What this blog is all about and why I think the future is going to be good.

As promised, today I’m going to talk a little bit about what I’m going to talk about in this blog (yep, still makes sense to me).

What will Realising we’re in the Future be about? Well just that really. I want to explore the cutting edge of science and technology, to investigate the very latest in what we can do and what we have found out about the universe.

A few months ago I was talking with a friend about a cutting edge technology (vertical farming), which she dismissed as sounding “very futuristic.” But they aren't: There are already vertical farms operating around the world today.  

Those are the technologies I want to look at: those that seem to be outlandish ideas that are decades away, but are actually being build and designed in labs and factories around the world today. Things like robots, spacecraft, amazing medical technologies and computers that are more powerful than ever.

I also want to look at technologies that are getting dated, and about what’s going to replace them. The first blog on the Hyperloop was along these lines. I’ll talks about how the decades old technologies in our cars, trains and planes (among other things), is beginning to be replaced.

I’m about to start a PhD in astronomy at the University of Warwick and that’s where my main interests lie. So I’ll also be talking about the latest ideas in science, some that will tie into the ways in which the future is going to look, and others that just show more about how interesting our universe is. Being in a university will mean I’ll hopefully be able to try and track down people who actually work on what I’m talking about and get their views on the subject.  

So that’s what this blog will be about. Hopefully it will be interesting, enlightening and amusing, or one of the three at least.

For this week, rather than doing a specific piece of science or technology, I thought I’d talk about a more overall theme, which is how I feel about the future.

Yesterday (20^th of August) was World Overshot Day. It wasn’t a day to celebrate. World Overshoot Day is the estimated point in each year that the human race uses more recourses than the Earth can restore in a year. From now until the end of the year our uses of resources becomes unsustainable. We are borrowing, or rather stealing, from future generations.

With this in mind, as well as other facts about the world such as increasing population, pollution, over farming and climate change, it’s easy to be pessimistic about the future. We appear to be living in a brief period of unsustainable prosperity and abundance- those of us, that is, lucky enough to live in the rich West- and we are sitting on a time-bomb of problems and challenges that will undo everything we’ve achieved.  

This blog will, in part, be about how that might not be the case.

I am optimistic about the future. At the risk of sounding like an old election slogan, I think things are going to get better and better.

Before I start though, I am in no way denying the problems that face us. As Marcus Brigstocke says: “There are people who deny climate change is happening, and people who can read.” The problems facing us in the future are huge. By the end of the century, human population growth will have levelled off at roughly 10 billion people. Simply feeding everyone, without irrevocably damaging the environment, is perhaps the biggest challenge, even without the fact of a messed up climate getting in the way. Non-renewable resources that are essential to our lives, such as oil, helium and rare-earth metals, are running out or becoming increasingly inaccessible. And that’s just our problems. The wider ecosphere of the planet may suffer even more, with the rate of species extinction at around 1000 to 10000 times higher than if humans were not around.

No, I’m not optimistic because I think those challenges don’t exist. They do. I’m optimistic because I, as well as an increasing number of people, think that we can overcome them.

All of the challenges we face, those I’ve mentioned above and more, the ways in which the world appears to be getting worse, have to be compared with the ways in which the world is getting better.

A couple of plots from Gapminder showing how life expectancy and GDP per capita have increased across the whole world between 1950 and 2012. Note the correlation. 

A quick look at Gapminder, where you can look at various statistics about the world in easy to read plots, shows that pretty much everything good is going up and everything bad is going down. We are living longer, better off, and have better access to what we need to live than ever before. I recommend (all of) the videos on Gapminder if you need convincing. Not only that, but we’re also more peaceful. In fact we’re living in the most peaceful time in history- you are less likely to die a violent death today than ever.

Yes, there are a billion people who are still living in horrendous poverty, but it’s important to see poverty for what it is: Not a step back, but the remnant of what life was like for everyone not two hundred years ago. This was highlighted by the IF Campaign this year, which had the objective of ending hunger for everyone. Even ten years ago that would have seemed impossible, but now it’s reasonable to expect that everyone might be living above the poverty line by the end of the century. And some of the things I’m going to talk about in this blog will help us get there even faster.

(As I was writing this I got an email from Christian Aid. A line in it read “We want to achieve an end to poverty in the swiftest and smartest ways we can”. Pretty much sums up what the next paragraph was going to be, so I’ll leave it there!)

There are many reasons behind these changes for the better, and for optimism about the future, and I’m not going to try and cover all of them at all. I’m going to stick to what I know about, the massive increase in the knowledge and capabilities of science and technology.

I want to explore how our new technological capabilities and the latest discoveries about the world we live in will help us overcome the challenges I’ve talked about and lead to a world of abundance for everyone.

So here’s a challenge for anyone who reads this. Name an issue or challenge that makes you feel pessimistic about the future, and I’ll try (when I get round to it) to find some developments in science and technology that might help address it. Hopefully I can convince you to be optimistic about the future as well!

Next week, Moore’s Law! Unless I find something else interesting, which is always possible.

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