It may be only a short while away, but the world in 2020 will be very different.

ALBERT EINSTEIN CLAIMED he never thought about the future. “It comes soon
enough,” he would say. And you can see his point. What would have been the
good of worrying about our destiny when it was not of our making?
But life has changed since the great physicist’s day. Sweeping changes of our
own creation now beset our world: carbon emissions, soaring populations,
cloning, rising extinction rates.
We are changing our planet and its biosphere in ways that were once
unimaginable. We are also developing lifesaving technologies that would have
appeared equally incredible a few decades ago. Everywhere we witness
change. But what will this bring and how will it affect our world?
Today, we will address these questions in detail and explore the issues
involved, concerns that will shape the existence and lifestyles of ourselves and
our future generations. Some, notably those involved in medical research,
look very hopeful. Others, especially those concerned with climate and
biodiversity, look far less optimistic. Indeed, they appear downright
disturbing.
Overall, it is sobering stuff, though we should not be too downhearted about
our prospects for life in 2020. We should rather try to find ways to deal with
this problem.
Hot in the city
WHATEVER else we experience in 2020, the impact of climate change will be
inescapable. That’s the clear message from virtually every scientist working in
the field. Last century saw global atmospheric temperatures rising by
0.6˚C; in the next decade and a half, we can expect much the same.
“Climate change will become particularly noticeable at the poles,” says James
Lovelock, the British scientist who developed the Gaia hypothesis, the idea
that life itself makes existence tolerable on Earth. “By 2020, the North Pole
will be becoming free of ice, and by the end of the decade we will be able to
sail straight across it. At the same time, the great glaciers of the southern
hemisphere and the West Antarctic ice sheet will be breaking up.”
The seas will rise dramatically, flooding Earth’s low-lying areas. Thus, by 2020,
we will have a very good idea of the fate that is awaiting our planet: heat,
flooding and desertification. “Essentially, for most people on the planet, it will
be like living through war,” warns Lovelock. “It will be grim, but we are all
going to have to stick together in our own communities.”
It is an apocalyptic vision. Nevertheless, Lovelock – one of the world’s most
distinguished climate experts – is not alone in his prognosis. Graeme
Pearman, of Australia’s national science agency, the CSIRO, also forecasts
cataclysmic changes. “The Great Barrier Reef is already suffering from serious
bleaching,” he says. “Temperature increases are killing off the coral and, with
another one-degree increase in global temperatures in prospect, we are going
to see serious damage being done to it. Not just from bleaching, but from
damage from ever-worsening storms that are yet another consequence of
global warming.” (See also ‘The late Great Barrier Reef’, Cosmos 9, p 32).
Around 90 per cent of people living today will still be alive in 2020, so these
disturbances will touch almost every family on Earth. Neither can we do
anything to halt them. Increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide that have
already taken place make them inevitable. Preventing even greater horrors
should therefore be a scientific and political priority for the next decade and a
half, says Tim Flannery, professor at Macquarie University in Sydney and
author of the climatic bestseller, The Weather Makers. And, most importantly,
a new and comprehensive policy for curbing carbon emissions both at home
and in the workplace is now desperately needed. As Flannery points out: “It’s
now too late to avoid changing our world. But we still have time, if good policy
is implemented, to avoid disaster.”
It’s life, Jim
NO FORECAST for 2020 would be complete without attempting to answer one
of the most enduring questions in science: is there life elsewhere in the
cosmos? And, if so, will we find it? The answer, according to Seth Shostak,
senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, in Mountain View, California, is a
simple “Yes”. By the end of the next decade we will have found evidence of
extraterrestrial life. The only issue to be decided is how we will actually make
that monumental discovery. And according to Shostak, it will be a three-horse
race: between Earth-based radio telescopes, planetary probes, and space
telescopes.
In the first category, radio telescopes will probe the skies to pick up signals
sent out by alien civilisations – either deliberate ‘here we are’ messages or old
episodes of their equivalent of TV showNeighbours that have been leaking out
across space since they were broadcast. And of all the instruments designed
to detect these interstellar signals, the Allen Telescope Array – a joint project
between SETI (which stands for Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) and
the University of California at Berkeley – is now rated the machine most likely
to succeed. Consisting of some 350 separate radio telescopes, the array went
into operation earlier in 2006 and, by searching the skies 24 hours a day, we
should hit pay dirt sometime between 2020 and 2025, says Shostak.
Then there are the space telescopes, and in particular NASA’s Terrestrial
Planet Finder mission, and the Darwin Mission of the European Space Agency,
which will hover in deep space and study the atmospheres of extrasolar
planets (those beyond our Solar System) for telltale signs of oxygen, ozone
and methane – gases that would indicate the presence of life. Both missions
have been delayed by budget problems but are still likely to be in space by
2020. “They could still win the race,” says Shostak, “but are outsiders at
present.”
And finally, there are planetary probes. Among these will be missions to land
spacecraft on Mars as well as to visit the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, worlds
that have ice-covered oceans where primitive lifeforms may be found. “My
money is one of these winning the race – particularly a Mars mission,” adds
Shostak. “Certainly, I am sure by 2020 or thereabouts, we will have good
evidence that we have neighbours somewhere in the galaxy and will know
that life is really just a form of dirty chemistry that happens on lots of worlds.”

Virtuosity
YOU ARE sitting in your New York hotel room on a business trip, pining for
your family. You could phone but conversations can often be stilted on
satellite lines. Not in 2020. Technology then should provide you with a
solution – and a new way to bond with your children: By playing computer
games and sharing virtual entertainments with them, even if they are still at
home in Brisbane.
It sounds strange. Nevertheless, computer experts say in little over a decade,
electronic pastimes will not only provide us with rich, textured, multicoloured
images, they will allow us to play games with any number of people no matter
where you – or they – are. “You could join in a team with your children and
hunt aliens, or shoot down enemy aircraft, even though you are thousands of
miles apart,” says David Perry, head of the California-based company Game
Consultants. “It will be the ultimate bonding experience.”
Nor will you be restricted to sitting before TV-based consoles. Future game
sets are going to be light, fast and portable. “You will be able to play games on
handheld devices that can connect with you with players across the globe –
even when you are standing in a queue in Disneyland,” adds Perry.
Peter Molyneux, a game designer for Microsoft Corp, is equally enthusiastic.
We will no longer buy games in stores but download only when we need
them, he predicts. As for their quality, that promises to be breathtaking.
“Fifteen years ago, we were playing Donkey Kong and Space Invaders. Now
games are approaching the quality of movies. By 2020, playing them will feel
as authentic as playing a sport or living life in the real world.”
Bye bye, cancer
BY 2020, several key research areas should be having considerable impact in
the battle against disease, cancer in particular. “Cancer will not be cured in
one massive battle,” cautions Robert Weinberg, the distinguished researcher
who discovered the first human oncogene (a gene that causes normal cells to
turn into tumours). “Nevertheless, during the next decade and a half, there
will be many individual skirmishes that will result in death rates from most
common cancers being pushed down progressively.”
For Weinberg, based at the Whitehead Institute within the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology of Boston, one of the main breakthroughs will involve
discoveries of how to use drugs – currently administered on their own – in
more effective combinations. In addition, the Human Genome Project, which
has provided researchers with a complete inventory of all human genes, will
make it increasingly easy to design drugs that attack very specific tumours.
“My guess is that about 25 per cent of cancers that currently are fatal will be
treated successfully, either cured or reduced to chronic but tolerable
conditions,” he says.
Such optimism is shared by Ian Frazer, a cancer expert at the University of
Queensland who famously developed a vaccine for human papillomavirus
(Cosmos, Issue 5, p10). His concern is primarily focussed on prevention. “A
quarter of all cancers are caused by chronic infections,” he points out. For
example, the Helicobacter bacterium is linked to gastric cancer; the Hepatitis C
virus to liver cancer; the Epstein-Barr virus to various lymphomas; and the
HTLV-1 virus to leukaemia. “Vaccines against all these infections are likely to
be developed by 2020,” Frazer says.
In addition, scientists stress that lifestyle changes could also have striking
effects on general health by 2020. “If there were serious reductions in
cigarette smoking, then overall cancer deaths would decline by 30 to 35 per
cent; while serious changes in diet, moving from meat to vegetarian diets,
would produce another 10 to 15 per cent,” adds Weinberg. And given the
plunge in cigarette consumption now occurring among men in the West, there
is hope that lifestyle-related cancers will continue to slump over the next two
decades.
And then there is stem cell science, the revolutionary technology that could
be used to create neurons, heart muscle and pancreatic tissue for patients,
using cells taken from their own skin. Using cloning technology, an embryo
would be created from an individual skin cell. Then stem cells would be
extracted from that embryo. In turn these would be used to create cell lines,
such as heart or pancreas cells that could be put back into patients as
lifesaving transplants that would not trigger immune rejections.
It is a breathtaking prospect. However, the reputation of stem cell research
was badly undermined last year by the revelation that pioneer scientist Hwang
Woo-suk, of South Korea, had faked much of his research (Cosmos, Issue 8,
p64). Experts remain confident, however, and argue that stem cell treatments
should be well established by 2020. “We will be able to use stem cells not only
for transplants but also to create banks of human tissue, both healthy and
diseased, in order to test potential new drugs on them,” says Huseyin Mehmet
of Imperial College London. “It will bring unprecedented accuracy and cost-
effectiveness to drug development.”

Robot dawn
FLOOR SWEEPING, dusting, window cleaning, picking up after the kids, sorting
the laundry, folding clothes, ironing, tidying the house: such activities are the
banes of our lives. Yet if engineers are right, by 2020, we may be able to forget
such chores, thanks to the development of domestic robots.
“We already have grass-cutting robots the public have happily accepted
scuttling around their gardens,” says robotics expert Gordon Wyeth of
Brisbane’s University of Queensland. “Now robots able to walk and balance on
two legs are becoming commonplace in laboratories, and computing power is
constantly rising while costs fall.”
As a result, home robots will be the next consumer ‘must have’ by 2020 when
they will have become as ubiquitous as personal computers today. They will
be smart, ready to attack their tasks out of the box and will team with humans
and other smart robots.
“I am betting most home robots will end up being named and treated like pets
of sorts,” adds Wyeth. “It will create a whole new industry where major
players will reap the rewards just as Microsoft has done with personal
computers.”
Smart dressing
ROBOTS WILL not have it all their own way, however. Indeed, they can expect
to face considerable technological competition in the home, thanks to
developments in materials science and nanotechnology. At the University of
New South Wales in Sydney, for example, researchers – led byRose
Amal and Michael Brungs – are developing self-cleaning surfaces for use in
hospitals as well as domestic kitchens and bathrooms. These surfaces will be
coated with particles that absorb ultraviolet light at a particular wavelength,
exciting electrons and giving the particles an oxidising quality stronger than
any commercial bleach. The surfaces will also be designed so that droplets
cannot form on them – water will run off, washing as it goes.
In addition, scientists are working on materials that will not only change our
homes but will transform the way we dress through the creation of ‘intelligent
clothes’. Special fabrics, fitted with monitors, will study our health throughout
the day, while we sleep, work and exercise. For example, at the University of
Wollongong, south of Sydney, researchers have created a fabric that emits a
groaning sound to warn sportsmen and women if they are stretching or
moving in ways that could harm them.
Another concept being developed by scientists involves embedding clothes
with mobile phone chips. “The idea is that if you get injured out hill-walking or
skiing, sensors will detect physiological and temperature changes to your
body,” says Jane McCann of Derby University in England. “The garment will
alert the mobile phone chip to call the nearest hospital.”
Energy diversity
JUST HOW we power the technology that will be offered in 2020 depends on
the world’s response to the threat of atmospheric warming. If global
agreements are reached soon over carbon emissions, major changes in power
production should have begun to make an impact on life across the planet.
New-generation nuclear plants, based on pressurised water reactors
perfected by the French, Germans and Americans – along with wind, water
and tidal power generators being developed across the globe – will spring up
across the landscape and power our homes. Or perhaps thorium-based
nuclear reactors – generating power while burning up old nuclear waste –
might have been perfected by then and be operational (see Cosmos, Issue 8,
p40).
“Energy systems will be a lot more diverse,” says the CSIRO’s Graeme
Pearman. “Wind, wave and solar energy will become a lot more important.
Similarly, cars will emit far less carbon dioxide: either we will drive the new
generation of highly efficient diesel cars that are being developed, or hybrids
that use a mix of electric power and petrol. However, cars running on fuel
cells and hydrogen will not yet be upon us. As for four-wheel drives – we will
hardly see them any more.”
The consequence of greater energy diversification, and the fragmentation of
habitats triggered by global warming, will also produce major changes in the
manner and places in which we live. “In 2020, we will be witnessing the
fragmentation of society,” says James Lovelock. “Individual regions, never
mind countries, will be compelled to depend on their own resources. We can
expect a future not necessarily of misery but of privation and austerity.”

Dead end
HUMANS WILL not be the only ones facing uncertain futures as changes
sweep our planet: Earth’s plants and animals are also in for a grim time over
the next 15 years. “Basically, humanity has taken over nearly all the low-lying
land that can be farmed on Earth today,” says ecologist Stuart Pimm of Duke
University, North Carolina. “Wild creatures have survived by holding on in
highland areas, but now these are threatened; not by agriculture, but rather
by climate change. And when these mountain refuges are destroyed as they
warm up, there will be nowhere else for these creatures to go.”
A classic example of this double whammy, land clearance and climate change,
is provided by the case of the ptarmigan, a distinctive flightless bird found in
Scotland. It likes cold weather and has survived nicely in the Cairngorms for
aeons. But now the area is warming up and ptarmigan numbers are dwindling
fast. Its chances of making it to 2020 are therefore slim – as are those of
Australia’s Thornton Peak nursery frog which now clings to life on a single
mountain in Queensland’s tropical forests. When that refuge goes, there will
be no more frog.
The danger is summed up by rainforest expert Nigel Stork, of James Cook
University in Queensland. “As the world warms, cloud cover will rise. It is a
simple climatic fact. High rainforests such as those on Thornton Peak get their
moisture directly from clouds, not rain, and so will start to dry out, with
unhappy consequences.”
Nor are the ptarmigan and the nursery frog alone. The prospects for many
forms of wildlife now look bleak. The polar bear, the lowland gorilla and the
chimpanzee, the tiger, many species of freshwater dolphin, and even the
Great White Shark, now face devastating drops in numbers that could result,
ultimately, in their extinction. “Take the freshwater dolphin,” says David
Cowdrey of the World Wide Fund for Nature’s London office. “There are 15 or
16 different species and all are in peril. All the great dam projects in Asia are
blocking off their habitats, while water extraction downstream is reducing
rivers to mere trickles.”
Then there is the case of the polar bear. As Arctic temperatures soar (climate
change affects regions in high latitudes far more quickly than equatorial
areas), so the impact on these animals becomes increasingly worrying. Polar
bears – and particularly mothers of newly born cubs – need to find food
(usually seals) quickly after they wake from hibernation. But as sea-ice melts
earlier and earlier each year, the platforms from which to mount their hunting
expeditions are disappearing. The result is starvation.
But it is hard to calculate how many species will be lost by 2020, for the simple
reason that we still do not know how many exist now. Lord Robert May, the
Australian population expert and former head of the U.K.’s Royal Society,
estimates there are around 7 million different species in the world, of which
we have studied about 1.5 million.
“If we just consider birds and mammals, however, we have only about 14,000
different species of these and we are losing on average one species a year,”
says May. “That may not seem much, but it is about a thousand times the
natural background rate and, more importantly, it is going to increase as
climate change worsens.
“There will not be the wholesale, instant slaughter that some activists have
predicted,” he adds. “But species losses will accumulate over the century until
we reach a level equal to the wave of extinctions that destroyed the dinosaurs
and so many other creatures 65 million years ago. That was one of the five
great extinctions that have affected life on Earth over the past few hundred
million years. We are now entering the sixth.”

By the 2020s, the world's economy is in peril. This crisis is gradually resolved by
a shift to renewable energy,* hybrid/electric vehicles,* higher fuel
efficiency* and alternative liquids such as algae biofuel.*** The transition is by
no means a smooth one, however. It requires an emergency response –
nothing less than an all-out Manhattan Project on a global scale.*

From 2020 onwards, there is a shift of money and resources away from
senior citizens and towards those in their middle years. Property and
inheritance laws, pensions, retirement plans and a number of elderly
benefits undergo significant changes, as Gen-Xers work to stem the gap
between themselves and their parents.

Banks and financial institutions are finally reformed this decade – though not
without a fight, and not to the extent that many voters would prefer.
However, there is now at least some focus on long term accountability,
rather than short term profits and risk-taking. Employees gain more rights,
freedoms and flexibility in the workplace, with offices becoming more casual
and informal. Social media and other technologies continue to drive the
spread of democracy around the world.