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September 10, 2021

What will the planet look like in 50 years? Here's how climate scientists figure it out

by Margo Rosenbaum

Climate change scientists don't like to use the term "prediction." Rather, they're making "projections" about the future of the planet as sea levels rise, wildfires sweep the West and hurricanes become more ferocious.

There's a good reason for that.

In a world awash in misinformation—about medicine, politics and climate, and pretty much everything else—part of a scientist's job now involves teaching the public about how science works. Convincing the public to have faith in science means making precise, measured projects about the future.

They've got to overcome the big question: Can you really make accurate projections about what the planet will look like in 50 years, a century from now?

Climate scientists think they can, based on the past five decades of climate science that has proven accurate. Futurists, such as Jamais Cascio, a distinguished fellow for the Institute for the Future, a nonprofit foresight group based in Silicon Valley, study present trends and available data to lay out plausible outcomes for the future.

Today, a lot of Cascio's work is centered around climate change, helping people prepare for the future and make informed decisions for a warming world.

"Everything in the world," Cascio said, "every future outcome will have to be examined through the lens of climate."

In the future, climate change may only get worse. But how much worse will it get?

Scientists have relied on climate models for over 50 years. To people who aren't scientists, it's challenging to understand the calculations that go into these projections. So, what exactly is a climate model?

Meteorologists can make weather predictions for the next hour, or even week, based on weather data and forecast models that use humidity, temperature, air pressure, wind speed, among other current atmospheric, land and oceanic conditions. But with climate, a specific region's weather averaged over decades, is a little more challenging to project and understand.

An extension of weather forecasting, climate models factor in even more atmospheric, land and oceanic conditions to make longer-term forecasts. Using mathematical equations and thousands of data points, the models create representations of physical conditions on earth and simulations of the current climate.

Climate models predict how average conditions will change in a region over the coming decades as well as how the climate appeared before humans recorded it.

Researchers can then understand how these changing conditions could impact the planet, which is useful especially for understanding climate change, said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist and director of climate and energy at the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental research center based in the Bay Area.

"Perhaps the most important (purpose) is to try to suggest the types of changes that might occur as the world continues to emit CO2 and other greenhouse gases," Hausfather said.

The first climate model, developed over 50 years ago in the early days of climate science, helped scientists gauge how the ocean and atmosphere interacted with each other to influence the climate. The model predicted how temperature changes and shifts in ocean and atmospheric currents could lead to climate change.

Today, these models are much more complicated and run on some of the world's most powerful supercomputers. A decade ago, most models broke up the world into 250-kilometer segments, but now the models are 100 square kilometers. More regional patterns emerge when simulations are at a finer scale.

"People aren't drawing a picture of temperature and carbon dioxide and drawing a line through it and then extrapolating that into the future," said Gavin A. Schmidt, a senior climate adviser at NASA.

Through these advancements in technology, these models are becoming even more useful to scientists in understanding the climate of the past, present and future.

"Fortunately, they don't do such a terrible job," Schmidt said.

All of this works toward convincing the public and businesses to take action.

A majority of Americans already notice the effects of climate change around them, according to a Pew Research Center survey from 2020. But individuals, businesses and politics must "adapt to a radically and dangerously changing climate," Cascio said.

On the individual level, people must consider the climate in all of their monumental decisions: whether to have children; which car to buy; how to invest; when and where to buy a house. Governments are tasked with climate decisions that impact the future of entire nations, such as whether to invest in alternative energy or write policy curbing emissions.

Are climate models useful?

Instead of thinking about climate models as whether or not they are right, Schmidt said climate models should be considered as to whether they provide useful forecasts.

"Do they tell us things? Do they get things right more than you would have done without them?" Schmidt said.

Usually, the answer is yes, and what these models inform scientists is crucial for their understanding of the future climate.

Hausfather knows this better than anyone, as he led a study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters analyzing the accuracy of early climate models. Some of the findings were included in the latest report from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published in August.

Hausfather, along with co-author Schmidt, compared 17 model projections of global average temperature developed between 1970 and 2007 with actual changes in global temperature observed through the end of 2017.

Hausfather and his colleagues found promising news: Most of the models have been quite accurate. More specifically, 10 of the model projections show results consistent with observations. Of the remaining seven model projections, four projected more warming than observed while three projected less warming than observed.

But Hausfather and his colleagues realized this wasn't telling the whole story. After accounting for differences between modeled and actual changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide and other factors driving the climate, it turns out 14 of 17 model projections were "effectively identical" to warming observed in the real world.

"That was strong evidence that these models are effectively right," Hausfather said. "They're doing a very good job of predicting global temperatures."

The accuracy was particularly impressive in the earliest climate models, Hausfather said, especially given the limited observational evidence of warming at the time.

But not all of the early models were error-free. One of the first climate models, created in 1971 by climate scientists Rasool and Schneider, projected that the world would cool due to the cooling effect of atmospheric aerosols.

"(The researchers) thought that the cooling effect of these aerosols from burning fossil fuels that would reflect sunlight back to space would be much stronger than the warming effects of the greenhouse gas," Hausfather said.

While the 1970s were still in the early days of climate research, most of the scientific literature of the time was still pointing toward a warming future as much more likely. Yet, Rasool and Schneider's model still spurred a slew of news stories about a potential ice age. Even today, the model "still gets trotted out every now and then by folks trying to discredit climate science today," Hausfather said.

Now the model is proven to be wrong. It's a consensus among climate scientists that the planet is not cooling—instead it's warming at an alarming rate.

Even today, despite the promise of climate models shown by Hausfather's study, these models still have their limitations, especially with regard to the uncertainty of future emissions. Climate scientists are physicists—not economists or political scientists, and it's challenging to understand how policy will shape emissions standards.

"We don't have a crystal ball that can predict the future human behavior in terms of how much our emissions will change," Hausfather said. "We can just predict how the climate will respond to the emissions."

Issues of accuracy in climate models also still arise when models are pushed outside of their specific parameters. To combat this, climate models focus their projections on physical conditions seen in the natural world, instead of statistical probability, Schmidt said.

Researchers have more confidence in the predictability of physics than statistics, because physics doesn't change into the future. Researchers can have confidence that they can use these models outside of the time period where they have observational data, such as looking at climate during the last ice age, Schmidt said.

"How things get expressed might be different but the basic physics ... the underlying processes don't really change," Schmidt said.

Hausfather said there's still a lot of work still to improve climate models, but they are consistently getting better over time. Simulations of the Earth become sharper as more physical processes are added and computer power grows.

Why make projections for the future?

While climate scientists focus on physics to make forecasts for the future climate, Cascio and other futurists place scientific data in a larger context, making foresight based on climate change, new technological developments, as well as political and social movements. Futurism is "essentially anticipatory history," Cascio said.

"The idea is to take the science and embed it into a historian's understanding of how the world works to try to get a sense of what are the possible outcomes that we see going forward," Cascio said.

But, just like with climate models , uncertainty is inherent to the nature of projections. Futurists do not want to over-promise, but they provide a forecast of what could happen and reasons why it could happen, Cascio said.

Most of Cascio's work with climate change projects a grim future. In his perspective, an "absolutely radical" and "transformative" climate plan is necessary to make the necessary change. Plans that are "sensible and acceptable (are) almost definitely not enough."

"I really want to be wrong about all of this stuff," Cascio said, "because there are no futures that are not really depressing for the next generation."

Despite the despair projected by many climate scientists and futurists, there's still hope. If global emissions can be brought down to zero, Hausfather said the best climate model estimates illustrate that the world will stop warming.

"It's not too late to act," Hausfather said. "The world is not locked into a particular amount of warming."

Cascio still tries to consider himself a long-term optimist for the future, because the changes necessary to mitigate climate change will also lead to a much more "transparent and equitable" world, he said.

"If we can make it through the second half of this century, there's a very good chance that what we'll end up with is a really wonderful world," Cascio said.

Journal information: Geophysical Research Letters

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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What Will Life Be Like in 2050?

By mid-century there will likely be 9 billion people on the planet, consuming ever more resources and leading ever more technologically complex lives. What will our cities be like? How much will artificial intelligence advance? Will global warming trigger catastrophic changes, or will we be able to engineer our way out of the climate change crisis?

Making predictions is, by nature, a dicey business, but to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Smithsonian magazine Big Think asked top minds from a variety of fields to weigh in on what the future holds 40 years from now. The result is our latest special series, Life in 2050 . Demographic changes in world population and population growth will certainly be dramatic. Rockefeller University mathematical biologist Joel Cohen says it’s likely that by 2050 the majority of the people in the world will live in urban areas, and will have a significantly higher average age than people today . Cities theorist Richard Florida thinks urbanization trends will reinvent the education system  of the United States, making our economy less real estate driven and erasing the divisions between home and work.

Large migrations from developing countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Mexico, and countries in the Middle East could disrupt western governments and harm the unity of France, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Poland, and the  United Kingdom  under the umbrella of the  European Union .

And rapidly advancing technology will continue ever more rapidly. According to Bill Mitchell, the late director of MIT’s Smart Cities research group, cities of the future won’t look like “some sort of science-fiction fantasy” or “Star Trek” but it’s likely that “discreet, unobtrusive” technological advances and information overlays, i.e. virtual reality and augmented reality, will change how we live in significant ways. Self-driving cars will make the roads safer, driving more efficient, and provide faster transports. A larger version of driverless cars—driverless trucks—may make long haul drivers obsolete.

Charles Ebinger, Director of the Energy Security Initiative at the Brookings Institution also thinks that by 2050 we will also have a so-called “smart grid” where all of our appliances are linked directly to energy distribution systems , allowing for real-time pricing based on supply and demand. Such a technology would greatly benefit energy hungry nations like  China  and India, while potentially harming fossil fuel energy producers like Canada and .

Meanwhile, the Internet will continue to radically transform media , destroying the traditional model of what a news organization is, says author and former New York Times Public Editor Daniel Okrent, who believes the most common kinds of news organizations in the future will be “individuals and small alliances of individuals” reporting and publishing on niche topics. 

But what will all this new technology mean? Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, the director of the Information & Innovation Policy Research Center at the National University of Singapore, hopes that advances in technology will make us more empowered, motivated and active , rather than mindless consumers of information and entertainment. And NYU interactive telecommunications professor Clay Shirky worries that technological threats could endanger much of the openness that we now enjoy online , perhaps turning otherwise free-information countries into mirrors of closed states like China and Turkey.

Some long view predictions are downright dire. Environmentalist Bill McKibben says that if we don’t make major strides in combating global warming, it’s likely we could see out-of-control rises in sea levels — particularly dangerous in island nations like the Philippines — enormous crop shortfalls, and wars over increasingly scarce freshwater resource s. But information technology may yield some optimism for our planet, says oceanographer Sylvia Earle, who thinks that services like Google Earth have the potential to turn everyday people into ocean conservationists .

In the financial world, things will be very different indeed, according to MIT professor Simon Johnson, who thinks many of the financial products being sold today, like over-the-counter derivatives, will be illegal —judged, accurately, by regulators to not be in the best interests of consumers and failing to meet their basic needs. If economic growth rates remain steady, however, it may present a challenge to regulators.

We will live longer and remain healthier. Patricia Bloom, an associate professor in the geriatrics department of Mt. Sinai Hospital, says we may not routinely live to be 120, but it’s possible that we will be able to extend wellness and shorten decline and disability for people as they age . AIDS research pioneer David Ho says the HIV/AIDS epidemic will still be with us , but we will know a lot more about the virus than we do today—and therapies will be much more effective. Meanwhile, Jay Parkinson, the co-founder of Hello Health, says the health care industry has a “huge opportunity” to change the way it communicates with patients by conceiving of individual health in relation to happiness.

In terms of how we will eat, green markets founder and “real food” proponent Nina Planck is optimistic that there will be more small slaughterhouses, more small creameries, and more regional food operations—and we’ll be healthier as a result . New York Times cooking columnist Mark Bittman, similarly, thinks that people will eat fewer processed foods , and eat foods grown closer to where they live. And Anson Mills farmer Glenn Roberts thinks that more people will clue into the “ethical responsibility” to grow and preserve land-raised farm systems . And what will our culture be like? We may not get rid of racism in America entirely in the next 40 years, but NAACP President Benjamin Jealous predicts that in the coming decades the issue of race will become “much less significant,” even as the issue of class may rise in importance. Father James Martin, a Jesuit priest, says it’s even likely that we’ll see a black pope , reversing centuries of Euro-centrism in favor of Catholics in  Africa. Nigeria is one such country with a large Catholic population. Meanwhile, prisons expert Robert Perkinson says he thinks there will be fewer Americans in prison in 2050 , because we will realize that the current high levels of incarceration are out of sync with our history and values. Historian and social scientist Joan Wallach Scott worries, however, that unless the countries of Europe figure out how to accommodate Muslim immigrant populations, t here will be more riots, and increasing divisions along economic, religious and ethnic lines , such instability could have knock on effects in countries ranging from Egypt and Iran to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. —

What Will Life on Earth Be Like in 2050?

Scientists Look Ahead Five Decades In State-Of-The-Planet Report, Explore Ways To Solve Earth's Problems

Washington, D.C.

January 19, 2006

Megan Rabbitt

[email protected]

The number of extreme events, such as hurricanes and famine, affecting at least one million people will increase over the next 45 years if a certain scenario of world development plays out. Demand for water will increase enormously — between 30% and 85% — especially in Africa and Asia, by the year 2050. But human health may improve as public health measures advance vaccine development and lessen the impact of epidemic diseases such as HIV/AIDS. These are just a few of the many findings of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) published in a 4-volume set by Island Press and released today.

The MA is the product of a 4-year global research initiative, commissioned by the United Nations, in which 1,300 scientists from 95 nations explore the complex interactions between human well-being and the environment.

“The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment tells us that there is an inextricable link between the health of humans and the health of the planet. We can no longer ignore the enormous economic and social benefits, such as climate regulation and water purification, provided by nature’s fragile ecosystems,” said Timothy E. Wirth, President of the United Nations Foundation. “The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment is an extensively researched, scientifically grounded roadmap for why and how we should slow or reverse today’s ecosystem degradation and chart a path toward sustainable human development.”

The MA looks ahead 50 years from the year 2000 to paint four alternate pictures, or scenarios, of life on earth. Current estimates of 3 billion more people and a quadrupling of the world economy by 2050 show that our consumption of biological and physical resources will skyrocket putting much more pressure on ecosystems. But the scenarios demonstrate that the condition of ecosystems in the future could be significantly worse or better than in the present – depending on policy choices. For example, wise use of environmental technology, investing in education and health, and reducing poverty can reduce pressure on ecosystems.

“Despite what looks like steady global decline, this is a story of hope. The MA gives us a powerful way to explore the possible impacts of broad policy directions for life on Earth and tells us that changes in policy can make a difference,” said Dr. Stephen Carpenter, Professor of Limnology at the University of Wisconsin and one of the chief authors of the MA.

For example, MA scientists examine how the problem of excess nutrients in the Gulf of Mexico will change under each of the scenarios in order to identify the best approach to reducing the Gulf’s dead zone, caused by decades-old land use decisions. With more sophisticated management of the delta and main stem and better coordination between upstream and downstream, the dead zone would shrink, according to one scenario. Another scenario shows that a decrease in global trade would boost agricultural production in the U.S. and, combined with other factors, would mean that more nutrients would enter the Mississippi River and flow to the Gulf, widening the dead zone.

“Many of the policies identified by the MA as positive for both the environment and mankind are used somewhere today. So if we have the political will, we have the ability to implement them on a global scale,” added Carpenter.

The four scenarios are descriptions of plausible futures – based on changes in such factors as economic and population growth, climate change, and trade – told from the point of view of someone looking back from 2050 at what has happened in the world since 2000.

If certain assumptions play out by 2050, according to the MA, water will be more plentiful in nearly all regions because of climate change, but pressure on ecosystems to provide water to meet growing demand increases. Food security is likely to remain out of reach for many people, despite increasing food supply, but child malnutrition, while not eradicated, will likely drop over the coming decades.

By the end of the century, climate change may be the predominant driver of biodiversity loss and changes in ecosystem services globally. The Earth’s surface temperature is projected to increase 2.0 – 6.4 degrees Celsius bringing more incidents of floods and droughts. Sea levels will rise (50 – 70 centimeters by 2100). Biodiversity damage will grow worldwide as the rate of change in climate escalates.

“Ecosystem services have dramatically improved human wellbeing over the past centuries. People are better nourished and live longer and healthier lives than ever before, incomes have risen, and political institutions are more open,” stated Dr. Walter Reid, Director of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and Professor with the Institute for the Environment at Stanford University. “But these gains have been achieved at a growing cost. It’s now time for us to measure the economic value of these services so we can make better decisions about our future.”

“Payments for ecosystem services can be an effective way to protect services that people rely on, such as clean water, while also protecting the environment,” said Dr. Prabhu Pingali of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. “By placing a monetary value on these services, we will be smarter about using them while creating alternative sources of income for people, from farmers in the United States to tribes in developing countries.”

Three parts of the world may undergo faster changes in ecosystems than other regions and should be closely monitored by scientists, according to the MA. For example, Central Africa could see a rapid increase in demand for food and water which will intensify farming and raise the risk of water contamination from fertilizers and pesticides. Other hot spots are the Middle East, where rapid population growth could increase dependence on food imports, and South Asia where deforestation and industrial farming may “break” the region’s ecosystems.

The MA represents the first time scientists have looked at how the health of the environment contributes to human well-being and how policy decisions we make today shape the world of tomorrow. It is also the first time that scientists have examined changes – not just to nature – but to the benefits people receive from nature (identified as ‘ecosystem services’ in the MA), such as providing food, filtering air and water, controlling disease, building soil, pollinating crops and aesthetic and spiritual benefits.

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Hello From the Year 2050. We Avoided the Worst of Climate Change — But Everything Is Different

L et’s imagine for a moment that we’ve reached the middle of the century. It’s 2050, and we have a moment to reflect—the climate fight remains the consuming battle of our age, but its most intense phase may be in our rearview mirror. And so we can look back to see how we might have managed to dramatically change our society and economy. We had no other choice.

There was a point after 2020 when we began to collectively realize a few basic things.

One, we weren’t getting out of this unscathed. Climate change, even in its early stages, had begun to hurt: watching a California city literally called Paradise turn into hell inside of two hours made it clear that all Americans were at risk. When you breathe wildfire smoke half the summer in your Silicon Valley fortress, or struggle to find insurance for your Florida beach house, doubt creeps in even for those who imagined they were immune.

Two, there were actually some solutions. By 2020, renewable energy was the cheapest way to generate electricity around the planet—in fact, the cheapest way there ever had been. The engineers had done their job, taking sun and wind from quirky backyard DIY projects to cutting-edge technology. Batteries had plummeted down the same cost curve as renewable energy, so the fact that the sun went down at night no longer mattered quite so much—you could store its rays to use later.

And the third realization? People began to understand that the biggest reason we weren’t making full, fast use of these new technologies was the political power of the fossil-fuel industry. Investigative journalists had exposed its three-decade campaign of denial and disinformation, and attorneys general and plaintiffs’ lawyers were beginning to pick them apart. And just in time.

These trends first intersected powerfully on Election Day in 2020. The Halloween hurricane that crashed into the Gulf didn’t just take hundreds of lives and thousands of homes; it revealed a political seam that had begun to show up in polling data a year or two before. Of all the issues that made suburban Americans—women especially—­uneasy about President Trump, his stance on climate change was near the top. What had seemed a modest lead for the Democratic challenger widened during the last week of the campaign as damage reports from Louisiana and Mississippi rolled in; on election night it turned into a rout, and the analysts insisted that an under­appreciated “green vote” had played a vital part—after all, actual green parties in Canada, the U.K. and much of continental Europe were also outperforming expectations. Young voters were turning out in record numbers: the Greta Generation, as punsters were calling them, made climate change their No. 1 issue.

And when the new President took the oath of office, she didn’t disappoint. In her Inaugural Address, she pledged to immediately put America back in the Paris Agreement—but then she added, “We know by now that Paris is nowhere near enough. Even if all the countries followed all the promises made in that accord, the temperature would still rise more than 3°C (5°F or 6°F). If we let the planet warm that much, we won’t be able to have civilizations like the ones we’re used to. So we’re going to make the changes we need to make, and we’re going to make them fast.”

Fast, of course, is a word that doesn’t really apply to Capitol Hill or most of the world’s other Congresses, Parliaments and Central Committees. It took constant demonstrations from ever larger groups like Extinction Rebellion, and led by young activists especially from the communities suffering the most, to ensure that politicians feared an angry electorate more than an angry carbon lobby. But America, which historically had poured more carbon into the atmosphere than any other nation, did cease blocking progress. With the filibuster removed, the Senate passed—by the narrowest of margins—one bill after another to end subsidies for coal and gas and oil companies, began to tax the carbon they produced, and acted on the basic principles of the Green New Deal: funding the rapid deployment of solar panels and wind turbines, guaranteeing federal jobs for anyone who wanted that work, and putting an end to drilling and mining on federal lands.

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Since those public lands trailed only China, the U.S., India and Russia as a source of carbon, that was a big deal. Its biggest impact was on Wall Street, where investors began to treat fossil-fuel stocks with increasing disdain. When BlackRock, the biggest money manager in the world, cleaned its basic passive index fund of coal, oil and gas stocks, the companies were essentially rendered off-limits to normal investors. As protesters began cutting up their Chase bank cards, the biggest lender to the fossil-fuel industry suddenly decided green investments made more sense. Even the staid insurance industry began refusing to underwrite new oil and gas pipelines—and shorn of its easy access to capital, the industry was also shorn of much of its political influence. Every quarter meant fewer voters who mined coal and more who installed solar panels, and that made political change even easier.

As America’s new leaders began trying to mend fences with other nations, climate action proved to be a crucial way to rebuild diplomatic trust. China and India had their own reasons for wanting swift action—mostly, the fact that smog-choked cities and ever deadlier heat waves were undermining the stability of the ruling regimes. When Beijing announced that its Belt and Road Initiative would run on renewable energy, not coal, the energy future of much of Asia changed overnight. When India started mandating electric cars and scooters for urban areas, the future of the internal-combustion engine was largely sealed. Teslas continued to attract upscale Americans, but the real numbers came from lower-priced electric cars pouring out of Asian factories. That was enough to finally convince even Detroit that a seismic shift was under way: when the first generation of Ford E-150 pickups debuted, with ads demonstrating their unmatched torque by showing them towing a million-pound locomotive, only the most unreconstructed motorheads were still insisting on the superiority of gas-powered rides.

Other easy technological gains came in our homes. After a century of keeping a tank of oil or gas in the basement for heating, people quickly discovered the appeal of air-source heat pumps, which turned the heat of the outdoors (even on those rare days when the temperature still dropped below zero) into comfortable indoor air. Gas burners gave way to induction cooktops. The last incandescent bulbs were in museums, and even most of the compact fluorescents had been long since replaced by LEDs. Electricity demand was up—but when people plugged in their electric vehicles at night, the ever growing fleet increasingly acted like a vast battery, smoothing out the curves as the wind dropped or the sun clouded. Some people stopped eating meat, and lots and lots of people ate less of it—a cultural transformation made easier by the fact that Impossible Burgers turned out to be at least as juicy as the pucks that fast-food chains had been slinging for years. The number of cows on the world’s farms started to drop, and with them the source of perhaps a fifth of emissions. More crucially, new diets reduced the pressure to cut down the remaining tropical rain forests to make way for grazing land.

In other words, the low-hanging fruit was quickly plucked, and the pluckers were well paid. Perhaps the fastest-growing business on the planet involved third-party firms that would retrofit a factory or an office with energy-efficient technology and simply take a cut of the savings on the monthly electric bill. Small businesses, and rural communities, began to notice the economic advantages of keeping the money paid for power relatively close to home instead of shipping it off to Houston or Riyadh. The world had wasted so much energy that much of the early work was easy, like losing weight by getting your hair cut.

But the early euphoria came to an end pretty quickly. By the end of the 2020s, it became clear we would have to pay the price of delaying action for decades.

For one thing, the cuts in emissions that scientists prescribed were almost impossibly deep. “If you’d started in 1990 when we first warned you, the job was manageable: you could have cut carbon a percent or two a year,” one eminent physicist explained. “But waiting 30 years turned a bunny slope into a black diamond.” As usual, the easy “solutions” turned out to be no help at all: fracked natural-gas wells were leaking vast quantities of methane into the atmosphere, and “biomass burning”—­cutting down forests to burn them for electricity—was putting a pulse of carbon into the air at precisely the wrong moment. (As it happened, the math showed letting trees stand was crucial for pulling carbon from the atmosphere—when secondary forests were allowed to grow, they sucked up a third or more of the excess carbon humanity was producing.) Environmentalists learned they needed to make some compromises, and so most of America’s aging nuclear reactors were left online past their decommissioning dates: that lower-carbon power supplemented the surging renewable industry in the early years, even as researchers continued work to see if fusion power, thorium reactors or some other advanced design could work.

The real problem, though, was that climate change itself kept accelerating, even as the world began trying to turn its energy and agriculture systems around. The giant slug of carbon that the world had put into the atmosphere—more since 1990 than in all of human history before—acted like a time-delayed fuse, and the temperature just kept rising. Worse, it appeared that scientists had systematically underestimated just how much damage each tenth of a degree would actually do, a point underscored in 2032 when a behemoth slice of the West Antarctic ice sheet slid majestically into the southern ocean, and all of a sudden the rise in sea level was being measured in feet, not inches. (Nothing, it turned out, could move Americans to embrace the metric system.) And the heating kept triggering feedback loops that in turn accelerated the heating: ever larger wildfires, for instance, kept pushing ever more carbon into the air, and their smoke blackened ice sheets that in turn melted even faster.

This hotter world produced an ongoing spate of emergencies: “forest-fire season” was now essentially year-round, and the warmer ocean kept hurricanes and typhoons boiling months past the old norms. And sometimes the damage was novel: ancient carcasses kept emerging from the melting permafrost of the north, and with them germs from illnesses long thought extinct. But the greatest crises were the slower, more inexorable ones: the ongoing drought and desertification was forcing huge numbers of Africans, Asians and Central Americans to move; in many places, the heat waves had literally become unbearable, with nighttime temperatures staying above 100°F and outdoor work all but impossible for weeks and months at a time. On low-lying ground like the Mekong Delta, the rising ocean salted fields essential to supplying the world with rice. The U.N. had long ago estimated the century could see a billion climate refugees, and it was beginning to appear it was unnervingly correct. What could the rich countries say? These were people who hadn’t caused the crisis now devouring their lives, and there weren’t enough walls and cages to keep them at bay, so the migrations kept roiling the politics of the planet.

There were, in fact, two possible ways forward. The most obvious path was a constant competition between nations and individuals to see who could thrive in this new climate regime, with luckier places turning themselves into fortresses above the flood. Indeed some people in some places tried to cling to old notions: plug in some solar panels and they could somehow return to a more naive world, where economic expansion was still the goal of every government.

But there was a second response that carried the day in most countries, as growing numbers of people came to understand that the ground beneath our feet had truly shifted. If the economy was the lens through which we’d viewed the world for a century, now survival was the only sensible basis on which to make decisions. Those decisions targeted not just carbon dioxide; these societies went after the wild inequality that also marked the age. The Green New Deal turned out to be everything the Koch brothers had most feared when it was introduced: a tool to make America a fairer, healthier, better-educated place. It was emulated around the world, just as America’s Clean Air Act had long served as a template for laws across the globe. Slowly both the Keeling Curve, measuring carbon in the atmosphere, and the Gini coefficient, measuring the distribution of wealth, began to flatten.

That’s where we are today. We clearly did not “escape” climate change or “solve” global warming—the temperature keeps climbing, though the rate of increase has lessened. It’s turned into a wretched century, which is considerably better than a catastrophic one. We ended up with the most profound and most dangerous physical changes in human history. Our civilization surely teetered—and an enormous number of people paid an unfair and overwhelming price—but it did not fall.

People have learned to defend what can be practically defended: expensive seawalls and pumps mean New York is still New York, though the Antarctic may yet have something to say on the subject. Other places we’ve learned to let go: much of the East Coast has moved in a few miles, to more defensible ground. Yes, that took trillions of dollars in real estate off the board—but the roads and the bridges would have cost trillions to defend, and even then the odds were bad.

Cities look different now—much more densely populated, as NIMBY defenses against new development gave way to an increasingly vibrant urbanism. Smart municipalities banned private cars from the center of town, opening up free public-transit systems and building civic fleets of self-driving cars that got rid of the space wasted on parking spots. But rural districts have changed too: the erratic weather put a premium on hands-on agricultural skills, which in turn provided opportunities for migrants arriving from ruined farmlands elsewhere. (Farming around solar panels has become a particular specialty.) America’s rail network is not quite as good as it was in the early 20th century, but it gets closer each year, which is good news since low-carbon air travel proved hard to get off the ground.

What’s changed most of all is the mood. The defiant notion that we would forever overcome nature has given way to pride of a different kind: increasingly we celebrate our ability to bend without breaking, to adapt as gracefully as possible to a natural world whose temper we’ve come to respect. When we look back to the start of the century we are, of course, angry that people did so little to slow the great heating: if we’d acknowledged climate change in earnest a decade or two earlier, we might have shaved a degree off the temperature, and a degree is measured in great pain and peril. But we also know it was hard for people to grasp what was happening: human history stretched back 10,000 years, and those millennia were physically stable, so it made emotional sense to assume that stability would stretch forward as well as past.

We know much better now: we know that we’ve knocked the planet off its foundations, and that our job, for the foreseeable centuries, is to absorb the bounces as she rolls. We’re dancing as nimbly as we can, and so far we haven’t crashed.

This is one article in a series on the state of the planet’s response to climate change. Read the rest of the stories and sign up for One.Five, TIME’s climate change newsletter.

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50 Years From Now, What Will the World Be Like?

If we continue felling the forests, polluting the earth, and using up all the water, our grandchildren won’t have much of a planet left..

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<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/9994912@N06/1960192692/">NicsPics07</a>/Flickr

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

[ Note: I became politically active and committed on the day 20 years ago when I realized I could stand on the front porch of my house and point to three homes where children were in wheelchairs, to a home where a child had just died of leukemia, to another where a child was born missing a kidney, and yet another where a child suffered from spina bifida. All my parental alarms went off at once and I asked the obvious question: What’s going on here? Did I inadvertently move my three children into harm’s way when we settled in this high desert valley in Utah? A quest to find answers in Utah’s nuclear history and then seek solutions followed. Politics for me was never motivated by ideology. It was always about parenting.

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— By Bill McGuire , The Guardian .

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More From Forbes

What will the world look like in 50 years.

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In our world of both exponential growth and accelerating innovation, systems of repetition are "doomed to collapse." We need to make radical changes to the frameworks in which we operate. The world is now an interconnected neural network, where problems are considered shared and where solutions are crowdsourced—we're no longer living in silos.

This power of connection has begun—and will continue—to reveal what we are capable of. We must work together to redefine what “growth” and “development” really mean.

What will the world look like in 50 years? Dare to imagine...

The Skoll World Forum reconvened for another year across Oxford's cobbled streets. During the opening plenary, Jeff Skoll, founder and chairman of the Skoll Foundation, Participant Media and the Skoll Global Threats Fund, identified 10 key achievements in social entrepreneurship over the past 10 years—achievements that are a testament to the world's growing community of changemakers.

10) Technology drives social, and social drives technology. Skoll cited the increase in mobile phone ownership as having implications on society and the ways in which we design solutions to challenges.

9) We now have global government commitments to scaling up social innovation , particularly from leadership in the U.K., Canada and the U.S.

8) Muhammad Yunus ( Global Academy Member ) and Grameen Bank were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize "for their efforts to create economic and social development from below."

7) Al Gore, Jr. and the IPCC were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change."

6) Deforestation rates are on the decline. Brazil, which was responsible for a third of the world’s carbon emissions, has reduced these by two billion tons—the single greatest reduction in carbon emissions in history.

5) Billions of people now have access to clean water.  “The 2015 goal to halve the number of people without access to safe drinking water had been met in 2010, five years ahead of schedule,” said Skoll.

4) Social Entrepreneurship has turned mainstream! There are now 40 million people with careers in social entrepreneurship, with more than 200 million volunteers lending a helping hand. Contrast this to 10 years ago, Skoll said, when the leaders of the social entrepreneur movement were “rogue disruptors.” (For more on the evolution of social entrepreneurship over the years, catch Bill Drayton's conversation with Tim West from Pioneers Post .)

3) Global markets are steadily shifting towards sustainability.  The future of business is social. Lourenço Bustani, one of Fast Company's 100 most creative people in business, has said that " the tipping point was reached in 2012 ."

2) We have made significant progress against significant killers. Eight million lives had been saved from HIV and AIDS, parasitic guinea worm disease is set to follow smallpox as the next disease to be completely eradicated, and polio is in line to disappear after that.

1) Fewer people are living in poverty than ever before. Skoll says the “disappearance of poverty is tantalizingly close” with the possibility that we could bring extreme poverty to virtually zero in the next generation. For the first time since poverty rates have been monitored, rates are falling in every region.

This post was written by Felicity McLean ( @flickmclean ), the communications manager at Ashoka UK . 

Ashoka CEO and Founder Bill Drayton is ahead of the curve, and has outlined the ways in which changemakers can tip a system . (Hint: It takes empathy.)

F ollow Ashoka's activities at Skoll with the  #AshokaAtSkoll  hashtag, and follow the broader conversation at  #SkollWF . 

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We asked 6 experts what the world will look like in 50 years time

• Business Insider spoke to six technology experts at Mobile World Congress 2018.
• They spoke about the future we could experience within the next 50 years.

Read the full transcript below:

Brian Wong - Kiip, CEO & Co-founder: So in 50 years I think the world will, in terms of technology, really change and really this concept I call proximity of tech - which is how close the technology is to your body. And right now where it’s kind of silly, we hold things and we wear things and it’s kind of at our hands, right? At our feet right, right? And we might put it on over our faces but the whole point is just getting it into our eyeballs, into our ears, into our stomachs. Ingestibles are already a thing, it’s crazy, you literally ingest these pills these robot pills that can obviously see what you’re eating and all these things and all your caloric intake, it’s amazing. And then you know you’ve heard of startups like Magic Leap where they’re doing AR for your world; I should just be able to load my emails then like do this, then do this, that’s literally what will happen I think in 50 years, everything will just come inside and that to me is really, really exciting.

Mahadev Satyanarayanan - Carnegie Mellon, University Professor: Many applications that today we perform unassisted, will, in fact, be assisted operations. So a surgeon or a nurse in a hospital who’s working on a patient will have an angel on his or her shoulder looking over him or her and offering helpful guidance when perhaps he has, or he’s about to make a mistake.

Dirk Wisselmann - BMW Group, Senior Engineer Automated Driving: In 50 years time I think we will see very diverse mobility. We will have autonomous cars, and I think we will still have manual driven cars because I think it’s really the choice of the customer. For safety reasons we will make the conventional cars also very safe, it’s not necessary that we really need completely autonomous driving, only driven by safety.

Paula Boddington - Oxford University, Senior Researcher (Department of Computer Science) : So what will the world look like in 50 years time, well sadly it’s anybody’s guess; so there are projections where the world is fantastic, we’ve got rid of poverty, we’re all living in some kind of harmonious situation, we’ve all got technology at our fingertips and there are other projections where the development of technology might lead to things like really wide scale unemployment and it might lead to people really being hooked into their machines. We could, I think, reach a much better world where people are living a more human life in fact as a response to this technology and I think if we don’t push it in that direction we could have a very, very dystopian future.

Rand Hindi - Snips, CEO: It is very hard to predict the future 50 years ahead, what I’m sure about though is that it will never be an artificial intelligence, that’s super intelligent that just takes over humans, but rather it’s going to be perhaps brain-machine interfaces, that enables us as humans to combine our horizontal intelligence, with the vertical execution capabilities of artificial intelligence. Because a combination of the two is far better than either of them alone.

Anna Bager - Interactive Advertising Bureau, Executive VP of Industry Initiatives: What do I think the world will look like in 50 years time? I hope I’m going to be around. I think it’s going to be better, more beautiful. I think we’re going to live in a world where we are not just seeing what we want to see but hopefully where we are being, from a media perspective, also inspired and challenged to think differently but all hope for the good of mankind and humanity. I think the world is going to be great.

Produced by   Charlie Floyd

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• EARTH DAY ISSUE

Today we’re fighting COVID-19. Where will our world be in 2070?

Will all coffee be fair trade? All cars electric? Or, by the time we celebrate the 100th anniversary of Earth Day, will hastening storms, pandemics, and inequality condemn our Earth?

Crew members aboard the International Space Station take numerous images of the Earth to record the images that provide NASA scientists with data to gain a deeper understanding of our Planet.

Today we are focused on saving a world slammed by a global pandemic. Fifty years ago, people took to the streets on the first Earth Day to try to save the world itself.

In this midst of today’s turmoil, National Geographic is exploring a deeper question: What kind of world will we have on the 100th anniversary of Earth Day, just 50 years from now?

Both optimists and pessimists believe we are at some kind of turning point, where action (or inaction) will push us along one path or another. Nat Geo’s latest issue includes compelling essays written from each point of view.

What’s the glass-half-full take? Writer Emma Marris cites increased efficiencies in cars, solar, wind energy, and battery storage as building blocks of a better world . She foresees a halt in subsidizing meat production, which would encourage society-wide shifts to more plant foods. She writes that government intervention, driven by a rising consciousness in both young and old, could impel businesses and individuals to retrofit buildings, get rid of oil and gas furnaces, and help take 1.3 billion gas-guzzlers off the road.

“The money we are talking about is not more than what we bailed out the banks with,” Marris writes, quoting Jonathan Foley of Project Drawdown, which does cost-benefit analyses of climate change solutions. Foley was referring to the recovery after the 2008-9 recession (although another business bailout looks to be coming soon in response to COVID-19).

Returning to good news, Marris writes that education already has improved our world in ways that go beyond the obvious. Women in Kenya, she writes, upon gaining widespread access to education and birth control, went from having 8.1 children on average in the 1970s to just 3.7 children in 2015.

Designed to foster tranquility, the Japanese Friendship Garden in San Diego encourages contemplation of the natural world. Emma Marris hopes for a future in balance in her optimistic essay looking forward to 2070.

Hybrid thinking will replace absolutism, she contends, in our attitudes toward nature. Big farms will coexist alongside vertical urban gardens. “Borders will be softer; backyards messier. Wilderness corridors will thread through farmlands and cities; floodplains will store carbon, produce food, and control floods. Kids will climb trees in schoolyard orchards to pick fruit,” Marris writes.

She sees our biggest threat—climate change—as a chance for rich nations to help the poor. It’s “an opportunity for us,” Marris writes, “to step up—to grow up—as a species.” Her 2070 Earth Day is a party, in a place where politicians universally agree on the sins of fossil fuels, all coffee is fair trade, and birdsongs sound clearly over the sharply diminished noise from urban traffic.

Not so fast, reluctantly argues Elizabeth Kolbert , author of The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History . By 2070, she expects rising seawaters to render the Marshall Islands and the Maldives uninhabitable; to flood Norfolk, Virginia half the year; to char and scar places like Australia and California during longer and more intense wildfire seasons.

Our future, Kolbert declares, depends on how much carbon we emit in the next 50 years —and anything short of a full shutdown will keep the level of carbon in our atmosphere (and the planet’s temperature) rising. Deforestation remains on the march, as does the extinction of the flora and fauna around us. “For every species teetering on the edge of oblivion, many more seem headed in that direction,” she writes.

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Kolbert can’t muster a sense of optimism about our future, or share in the vision of a joyful Earth Day 2070, even though she acknowledges that technical advances may solve some of our problems.

“Perhaps people will perfect pollen-carrying drones. (They’re already being tested.) Perhaps we’ll also figure out ways to deal with rising sea levels and fiercer storms and deeper droughts. Perhaps new, genetically engineered crops will allow us to continue to feed a growing population even as the world warms. Perhaps we’ll find ‘the interconnected web of life’ isn’t essential to human existence after all,“ Kolbert writes.

Scorched earth after the Duncan Fire in Boise, Idaho. Elizabeth Kolbert expects a harsh future for Earth in 2070, with longer and more intense wildfire seasons.

Then she concludes: “To some, this may seem like a happy outcome. To my mind, it’s an even scarier possibility. It would mean we could continue indefinitely along on our current path—altering the atmosphere, draining wetlands, emptying the oceans, and clearing the skies of life. Having freed ourselves from nature, we would find ourselves more and more alone, except perhaps for our insect drones.”

So which future will be ours? Will we get to help determine it—or is it out of our hands? As I work finishing this article before dawn on Tuesday, a songbird chirps outside my home. I pull down from my bookshelf the thin collection of Greta Thunberg’s speeches, No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference .

In one speech, Thunberg says the hope is in our defiance, our refusal to be resigned to oblivion.

“We are the ones making a difference,” the Swedish teenager tells the youthful London crowd in April 2019. “It shouldn’t be like that, but since no one else is doing anything, we will have to do so. ... We will never stop fighting for this planet, and for ourselves, our futures, and the futures of our children and grandchildren.”

Maybe that’s the one point both essayists—and well as Thunberg and her opponents—can agree upon: Our Earth is worth fighting for.

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• CARBON FOOTPRINT
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• Experts Optimistic About the Next 50 Years of Digital Life

Fifty years after the first computer network was connected, most experts say digital life will mostly change humans’ existence for the better over the next 50 years. However, they warn this will happen only if people embrace reforms allowing better cooperation, security, basic rights and economic fairness

Table of contents.

• 1. Themes about the next 50 years of life online
• 2. Internet pioneers imagine the next 50 years
• 3. Humanity is at a precipice; its future is at stake
• 4. The internet will continue to make life better
• 5. Leading concerns about the future of digital life
• About this canvassing of experts
• Acknowledgments

The year 1969 was a pivot point in culture, science and technology. On Jan. 30, the Beatles played their last show. On July 20, the world watched in awe as Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin become the first humans to walk on the moon. Less than a month later, nearly half a million music fans overran a muddy field near Woodstock, New York, for what Rolling Stone calls the “greatest rock festival ever.”

But the 1969 event that had the greatest global impact on future generations occurred with little fanfare on Oct. 29, when a team of UCLA graduate students led by professor Leonard Kleinrock connected computer-to-computer with a team at the Stanford Research Institute. It was the first host-to-host communication of ARPANET, the early packet-switching network that was the precursor to today’s multibillion-host internet.

Heading into the network’s 50th anniversary, Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center asked hundreds of technology experts, including Kleinrock and fellow internet pioneers , how individuals’ lives might be affected by the evolution of the internet over the next 50 years. Overall, 530 technology pioneers, innovators, developers, business and policy leaders, researchers and activists in the nonscientific canvassing responded to this query:

The year 2019 will mark the 50th anniversary of the first host-to-host internet connection. Please think about the next 50 years. Where will the internet and digital life be a half century from now? Please tell us how you think connected technology, platforms and applications will be integrated into people’s lives. You can tackle any dimension of this question that matters to you. You might consider focusing on questions like this: What changes do you expect to see in the digital world’s platform companies? What changes do you expect to see in the apps and features that will ride on the internet? How will digital tools be integrated into everyday life? What will be entirely new? What will evolve and be recognizable from today’s internet? What new rules, laws or innovations in its engineering over the intervening years will change the character of today’s internet?

Considering what you just wrote about your expectations for the next 50 years, how will individuals’ lives be affected by the changes you foresee?

Some 72% of these respondents say there would be change for the better, 25% say there would be change for the worse and 3% believe there would be no significant change.

This is a non-scientific canvassing based on a non-random sample. Thus, the results are not projectable to any population other than the individuals expressing their points of view in this sample. The respondents’ remarks reflect their personal positions and are not the positions of their employers.

The optimists responding to the better-worse-no change question expressed hope that in the next 50 years digital advances will lead to longer lifespans, greater leisure, more equitable distributions of wealth and power and other possibilities to enhance human well-being. At the same time, nearly all of these experts’ written predictions included warnings about the possibilities of greater surveillance and data-abuse practices by corporations and governments, porous security for digitally connected systems and the prospect of greater economic inequality and digital divides unless policy solutions push societies in different directions.

In short, these experts argue the future is up for grabs and some argue key decisions need to be made soon. The main themes in these hundreds of experts’ comments are outlined in this table.

[chart id=”23145″]

Among the experts making the case that choices made now could affect whether the future turns out well or not was Erik Brynjolfsson , director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy and author of “Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future.” He wrote, “I don’t think the right framing is ‘will the outcome be good, or bad?’ but rather it must be ‘how will we shape the outcome, which is currently indeterminate?’ I’m hopeful that we will make the right choices, but only if we realize that the good outcomes are not at all inevitable.”

Esther Dyson , entrepreneur, former journalist, founding chair at ICANN and founder of Wellville, wrote, “The impact of the internet is not entirely inherent in the technology; it depends on what we do with it. It’s so powerful that it has given us the opportunity to satisfy many of our short-term desires instantly; we need to learn how to think longer-term. So far we have mostly done a bad job of that: Individuals are addicted to short-term pleasures such as likes and other acknowledgments (to say nothing of drugs and instantly available, online-ordered pleasures), to finding friends rather than building friendships (and marriages); businesses to boosting quarterly profits and to recruiting ‘stars’ rather than investing in their own people; nonprofits to running programs rather than building institutions; and politicians to votes and power. Do we have the collective wisdom to educate the next generation to do better despite our own poor example?”

Susan Etlinger , an industry analyst for Altimeter Group and expert in data, analytics and digital strategy, commented, “In 50 years, what we know as our internet will be largely obsolete. Rather than organizing information in the form of URLs, apps and websites, our digital interactions will be conversational, haptic and embedded in the world we live in (even, to some extent, in ourselves). As a result, the distinction between the physical and digital worlds will largely fall away. Prosthetics, imaging, disease and pathogen detection, and brain science (identifying, understanding and perhaps even modifying the workings of the brain) will all see advances far beyond what we can imagine today. Our ability to understand weather and the natural world at scale will be immensely powerful, driven by advances in machine intelligence and networking.  Yet all of these innovations will mean little if the algorithms and technology used to develop them are not applied with the same attention to human consequences as they are to innovation. Even today, the ‘Minority Report’ notion of ‘pre-crime’ is crudely possible using predictive policing technology, yet it is just one example of how embedded bias can perpetuate and actually intensify injustice. This is also true in education, health care, our financial system, politics and really every system that uses data to generate predictions about the world and the future. This is not at all to say that we should retreat, but rather that we should embrace the opportunity intelligent technologies give us – to see and better understand our biases so we can optimize for the world we want, rather than a more efficient version of the world we already have. We’ve already seen this capability weaponized in the political sphere; the decisions we make now will set a precedent for whether we are able to use intelligent technologies justly and ethically, or whether in 50 years we have consigned ourselves to a permanent state of information (and literal) warfare.”

Lindsey Andersen , an activist at the intersection of human rights and technology for Freedom House and Internews, now doing graduate research at Princeton University, commented, “The net benefits for people, in access to government services, information and quality of life, will outweigh the net losses. That said, as with any major advancement, there will be winners and losers. The losses will likely come in the form of jobs, autonomy and even freedom. But, perhaps for the first time, we are in a position to mitigate these losses because we can predict them. And if we begin solving the problems we have with technology today, it will help address the problems of the future.”

Alex Halavais , an associate professor of social technologies at Arizona State University, wrote, “The development and diffusion of new technologies have had a net-positive effect on our society over time. Certainly, there have been several near-cataclysmic events over the last two 50-year cycles, and we are currently undergoing the slow-moving technologically motivated disaster of the anthropocene. But over time these technologies have helped to enable more freedom than oppression, more abundance than deprivation and more creation than destruction. I would bet on that future.”

Fiona Kerr, industry professor of neural and systems complexity at the University of Adelaide, commented, “People love bright, shiny things. We adopt them quickly and then work out the disadvantages, slowly, often prioritizing on litigious risk. The internet has been a wonderful summary of the best and worst of human development and adoption – making us a strange mixture of connected and disconnected, informed and funneled, engaged and isolated, as we learn to design and use multipurpose platforms shaped for an attention economy.”

Joly MacFie , president of the Internet Society’s New York Chapter, said, “We are still in digital society’s adolescence. Maturity will bring ubiquity, understanding, utility, security and robustness.”

Randy Marchany , chief information security officer at Virginia Tech and director of Virginia Tech’s IT Security Laboratory, said, “The human-machine interface will be where I think we’ll see the biggest change. In the beginning, keyboard-based devices were the primary way of communicating with a computer. Today, natural-language devices (Watson, Alexa, Siri) are becoming the norm. The younger generations are using more and more conversational methods to communicate with their devices. Descendants of the Google Glass-style devices displaying info using augmented reality techniques will become the normal way of accessing and inputting information. I suspect that governments will find themselves at odds with the corporations that collect this data. For example, if Facebook can influence an election, does a government fear it, partner with it, or take it over completely? Technology will create societal disruptions a la previous ‘industrial revolutions’ as older technologies and their jobs disappear, and the workforce needs to be trained in the new technologies. This disruption will cause fundamental changes in governments, attitudes and way of life. There will be a polarization of views between the new tech and old tech worlds. How we deal with this polarization will determine whether the transition is peaceful or not.”

Richard Forno , of the Center for Cybersecurity and Cybersecurity Graduate Program at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, wrote, “A few thoughts: 1) I see the future internet as more commercialized and locked-down in response to corporate/government interests over IP controls, cybersecurity and perhaps public discourse – to include enacting national borders in cyberspace. 2) Continued Balkanization of the future internet as people embrace various new tech – which Internet of Things platform will they use? Which ‘smart’-whatever platform will become dominant? Will we have many separate ecosystems with as-yet undefined lifespans and/or vendor support cycles that lead to forced upgrades? What problems will that pose? 3) Current questions raised over how internet tech like social media, mobile devices, everything-on-demand impacts society may well set the stage for radical rethinking about what the future internet will look like – and I suspect it’ll be far removed from the romantic ‘informational equality’ of the 1990s and early 2000s. The bottom line: The future internet will reflect future humankind. Humans are a chaotic and fallible species – so how we will develop/embrace future tech within our global society is not something easily predicted other than to say it will reflect contemporary views, mores and interests.”

John McNutt , a professor in the school of public policy and administration at the University of Delaware, responded, “Not every technology is a good idea, and every advance should be carefully considered in terms of its consequence. On balance, technology has made much human progress possible. This is likely to continue. We will always have false starts and bad ideas. People will misuse technology, sometimes in horrific ways. In the end, human progress is based on creating a future underpinned by knowledge, not ignorance.”

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What will life be like in 100 and 200 Years?

Insights · June 2nd, 2022

Welcome to futurist.com

Before you read this post check out Futurist Speaker Nikolas Badminton and what he can do for your organization with his futurist keynotes .

What will life be like in 100 and 200 Years? It’s hard to consider as no-one alive today will be around. Let’s speculate on those futures.

Nikolas often gets interviewed by publications on various subjects and a while back he was asked about what life will be like in 100 and 200 Years in these two Best Life articles from 2018, ‘ This Is What Life Could Look Like 100 Years from Now ‘ and ‘ This Is What Life Could Look Like 200 Years from Now ‘.

In 2022 we are at a later stage of exponential progress and change. Some say that more has changed globally in the past 50 years than the previous 250, however it’s the millennia behind us that have brought us to where we are today.

By 2122 we will have likely leveled-up as a race of people. I personally believe that we will hit a crunch in the next 100 years in terms of the health of the planet and the exploding population in mega-cities (cities over 10 million people in size). It’s very hard to predict 20 years into the future, and maybe we shouldn’t predict at all , but we can see signals of change today that inevitably come to pass and define the world in 100 years time.

Let’s get into it…

What will the world look like in 100 years?

By 2122 the training wheels are off and we are in a new mode of operation with data as the foundation and systemic parts of society starting to create fairness and equality in the world (we have a long way to go from where we are today)

Here are some speculations on where we will be in 2122:

• We will stabilize at around 11 billion global population with 90% of the global population will live in cities and will result in completely new ways of living and working and we will be in a 100% renewable energy situation. Mega-tall buildings – 100+ stories – will be the norm in major cities to accommodate the needs for accommodation. It’s likely that no-one will drive vehicles – it will all be autonomous transportation.
• The world will run on systems, sensors, cameras, artificial intelligence, and autonomous infrastructure.
• Globally we will see a level of collaboration between governments that we do not see today. And, it will be about planning for greater population movement and wealth distribution. We will be headed towards a world of equality and abundance. Ideas like  ‘The Venus Project’  will start to come into being.
• We will also see the 1% moving to out-of-jurisdiction at-sea communities – they call this  seasteading . Mobilization on this has already started.
• We will also see research bases on The Moon and Mars. Elon Musk’s grave will be on Mars at the peak of the Olympus Mons.

What will the world look like in 200 years?

By 2222 we will have ascended into being an entirely new kind of society.

Here are some speculations on where we will be in 2222:

• No more disease. No more cancer. Medicine will be so advanced that we will see people living to 150+ years old. People will also forego having children but there will be some that choose to do this selectively.
• Wealth and earnings have no meaning – we will have a world striving to be completely equal. Leaders will be defined the goodness they do in the world and the entire society will have an active role in building culture and sustaining communities.
• Technology will be invisible. Things will just work seamlessly.
• There will be pop up communities that choose to live ‘the old way’ off of the land and with a lack of technology. They will be seen as important parts of historical society and many people in the world will crave to visit those experiences as a reminder of how we lived, and how close we came to really screwing everything up.

This was originally shared on  nikolasbadminton.com

To engage  Nikolas Badminton  or the  Futurist Think Tank  please  contact us here .

Nikolas Badminton

Nikolas is the Chief Futurist of the Futurist Think Tank. He is world-renowned futurist speaker, a Fellow of The RSA, and has worked with over 300 of the world’s most impactful companies to establish strategic foresight capabilities, identify trends shaping our world, help anticipate unforeseen risks, and design equitable futures for all. In his new book – ‘Facing Our Futures’ – he challenges short-term thinking and provides executives and organizations with the foundations for futures design and the tools to ignite curiosity, create a framework for futures exploration, and shift their mindset from what is to WHAT IF…

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Table of contents, where i see myself in 10 years: a profound exploration, 10 years from now: nurturing personal and professional growth, how do i see myself 10 years from now: a commitment to values, embracing the journey of the next decade, turning dreams into reality: the road to my future, navigating the career landscape: a fulfilling professional journey, fostering personal growth: a holistic approach to well-being, a global citizen: making a positive impact on society, conclusion: a journey of transformation and purpose.

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Example Of Essay On What Will The World Look Like In 50 Years

Type of paper: Essay

Topic: Disaster , Global Warming , World , Vehicles , Drunk Driving , Marijuana , Cars , Driving

Published: 03/18/2020

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In 50 years technology will have advanced in a lot of areas, making the world look very different. Each one of these technologies will have effects on the laws and on the attitudes of the population. Although many things will be different, many things will stay the same. 50 years is not long enough for there to be changes on a massive scale, but it is long enough for significant changes. In 50 years, when you look at other cars on the road, you will see the drivers texting, working, and watching streaming movies. This is because self-driving cars will have a big impact on the future, freeing drivers up to do as they please while the car takes them to their destinations. This brand new, still-in-testing technology will change a lot of things once it becomes a wide spread convince. In order to prevent accidents, the cars rely on software created by the car companies. So, drivers won’t be responsible for accidents, the software companies and car companies will have to pay for the accidents (or for auto insurance). Since there will be no such thing as drunk driving, police officers will no longer have to arrest people for drunk driving. There will be less legal consequences. In 50 years there will also be less consequences for other crimes, such as possession of marijuana. Since many states are legalizing marijuana. Many more states will legalize it in the future. Perhaps, in 50 years, it will be legal in all of the states. So, just like with drunk driving, no one will be arrested. The jails won’t be as full either. People’s aptitudes will probably change toward alternative lifestyles. Gay marriage is becoming accepted in states across the country, so in 50 years it will probably be accepted all over the country, maybe even all over the world. The legalization of gay marriage will make people be more accepting of alternative lifestyles in general. Even religious groups will allow gay people to join their congregations. Part of this will be because of the current influence of Pope Francis, who believes in keeping an open and loving mind toward homosexuals and other persecuted minorities. The world might be warmer due to global warming. If global warming is as dangerous as some scientist say, there will be less snow and more deserts. People will have to wear shorts and tee shirts instead of jackets and boots. If it’s too warm, future people may be forced to stay inside, in air-conditioning, during the summer months. More people will buy pools and beachfront property. In conclusion, in 50 years people will watch streaming television while they ride to beach-parties in their self-driving cars. At the party, they won’t have to worry if they drink a little too much, because their car will drive them home. Everyone will be relaxed about social issues like religion, marijuana, and homosexuality. On the other hand, people will worry about rising temperatures and water shortages from global warming.

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Home — Essay Samples — History — 21St Century — Reflections on a Half-Century: The World 50 Years Ago

Reflections on a Half-century: The World 50 Years Ago

• Categories: 20Th Century 21St Century

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Published: Jun 13, 2024

Words: 768 | Pages: 2 | 4 min read

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Introduction, body paragraphs, political landscape, social transformations, technological innovations.

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50 Years From Now... by Sarah

Sarah's entry into Varsity Tutor's May 2020 scholarship contest

50 Years From Now... by Sarah - May 2020 Scholarship Essay

The year is 2070, lights are powered by plants, plastic straws and bottles are eliminated, and travel is now eco-friendly. But what about education? People always think of how the environment, technology and housing will progress in the future, but never consider the future of education. In 50 years from now there will be a more integrated education system that combines at home learning and in-person learning. Given the current COVID-19 pandemic, it is apparent that many changes to how people experience learning will incur within the next 50 years. To mitigate the spread of infectious diseases, schools may rotate which students and what classes happen on campus versus remotely. Or maybe, schools will implement air filtration systems, as well as decontamination stations to disinfect students as they enter classrooms. In 50 years from now, as technological advances increase and technology becomes more accessible, there will be an increase in remote learning possibilities that will allow students the option to tailor their school schedule to their individual needs. With services such as Zoom, Google Classroom, and Haiku there are unlimited ways for students to learn and connect with teachers at home. One of the main outcomes from the COVID-19 pandemic is that it forces teachers that typically would not rely on technology to do so. It has also made teachers more creative in creating lessons and has given them a greater skill set for teaching. In 50 years, students will be able to choose if they want to attend classes online or in person to accommodate sports schedules, parent work schedules and medical needs. This will allow students to get more out of their education and feel less stressed about. There will still be guidelines and rules for students who choose to forego in person classes, but this freedom will give them more sense of power and control over their education. In 50 years from now, schools will have more pathways for students to follow. In my current high school, we have three main pathways students may choose to follow: engineering, theater arts, film. These pathways are meant to foster a students’ passions and allow them to explore potential jobs that fall within that pathway. In the future schools will have a wider range of pathways that students may follow that will give students the ability to discover what they are passionate about and discover how they can make their dreams a reality. In 50 years from now, schools will have a better understanding of mental health. Currently, mental health is a major issue among students and teachers across the world. Students worry if their grades are good enough, if they have enough extracurriculars, if they will get into college. Teachers worry if they are teaching their students enough material, if their students will pass their AP exam, if they will become department chair. This is not considering the state of both students’ and teachers’ home lives. While schools are beginning to understand the stress that students and teachers are under, in 50 years, schools will implement better systems to moderate these stresses, in order to improve mental health. In 50 years from now education will be greater. Teachers will have an arsenal of resources, students will have a greater ability to take control of their education and students and teachers will be happier. In 50 years from now, I will be telling my grandchildren about the year 2020, the year COVID-19 reshaped my senior year and the year education began to transform for the better.

50 years from now

• Published: October 4, 2022
• Updated: October 4, 2022
• University / College: McMaster University
• Language: English
• Downloads: 16

What will life be like 50 years from now? In the future, we will be having many different changes, some predictable and some a complete mystery to us. In 50 years we may have a complete breakthrough in medicine. Cancer, aids, and all sorts of ilnesses may be cured. We might even discover a new life form from another planet. There is just so much we can do in 50 years and predictions must be made.

In 50 years we will have the ability to go outer space without need of all the training that astronauts nowadays require, and our cars will be nothing like how they are today because within 50 years the world as we know it will be completely different. Life in fifty years will be a lot different then it is now. In most people’s eyes they see the world having flying cars and floating houses, but the way I see it, it’s a lot different. In 50 years we might not have fresh air to breathe or clean water to drink.

If humans don’t stop burning oil and coal, the greenhouse gases into the atmosphere are about to cause extremely high temperatures and the coldest places on Earth might one day have the best climate for humans. In conclusion, the greatest minds of this planet are saying the possibilities of what can happen in 50 years is endless. There are just way too many theories and too many possibilities to account for. It seems that 50 years from now, it will be a completely different world than it is from the world we live in now .

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what will life like 50 years from now ?

IELTS essay what will life like 50 years from now?

• Some people believe that children should be allowed to stay at home and play until they are six or seven years old. Others believe that it is important for young children to go to school as soon as possible. What do you think are the advantages of attending school from a young age? The upbringing of children has been an important issue for the parents. People have two main school of thoughts in this aspect: either the children should be nurtured at home for at least six to seven years or they should be sent to school at an early age. This topic has a vast diversity and the pro ...
• Some people think that it is important to have a single language as an international official language. Others think that it will make it difficult to identify countries and cause a loss of culture. Language is something that we use to communicate with everyone, everybody, language also helps us to make new friends or bring people together. However, some people think that it is necessary to have a language and make this language an international language, but besides that, some people think oth ...
• Many working people get little or no exercise either during the working day or in their free time and have health problems as a result. Why do so many working people not get enough exercise? What can be done about this problem? Long working hours have always been an issue to employees across all fields in the society. They have so much work to do that they often have to work overtime. As a result, these people have virtually no time to work out and maintain their health. This essay will discuss possible causes and suggest ...
• Learning a foreign language offers an insight into how people from other cultures thịnk and see the world. The teaching of a foreign language should be compulsory at all primary schools. There arises no question over the verity of the statement that the role of the foreign language is more pivotal in the life of everyone. In this contemporary era, a cluster of like minded individual consider that primary schools must teach foreign language to students and this subject should be comp ...
• Topic 2: When international media (including movies, fashion shows, advertisements and other TV programmes) convey the same messages to the global audience, people argue that the expansion of international media has negative impacts on cultural diversity. What is your opinion? Almost every day of the week, you can read stories about transmitting global industries messages in the world. In fact, this issue has aroused much controversy among global audience and vast industries. Some people believe that impressing individual by conveying messages have a negative effect on th ...
• There is an increasing amount of advertising directed at children which encourages them to buy goods such as toys and snacks. Many parents are worried that these advertisements put too much pressure on children, while some advertisers claim that they provide useful information to children. In this cutting edge era, advertisements are increasing rapidly nowadays. Commercials are directed at youngsters for instance fast food, toys and other products. Whilst, guardians claim that these ads have adverse effects on them. Advertisers believe that adverts are giving out beneficial informatio ...
• success is often measured by wealth and material belongings. Do you think wealth is the best measure of success? what makes a successful person. Nowadays, A number of people believe that measure achievements by wealth or materialistic belongings. According to me, I completely agree with this because wealth makes it easier for us to succeed. On the one hand, People have a various purpose for being a successful person. I believe that money or ...
• Higher education could be funded in three ways. All costs paid by government, all costs paid by students or students paying all costs through a government loan. What are the advantages of these choices? Since university funding benefits both university students and society as a whole, both parties should bear some of the cost of university educations. University students gain both personal and economic benefits by attending university; however, society also benefits by having a more educated popula ...
• Children today are too dependent on computers and electronic entertainment. It would be better for them to be outside playing sports and taking part in more traditional past times than spending all day indoors. In today’s world, children are overly reliant on computers and technological entertainment. However, it is believed that children are better off exercising outdoors and engaging in more traditional pastimes rather than staying indoors all day. In my opinion, I certainly agree that outdoor activities ...
• You have just moved into a new home and are planning to hold a party. You are worried that the noise may disturb your neighbour. Dear John Fishman, My name is Iryna and I’m your new neighbor. I am writing to let you know that I am planning to hold a party this weekend in my backyard. I have just moved into this neighborhood and I would like to celebrate it with my friends and my new neighbors. Therefore, I want to invite yo ...
• Environmental problems are becoming a global issue. Environmental problems are counter-challenging the quality of life people enjoy in modern advanced societies. Do you think that environmental problems will produce better results if it is addressed globally or it should be addressed by individual countries? Over a decade or two, there are a number minor environmental problems in past that have now taken a face of global issues. A plethora of them are regional like cyclones whereas some are at worldwide level, greenhouse effect, global warming, for instance. The major issues like climate change have mad ...
• : Nowadays we are producing more and more rubbish. Why do you think this is happening? What can governments do to help reduce the amount of rubbish produced? In the contemporary era, it is opine that garabage production is increasing rapidly in community. However, this may cause damage to our environment. But would a help from government is really necessary to reduce the rubbish production? This essay will discuss the above notion in subsequent paragraph ...

Suddenly Trump Looks Older and More Deranged

Now the Republicans are the ones saddled with a candidate who can’t make a clear argument or finish a sentence.

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Four days after the end of the Republican National Convention, it suddenly looks like a very different event. I watched it intermittently, on television, along with perhaps 25 million other Americans (a relatively small number, though enough to matter). I focused on the highlights, like most viewers did. I read the analysis and thought I understood what had happened. But in the light of President Joe Biden’s brave and unprecedented decision to drop out of the race, my memory of what Donald Trump and his party were doing and saying has permanently shifted. I suspect this will be true for at least some of the other 25 million of us too.

Whatever happens next, the frame has altered. Now it is the Republicans who are saddled with the elderly candidate, the one who can’t make a clear argument or finish a sentence without veering off into anecdote. Now the Democrats are instead proposing something new. Now it is the many pundits who were already bored by the race and ready to wrap it up who look foolish.

Remember, if you still can: The Republican convention was a carefully curated, meticulously planned presentation. As my colleague Tim Alberta has said, the theme was “strength.” Strength was expressed by exaggerated, absurd, comic-book figures: Hulk Hogan, Kid Rock. The latter chanted “Fight, fight!” and “Trump, Trump!” while pumping his fist. Then he sang “American Bad Ass,” an unlistenable work of profound dissonance. Trump himself walked into the convention hall to the strains of James Brown’s famously misogynistic anthem “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.”

Read: This is exactly what the Trump team feared

Strength was implied by the equally choreographed demonstrations of debasement. Nikki Haley, who had repeatedly questioned whether Trump is “mentally fit” to be president—and had declared that “the first party to retire its 80-year-old candidate” will win the election—offered her “strong endorsement.” The vice-presidential nominee, J. D. Vance, who had previously compared Trump to Hitler and described him as “ cultural heroin ,” performed a kind of kowtow, appearing at the convention in the form of supplicant, acolyte, prodigal son. Like so many other Republicans, he bowed to the power of Trump, to the vulgarity of Hulk Hogan, to a whole host of things he used to say he didn’t like, and maybe still doesn’t like. He even made a peculiar, strained attempt to link his children and his wife, the daughter of South Asian immigrants, to a cemetery in East Kentucky where he said they will be buried, as if none of this will make sense until all of us are dead.

But then Trump himself appeared, and it was as if the emperor with no clothes had taken the stage. There was nothing strong about an overweight, heavily made up yet nevertheless shiny-faced elderly man who rambled and babbled for an hour and a half, completely undermining the slick image created in the previous four days. He began by sticking to his script, solemnly referencing the failed assassination attempt against him days before. But even when telling that story, he could not master the appropriate tone and almost immediately changed the subject. “And there’s an interesting statistic,” he said: “The ears are the bloodiest part. If something happens with the ears, they bleed more than any other part of the body. For whatever reason, the doctors told me that.”

Eventually, instead of sounding like an “American Bad Ass,” he digressed into pure gibberish . One example:

They’re coming from prisons. They’re coming from jails. They’re coming from mental institutions and insane asylums. I—you know the press is always on because I say this. Has anyone seen The Silence of the Lambs ? The late, great Hannibal Lecter. He’d love to have you for dinner. That’s insane asylums. They’re emptying out their insane asylums. And terrorists at numbers that we’ve never seen before. Bad things are going to happen.

In Venezuela, Caracas, high crime, high crime. Caracas, Venezuela, really a dangerous place. But not anymore, because in Venezuela, crime is down 72 percent. In fact, if they would ever in this election, I hate to even say that, we will have our next Republican convention in Venezuela because it will be safe. Our cities, our cities will be so unsafe, we won’t be able—we will not be able to have it there.

On Thursday evening, this performance seemed deranged, sinister, and frightening. Now, following Biden’s decision to halt his own campaign, it just looks deranged. On the one hand, we have a sitting president who understood his limitations and, in an act of patriotism, selflessness, and party unity, decided to step away from power. On the other hand, we have a former president clinging to power, holding on desperately to the myth of a lost election, evoking the same predictable descriptions of carnage and disaster he served up eight years ago. Today, he is still attacking Biden, who is no longer his opponent.

Read: A searing reminder that Trump is unwell

In retrospect, the Republican Party’s convention looks not just staged but also hollow and false. By contrast, the Democratic Party’s convention will be substantive and maybe even spontaneous. In the hours that have passed since Biden’s announcement, a million different Kamala Harris memes, music mixes, and clips have appeared online, not orchestrated by her campaign or by any campaign, just put together by random people, some of whom like her and some of whom do not. One mash-up of her wackier speeches, her laugh, and a Charli XCX soundtrack had 3.4 million views by this morning. We don’t know yet whether Harris will be the candidate or, if she is, whether she will be a good one, but the energy has already shifted from the men trying to impose their image of their party on the country to online Gen Zers who can flip the script any way they want.

I don’t know what will happen next, and that’s the point. The heavy sense of inevitability that surrounded the RNC has lifted. The cadres of people organized by the Heritage Foundation and a dozen offshoots, all quietly preparing to dismantle the rights of American women, to replace civil servants with loyalists, to take apart pollution controls, and to transfer more money into the hands of Trump-friendly billionaires—they are no longer marching inexorably toward the halls of power. The people who spent a week trying to bend reality to fit their flawed, vengeful candidate became too confident too soon.

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Mom attempts Olympic gymnastics in her kitchen and her performance goes viral

The handstand. The switch leap. Even the Shushunova.

These are all moves that you can see performed to perfection in the gymnastics competition in the Olympic Games ... and also in the kitchen of Breanne Allarie, a mom of two from Vancouver, British Columbia.

“I just pulled out the mat and put on my swimsuit. And I was like, ‘Let’s go,’” she says of making the viral video, which was posted on Instagram on Monday and already has 22 million views. She says it took “all of five minutes” for her husband, Jordan Allarie, to film.

“My husband and I just had been watching all the clips from the Olympics, and I always have been the type of person that if I see something, I’m like, ‘I could probably do that. I could try it myself,’” Allarie tells TODAY.com. “So I brought up my kids’ mat and I just started doing some tricks.”

As you might have guessed, this mom wasn't starting at square one. She has a gymnastics background.

"I was in intense gymnastics competitively until I was about 14 years old," she explains. "Originally, I really wanted to go to the Olympics. And then as I got older, I was like, 'OK, maybe not the Olympics, but a full-ride scholarship.' That was the goal."

But then, as Allarie was practicing for a major competition, "I did a tumbling pass and I landed on my neck and I fractured my back. That was it," she says. "Honestly, I was so lucky that I could still walk."

After she recovered, Allarie started dancing and eventually went pro. She and her husband worked on cruise ships and at Tokyo Disney.

Allarie took a step back from performing when her kids were born — they're 4 and 6 now — but loves the opportunity to showcase her creative side as an online content creator.

Of the skills she attempts in the video, Allarie says that the Shushunova was the most difficult.

"That's the one where I jump into the air and you pretty much land flat," she explains. "Everybody was like, 'Why are you doing a belly flop?' But it's actually a legit gymnastics move called the Shushunova."

In the video, Allarie said, "Do you think I could do a back flip?"

Her husband immediately answered, "No."

"I just feel like I could do it," she replied.

No, Allarie did not, in fact, attempt a backflip that day.

"It has been a very long time since I've done some of those moves. Probably not since I was 14," she says. "I really did want to try the backflip, but I think it is probably for the best I didn't." 

Allarie mentioned that some commenters said that she was "brave" to wear a swimsuit, "But I don't think it's about bravery," she says. "I think it's just about me being me. And the world can either take it or leave it."

She wants to show everyone that "midsize moms can do it, too ... maybe ... sort of." And her kids are learning from her can-do attitude.

Allarie's 4-year-old son watched her film the sequence. He said, "'I give you a gold, Mom!'"

Peacock is streaming the Paris Olympics around the clock.  Learn more about accounts here . TODAY earns a commission on purchases. Peacock is owned by our parent company NBCUniversal.

Rosie Colosi lives in New Jersey and is a reporter for TODAY Parents. She has bylines in The Atlantic, The Week, MSNBC, and PureWow, and she has written 33 nonfiction children's books for Scholastic, Klutz, and Nat Geo Kids. Once upon a time, she played Mrs. Claus in "The Rockettes' Radio City Christmas Spectacular," but now she mostly sings songs from "Annie" to her two daughters … while they beg her to play Kidz Bop.

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Southwest Airlines plans to start assigning seats, breaking with a 50-year tradition

Southwest Airlines plans to drop the open-boarding system it has used for more than 50 years and will start assigning passengers to seats, just like all the other big airlines. (AP Video: Kendria LaFleur)

A passenger checks in for her Southwest Airlines flight at Midway International Airport in Chicago, Thursday, July 25, 2024. Southwest Airlines plans to drop the open-boarding system it has used for more than 50 years and will start assigning passengers to seats, just like all the other big airlines. (AP Photo/Teresa Crawford)

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A passenger checks in for his Southwest Airlines flight at Midway International Airport in Chicago, Thursday, July 25, 2024. Southwest Airlines plans to drop the open-boarding system it has used for more than 50 years and will start assigning passengers to seats, just like all the other big airlines. (AP Photo/Teresa Crawford)

Southwest passengers and airliners line up and move at Love Field in Dallas, Thursday, July 25, 2024. Southwest Airlines said Thursday that it plans to drop the open-boarding system it has used for more than 50 years and will start assigning passengers to seats, just like all the other big airlines. (AP Photo/LM Otero)

Travelers board a Southwest Airlines plane to depart from Love Field in Dallas, Thursday, July 25, 2024. (AP Photo/LM Otero)

FILE - Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 lands at Manchester Boston Regional Airport, June 2, 2023, in Manchester, N.H. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa, File)

Southwest Airlines planes can be seen on the terminal at Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport in Baltimore, Friday, July 19, 2024, in Baltimore. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough, File)

FILE - American Airlines passenger jets prepare for departure, July 21, 2021, near a terminal at Boston Logan International Airport in Boston. (AP Photo/Steven Senne, File)

FILE - A woman waits for her flight as an American Airlines jet passes by at Sky Harbor airport on March 4, 2023, in Phoenix. American reports earnings on Thursday, July 25, 2024. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel, File)

DALLAS (AP) — Goodbye, cattle call.

Southwest Airlines said Thursday that it plans to drop the open-boarding system it has used for more than 50 years and will start assigning passengers to seats, just like all the other big airlines.

The airline said it has been studying seating options , running tests and surveying customers. Southwest discovered that preferences have changed over the years and the vast majority of travelers now want to know where they are sitting before they get to the airport.

Southwest’s unusual boarding process started as a fast way to load passengers and limit the time that planes and crews spend sitting idly on the ground, not making money . It helped the airline operate more efficiently and even squeeze a few more flights into the daily schedule.

It was one reason that Southwest alone among U.S. airlines remained profitable every year until the coronavirus pandemic.

Here’s how it works: Instead of being assigned a seat when they buy a ticket, Southwest customers check in exactly 24 hours before departure to secure their spots in boarding lines. In the beginning, the first 30 to check in were put in the coveted “A” boarding group, guaranteeing them a window or aisle seat. Dawdlers landed in “B,” which was still OK, or “C,” which would often result in a middle seat.

The system became less democratic over time as Southwest let people pay extra to guarantee a spot near the front of the line. Despite that, many Southwest loyalists still love open seating. The airline thinks they will adapt.

“I know there are going to be customers who say, ‘I want to stay with open seating.’ It’s a minority,” Southwest CEO Robert Jordan told CNBC, “but we had the same thing when we switched from plastic boarding passes. We had the same thing when we took peanuts out of the cabin. I’m convinced we can win them over.”

The airline said surveys showed that 80% of its customers — and 86% of “potential” customers — want an assigned seat. Jordan said open seating was the top reason that travelers cited for choosing another airline over Southwest.

Some Southwest passengers reacted with sadness and disappointment to news that open seating is going away.

“Hearing that announcement today, I was like, no, this is my favorite part of Southwest,” said Lindsey Magness, who works in college athletics in Oklahoma City.

Magness said that with open seating, she can try for a window seat or, depending on her mood, an aisle. And assigned seating doesn’t always work either. Magness said American Airlines seated her away from her husband on their honeymoon trip earlier this summer.

Brandon Bowser of Odenton, Maryland, said he flies on different airlines based on which one has the best deal, but he has found Southwest’s open boarding to be faster and less complicated than other airlines.

“The convenience that comes with being able to pick your own seat is what sets Southwest apart and makes them sort of a preferred airline,” he said. “A lot of my friends swear by Southwest, that’s all they will fly, and they are completely irate about this decision.”

At Chicago Midway airport, Kimberly King was happy to learn of the change. She was at a check-in kiosk with her four children for a flight home to California.

”I used to fly United a lot and I liked the assigned seats, especially with kids, kind of expecting and knowing where we were going to be,” King said. “The only reason really why I continue to fly Southwest is for the free bags.”

Southwest still lets passengers check two bags for free. It’s been a centerpiece of the airline’s advertising campaigns for years. CEO Jordan said Southwest has no plans to end bags-fly-free “at this point.”

There are drawbacks to Southwest boarding. It’s hard to get a good spot in line without paying an extra fee. Southwest executives said 60% of passengers check in the first 30 seconds. Those who miss the rush fear there won’t be room in the overhead bins for their carry-on bag. Late boarders can struggle to see an open seat anywhere, and start roaming up and down the aisle — Southwest calls them “spinners.”

There are a number of tricks that passengers use to game the system.

Some take advantage of early boarding for people who need extra time. Others ignore the age limit (6 or under) for children in families that are allowed to board right after the “A” group. Once on the plane, some passengers hold choice seats for mates who are far behind them in line.

Photos appear occasionally on social media of an unusually large number of people in wheelchairs at Southwest gates. They get to board early.

“It’s certainly one of the things that anger people even if it doesn’t have a material impact on them,” said Brett Snyder, a travel agent and author of the Cranky Flier blog. “In some cases those are people who have absolutely legitimate reasons. In other cases, it’s the ‘Jetway Jesus’ phenomenon.”

That’s a reference to recoveries so miraculous that the disability causing the person to need a wheelchair to reach the gate is cured during flight, and they walk off the plane like everybody else.

Snyder doubts that fans of open seating will abandon Southwest.

“Those people will still fly Southwest,” he said. “They may grumble about it, but there’s no one else they can go to that has open seating.”

In addition to the boarding change, Southwest also plans to convert about one-third of the seats on its planes to premium seating with more legroom, matching a practice that is standard among other large U.S. carriers.

The airline’s newest schedule also includes a few redeye flights — a first for Southwest.

The overnight flights will start in mid-February on nonstop routes including Las Vegas to Baltimore and Orlando; Los Angeles to Baltimore and Nashville; and Phoenix to Baltimore. More routes will be added over time, the airline said.

The changes come as Southwest is under pressure from Elliott Investment Management . The hedge fund argues that the airline lags rivals in financial performance and has failed to change with the times. It wants to replace Jordan and Chairman Gary Kelly.

Southwest also faces increased scrutiny from the Federal Aviation Administration after a series of worrisome flights, including one that dove within 400 feet of the ocean off Hawaii, two that flew at extremely low altitudes while still miles from landing at airports in Oklahoma and Florida, and another that was discovered to have rudder-area damage after an unusual “Dutch roll” wiggle during a flight.

Southwest announced the seating move and other changes on the same day that both it and American Airlines reported a steep drop in second-quarter profit despite higher revenue. Airlines are struggling with higher costs and reduced pricing power, especially on flights within the United States, as the industry adds flights faster than the growth in travel demand.

Southwest, based in Dallas, said its second-quarter profit fell 46% from a year earlier, to $367 million, as higher costs for labor, fuel and other expenses outstripped an increase in revenue. The results met Wall Street expectations.

American Airlines also reported a 46% drop in profit, to $717 million. CEO Robert Isom said the airline was held back by a sales strategy that it is now rolling back and by an oversupply of domestic flights.

American said its earnings per share in the third quarter will be break-even, well below Wall Street’s expectation of 48 cents per share. American also cut its forecast of full-year earnings to between 70 cents and $1.30 per share, down from a previous prediction of $2.25 to $3.25 per share.

Shares of the leading U.S. airlines rose Thursday. Southwest Airlines Co. gained 5.5% and American Airlines Group Inc., based in Fort Worth, Texas, rose 4%. Delta, United, Alaska and JetBlue also gained.

Associated Press writer Wyatte Grantham-Philips in New York and video journalist Teresa Crawford in Chicago contributed to this report.

This story has been updated to correct that King was interviewed at Chicago Midway airport, not O’Hare.

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Opinion Guest Essay

Don’t Take Trump’s Word for It. Check the Data.

Credit... By Kiel Mutschelknaus

Supported by

By Steven Rattner

Graphics by Aileen Clarke

Mr. Rattner is a contributing Opinion writer. He served as counselor to the Treasury secretary in the Obama administration.

• July 24, 2024

For more than 90 minutes last week, Donald Trump gave a rambling speech accepting the Republican nomination for president for a third time. He used the opportunity, as well as his June debate with President Biden, to repeat favorite false claims and exaggerations. That Mr. Trump has a proclivity for saying untrue things is well known. But in his latest campaign for the White House, I’ve been struck by what appears to be an escalation in both the frequency of Mr. Trump’s lies and the outrageousness of his distortions.

Now that the uncertainty around Mr. Biden’s candidacy has been resolved, the campaign will begin anew. With Mr. Trump sure to ratchet up his falsehood-laden rhetoric, it’s a good time to review his recent record of dishonesty.

Lie: “ The only jobs [President Biden] created are for illegal immigrants and bounce-back jobs — they’re bounced back from the Covid. ”

Truth: Under Mr. Trump — even excluding the impact of the Covid pandemic — the economy generated an average of 182,000 jobs a month, well below Mr. Biden’s 277,000 a month (excluding his post-pandemic bounce) and Bill Clinton’s 242,000.

Job growth under Trump lagged behind Biden

and Clinton

Even when the effect of the pandemic is excluded,

the Trump administration’s figures are lower than

those of other recent presidents.

+400,000 jobs per month

Covid gains

Covid losses

–100k

Job growth under Trump lagged behind Biden and Clinton

Even when the effect of the pandemic is excluded, the Trump administration’s

figures are lower than those of other recent presidents.

G.H.W. Bush

Sources: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; U.S. Department of the Treasury

Lie: “ It’s killing people. They can’t buy groceries anymore. They can’t — you look at the cost of food where it’s doubled, and tripled and quadrupled. They can’t live. They’re not living anymore. ”

Grocery price increases fell short of Trump’s

Change in the cost of food items from January 2021

through June 2024.

Ma r garine

F r oz en juices

Other f ats

Crackers and

Grocery price increases fell short of Trump’s claims

Change in the cost of food items from January 2021 through June 2024.

F r oz en juices and

Other fats and oils

Crackers and bread

All food items

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Note: These are the top five categories with the largest price increases.

Trump’s tax cuts were smaller compared to

Reagan and Obama

Tax cuts shown as a percentage of the U.S. economy in

The Reagan tax cut

was more than four

times as large as

the Trump cut.

Trump’s tax cuts were smaller compared to Reagan and Obama

Tax cuts shown as a percentage of the U.S. economy in that year.

The Reagan tax cut was more than four times as large as the Trump cut.

Sources: Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget; Congressional Budget Office

Note: Size of U.S. economy as measured by U.S. gross domestic product.

The federal deficit grew during the Trump years

+$1 trillion surplus

–$4 trillion deficit

Source: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

Consumers paid for Trump-era tariffs

104 price index

Goods placed under tariffs in 2018

The cost of

goods diverged after tariffs were added to some

but not others.

All other core goods

Tariffs in effect

The cost of goods diverged after tariffs were added to some but not others.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

Note: Prices are indexed to January 2018 levels as 100.

European nations spent more on Ukraine aid

than the U.S.

Cumulative aid for Ukraine since January 2022.

$188 billion

$200 billion

$107 billion

Russia invades Ukraine

United States

European nations spent more on Ukraine aid than the U.S.

Source: Kiel Institute for the World Economy

Note: European aid includes support from European Union members as well as Iceland, Norway, Switzerland and Britain.

A shortage of workers as Americans retire

Since July 2021, the United States has had more

jobs than workers to fill them.

5 million more jobs than workers

18 million fewer jobs than workers

Great Recession

Since July 2021, the United States has had more jobs than workers to fill them.

2 million more jobs than workers

Sources: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Violent crimes per 100,000 people

295 (estimated)

Property crimes per 100,000 people

1,593 (estimated)

Property crimes per 100,000

Violent crimes per 100,000

Sources: F.B.I.; Jeff Asher

Political scientists rank Trump last in

presidential greatness

Presidents ranked by overall greatness on a scale of 0 to

100, based on a survey of 154 political scientists.

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

Roosevelt, Theodore

Johnson, Lyndon B.

Adams, John

Bush, George H.W.

Adams, John Quincy

Harrison, Benjamin

Bush, George W.

Harrison, William

Johnson, Andrew

Political scientists rank Trump last in presidential greatness

Presidents ranked by overall greatness on a scale of 0 to 100, based on

a survey of 154 political scientists.

Inaugu r ation

Sources: American Political Science Association; Encyclopedia Britannica

Note: Ratings have been rounded to the nearest whole number.

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