, but other countries that have put significant effort into tackling the "baby bust" have struggled. Singapore still has a fertility rate of around 1.3.

Prof Murray says: "I find people laugh it off; they can't imagine it could be true, they think women will just decide to have more kids.

"If you can't [find a solution] then eventually the species disappears, but that's a few centuries away."

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Fertility rate: 'Jaw-dropping' global crash in children being born

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Nearly every country will see their populations fall as the world has fewer babies.

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This is a global average. Temperatures in the Persian Gulf are set to rise to 35 degrees Celsius by 2100.

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As world leaders gathered to mark the start of 2050, they looked back on the coronavirus pandemic 30 years before as a turning point in the quest to rein in global warming. Nations pulled together to defeat the pandemic, and that launched a new era of cooperation to prevent a climate disaster. Investments in green energy and new technology yielded rapid cuts in emissions of carbon dioxide, putting the world on track to limit global warming to around 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels.

Or maybe not. In 2050, the world could look back and see the pandemic as little more than a blip in a long and mostly futile effort to stave off global warming. Despite a temporary drop in carbon emissions from the 2020 outbreak, countries turned to cheap fossil fuels to revive their economies after the crisis. Carbon emissions soared and temperatures followed, setting the stage for 5 °C of warming by the end of the century.

These are just two possible visions of the future. Nobody knows how the current pandemic will play out; nor is it clear whether humanity will ultimately come together to avoid a potential climate catastrophe. But climate researchers need to explore what kinds of problem might emerge with different levels of warming. So they have developed a suite of scenarios intended to represent a range of futures that humanity could face. Their goal is to investigate how different policies might alter carbon emissions - and how the planet will react to all of that heat-trapping gas.

At one end of the spectrum, optimistic scenarios explore worlds in which governments join forces to advance low-carbon technologies while reducing poverty and inequality. The other end sees countries ramp up their use of cheap fossil fuels, pursuing economic growth at all costs.

Research teams have been running these scenarios (see 'A range of futures') through the world's major climate models for the first time, providing projections of how Earth might respond to different socio-economic pathways. These simulations will inform climate research for years to come, and will play a central part in the next major assessment of global warming by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is due out next year. The research could also have a key role in the negotiations around a new set of commitments to reduce emissions under the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

These scenarios update a set that has been in use for the past decade, including one extreme - and controversial - version that projects a temperature increase of around 5 °C above pre-industrial levels by 2100. Critics have charged that this particular scenario, which has had a central role in climate studies for more than a decade, is misleading because it includes unrealistic amounts of coal use - a roughly fivefold increase by 2100. But many researchers dismiss that criticism, saying that even such high-emissions scenarios have value as long as people understand their underlying assumptions and limitations. A massive release of methane from Arctic permafrost, for example, could have a similar effect to huge surges in fossil-fuel use.

"We're trying to understand risks, not predict the future," says Donald Wuebbles, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a coordinating lead author on the first volume of the latest US national climate assessment, released in 2017. The scenarios are not designed to project emissions, but to investigate different levels of warming and types of economic development. They help a wide variety of researchers: climate modellers use them to test their models and project the impact of increasing greenhouse-gas emissions; economists need them to explore the costs of policies; and ecologists rely on them to predict changes to ecosystems around the globe.

"This is not science fiction," says Kristie Ebi, an environmental-health researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle who co-chairs the committee that developed the new scenarios. "We need these model results to give us insights into the impacts of our choices, and now we can do that."

Unusual business

In April 1989, a group of experts tasked with forecasting potential futures met in Bilthoven, the Netherlands, to prepare for the first IPCC assessment, which was due out the following year. They created scenarios describing how much carbon dioxide, methane and other heat-trapping gases nations might produce over the next century. And those possible future worlds - from the extremely polluted to the exceptionally clean - provided the raw material for climate modellers to project how the planet might react.

Since then, the IPCC has updated the main emissions scenarios several times. But the situation changed in 2006, when the IPCC decided to get out of the scenario-development business because of pressure from the United States and others who argued that the organization should assess, not guide, science.

So, in 2010, a self-appointed group led by climate scientist Richard Moss, then at the Joint Global Change Research Institute in College Park, Maryland, published a new framework for creating and using scenarios designed to guide research for the IPCC's last assessment, which was released in 2013-14.

The group provided a set of four projections of future carbon pollution levels - dubbed Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) - that could be run by climate-modelling groups around the world to produce forecasts about the fate of the planet. The RCPs were selected to portray different levels of radiative forcing - a number that reflects how much extra warming results from greenhouse-gas emissions. The RCPs weren't intended to describe particular emissions trends or project how economies and technology might change. That job was left for other researchers, who would later produce sets of emissions trends that could drive greenhouse-gas concentrations in ways that mimic the RCPs.

Moss says the RCPs were designed to capture the spectrum of warming possibilities in the scientific literature and create a significant enough range between the high and low projections that climate modellers would be able to differentiate between them. And one major appeal of the scenario with a 5 °C global temperature increase that elicited so much criticism - called RCP8.5 - is that it provides modellers with a powerful signal. "We wanted to give enough detail so that climate modellers could do their work," says Moss. Regarding the individual scenarios, he adds, "we never meant to give them any particular weight".

Over time, however, the RCPs took on a life of their own. Although the caveats and qualifications are all there for those who know where to look, many scientists and others started using RCP8.5 to represent a world without aggressive climate action.

"It's very tempting to use RCP8.5 for a whole range of reasons, but it's also pretty unrealistic," says Glen Peters, a climate-policy researcher at the Center for International Climate Research in Oslo and co-author of a recent commentary on the issue. "The question is how you balance those issues and communicate what it represents."

The mischaracterization of RCP8.5 - as a projection of what could happen in a business-as-usual world in which governments fail to enact climate policies - is endemic, says Roger Pielke Jr, a science-policy researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder. Pielke says that even major scientific reviews such as the US national climate assessment have defaulted to using RCP8.5 as a de facto baseline scenario in which emissions continue to spike. That inflates projections of the effects of global warming - as well as of the costs of inaction, he says.

Wuebbles defends the decision to use RCP8.5 in the US assessment. The document refers to RCP8.5 merely as a "higher" scenario. It notes that emissions were consistent with this scenario for 15-20 years, until they levelled off for a few years around 2014.

Moreover, RCP8.5 provides scientists with a high-risk scenario that is valuable for understanding the risks posed by climate extremes, says Céline Guivarch, a climate-change economist at the Centre for International Research on the Environment and Development (CIRED) in Nogent-sur-Marne, France. Many scientists argue that even if coal use doesn't rise in a catastrophic way, 5 °C of warming could occur by other means, including thawing permafrost.

After the RCPs were published in 2010, the plan was to have a new set of fleshed-out socio-economic scenarios ready within two years. Those would have fed into the IPCC reports that came out in 2013 and 2014, which found that the rate of warming since 1950 is unprecedented over a timescale of centuries to millennia, and set the stage for the 2015 Paris climate accord.

But the process was much more difficult - and took a lot longer - than anticipated. The new generation of scenarios, known as Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs), were not introduced until 2015. Only now, as the major climate-modelling centres around the world run their experiments for the 2021 IPCC assessment, are they taking centre stage in climate research.

Although based on the old RCPs, the new scenarios for the first time present fully fleshed-out narratives about how the world might evolve. Each provides a broad storyline about how the world might change, as well as numbers for key demographic trends - population, economic productivity, urbanization and education - in every country on Earth, which modellers then use to simulate emissions and planetary impacts.

The teams that produced the SSPs intentionally left out any climate policies. This approach allows scientists to run their own experiments and test the impacts of different decisions by governments and societies, says Ebi. The flexibility allows her and other public-health researchers to compare and contrast the health benefits from climate policies that simultaneously reduce carbon emissions and result in cleaner air.

"You couldn't do that before," Ebi says. "It's allowing the climate community to ask questions that we couldn't ask."

Rocky road

Although the SSP scenarios are only a few years old, they were developed in a world very different from today's. They were shaped before the political upheaval of 2016, when the United Kingdom voted to exit the European Union and the United States elected President Donald Trump, who promised to put America first and withdraw from the Paris climate treaty.

But the teams that drafted the SSPs imagined a storyline that is very close to the path that the United States and other major powers are taking. The SSP3 scenario, called "regional rivalry - a rocky road", is defined by a resurgence of nationalism. It sees concerns about economic competitiveness and security lead to trade wars. As the decades progress, national efforts to lock down energy and food supplies short-circuit global development. Investments in education and technology decline. Curbing greenhouse gases would be difficult in such a world, and adapting to climate change wouldn't be any easier. Under this scenario, the average global temperature is projected to soar to more than 4 °C above pre-industrial levels.

For Ebi, it's a lesson in humility, because the scenario seemed outlandish when it was developed. But that is the point.

"When we started working on this, there was no discussion of America first, there was no Brexit, there weren't trade wars between the United States and China," she says. "It's uncomfortable, but you need to have those kinds of pathway. We don't know what the future is going to look like."
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-01125-x

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As world leaders gathered to mark the start of 2050, they looked back on the coronavirus pandemic 30 years before as a turning point in the quest to rein in global warming. Nations pulled together to defeat the pandemic, and that launched a new era of cooperation to prevent a climate disaster.

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2100: Predicted Sixth Mass Extinction Event

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2100: Predicted Sixth Mass Extinction Event

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MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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In the past 540 million years, the Earth has endured five mass extinction events, each involving processes that upended the normal cycling of carbon through the atmosphere and oceans. These globally fatal perturbations in carbon each unfolded over thousands to millions of years, and are coincident with the widespread extermination of marine species around the world.

The question for many scientists is whether the carbon cycle is now experiencing a significant jolt that could tip the planet toward a sixth mass extinction. In the modern era, carbon dioxide emissions have risen steadily since the 19th century, but deciphering whether this recent spike in carbon could lead to mass extinction has been challenging. That's mainly because it's difficult to relate ancient carbon anomalies, occurring over thousands to millions of years, to today's disruptions, which have taken place over just a little more than a century.

Now Daniel Rothman, professor of geophysics in the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and co-director of MIT's Lorenz Center, has analyzed significant changes in the carbon cycle over the last 540 million years, including the five mass extinction events. He has identified "thresholds of catastrophe" in the carbon cycle that, if exceeded, would lead to an unstable environment, and ultimately, mass extinction.

In a paper published today in Science Advances, he proposes that mass extinction occurs if one of two thresholds are crossed: For changes in the carbon cycle that occur over long timescales, extinctions will follow if those changes occur at rates faster than global ecosystems can adapt. For carbon perturbations that take place over shorter timescales, the pace of carbon-cycle changes will not matter; instead, the size or magnitude of the change will determine the likelihood of an extinction event.

Taking this reasoning forward in time, Rothman predicts that, given the recent rise in carbon dioxide emissions over a relatively short timescale, a sixth extinction will depend on whether a critical amount of carbon is added to the oceans. That amount, he calculates, is about 310 gigatons, which he estimates to be roughly equivalent to the amount of carbon that human activities will have added to the world's oceans by the year 2100.

Does this mean that mass extinction will soon follow at the turn of the century? Rothman says it would take some time - about 10,000 years - for such ecological disasters to play out. However, he says that by 2100 the world may have tipped into "unknown territory."

"This is not saying that disaster occurs the next day," Rothman says. "It's saying that, if left unchecked, the carbon cycle would move into a realm which would be no longer stable, and would behave in a way that would be difficult to predict. In the geologic past, this type of behavior is associated with mass extinction."
History follows theory
Rothman had previously done work on the end-Permian extinction, the most severe extinction in Earth's history, in which a massive pulse of carbon through the Earth's system was involved in wiping out more than 95 percent of marine species worldwide. Since then, conversations with colleagues spurred him to consider the likelihood of a sixth extinction, raising an essential question:

"How can you really compare these great events in the geologic past, which occur over such vast timescales, to what's going on today, which is centuries at the longest?" Rothman says. "So I sat down one summer day and tried to think about how one might go about this systematically."

He eventually derived a simple mathematical formula based on basic physical principles that relates the critical rate and magnitude of change in the carbon cycle to the timescale that separates fast from slow change. He hypothesized that this formula should predict whether mass extinction, or some other sort of global catastrophe, should occur.

Rothman then asked whether history followed his hypothesis. By searching through hundreds of published geochemistry papers, he identified 31 events in the last 542 million years in which a significant change occurred in Earth's carbon cycle. For each event, including the five mass extinctions, Rothman noted the change in carbon, expressed in the geochemical record as a change in the relative abundance of two isotopes, carbon-12 and carbon-13. He also noted the duration of time over which the changes occurred.

He then devised a mathematical transformation to convert these quantities into the total mass of carbon that was added to the oceans during each event. Finally, he plotted both the mass and timescale of each event.

"It became evident that there was a characteristic rate of change that the system basically didn't like to go past," Rothman says.

In other words, he observed a common threshold that most of the 31 events appeared to stay under. While these events involved significant changes in carbon, they were relatively benign - not enough to destabilize the system toward catastrophe. In contrast, four of the five mass extinction events lay over the threshold, with the most severe end-Permian extinction being the farthest over the line.

"Then it became a question of figuring out what it meant," Rothman says.
A hidden leak
Upon further analysis, Rothman found that the critical rate for catastrophe is related to a hidden process within the Earth's natural carbon cycle. The cycle is essentially a loop between photosynthesis and respiration. Normally, there is a "leak" in the cycle, in which a small amount of organic carbon sinks to the ocean bottom and, over time, is buried as sediment and sequestered from the rest of the carbon cycle.

Rothman found that the critical rate was equivalent to the rate of excess production of carbon dioxide that would result from plugging the leak. Any additional carbon dioxide injected into the cycle could not be described by the loop itself. One or more other processes would instead have taken the carbon cycle into unstable territory.

He then determined that the critical rate applies only beyond the timescale at which the marine carbon cycle can re-establish its equilibrium after it is disturbed. Today, this timescale is about 10,000 years. For much shorter events, the critical threshold is no longer tied to the rate at which carbon is added to the oceans but instead to the carbon's total mass. Both scenarios would leave an excess of carbon circulating through the oceans and atmosphere, likely resulting in global warming and ocean acidification.

From the critical rate and the equilibrium timescale, Rothman calculated the critical mass of carbon for the modern day to be about 310 gigatons.

He then compared his prediction to the total amount of carbon added to the Earth's oceans by the year 2100, as projected in the most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC projections consider four possible pathways for carbon dioxide emissions, ranging from one associated with stringent policies to limit carbon dioxide emissions, to another related to the high range of scenarios with no limitations.

The best-case scenario projects that humans will add 300 gigatons of carbon to the oceans by 2100, while more than 500 gigatons will be added under the worst-case scenario, far exceeding the critical threshold. In all scenarios, Rothman shows that by 2100, the carbon cycle will either be close to or well beyond the threshold for catastrophe.

"There should be ways of pulling back [emissions of carbon dioxide]," Rothman says. "But this work points out reasons why we need to be careful, and it gives more reasons for studying the past to inform the present."

This research was supported, in part, by NASA and the National Science Foundation.

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Mathematics predicts a sixth mass extinction

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In the past 540 million years, the Earth has endured five mass extinction events, each involving processes that upended the normal cycling of carbon through the atmosphere and oceans. These globally fatal perturbations in carbon each unfolded over thousands to millions of years, and are coincident with the widespread extermination of marine species around the world.

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2100: Nuclear Fusion Contributes to Carbon Emission Reduction.

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2100: Nuclear Fusion Contributes to Carbon Emission Reduction.

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2102: Gene editing technology weaponised.

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2102: Gene editing technology weaponised.

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This is a clear danger and will need to be considered in terms of developing ways to ensure it does not happen.

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Ant with fungus. Credit: Shutterstock

It has been over a year since the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic. And perhaps the most important lesson is that we were completely unprepared to face the debilitating virus.

This raises some scary thoughts. What if the threat wasn't COVID-19, but a gene-edited pathogen designed to turn us into zombies-ghost-like, agitated creatures with little awareness of our surroundings? With recent advances in gene editing, it may be possible for bioterrorists to design viruses capable of altering our behavior, spreading such a disease and ultimately killing us. And chances are we still wouldn't be sufficiently prepared to deal with it.

A zombie apocalypse may sound far-fetched, reserved for the annals of graphic novels, immersive gaming experiences and popular culture. But there are examples of "zombification" in nature. Perhaps the most well known is rabies, which can cause aggression and hallucination and is almost always fatal once symptoms appear.

But there are others. A recently discovered kind of wasp, for example, can turn a particular species of spider (Anelosimus eximius) into "zombies" by laying eggs on their abdomen. The resulting larvae then attaches itself to the spider, feeding on it, while the spider, once a social individual, leaves the colony and prepares to die alone. Other zombification examples from nature include the African sleeping sickness, a fatal neurological condition created by insect-borne parasites, and the Ophiocordyceps unilateralis fungus, which changes the behavior of carpenter ants before killing them and sprouting out of their heads.
Weaponising pathogens
Last year, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry recognized the development of a type of genetic scissors called CRISPR-Cas9. Interest in this technology has been simmering for a while, with equal doses of excitement and fear. Because of its ability to edit the human genome with unprecedented precision, replacing a single letter in the DNA, CRISPR has already proven itself useful in treating genetic conditions such as sickle cell disease, beta thalassemia, and many others.

But CRISPR-Cas9 could theoretically also be used for darker purposes, such as bioterrorism. It could alter pathogens to make them more transmissible or fatal. Alternatively, it could turn a non-pathogen, such as a harmless microbe, into an aggressive virus. The technique may even be able to alter a virus to make it dangerous for a larger range of species than it currently infects, or make it resistant to antibiotics or antivirals.

Whether CRISPR could be used to infect humans in a way to make them zombie-like remains a theoretical speculation. At the moment, there are probably easier ways to terrorize people. But as biotechnologies improve in the wake of COVID, the risk from bioterrorism is increasing.

If a zombie-like disease could be created, it clearly wouldn't make deceased people reawaken as zombies. But an infection that passed through saliva with extremely high transmission and mortality rate, and which caused agitation, destructive behavior and death, wouldn't be far off the horror that we see in zombie movies. Such a virus would spread rapidly from human to human in a similar manner to diseases such as Ebola and Marburg viruses. In the epic zombie film, 28 Days Later, the fictitious "rage virus" was, in fact, inspired by these two real-life viruses.

Given these possibilities, it is not surprising that the director of the US National Intelligence, James Clapper, termed gene editing "weapons of mass destruction and proliferation" in 2018.

Many countries are aware of the risks. In 2018, the US government released its first bio-defense strategy, involving multiple government agencies. The plan covers not only deliberate bioterror threats, but also "naturally occurring outbreaks and infectious diseases that escape a lab accidentally." And, curiously, the US Department of Defense Strategic Command unit has issued a training program called CONOP 8888 (Counter-Zombie Dominance), which simulates a zombie apocalypse situation. However, this was designed to be completely fictitious, providing military and defense training without the need to involve real, classified information.
How to stop it
Do we stand a chance against such gene-edited pathogens? We have international law conventions on biological and chemical toxins. These strictly prohibit states from acquiring or retaining biological weapons. But it is questionable whether these are adequate in the face of novel approaches. Gene editing technologies such as CRISPR are getting cheaper and easier to work with. That means rogue scientists or organizations could use them for bioterrorism.

Ideally, specific provisions in these international instruments should be revisited and adapted to the changing environment. This may include imposing a moratorium on experimenting with gene editing as biological weapon tools or allowing experimentation strictly for benefiting human health.

In June, a WHO expert committee published two reports (see here and here) that made recommendations about how human genome editing could be governed at the appropriate institutional, national and global level. Its framework incorporates structures of governance that already exist in different countries, such as regulatory authorities or national guidelines regarding genome editing or similar technologies. It recommends, for example, that ethics committees review clinical trials and approvals in the area.

While these recommendations provide some clarity, it is concerning that these are simply guidelines that do not have the force of law. The WHO is not in a position to regulate genome editing in individual countries. It therefore becomes incumbent on individual countries to implement these recommendations as part of their own national law. Another problem is that the guidelines do not address issues of safety and efficacy-stating this wasn't part of the scope of the review. But that may change going forward.

For now, these recommendations are the closest thing we have to a global framework of governance. And as the technology continues to develop, it is hoped that they will also evolve accordingly. But ultimately, we may need to think about how to make such frameworks legally binding.

If all else fails, we might have to start working on our cardio and survival skills, and take a leaf out of the books of survivalist preppers.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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How gene editing could be used as a weapon, and what to do about it

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It has been over a year since the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic. And perhaps the most important lesson is that we were completely unprepared to face the debilitating virus. This raises some scary thoughts. What if the threat wasn't COVID-19, but a gene-edited pathogen designed to turn us into zombies-ghost-like, agitated creatures with little awareness of our surroundings?

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2110: Artificial Intelligence now widely used.

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2110: Artificial Intelligence now widely used.

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Predictions about the application of artificial intelligence a century from now are fairly generalised. The convergence with the transhumanist movement is often mentioned with the idea of AI being used as a memory aid. Other applications are autonomous, with created intelligence being manufactured to run facilities in locations where humanity cannot survive.

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As good as the human brain - or part of it?
It's 55 years since the term artificial intelligence was coined. But how advanced will AI be in 2050 and in 2100? silicon.com quizzed some of the field's foremost thinkers to find out...
Hugh Loebner, inventor
That's hard to say. [Mathematician and scientist Alan] Turing, I believe, thought his test would be passed by 2050. I suppose that by 2100 we'll have human equivalent or superior machines.

Ray Kurzweil, futurist

2050? That's past the Singularity [the point when machine intelligence outpaces that of humans].

As I articulate in my book The Singularity is Near, computation is growing at a doubly exponential rate. Computers today are billions of times more powerful per dollar than when I was an undergraduate and we will do that again in 25 years. Software is also growing in sophistication and we are well on our way to completely reverse-engineering the human brain within 20 years.

That is also following an exponential progression. We will have fully human-level (Turing-test capable) AI by 2029. These human-like capabilities will combine with the ways that machines are already superior in terms of sharing knowledge at speeds that are a million times faster than human language, and other advantages. We will merge with this intelligent technology and become a hybrid of biological and nonbiological intelligence, except that the nonbiological portion of our intelligence will continue to expand exponentially. So our brains will expand their capacity a billion-fold by 2045 through this merger and ongoing exponential advance of information technology.

By 2100, that expansion will be trillions of trillions-fold and we will begin to expand beyond our solar system.

Eric Horvitz, president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
This is hard to predict right now but I'll mention one area. I foresee a great deal of work on building systems that work in a complementary way with people, where the computing system complements human skills.

I see the development of increasingly sophisticated systems that work very closely with people in a complementary manner to assist them with their goals, to help them to remember things they might forget, and to ensure their privacy.

Noel Sharkey, professor of AI and robotics

It's very difficult to tell where AI will be in 40 years' or 50 years' time - really difficult... I expect to see a lot of autonomous operation in robots.

I would expect certainly one thing for sure would be autonomous cars... We're going to see a lot of robots as receptionists I think - see robots in medicine, that's going to be one of the great breakthroughs... I would hope that in 50 years' time you'd be able to get your appendix removed by machine and also it means you could take a machine down the motorway and have it operate on people rather than rush them to hospital and have them die on the way, which is one of the common things, so those areas I think will be very big.

But it depends on what society does and whether we go the technological route, so I couldn't possibly give a prediction that I would think would be true.

Kevin Warwick, professor of cybernetics

I feel that by 2050 we will have gone through the Singularity and it will either be that intelligent machines actually dominant - The Terminator scenario - or it will be cyborgs, upgraded humans.

I really, by 2050, can't see humans still being the dominant species. I just cannot believe that the development of machine intelligence would have been so slow as to not bring that about.

So I think we will have to have upgraded with implants by 2050, so by 2100 - it's very difficult to predict that far ahead but hopefully cyborgs will have developed and we will be able to communicate just by thinking and we will have multidimensional thought and some of those abilities so it'll be a tremendously exciting time if you're a cyborg in 2100.
Top photo credit: null0 via Flickr.com under the following Creative Commons licence
Middle and bottom photo credits: Chris Beaumont/CBS Interactive

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Artificial intelligence: How advanced will AI be in 2100?

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As good as the human brain - or part of it? It's 55 years since the term artificial intelligence was coined. But how advanced will AI be in 2050 and in 2100? silicon.com quizzed some of the field's foremost thinkers to find out... Hugh Loebner, inventor That's hard to say.

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The iterations and development of quantum computing and artificial intelligence creates an environment for a second information war.

Many depictions of artificial intelligence warfare involve the deployment of autonomous drone soldiers, aircraft and submersibles. However, the nature of this conflict is likely to be less about physical combat, but more about disruption activities that target key infrastructure.

The nature of this war will be different to the first. Here, we are more concerned with direct corporation to corporation data theft and sabotage. These activities will still be as destructive as almost every state actor will be reliant on private sector infrastructures.

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Artificial intelligence is among the many hot technologies that promise to change the face of warfare for years to come. Articles abound that describe its possibilities and warn those who fall behind in the AI race. The Department of Defense has duly created the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center in the hopes of winning the AI battle. Visions exist of AI enabling autonomous systems to conduct missions, achieving sensor fusion, automating tasks, and making better, quicker decisions than humans. AI is improving rapidly and some day in the future those goals may be achieved. In the meantime, AI's impact will be in the more mundane, dull, and monotonous tasks performed by our military in uncontested environments.

Artificial intelligence is a rapidly developing capability. Extensive research by academia and industry is resulting in shorter training time for systems and increasingly better results. AI is effective at certain tasks, such as image recognition, recommendation systems, and language translation. Many systems designed for these tasks are fielded today and producing very good results. In other areas, AI is very short of human-level achievement. Some of these areas include working with scenarios not seen previously by the AI; understanding the context of text ( understanding sarcasm, for example) and objects; and multi-tasking (i.e., being able to solve problems of multiple type). Most AI systems today are trained to do one task, and to do so only under very specific circumstances. Unlike humans, they do not adapt well to new environments and new tasks.

Artificial-intelligence models are improving daily and have shown their value in many applications. The performance of these systems can make them very useful for tasks such as identifying a T-90 main battle tank in a satellite image, identifying high-value targets in a crowd using facial recognition, translating text for open-source intelligence, and text generation for use in information operations. The application areas where AI has been most successful are those where there are large quantities of labelled data, like Imagenet, Google Translate, and text generation. AI is also very capable in areas like recommendation systems, anomaly detection, prediction systems, and competitive games. An AI system in these domains could assist the military with fraud detection in its contracting services, predicting when weapons systems will fail due to maintenance issues, or developing winning strategies in conflict simulations. All of these applications and more can be force multipliers in day-to-day operations and in the next conflict.
AI's Shortfalls for Military Applications
As the military looks to incorporate AI's success in these tasks into its systems, some challenges must be acknowledged. The first is that developers need access to data. Many AI systems are trained using data that has been labeled by some expert system (e.g., labeling scenes that include an air defense battery), usually a human. Large datasets are often labeled by companies who employ manual methods. Obtaining this data and sharing it is a challenge, especially for an organization that prefers to classify data and restrict access to it. An example military dataset may be one with images produced by thermal-imaging systems and labeled by experts to describe the weapon systems found in the image, if any. Without sharing this with preprocessors and developers, an AI that uses that set effectively cannot be created. AI systems are also vulnerable to becoming very large (and thus slow), and consequently susceptible to "dimensionality issues." For example, training a system to recognize images of every possible weapon system in existence would involve thousands of categories. Such systems will require an enormous amount of computing power and lots of dedicated time on those resources. And because we are training a model, the best model requires an infinite amount of these images to be completely accurate. That is something we cannot achieve. Furthermore, as we train these AI systems, we often attempt to force them to follow "human" rules such as the rules of grammar. However, humans often ignore these rules, which makes developing successful AI systems for things like sentiment analysis and speech recognition challenging. Finally, AI systems can work well in uncontested, controlled domains. However, research is demonstrating that under adversarial conditions, AI systems can easily be fooled, resulting in errors. Certainly, many DoD AI applications will operate in contested spaces, like the cyber domain, and thus, we should be wary of their results.

Ignoring the enemy's efforts to defeat the AI systems that we may employ, there are limitations to these seemingly super-human models. An AI's image-processing capability is not very robust when given images that are different from its training set-for example, images where lighting conditions are poor, that are at an obtuse angle, or that are partially obscured. Unless these types of images were in the training set, the model may struggle (or fail) to accurately identify the content. Chat bots that might aid our information-operations missions are limited to hundreds of words and thus cannot completely replace a human who can write pages at a time. Prediction systems, such as IBM's Watson weather-prediction tool, struggle with dimensionality issues and the availability of input data due to the complexity of the systems they are trying to model. Research may solve some of these problems but few of them will be solved as quickly as predicted or desired.

Another simple weakness with AI systems is their inability to multi-task. A human is capable of identifying an enemy vehicle, deciding a weapon system to employ against it, predicting its path, and then engaging the target. This fairly simple set of tasks is currently impossible for an AI system to accomplish. At best, a combination of AIs could be constructed where individual tasks are given to separate models. That type of solution, even if feasible, would entail a huge cost in sensing and computing power not to mention the training and testing of the system. Many AI systems are not even capable of transferring their learning within the same domain. For example, a system trained to identify a T-90 tank would most likely be unable to identify a Chinese Type 99 tank, despite the fact that they are both tanks and both tasks are image recognition. Many researchers are working to enable systems to transfer their learning, but such systems are years away from production.

Artificial-intelligence systems are also very poor at understanding inputs and context within the inputs. AI recognition systems don't understand what the image is, they simply learn textures and gradients of the image's pixels. Given scenes with those same gradients, AIs readily identify portions of the picture incorrectly. This lack of understanding can result in misclassifications that humans would not make, such as identifying a boat on a lake as a BMP.

This leads to another weakness of these systems-the inability to explain how they made their decisions. Most of what occurs inside an AI system is a black box and there is very little that a human can do to understand how the system makes its decisions. This is a critical problem for high-risk systems such as those that make engagement decisions or whose output may be used in critical decision-making processes. The ability to audit a system and learn why it made a mistake is legally and morally important. Additionally, issues on how we assess liability in cases where AI is involved are open research concerns. There have been many examples in the news recently of AI systems making poor decisions based on hidden biases in areas such as loan approvals and parole determinations. Unfortunately, work on explainable AI is many years from bearing fruit.

AI systems also struggle to distinguish between correlation and causation. The infamous example often used to illustrate the difference is the correlation between drowning deaths and ice cream sales. An AI system fed with statistics about these two items would not know that the two patterns only correlate because both are a function of warmer weather and might conclude that to prevent drowning deaths we should restrict ice cream sales. This type of problem could manifest itself in a military fraud prevention system that is fed data on purchases by month. Such a system could errantly conclude that fraud increases in September as spending increases when really it's just a function of end-of-year spending habits.

Even without these AI weaknesses, the main area the military should be concerned with at the moment is adversarial attacks. We must assume that potential adversaries will attempt to fool or break any accessible AI systems that we use. Attempts will be made to fool image-recognition engines and sensors; cyberattacks will try to evade intrusion-detection systems; and logistical systems will be fed altered data to clog the supply lines with false requirements.

Adversarial attacks can be separated into four categories: evasion, inference, poisoning, and extraction. It has been shown that these types of attacks are easy to accomplish and often don't require computing skills. Evasion attacks attempt to fool an AI engine often in the hopes of avoiding detection-hiding a cyberattack, for example, or convincing a sensor that a tank is a school bus. The primary survival skill of the future may be the ability to hide from AI sensors. As a result, the military may need to develop a new type of AI camouflage to defeat AI systems because it's been shown that simple obfuscation techniques such as strategic tape placement can fool AI. Evasion attacks are often proceeded by inference attacks that gain information about the AI system that can be used to enable evasion attacks. Poisoning attacks target AI systems during training to achieve their malicious intent. Here the threat would be enemy access to the datasets used to train our tools. Mislabeled images of vehicles to fool targeting systems or manipulated maintenance data designed to classify imminent system failure as normal operation may be inserted. Given the vulnerabilities of our supply chains, this would not be unimaginable and would be difficult to detect. Extraction attacks exploit access to the AI's interface to learn enough about the AI's operation to create a parallel model of the system. If our AIs are not secure from unauthorized users, then those users could predict decisions made by our systems and use those predictions to their advantage. One could envision an opponent predicting how an AI-controlled unmanned system will respond to certain visual and electromagnetic stimuli and thus influence its route and behavior.
The Path Forward for Military AI Usage
Artificial intelligence will certainly have a role in future military applications. It has many application areas where it will enhance productivity, reduce user workload, and operate more quickly than humans. Ongoing research will continue to improve its capability, explainability, and resilience. The military cannot ignore this technology. Even if we do not embrace it, certainly our opponents will, and we must be able to attack and defeat their AIs. However, we must resist the allure of this resurgent technology. Placing vulnerable AI systems in contested domains and making them responsible for critical decisions opens the opportunity for disastrous results. At this time, humans must remain responsible for key decisions.

Given the high probability that our exposed AI systems will be attacked and the current lack of resilience in AI technology, the best areas to invest in military AI are those that operate in uncontested domains. Artificial-intelligence tools that are closely supervised by human experts or that have secure inputs and outputs can provide value to the military while alleviating concerns about vulnerabilities. Examples of such systems are medical-imaging diagnostic tools, maintenance-failure prediction applications, and fraud-detection programs. All of these can provide value to the military while limiting the risk from adversarial attacks, biased data, context misunderstanding, and more. These are not the super tools sponsored by the AI salesmen of the world but are the ones most likely to have success in the near term.
Lt. Col (Ret) Paul Maxwell is the Cyber Fellow of Computer Engineering at the Army Cyber Institute at the United States Military Academy. He was a cyber and armor branch officer during his twenty-four years of service. He holds a PhD in electrical engineering from Colorado State University. The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Staff Sgt. Jacob Osborne, US Marine Corps

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Artificial Intelligence is the Future of Warfare (Just Not in the Way You Think) - Modern War Institute

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Artificial intelligence is among the many hot technologies that promise to change the face of warfare for years to come. Articles abound that describe its possibilities and warn those who [...]

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2113: Artificial Intelligence Conflict Prediction Modelling.

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2113: Artificial Intelligence Conflict Prediction Modelling.

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The power of artificial intelligence is being used to analyse human society. Historical data is being used to inform future trend mapping. The amounts of data are enormous and could not be processed by previous generations of computers. However, the design for this kind of application has already been sketched and attempted with the use of machine learning algorithms. The development of a second or third generation artificial intelligence will supercharge this process.

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Introduction

For at least the last two decades, the international community in general and the United Nations specifically have attempted to develop robust, accurate and effective conflict early warning system for conflict prevention. From Boutros Boutros-Ghali's An Agenda for Peace (UNSC 1992) on through to the present day, Secretaries General, practitioners and academics have continually documented and called to attention the need for comprehensive early warning systems to collate, analyze and disseminate information and data on sociopolitical and armed conflict dynamics. Indeed, as recently as September 2011, Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and the UN Security Council reiterated this need once again through the Preventative Diplomacy: Delivering Results report (UNSC 2011a). The president of the Security Council at the time stated that a 'key component...of a comprehensive conflict prevention strategy include[s] early warning [mechanisms]' (UNSC 2011b). The need for an early warning system within the UN system is therefore well established. However, early warning systems face a number of practical hurdles to implementation. Two of these are access to open data and technical limits on making sense of that data once obtained.

One potential and promising component of integrated early warning systems lies in the field of machine learning. Machine learning is a branch of computer science that leverages algorithms, or a set of step-by-step computational procedures, to perform actions without explicitly being programmed to do so. Many of the methodologies that undergird the field of machine learning are not new, with some of the newest methodologies like support vector machines and random forests developed in the mid to late 1990's. Indeed, some of these methodologies have been utilized in limited cases for early warning over the past decade. However, advances in data management, predictive analytics, and parallelized data processing have made these methods more widely accessible for use in both big and small data analysis. Additionally, all provided enormous benefits to a wide variety of private (as well as some public) sector applications. For example, the 2012 election campaign of US President Barack Obama successfully utilized a range of data science techniques to analyze voter behavior, manage get out the vote campaigns, and better target potential swing voters. Companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Google have utilized predictive analytics for a number of years to predict consumer behavior and better target recommendations or advertisements. In both the macro- and microcosms, parallelization has had huge impacts for everything from human genome sequencing to analysis of the massive amounts of data returned from deep field telescopy. And of course the recent revelations regarding the NSA surveillance, including the now infamous PRISM program, indicate that all of these techniques are being utilized in intelligence gathering by some nation states.

Data science is increasingly being applied to the domain of international development and international relations, where the field holds 'new opportunities for humanitarian and development assistance in the most complex and dangerous environments' (Kilcullen and Courtney). For example in poverty mapping, researchers in Spain developed a predictive model using anonomyzed call detail records (CDRs) from an unnamed South American city to map poverty. The model was applied using a variety of predictors derived from aggregating call locations and call characteristics and was tested against existing survey derived municipal poverty maps. The result showed a high degree of accuracy (Soto et al. 2011). Similarly, one proposal to the NetMob 2013 special session on the D4D challenge proposed using CDRs for subnational poverty mapping in developing countries. The paper tested this hypothesis on historical data in Cote d'Ivoire, again with a high degree of accuracy (Smith et al. 2013). More recently, a number of researchers have attempted to apply machine learning towards predicting outbreaks of violence.

Indeed, it appears that the application of machine learning techniques could provide significant contributions to tactical early warning systems and conflict prevention strategies in particular, if leveraged intelligently as part of a larger system of 'intelligence.' However, questions remain: is it possible to use a combination of open source geospatial and national statistics to develop subnational indicators of vulnerability to violent events? Is there a way to scale and incorporate additional data as it becomes available? Can the aggregation and modeling process be parallelized to handle larger datasets in real-time? Finally can these modern computational techniques even be used to predict conflict and feed into 3 rd and 4 th generation early warning systems?

This paper outlines an initial approach to test exactly that. First the paper offers a definition of machine learning terminology as an entry point as well as an outline of the analytical methods used. Then, in order to address the lack of highly granular and timely global statistics, this paper proposes a mixed method approach of using GIS data processing techniques to aggregate national, subnational and satellite data to the district level. The resulting data is then used as a test case for the application of two predictive machine-learning algorithms, which is reported in the final section.

Machine Learning Methodology

For the intents of this paper, the problem can be defined as a supervised classification machine-learning problem. As the previous sentence is probably not terribly meaningful to conflict analysis practitioners, a few definitions are in order at the outset.

Machine learning can be defined as 'systems [or algorithms] to automate decision making and classification of data' (Warden 2011: 31). These algorithms use existing or incoming data to extract structure, generalize results and make predictions about future data. Machine learning tasks are typically divided into two categories: supervised and unsupervised learning. Unsupervised learning is an attempt to provide structure to relatively unstructured data. In unsupervised learning, the dependent variable is not known at the outset. For example, education researchers have used cluster analysis, a common unsupervised learner, to identify groups of students with similar demographic and socioeconomic properties. Likewise, police can use geo-referenced data on crime to identify 'clusters' of types of crime over time in order to better formulate policing strategies.

Supervised learners on the other hand, of which the current paper is an example, are typically used for making predictions from existing data. The algorithm uses sample data in which the dependent variable is already known to extrapolate onto data in which the dependent variable is not know. A classification problem revolves around identifying which category or set of categories a given observation belongs to based on a set of predictive variables or features, often called the feature space. An algorithm used to identify is called a classifier and the category scheme is referred to as the target class.

One example of supervised classification learning is optical character recognition. In this use, the incoming feature space is a set of the pixel positions of known letters. The target class is simply what letter a group of pixels represents. Another example is spam filters in which the incoming data consists of emails pre-classified as spam and not-spam. In both these cases, incoming data is divided randomly into a training set and a test set. The training set is used to train the model for prediction and the test set is used to test the final model for predictive accuracy and generalizability.

There are a wide variety of learning algorithms to choose from for supervised classification applications. This paper represents the first step in an iterative process of developing a workable model of conflict prediction. As such, many of the methodological decisions that underpin this stage were made in the interest of expediency. Data was selected for completeness, algorithms were selected for speed, etc. Future research will refine this methodology to create better and more accurate models. However, this stage is rather more about testing the feasibility of even designing such a machine learning system. Due to these limiting considerations two initial options were selected: naïve Bayes and Random Forests.

The naïve Bayes algorithm provides a relatively simple test application that in many cases gives tolerable performance in terms of both speed and accuracy. The naïve Bayes algorithm is a simple probabilistic classifier. That is the algorithm assumes that the presence of a particular feature is unrelated to the presence of any other feature, given the target class variable. For example, an animal may be a classified as a cat if it is a mammal, domesticated and 10 lbs. A naïve Bayes algorithm would consider each features contribution to the probability that this animal is a cat independently regardless of the presence or absence of other features.

The second method, the random forest algorithm, provides a more sophisticated learner and offers the possibility of model improvement. Random forests have gained popularity for speed and accuracy performance as well as ability to handle data with either a large number of observations or variables. Random forests are a form of ensemble learner that extends the decision tree learner algorithm. Ensemble methods refer to the use of multiple models that are then recombined to increase the predictive performance over any of the single models. Decision trees create a model of that tries to predict the value of a target variable based on a range of input variables. The trees are composed of a root, children and leaf elements. Each split corresponds to a given input variable and each child element corresponds to that variables possible values. Each leaf element corresponds to the value of a target variable given the all values of the elements as you traverse the path from the root to the leaf. The tree is 'learned' by deriving splits based on some test that determines which input variable best splits the data at that level. Random forests expand on this methodology by iterating over the data to create multiple trees. Each tree is derived from a sub-sample of the training data and a sub-selection of the predictor variables. The final classification is determined by an aggregation of 'votes' from each of the component trees. Random forests are highly popular due to a number of factors. In a wide variety of use cases, they have proven highly accurate. They are also efficient on datasets with a large number of observations and variables. They are also useful in determining the importance of component variables, which can be useful in designing future research.

Data

Much of the previous research involving international comparisons of vulnerability and conflict have taken the nation state as the unit of observation. However, national aggregation of data risks loosing site of the nuances and context inherent in conflict analysis. For instance, a national aggregation of risk factors and incidence of violence in Nigeria over the last decade would risk collating the outbreaks of violence in the north and the south, both of which have very different historical factors and characteristics.

This project tries to square the circle by taking a more granular view, while maintaining some of the advantages of political boundaries. The unit of analysis is the third and second level subnational administrative boundaries derived from the National Administrative Boundaries GIS dataset provided by Columbia's Global Rural-Urban Mapping Project (GRUMP) (CIESIN et al. 2011). This data includes 399,747 non-overlapping polygons covering the globe. Each polygon corresponds to the geographic area of a specific subnational district or county. For instance the second level administrative boundaries in the United States includes all counties in every state in the country. The third level administrative boundaries of Canada would include all rural and urban jurisdictions in each district or county of each province in the country.

Research at this stage is limited for the reasons discussed above regarding experimentation. In the interest of maintaining a scope conducive to experimentation, the area of study was limited to continental Africa. This results in 33,752 subnational units covering fifty-five countries. Future research will experiment with hierarchical modeling of subnational and national units as well as a variety of levels of aggregation on their own and an expanded scope.

A necessary component of a classification machine-learning problem is the target class, in this case the instance or intensity of conflict in a given district. Over the last few years, a number of geospatially tagged datasets of violence have been developed. For the purposes of testing, we chose the Armed Conflict Location and Event Dataset (ACLED) (Raleigh et al. 2010). Designed for disaggregated conflict analysis and crisis mapping, the dataset includes reported political and armed conflict in over 50 developing countries, though we only look at battle incidents and fatalities. Temporal coverage spans from 1997 to near real time, but in order to match additional data, the scope of this paper is cut at 2012. Data was aggregated using a vector join function that yielded the number of battles, as well as minimum, maximum, mean, median, and sum of fatalities. This was done for each year from 1997 to 2012. This creates a dataset of 33,752 districts over sixteen years or 540,032 district-year observations (see Figure below).

While there are a number of ways to derive a target class from this data, this paper uses two variations. The first is a simple binary class that indicates whether or not any battles occurred in a given district in a given year. The second is a numeric count of the number of battles that occurred in a given district in a given year. During initial testing, two other target variables were attempted: the sum of fatalities in a given year in a given district and the mean fatality per battle in a given year in a given district. Neither of these classes performed well either as continuous variables or as binned variables. However, they were a useful proxy for previous levels of violence that was in turn used as predictor variables. These variables also provide a useful baseline for predicting conflict based solely on previous conflict. The distributions of all four conflict variables are provided in Figure below.

The next step in the machine learning process is the selection of predictor variables. Predictors at this stage of experimentation were chosen based both on the literature surrounding conflict analysis and based on data availability. It is important to note at this stage that machine learning is an iterative process. While this paper establishes the foundation, future research will focus on refining the input data and improving the speed and accuracy of a variety of learners.

Certain levels of ethnic fractionalization have been found to be a predictor of conflict in a number of econometric studies. For this paper, supranational ethnic composition is taken from the Geo-referencing of Ethnic Groups (Weidman et al. 2010) dataset. The data consists of 8,969 GIS shapefile polygons and includes features referencing majority ethnic composition drawn from the classical Soviet Atlas Narodov Mira. An intersection function was used to create a count of the number of different ethnic groups that overlap a given district. The values gained ranged from 0 to 18 with a mean of 1.286.

Population density can be an important predictor of the level of violence if only because it is statistically more unlikely to find human on human violence in and area sparsely populated. Satellite derived population data was taken from Columbia's Gridded Population of the World (GPW) project and uses both the past and future population grid counts (CIESIN et al. 2005). The data consists of 29,652,480 raster grids, each associated with a value that indicates that grid cell's population level. The data comes in five-year increments starting in 1990 and projects to 2015. Past data is correlated to match UN population data revisions. This was processed to the district level using a zonal statistics function, which derives continuous variables on the sum and mean of values contained in a given district. The data was further processed to give the population value of the year of observation as well as the value lagged by one and two years. Mean values, which denote the average value of a raster cell in a given district, ranged from 0 to 751,416 with a mean of 6,550. 'Sum' values, which denotes an estimate of the total population of a given district, ranged from 0 to 10,462,972 with a mean of 24,306.

Poverty has been posited often as a driver of conflict through both the greed and grievance models of conflict with a variety of causal mechanisms posited. GDP data was taken from Columbia's Global 15X15 Minute Grids of Downscaled GDP Based on the SRES B2 Scenario (Yetman et al. 2004). The data consists of 823,680 raster grids indicating an absolute level of GDP at 1990 and a projection of 2025 levels. The data was processed by first taking zonal statistics on both the 1990 and 2025 GDP levels. These end points were used to calculate both the yearly increment and the yearly percent change necessary to get from 1990's level to 2025's level. Yearly national GDP estimates were then taken from the World Bank to calculate a given district's deviation from the long term projected average. This deviation was applied to the calculated incremental change and applied beginning in 1990 to calculate a district's new yearly trajectory and account for changes since the data was created in 2000. This data was used to create mean (the average GDP of a raster cell in a district), change (the change in GDP from the previous year) and sum (the total GDP of a given district) values. These values where in turn used to create values for the current year as well as values for one and two years lagged. The sum data ranged from 0 to 733.0744 with a mean of 1.5950.

An alternate proxy is comprised of both the Global Subnational Prevalence of Child Malnutrition and the Global Subnational Infant Mortality Rates (CIESIN 2005), both from Columbia. The data consists of 823,680 raster grids indicating the percentage of children under five years of age that are underweight and the grid's child mortality rate per 10,000 live births. Data was processed using a zonal statistic function. Infant mortality rates ranged from 0 to 2031 with a mean of 950. Underweight values ranged form 0 to .54 with a mean of .29.

Acute hazards can place stress on areas that can lead ultimately to conflict. This is especially the case for hazards that have long-term implications for livelihoods. Hazard data was taken from both the flood and drought components of the Global Multihazard Frequency and Distribution (CHRR et al. 2005) from Columbia. Specifically each indicator comes from a 29,652,480-cell raster indicating the frequency of a given hazard on a scale from 0-10, with a zero indicating no or virtually no frequency. Data was aggregated using a zonal statistics function. Frequency values ranged from 0 to 10 with a mean flood value of 4.899 and a mean drought value of 5.956.

In some cases, conflicts can arise over land use between pastoralists and farmers. For this paper, land usage data was taken from the Global Agricultural Lands data from Columbia (Ramankutty et al. 2010). The data includes two raster files consisting of 9,331,200 cells indicating percentage of land used for pasture and crops. These were processed by first using the QGIS raster calculator to multiply the two percentages together and multiplied by four. This creates and index where a score of one indicates 100 percent of the land being used for pastures and crops, with fifty percent devoted to each use. A lower score can indicate either a shift in this proportion or a percentage of the land used for other purposes. The resulting raster was aggregated via a zonal statistics function. The values range from 0 to 1 with a mean of .1968.

Natural resources have been debated ad-infinitum as drivers of conflict. For this study we focus on the availability of two resources. Diamonds tend to better represent lootable resources that are often used as illicit financing instruments, while the availability of petroleum can be an incentive for state capture. Diamond data is numeric variable that indicates the number of lootable diamond deposits in a given district. Data comes from the Diamond Resources (Gilmore et al. 2005) dataset from the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), which is geo-referenced and disaggregated by type of deposit. Lootable diamonds are those that are extracted relatively easily using artisanal methods and are often alluvial or surface deposits. Non-lootable diamonds, in contrast, require heavy mining equipment and substantial extraction infrastructure and tend to be less easily used for financing armed non-state actors. These points were aggregated to district polygons using a GIS merge by location function. Values ranged from 0 to 3 with a mean of .00453. Petroleum data was taken from the PRIO Petroleum Dataset v. 1.2 (Päivi et al. 2007). Data consists of shapefiles indicating all know petroleum deposits in the world. The data was processed using an intersection function to create a binary variable indicating simply whether or not the district contains a petroleum deposit, which was the case in two percent of the districts.

Finally, institutions are a key factor to a functioning society, effective rule of law, and peaceful conflict resolution mechanisms. Governance indicators were taken from the Database of Political Institutions (DPI) created by the Development Research Group at the World Bank. The DPI contains 125 variables, mainly measuring aspects of the political system and electoral rules and is aggregated at the country-year. SQLite was used to propagate this data through subnational levels.

The final list of variables considered at this stage is:

Ethnic composition

Land conflict index

Mean flood and drought frequency

Number of lootable diamond deposits

Existence of petroleum

Population of children under five years of age in 2000

Mean percentage of children under five years of age underweight

Mean infant mortality rate

Mean GDP of the current and previous two years

One year change in GDP for the three previous years

Mean population for the current year and the previous two years

Sum and mean of battle related fatalities and number of battle events from the previous three years calculated by y₁ + (.5 * y₂) + (.25 * y₃)

Whether the government is head of government is from the military

The vote share of government and opposition coalitions in the legislative branch

While imperfect, these data represent a useful first step in testing the feasibility of aggregating disparate data sources as well as to test whether the application of machine learning has any added value for this problem domain. Governance data was especially problematic as the features selection came down to choosing most complete variables. Even taking this into account, the final dataset was 37,153 observations short of the full set of district-years due to missing data. The distribution of target classes is included above on the right and there seems to be no discernable systemic loss of data as far as distribution. However it should be noted that in the final data set, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and South Sudan fall out completely. Future research will address this important shortcoming.

Analysis

For the purposes of this paper, two learning algorithms were applied: naïve Bayes and random forest. As a baseline, both classifiers were tested using only prior conflict data as a predictor. This allows a test to see if machine learning offers any improvement in predictive power over simply knowing that a given district had experienced conflict in prior years. The naïve Bayes classifier provides a relatively simple algorithm that offers a tolerable base case in terms of speed and accuracy. The random forest algorithm provides a more sophisticated learner and offers the possibility of performance gains between models. The predictor features and target classes of the full model are outlined in the section above. Following machine learning convention, the data was divided randomly with 70 percent of observations allocated for a training set and 30 percent for a test set. As a final test of accuracy, the data for 2012 was first separated as a final homogenous test set. This means that the models were trained and tested on data spanning 2000-2011, with a final accuracy test reported for the full set of 2012 data.

Figure shows the accuracy performance of the algorithms. There was not a large variation in terms of total accuracy across models. This is not surprising as prior research indicates that machine learning tends to over predict instances of conflict and districts experiencing outbreaks of violence are exceedingly rare. Therefore, large swings in the accuracy of predicting violence (as opposed to predicting a lack of violence) would have relatively little effect on the overall predictive accuracy. Indeed, that is born out by the algorithm's performance against the baseline. However, while the overall variation in accuracy is minimal, there are large differences between the models when looking at the ratio of false to true positives. That is, the naïve Bayes algorithm is gains six and a half percentage points of accuracy when predicting an outbreak of violence while only loosing a two percentage points of accuracy in predicting the absence of violence over the baseline. The algorithm was performed with 4-fold cross validation on two variants of the target class: a binary indicator of battles in a given year and a twelve level, binned indicator of the number of battles in a given year.

The random forest algorithm offers drastically better results than the naïve Bayes algorithm, both for the baseline and for the full model. The model is slightly more accurate overall than the naïve Bayes baseline. The full model also looses no accuracy when moving from the baseline to the full model while gaining over five percentage points in accuracy when predicting outbreaks of violence. For the purposes of this paper, the R randomForest package was used to run a 100-tree forest on the data. The model used two variants: a binary target class indicting simply the existence of battles in a given year and a continuous target class indicting number of battles in a given year. Both versions offered significant improved performance to the naïve Bayes classifier. For the binary target class, the out-of-bag error rate estimate was only 1.16%. However, nearly all of this error was cases of false positives. In the cases where the model predicted no battles there was a slight increase in accuracy from 97.4% to 98.9%. In the cases where the model predicted battles, there was a more significant increase in accuracy from 24.6% to 58.5%, indicating a decrease in false positives. In the case of the regression classifier, comparison between the random forest and naïve Bayes models is more difficult. The model does estimate that 26.9% of the inherent variance is explained by the model. But still in both cases, the number of false positives far outnumbers false negatives.

The performance of both of the random forest models is reported in Figure below. In the case of the regression model, accuracy of the model seems to peak at around the 60th tree. Somewhat surprisingly, the binary model has the opposite trend in that accuracy peaks at a very early iteration (around 10) and gets worse until leveling at about the 40 th tree. This is very slight increase in error, however, and is offset by a corollary decrease in error for both the out-of-box and 'no battle' prediction which again seems to peak around the 50-60 th tree iteration.

One advantage of the random forest is the ability to determine variable importance based on each variables contribution to an increase in purity and a decrease in error. These are reported in Figure below. The charts on the left measure the decrease in accuracy of the model when a given variable is removed. The charts on the right measure the aggregate mean decrease in purity of the leaf elements of trees when a given variable is removed. The top thirty most important features are reported for each chart.

Unsurprisingly, the number of battles in the previous three years figures highly as does population. Due to the fact that many of these component variables are auto correlated, future analysis will consider aggregating lagged measures into a single variable by using time decomposition aggregation. Promisingly, variables like ethnic composition, drought and flood frequency, and some of the governance indicators offered a payoff in terms of increased accuracy. Future research will focus on refining these indicators as well as identifying new and better ones.

As a final test of the learners, the derived models were applied to 2012's data, which was initially partitioned from the rest of the dataset. The predictions were then mapped against actual instances to give a visual representation of the accuracy of the models. These maps are presented in Figure above with the regression forest on the top left, actuals on the top right, and a composite of the binary forest, regression forest converted to a binary class and the actual binary occurrences on the bottom. These maps give a good visual representation of the accuracy of both learners. Interestingly, the binary random forest learner actually heavily under-predicts for 2012. What this also shows is that while the regression forest learner tends to over-predict; it does not do so randomly. Over-prediction values tend to be geographically clustered in the right place, indicating that there may be some promise going forward as the data is expanded upon and refined.

Conclusion

This paper represents an initial step towards using machine-learning methodology to model fragility and vulnerability to conflict at the global level. It is true that these initial gains from the application of machine learning seem small and may leave much to be desired for policy makers hoping for big gains in actionable information. It needs to be stressed however, that this paper only represents an initial feasibility study. Next steps will focus on refining the models to improve accuracy as well as creating scalable applications to process incoming data more quickly and efficiently. That said, there are a number of lessons learned that should be incorporated into future research.

First, there is the question of using a broader or narrower geographic scope. On the one hand, a more narrow regional or country based scope could be helpful for a few reasons. Limiting the geographic area could help to better create a rough hierarchy of risk factors in a specific context. The missing data issues would likely be less an issue in a narrower scope, as it would preclude the need for data with global coverage.

On the other hand, there are a number of advantages to developing models with a global scope. For strategic planners, those working at multilateral organizations for instance, it can be imperative to have a global picture of risk. This is one of the reasons that within the domain of international affairs aggregated national indexes of fragility and risk are so widely utilized. Using machine learning techniques to tie these types of risk indexes to actual risk of conflict or violence would help make them more effective. Global scoping of subnational data aggregation also would allow researchers to capture risk and vulnerability in areas that may seem relatively stable to outside observers.

A second lesson learned is the need for better data management and processing tools. There are a number of methods to parallelize the processing of large datasets. The most feasible and scalable solution would be to move processing tasks to a cloud-based architecture. Cloud services like Amazon's Elastic Cloud Computing lets users rent processing bandwidth and storage on a per-use basis. This would allow future research iterations to expand processing power as the need arises. And this need tended to arise often, especially when dealing with zonal statistics. Many of the zonal statistic operations took at least a day to process. Indeed, some data was left out of the model due to barriers on reasonable processing time. Fortunately, there exists a geoprocessing library written in a Java-based language called Geotrellis. It is meant specifically for the task of processing geographical data and contains a number of features for both performing zonal statistics and running the processes in parallel. Future processing should be done using Geotrellis on a cluster of machines running in parallel on Amazon's EC2. Additionally, the machine learning tasks could also be parallelized using the same architecture. Finally, parallelization would allow an application of machine learning the option to harness disparate sources of data in real time if such data was deemed useful. All of the learning operations took upwards of six hours to complete in serial. Parallelizing the learning tasks could open up possibilities of utilizing different learning algorithms as well experimenting more with variations on the random forest paradigm. Finally, using parallel processing techniques opens up the possibility of performing real-time or near real-time analysis in the future.

The third take-away is that future research will need to address autocorrelation of some of the data. This could be done by creating a time deteriorating index of temporal data for certain categories of indicators. This project makes a first attempt in that direction by counting number of fatalities of battles in a previous year as full, two years previous as half and three years prior as one-quarter. A useful extension of this might be to change the deterioration equation to extend out ten full years. This would mirror some of the literature on conflict recidivism, which indicates that the risk period for resurgence of conflict after the end of hostilities is approximately one decade.

A fourth lesson is that the success of modeling violence going forward will be determined by finding new and better sources of data. One principle concern for variable selection at this stage of the project was expediency. The population data for instance is not ideal as the data used were three snapshots at five-year increments for a baseline and three projections at five-year increments used to interpolate missing values. Likewise with the GDP data. There are a number of new projects aimed at taking yearly snapshots of GDP and population based on satellite imagery that could greatly improve any modeling accuracy. Likewise, the governance data was problematic. Since the DRC and South Sudan were omitted due to missing data, and these are cases in which there were a number of battles, there is likely a large subsequent drag on predictive power. This needs to be rectified in future research. An interesting model is the Failed States Index with uses a combination of natural language processing on news and open source documents as well as other data to create national aggregations of component indicators. They have had some success in targeting their data aggregation techniques to the subnational level in specific cases, which could prove a useful addition if they were so inclined.

Fifth, the target class used at this stage is imperfect. Ideally going forward, models would use an expanded definition of violence that would offer a much richer target class. One line of research could extend analysis and modeling across the additional component classes of the ACLED data, for instance on rioting or violence against civilians. Another interesting tract is to use a new dataset called the Global Data on Events, Location and Tone (GDELT). This data includes more than 200-million geo-located events with global coverage from 1979 to the present day. This could prove useful in developing better target classes, especially target classes with global scope.

See for example Tikuisis et al. (2013); and Avra et al. (2013). It should be noted that both of these articles are based on the data of the International Conflict Early Warning System (ICEWS) and later Global Database of Events, Language and Tone (GDELT). While this data is indeed well suited to machine learning methodology, it was unfortunately not available when the research in the current article was undertaken. Future iterations of IPI's work on conflict prediction will seek to utilize GDELT data.

It should be noted here that there are a number of limitations in ACLED's data collective methodology. As Kristine Eck surmised in her recent article 'those interested in sub-national analyses of conflict should be ware of ACLED's data due to quality-control issues which can result in biased findings if left unchecked by the researcher,' (Eck 2013). The author acknowledges these limitation and future research will utilize GDELT data, which was only made available after this paper was drafted.

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Stability: International Journal of Security and Development

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
For at least the last two decades, the international community in general and the United Nations specifically have attempted to develop robust, accurate and effective conflict early warning system for conflict prevention.

# data[].attributes.headline
2114: Off World Mining Industry is a Major Business.

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2114: Off World Mining Industry is a Major Business.

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With only a few years of coal left as a fuel, it is expected the world will have completed it's shift to alternative energy sources.

Asteroid mining is already being planned for. By 2114, this industry will be well established and providing resources for all aspects of Earth's industrial production.

# data[].attributes.body
Human civilisation emerges from a global energy crisis and the challenges of its technological inventions. Artificial Intelligence, gene editing and space colonies are all part of the world of 2122.