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A More Sustainable Path to 2050

Science shows us a clear path to 2050 in which both nature and 10 billion people can thrive together.

August 30, 2019

Written for The Nature Conservancy Magazine Fall 2019 issue by Heather Tallis, former lead scientist for TNC.

A few years ago The Nature Conservancy began a process of reassessing its vision and goals for prioritizing its work around the globe. The resulting statement called for a world where “nature and people thrive, and people act to conserve nature for its own sake and its ability to fulfill and enrich our lives.”

That sounds like a sweet future, but if you’re a scientist, like I am, you immediately start to wonder what that statement means in a practical sense. Could we actually get there? Is it even possible for people and nature to thrive together?

Our leaders had the same question. In fact, when the vision statement was first presented at a board meeting, our president leaned over and asked me if we had the science to support it.

“No,” I said. “But we can try to figure it out.”

There is a way to sustain nature and 10 billion people.

Explore the path to a better world. Just 3 changes yield an entirely different future.

Ultimately, I assembled a collaborative team of researchers to take a hard look at whether it really is possible to do better for both people and nature: Can we have a future where people get the food, energy and economic growth they need without sacrificing more nature?

Modeling the Status Quo: What the World Will Look Like in 2050

Working with peers at the University of Minnesota and 11 other universities, think tanks and nonprofits, we started by looking into what experts predict the world will look like in 2050 in terms of population growth and economic expansion. The most credible projections estimate that human population will increase from about 7 billion people today to 9.7 billion by 2050, and the global economy will be three times as large as it is today.

Our next step was to create a set of mathematical models analyzing how that growth will influence demand for food, energy and water.

We first asked how nature will be doing in 2050 if we just keep doing things the way we’ve been doing them. To answer this, we assumed that expanding croplands and pastures would be carved out of natural lands, the way they are today. And we didn’t put any new restrictions on the burning of fossil fuels. We called this the “business as usual” scenario. It’s the path we’re on today. On this current path, most of the world’s energy—about 76%—will come from burning fossil fuels. This will push the Earth’s average temperature up by about 5.8 degrees Fahrenheit, driving more severe weather, droughts, fires and other destructive patterns. That dirty energy also will expose half of the global population to dangerous levels of air pollution.

Dig into the Research

Explore the models behind the two paths to 2050 and download the published findings.

We first asked how nature will be doing in 2050 if we just keep doing things the way we’ve been doing them.

Meanwhile, the total amount of cropland will increase by about the size of the state of Colorado. Farms will also suffer from increasing water stress—meaning, simply, there won’t be enough water to easily supply agricultural needs and meet the water requirements of nearby cities, towns and wildlife.

In this business-as-usual scenario, fishing worldwide is left to its own devices and there are no additional measures in place to protect nature beyond what we have today. As a result, annual fish catches decline by 11% as fisheries are pushed to the brink by unsustainable practices. On land, we end up losing 257 million more hectares (about 10 Colorados) of our native forests and grasslands. Freshwater systems suffer, too, as droughts and water consumption, especially for agriculture, increase.

Overall, the 2050 predicted by this business-as-usual model is a world of scarcity, where neither nature nor people are thriving. The future is pretty grim under this scenario—it’s certainly not a world that any of us would want to live in.

We wanted to know, “does it really have to be this way?”

Modeling a More Sustainable 2050

Next, we used our model to test whether predicted growth by 2050 really requires such an outcome. In this version of the future, we allowed the global economy and the population to grow in exactly the same manner, but we adjusted variables to include more sustainability measures.

The 2050 predicted by the business-as-usual model is a world of scarcity, where neither nature nor people are thriving. The future is pretty grim under this scenario—it’s certainly not a world that any of us would want to live in.

We didn’t go crazy with the sustainability scenario. We didn’t assume that everyone was going to become a vegan or start driving hydrogen cell cars tomorrow. Instead, the model allowed people to continue doing the basic things we’re doing today, but to do them a little differently and to adopt some green technologies that already exist a little bit faster.

In this sustainable future, we limited global warming to 2.9 degrees Fahrenheit, which would force societies to reduce fossil fuel consumption to just 13% of total energy production. That means quickly adopting clean energy, which will increase the amount of land needed for wind, solar and other renewable energy development. But many of the new wind and solar plants can be built on land that has already been developed or degraded, such as rooftops and abandoned farm fields. This will help reduce the pressure to develop new energy sources in natural areas.

We also plotted out some changes in how food is produced. We assumed each country would still grow the same basic suite of crops, but to conserve water, fertilizer and land, we assumed that those crops would be planted in the growing regions where they are most suited. For example, in the United States we wouldn’t grow as much cotton in Arizona’s deserts or plant thirsty alfalfa in the driest parts of California’s San Joaquin Valley. We also assumed that successful fishery policies in use in some places today could be implemented all over the world.

Under this sustainability scenario, we required that countries meet the target of protecting 17% of each ecoregion, as set by the Convention on Biological Diversity. Only about half that much is likely to be protected under the business-as-usual scenario, so this is a direct win for nature.

What 2050 Could Look Like

The difference in this path to 2050 was striking. The number of additional people who will be exposed to dangerous levels of air pollution declines to just 7% of the planet’s population, or 656 million, compared with half the global population, or 4.85 billion people, in our business-as-usual scenario. Air pollution is already one of the top killers globally, so reducing this health risk is a big deal. Limiting climate change also reduces water scarcity and the frequency of destructive storms and wildfires, while staving off the projected widespread loss of plant and animal species (including my son’s favorite animal, the pika, that’s already losing its mountain habitat because of climate change).

In the sustainability scenario we still produce enough food for humanity, but we need less land and water to do it. So the total amount of land under agricultural production actually decreases by seven times the area of Colorado, and the number of cropland acres located in water-stressed basins declines by 30% compared with business as usual. Finally, we see a 26% increase in fish landings compared to 2010, once all fisheries are properly managed.

Although the land needed for wind and solar installations does grow substantially, we still keep over half of nearly all the world’s habitat types intact, and despite growth in cities, food production and energy needs, we end up with much more of the Earth’s surface left for nature than we would under the business-as-usual scenario.

Our modeling research let us answer our question. Yes, a world where people and nature thrive is entirely possible. But it’s not inevitable. Reaching this sustainable future will take hard work—and we need to get started immediately.

3 Sustainable Changes To Make Now

That’s where organizations like TNC come in. The Conservancy is working on strategies with governments and businesses to adopt sustainable measures, providing near- and long-term benefits to society as a whole. Our research shows there’s at least one path to a more sustainable world in 2050, and that major advances can be made if all parts of society focus their efforts on three changes.

First, we need to ramp up clean energy and site it on lands that have already been developed or degraded. In the Mojave Desert, for instance, TNC has identified some 1.4 million acres of former ranchlands, mines and other degraded areas that would be ideal for solar development. We need to do much more to remove the policy and economic barriers that still make a transition to clean energy hard. Technology is no longer the major limiting factor. We are.

The most critical action each of us can take is to support global leaders who have a plan for stopping climate change in our lifetimes.

Second, we need to grow more food using less land and water. One way to do that is by raising crops in places that are best suited for them. The Conservancy has been piloting this, too. In Arizona, TNC partnered with local farmers in the Verde River Valley to help them switch from growing thirsty crops like alfalfa and corn in the heat of the summer to growing malt barley, which can be harvested earlier in the season with less draw on precious water supplies. This is not a revolutionary change—the same farmers are still growing crops on the same land—but it can have a revolutionary impact.

Finally, we need to end overfishing. The policy tools to do so have been available for many years. What we must do now is get creative about how we get those policies adopted and enforced. One example I have been impressed by is our work in Mexico, where TNC is involved in looking at the root causes of what’s limiting good fishing behavior. The answer is unexpected: social security debt that many fishers have accrued by being off the books for many years. The Conservancy is exploring an ambitious partnership and a novel financial mechanism that could forgive this debt and persuade more fishers to report their catch and adopt sustainability measures.

The Most Important Change Now: Clean Energy

These are just a few examples from North America. There are many more from around the world. To achieve a more sustainable future, governments, industry and civic institutions everywhere will have to make substantial changes—and the most important one right now is to make a big investment in clean energy over the next 10 years. That’s a short timeline, but not an impossible one. I don’t like what I’m seeing yet, but I’m hopeful. It took the United States just a decade to reach the moon, once the country put its mind to the goal. And solar energy is already cheaper (nearly half the price per megawatt) than coal, and outpacing it for new capacity creation—something no one predicted would happen this fast.

We need to do much more to remove the policy and economic barriers that still make a transition to clean energy hard. Technology is no longer the major limiting factor. We are.

How will we get there? By far the most critical action each of us can take is to support global leaders who have a plan for stopping climate change in our lifetimes. Climate may not feel like the most pressing issue at times—what with the economy, health care, education and other issues taking up headlines. But the science is clear: We’ve got 10 years to get our emissions under control. That’s it.

We’ve already begun to see the impacts of climate change as more communities face a big uptick in the severity and frequency of droughts, floods, wildfires, hurricanes and other disasters. Much worse is on the way if we don’t make the needed changes. It’s been easy for most of us to sit back and expect that climate change will only affect someone else, far away. But that’s what the people in Arkansas, California, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Washington, the Dominican Republic, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Mexico, the United Kingdom, the Philippines, India and Mozambique thought. Every one of these places—and many more—have seen one of the worst disasters on its historic record in the past 10 years.

There are so many paths we could take to 2050. Clearly, some are better than others. We get to choose. Which one do you want to take?

Stand up for a More Sustainable Future

Join The Nature Conservancy as we call on leaders to support science-backed solutions.

Getting to Sustainability

Carbon Capture

The most powerful carbon capture technology is cheap, readily available and growing all around us: Trees and plants.

Energy Sprawl Solutions

We can ramp up clean energy worldwide and site it wisely to limit the effect on wildlife.

Fishing for Better Data

Electronic monitoring can make fisheries more sustainable.

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The future is vast – what does this mean for our own life?

If we manage to avoid a large catastrophe, we are living at the early beginnings of human history..

The point of this text is not to predict how many people will ever live. What I learned from writing this post is that our future is potentially very, very big.

If we keep each other safe – and protect ourselves from the risks that nature and we ourselves pose – we are only at the beginning of human history.

Our actions today impact those who will live in that vast future that is ahead of us.

• Our impact can be negative – for example when we degrade the environment that future generations will inherit from us, or when we develop technologies that create risks for them.
• But our impact can also be positive – by developing science that allows these future generations to live healthier lives, or by building a culture that enriches their lives in the way that our history enriches our lives.

The fact that our actions have an impact on the large number of people who will live after us should matter for how we think about our own lives. Those who ask themselves what they can do to act responsibly towards those who will live in the future call themselves 'longtermists'. Longtermism is the ethical view that we should act in ways that reduce the risks that endanger our future, and in ways that make the long-term future go well. 1

Before we look ahead, let’s look back. How many came before us? How many humans have ever lived?

It is not possible to answer this question precisely, but demographers Toshiko Kaneda and Carl Haub have tackled the question using the ​​historical knowledge that we do have.

There isn’t a particular moment in which humanity came into existence, as the transition from species to species is gradual. But if one wants to count all humans one has to make a decision about when the first humans lived. The two demographers used 200,000 years before today as this cutoff. 2

The demographers estimate that in these 200,000 years about 109 billion people have lived and died. 3

It is these 109 billion people we have to thank for the civilization that we live in. The languages we speak, the food we cook, the music we enjoy, the tools we use – what we know we learned from them. The houses we live in, the infrastructure we rely on, the grand achievements of architecture – much of what we see around us was built by them.

Our present

In 2022 7.95 billion of us are alive. Taken together with those who have died, about 117 billion humans have been born since the dawn of modern humankind.

This means that those of us who are alive now represent about 6.8% of all people who ever lived.

These numbers are hard to grasp. I tried to bring it into a visualization to put them into perspective. 4

It’s a giant hourglass. But instead of measuring the passage of time, it measures the passage of people.

Each grain of sand here represents 10 million people: each year 140 million babies are born. So we add 14 grains of sand to the hourglass. Every year, 60 million people die; this means 6 grains pass through the hourglass and are added to the large number of people who have died. 5

Our potential future

How many people will be born in the future?

We don’t know.

But we know one thing: The future is immense, and the universe will exist for trillions of years.

We can use this fact to get a sense of how many descendants we might have in that vast future ahead.

The number of future people depends on the size of the population at any point in time and how long each of them will live. But the most important factor will be how long humanity will exist.

Before we look at a range of very different potential futures, let’s start with a simple baseline.

We are mammals. One way to think about how long we might survive is to ask how long other mammals survive. It turns out that the lifespan of a typical mammalian species is about 1 million years. 6 Let’s think about a future in which humanity exists for 1 million years: 200,000 years are already behind us, so there would be 800,000 years still ahead.

Let’s consider a scenario in which the population stabilizes at 11 billion people (based on the UN projections for the end of this century) and in which the average life length rises to 88 years. 7

In such a future, there would be 100 trillion people alive over the next 800,000 years.

The chart visualizes this. Each triangle represents 7.95 billion people – it is the green triangle shape from the hourglass above and corresponds to the number of us alive today.

Each row represents the birth of half a trillion children. For 100 trillion births there are 200 rows.

If you disagree with the numbers I use in my scenario it is easy for you to see how different numbers would lead to different futures. Here are two examples:

• If you think the world population will stabilize at a level that’s 50% higher than in my calculation, then the number of future births will be 50% higher. The chart would be 50% wider. It would show the births of 150 trillion children.
• If you think the world population will have a size of just one billion people, then the chart would be only an eleventh as wide and would show 9.1 trillion births. 8

The chart shows how many children might be born in the next 800,000 years, a future in which humans survive for as long as a typical mammalian species.

But, of course, humanity is anything but “a typical mammalian species.”

One thing that sets us apart is that we now – and this is a recent development – have the power to destroy ourselves. Since the development of nuclear weapons, it is in our power to kill all of us who are alive and cause the end of human history .

But we are also different from all other animals in that we have the possibility to protect ourselves, even against the most extreme risks. The poor dinosaurs had no defense against the asteroid that wiped them out. We do. We already have ​​effective and well-funded asteroid-monitoring systems and, in case it becomes necessary, we might be able to deploy technology that protects us from an incoming asteroid. The development of powerful technology gives us the chance to survive for much longer than a typical mammalian species.

Our planet might remain habitable for roughly a billion years. 9 If we survive as long as the Earth stays habitable, and based on the scenario above, this would be a future in which 125 quadrillion children will be born. A quadrillion is a 1 followed by 15 zeros: 1,000,000,000,000,000.

A billion years is a thousand times longer than the million years depicted in this chart. Even very slow-moving changes will entirely transform our planet over such a long stretch of time: a billion years is a timespan in which the world will go through several supercontinent cycles – the world’s continents will collide and drift apart repeatedly; new mountain ranges will form and then erode, the oceans we are familiar with will disappear and new ones open up.

But if we protect ourselves well and find homes beyond Earth, the future could be much larger still.

The sun will exist for another 5 billion years. 10 If we stay alive for all this time, and based on the scenario above, this would be a future in which 625 quadrillion children will be born.

How can we imagine a number as large as 625 quadrillions? We can get back to our sand metaphor from the first chart.

We can imagine today’s world population as a patch of sand on a beach. It’s a tiny patch of sand that barely qualifies as a beach, just large enough for a single person to sit down. One square meter.

If the current world population was represented by a tiny beach of one square meter, then 625 quadrillion people would make up a beach that is 17 meters wide and 4600 kilometers long. A beach that stretches all across the USA, from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast. 11

And humans could survive for even longer.

What this future might look like is hard to imagine. Just as it was hard to imagine, even quite recently, what today might look like. “This present moment used to be the unimaginable future,” as Stewart Brand put it.

Our responsibility is vast

A catastrophe that ends human history would destroy the vast future that humanity would otherwise have.

And it would be horrific for those who will be alive at that time.

The people who live then will be just as real as you or me. They will exist, they just don’t exist yet. They will feel the sun on their skin and they will enjoy a swim in the sea. They will have the same hopes, they will feel the same pain.

‘Longtermism’ is the idea that people who live in the future matter morally just as much as those of us who are alive today. 12 When we ask ourselves what we should do to make the world a better place, a longtermist does not only consider what we can do to help those around us right now, but also what we can do for those who come after us. The main point of this text – that humanity’s potential future is vast – matters greatly to longtermists. The key moral question of longtermism is ‘what can we do to improve the world’s long-term prospects?’.

In some ways, many of us are already longtermists. The responsibility we have for future generations is why so many work to reduce the risks from climate change and environmental destruction.

But in other ways, we pay only little attention to future risks. In the same way that we work to reduce the risks from climate change, we should pay attention to a wider range of potentially even larger risks and reduce them.

I am definitely frightened of these catastrophic and existential risks. 13 In addition to nuclear weapons, there are two other major risks that worry me greatly: Pandemics, especially from engineered pathogens, and artificial intelligence technology. These technologies could lead to large catastrophes, either by someone using them as weapons or even unintentionally as a consequence of accidents. 14

Large risks are not only a problem in the future — they are a reality now

We don’t have to think about people who live billions of years in the future to see our responsibilities. The majority of today’s children can expect to see the next century. Some of our grandchildren might live long enough to see the 23rd century. A catastrophe in the next decades would be horrific for people very close to us.

The focus of this text is the long-term future, but this shouldn’t give the impression that the risks we are facing are confined to the future. Several large risks that could lead to unprecedented disasters are already with us now. The use of the nuclear weapons that exist at this moment would kill millions immediately and billions in the ‘nuclear winter’ that follows (see my post on nuclear weapons). Not enough people have registered how the situation we are in has changed. AI capabilities and biotechnology have developed rapidly and are no longer science fiction; they are posing risks to those of us who are alive today. 15

Similarly, this text focuses mostly on the loss of human lives, but there would be other losses too: nuclear war would devastate nature and the world’s wildlife; existential catastrophes would destroy our culture, our civilization.

The point is that even if we only consider the impact of these risks on the present generation and only consider the potential loss of lives, they’re among the most pressing issues of our time. This is much more the case if we consider their impact beyond mortality and their impact on future generations.

The reduction of existential risks is one of the most important tasks of our time, yet it is extremely neglected

The current pandemic has made it clear how badly the world has neglected pandemic preparedness. This illustrates a more general point. By reducing the risk of the catastrophes which would endanger our entire future – for example, the very worst possible pandemics – we would also reduce the risk of smaller, yet still terrible, disasters, such as COVID-19.

As a society, we spend only little attention, money, and effort on the risks that imperil our future. Only very few are even thinking about these risks, when in fact these are problems that should be central to our culture. The unprecedented power of today’s technology requires unprecedented responsibility.

Technological development made the high living standards of our time possible . I believe that a considerable share of the fruits of this growth should be spent on reducing the risks and negative consequences of particular technologies.

More researchers should be able to study these risks and how we can reduce them. I would love to see more artists who convey the importance of the vast future in their work. And crucially I think it needs competent political work. I imagine that one day countries will have ministries for the reduction of catastrophic and existential risks and some of the world’s most important institutions will be dedicated to the far-sighted work that protects humanity.

It will be too late to react once the worst has happened. This means we have to be proactive; we have to see the threats now.

The current situation in which these risks are hardly receiving any attention is frightening and depressing. But it is also a large opportunity. Because these risks are so very neglected, a career dedicated to the reduction of these risks is likely among the best opportunities that you have if you want to make the world a better place.

Our opportunities are vast too

So far I’ve only spoken about the risks that we face. But our large future means that there are large opportunities too.

Problems are solvable. This is for me the most important insight that I learned from writing Our World in Data over the last decade.

Compared to the vast future ahead, the two centuries shown in this chart here are only a brief episode of human history. But even in such a short period, we have made substantial progress against many large problems.

Given enough time we can end the horrors of today. Poverty is not inevitable; we can achieve a future where people are not suffering from scarcity. Diseases that are incurable today might be curable in just a few generations; we already have an amazing track record in improving people’s health . And we can achieve a world in which we stop damaging the environment and achieve a future in which the world’s wildlife flourishes .

Our children and grandchildren can continue the progress we are making, and they may create art and build a society more beautiful than we can even imagine.

The point of this text was to see that the future is big. If we keep each other safe the huge majority of humans who will ever live will live in the future.

And this requires us to be more careful and considerate than we currently are. Just as we look back on the heroes who achieved what we enjoy today, those who come after us will remember what we did for them. We will be the ancestors of a very large number of people. Let’s make sure we are good ancestors.

For this, we need to take the risks we are facing more seriously. The risks we are already facing are high. Giving this reality the attention it deserves is the first step, and only very few have taken it. The next step will be to identify what we can do to reduce these risks and then set about doing that.

Let’s also see the opportunity that we have. Those who came before us left us a much better world; we can do the same for the many who come after us.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Charlie Giattino, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, Anders Sandberg, Edouard Mathieu, Hannah Ritchie, and Will MacAskill for their very helpful comments on this essay.

The text and title were last updated on August 10, 2022.

Recommendations on what to read on our long-run future and the risk of existential catastrophes

There are some excellent books and resources:

• On longtermism and the vast future ahead of us I recommend ‘What We Owe The Future’, the new book by philosopher Will MacAskill.
• For a broad overview of existential risks and how we can reduce them, I recommend Toby Ord’s extraordinary book ‘ The Precipice ’. It is one of the most important books I have read.
• On the risks and opportunities of artificial intelligence, I recommend Brian Christian’s book ‘ The Alignment Problem – Machine Learning and Human Values ’.
• The research team of the non-profit “80,000 Hours” focuses on the question of what you can do with your career to make the world a better place, the reduction of large risks is one of their key recommendations. A starting point on existential risk reduction is this overview written by Benjamin Todd.
• Other overviews of longtermism include its Wikipedia page , this BBC article , and this explainer by Fin Moorhouse . Some objections to longtermist ideas are discussed in this essay .

The future will not just happen to us, it is we who create the world we will live in. Isaac Asimov saw it like this: 16

“There are no catastrophes that loom before us which cannot be avoided; there is nothing that threatens us with imminent destruction in such a fashion that we are helpless to do something about it. If we behave rationally and humanely; if we concentrate coolly on the problems that face all of humanity, rather than emotionally on such nineteenth-century matters as national security and local pride; if we recognize that it is not one’s neighbors who are the enemy, but misery, ignorance, and the cold indifference of natural law—then we can solve all the problems that face us. We can deliberately choose to have no catastrophes at all.” – Isaac Asimov

Continue reading on Our World in Data:

Nuclear weapons: Why reducing the risk of nuclear war should be a key concern of our generation

Appendix to ‘ the future is vast’, how many people have ever lived.

My main data source is the long-run estimate by demographers Toshiko Kaneda and Carl Haub (reference below).

From 200,000 BCE until 2020 they calculate that 116,761,402,413 people were born. 7,772,850,162 of these people were alive in 2020.

Of course the error margins around both of these numbers – especially the historical one – are large, which Kaneda and Haub clearly acknowledge. I’m not using their point estimates – neither in the text nor in the chart – because I think that these estimates, down to the individual person, would suggest a wrong sense of precision.

Older estimates of how many people have ever lived were published by Goldberg (1983) and Deevey (1960). They arrived at lower estimates – of 55 billion and 81 billion respectively. Previously it was thought that modern humans emerged only much later and earlier estimates assumed better health conditions, i.e. lower mortality, of people in the distant past.

I believe the more recent work by Kaneda and Haub is the best estimate that is available. But the large uncertainties and the wide range of different estimates that were published in recent decades should be emphasised.

• Toshiko Kaneda and Carl Haub (2021) – How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth? . Published by the Population Reference Bureau.
• Goldberg (1983) – How many people have ever lived? In Probability in Social Science .
• Deevey (1960) – The Human Population. In Scientific American .

My update of Kaneda and Haub:

Kaneda and Haub published estimates up to mid-2020.

I updated the figures from Kaneda and Haub for mid-2022 by adding the births in the following 2 years. According to the UN there were 139,975,303 births in 2020 and 139,821,086 births in 2021 (these were estimates published before the pandemic and are not precise observations, but the imprecision of these estimates is small relative to the large uncertainties in the other relevant figures).

This means the total number of people ever born up to 2022 is 116,761,402,413 + 139,975,303+139,821,086 = 117,041,198,802 births

According to the UN 7,953,952,577 people are alive in 2022.

People who died between 200,000 BCE and 2022: 116,921,736,195 - 7,953,952,577 = 108,967,783,618 deaths

Share of people alive today among all people ever born: (7,953,952,577 / 117,041,198,802) * 100 = 6.8%

Calculations for drawing the hourglass visualization: Humanity’s past and present in grains of sand

Each grain of sand represents 10 million people.

Grains to represent today’s population : 7,953,952,577 / 10,000,000 = 795 grains

Grains to represent the dead: 108,967,783,618/ 10,000,000 = 10,897 grains (to not suggest a false sense of certainty around this number I rounded it to 10,900 grains in the visualization).

How large would humanity’s future be if we survived as long as a typical mammal?

The scenario shown in the chart on humanity’s potential future:.

Estimates for the average lifespan of mammalian species: Estimates for the average lifespan of mammalian species range from 0.6 Million years (Barnovsky et al, 2011) to 1.7 million years (Foote and Rap 1996).

As a rough midpoint between these two estimates I follow Toby Ord and use 1 million years.

Remaining length of humanity’s existence: As about 200,000 years of history are already behind us we would have close to 800,000 years left.

Size of humanity’s population: According to the UN projections , the global population will continue to increase for the rest of this century, but by the end of the century population growth will be close to zero. The UN demographers expect the world population then to be 10.9 billion people. I’m assuming that population growth continues a bit further into the 22nd century and will then stabilize at 11 billion people.

As emphasized throughout the text I am thinking of this as an illustrative scenario that makes it possible to understand the dimensions we are concerned with. It is not a prediction and as with all scenarios about the far distant future, the reality could turn out to be very different; population growth might continue further or the world population could decline.

Life expectancy in the future: The UN demographers project that many countries will have life expectancies higher than 90 years by the end of the century. The world average life expectancy is projected to be 82 years then. If we assume that the rest of the world population can catch up to the healthiest countries in the period after 2100, then an average life expectancy of more than 90 or 100 years is possible (especially for the more distant future, extremely long life expectancies are imaginable).

I assume a life expectancy of 88 years in my projection. This is higher than the projected global average, but lower than the life expectancies projected for the best-off countries. It is certainly a rather conservative estimate if we consider that we could achieve a future in which health continues to improve.

So these are my assumptions for this scenario:

• 800,000 years remaining for our species
• 11,000,000,000 people living at any one time
• 88 years of life expected for the average person

Taking this together, how many children will ever be born after the year 2022?

(800,000 years / 88 years per person) * 11,000,000,000 people =

100,000,000,000,000 people =

100 trillion people will be born in the next 800,000 years

When will the 1000th generation be born?

In the second chart I added this information as an annotation. One has to make several assumptions to estimate this point in time. Here are my assumptions:

In a world in which the population is stable, every 2 people have on average 2 children who live long enough to have children themselves. This would mean that within each 88 year period there will be as many births as there are people.

For simplicity we can assume that one generation is 22 years long (i.e., on average future people have children when they are 22 years old). This is a nice assumption because it means that each generation is a quarter as long as the life length of people in this scenario.

In this world each generation would be a cohort of 11 billion / 4 = 2.75 billion people.

This means that the 1000th generation from today would be born in 22,000 years from today. (This isn’t exactly correct because there will be population growth in the next century, i.e. it would take a little longer than 22,000 years.)

In these 1000 generations there will be 2.75 billion * 1000 = 2,750 billion births.

That means the number of births in the next 1000 generations would be 346-times larger than today’s world population (2,750 billion / 7.95 billion = 345.9).

How long will it take until as many babies are born as there are people today?

In the second chart I added this information as an annotation.

According to the UN projections there will be 8,036,352,977 children born between 2022 and 2079. This means that there will be as many children born in the next 57 years as there are people alive today.

Calculations for the ‘triangles-chart’:

Humanity’s past, present and future in multiples of each other.

The future in multiples of all people ever: 100,000,000,000,000 / 117,000,000,000 = 855-times

The future in multiples of the present: 100,000,000,000,000 / 7,953,952,577 = 12,572-times

The past in multiples of the present:

(117,041,198,802 - 7,953,952,577) / 7,953,952,577 = 13.7 = rounded to 14

One trillion in multiples of the present: 1,000,000,000,000 / 7,953,952,577 = 125.724 = rounded to 126 (This is what I use as the number of triangles per row.)

The number of future births over the next 5 billion years in multiples of today’s population:

625 quadrillion people would be born in this scenario in the next 5 billion years: 625,000,000,000,000,000 people

People alive in 2022: 7,953,952,577 people

625,000,000,000,000,000 / 7,953,952,577 = 78,577,285

How large could humanity’s future be if we survived for even longer than a typical mammal?

1.5 million years remaining: if homo sapiens survives as long as homo erectus.

How long has Homo Erectus existed?

Homo erectus is an extinct species of archaic humans. It is  among the first recognizable members of the genus Homo. It was also the first human ancestor to spread throughout Eurasia,

Homo erectus survived for at least 1.7 million years. The oldest fossils regarded as Homo Erectus are the Dmanisi specimens from present-day Georgia, dated to 1.8 million years ago (Lordkipanidze et al, 2006). The most recent fossils are from present-day Indonesia, and have been dated to 0.1 million years ago (Yokohama et al., 2008).

How large was humanity’s future if we survived as long as Homo erectus?

If we – Homo sapiens – survive as long as Homo erectus we would have 1.5 million years left. Our future would be almost twice as large as shown in the chart in the main text.

Almost 190 trillion children would be born into this world.

This is the calculation:

• 1,500,000 years
• 11,000,000,000 people
• And the average person lives for 88 years

(1,500,000 years / 88 years per person) * 11,000,000,000 people =

187,500,000,000,000 people =

187.5 trillion people would be born in the next 1.5 million years

[Alternatively you could see this by considering that 1,500,000 years is 1.875-times longer than 800,000 years.]

1 billion years: If Homo sapiens survives as long as the earth is habitable

How long will Earth remain habitable? How long will our sun exist?

Astrophysicist Jillian Scudder, Anders Sandberg, and Toby Ord suggest that our planet will remain habitable for roughly a billion years.

• Toby Ord’s ‘The Precipice’, especially footnote 40 in the first chapter.
• Jillian Scudder (2015) – The sun won’t die for 5 billion years, so why do humans have only 1 billion years left on Earth?
• Anders Sandberg’s text for the BBC: The greatest long-term threats facing humanity . He also explains what will happen when and why.

Based on the scenario above this would be a future in which 125 quadrillion children will be born.

• 1,000,000,000 years

(1,000,000,000 years / 88 years per person) * 11,000,000,000 people =(1,000,000,000 / 88) * 11,000,000,000 = 125,000,000,000,000,000 people = 125 quadrillion people would be born in this scenario in the next billion years.

A quadrillion is a one followed by 15 zeros (1,000,000,000,000,000).

125 quadrillion is 125 thousand trillion people (According to the short scale ).

5 billion years – as long as the sun exists

If humanity survived for as long as the sun exists, 5 billion years.

• 5,000,000,000 years

(5,000,000,000 years / 88 years per person) * 11,000,000,000 people =625,000,000,000,000,000 people =

625 quadrillion people would be born in this scenario in the next 5 billion years.

625 quadrillion is 625 thousand trillion people.

How to imagine 625 quadrillion births?

625 quadrillion relative to 100 trillion

Over the next 5 billion years: 625 quadrillion = 625,000,000,000,000,000

Over the next 800,000 years: 100 trillion = 100,000,000,000,000

625,000,000,000,000,000 / 100,000,000,000,000 = 6,250

Two ways to illustrate this:

• The chart would not fit on one page, but would need 6,250 pages.
• If the chart for the 100 trillion people is 30 cm high, then a chart that shows the future that is 6250-times as long would be 62.5 metres high.

625 quadrillion relative to today’s population

The ratio between today’s world population and the future world population:

The ratio between future people and all people alive today would be 78.6 million to one.

78,577,285 meter are 78,577 kilometer

Making the beach 17 meter wide means it would be 4,622km long (78,577/17). These are 2872 miles.

On longtermism see William MacAskill (2022) – ‘ What We Owe The Future ’ and literature referenced in the later sections and at the end of this text.

One could also choose a much earlier point in time. Recent research from the Jebel Irhoud site in modern-day Morocco suggests that it could be as early as 315,000 BCE. See: Ewan Callaway (2017) – ‘Oldest Homo sapiens fossil claim rewrites our species' history ’. Nature. doi:10.1038/nature.2017.22114.

But I should also note that for the estimates of the total number of total people it does not matter very substantially. This is because the population size of our species was very low in those early days, and at several times our species was close to extinction.

The majority of them lived very short lives: about one in two children died in the past. When conditions are so very poor and children die so quickly then the birth rate has to be extremely high to keep humanity alive; Kaneda and Haub assume a birth rate of 80 births per 1000 people per year for most of humanity’s history (up to the year 1 CE). That is a rate of births that is about 8-times higher than in a typical high-income country and more than twice as high as in the poorest countries today (see the map ). The past was a very different place.

As noted in this visualization, this is an updated adaptation of a 2013 visualization by Oliver Uberti. You find it on his website . I also recommend having a look at his books, which he co-authored with James Cheshire ; they are beautiful data visualization books.

The cited numbers are from the UN’s demographic projection published in the year 2019 for the year 2022 (see here ). With the ongoing COVID pandemic the number of deaths is likely going to be higher than expected. You can track ‘excess deaths’ during the pandemic here . In 2021 excess deaths were possibly in the range of 10 million, if the same should be true in 2022 the chart should show 7 instead of 6 grains passing through the hourglass.

All references and calculations are in the Appendix below.

To not clutter this post with footnotes, I have put all my sources and all calculations in a long appendix below this post.

1 billion is one-eleventh of 11 billion. And 9.1 trillion is one-eleventh of 100 trillion.

All references and all calculations are in the Appendix below.

All sources and calculations are in the Appendix.

Here is the calculation:

The ratio between 625 quadrillions and the current world population is 78.6 million to one.

[625,000,000,000,000,000 / 7,953,952,577 = 78,577,285]

Making the beach 17 meters wide means it is 4,622km long (78,577/17).

These are 2872 miles.

For an introduction to longtermism read Benjamin Todd (2017) – Why our impact in millions of years could be what most matters .

Existential risks are those that can cause human extinction or can permanently curtail humanity's potential so that survivors would not have sufficient means to recover.

Catastrophic risks are similar in that they are large global risks that could kill billions of people, but they retain the possibility of recovery.

See for example Future of Life Institute Existential Risks .

AI technology could have the power to transform our world in undesirable ways, either unintentionally or intentionally as a weapon. On the risks – and opportunities of artificial intelligence – I recommend Brian Christian’s book ‘ The Alignment Problem – Machine Learning and Human Values ’.

On pandemics – and Global Catastrophic Biological Risks more broadly – I recommend the relatively brief online text ‘ Reducing global catastrophic biological risks ’ written by Gregory Lewis for 80,000 Hours. In the same publication, you also find a discussion of the risks from extreme climate change: Climate change authored by Benjamin Hilton.

I consider the four risks that I mentioned – nuclear weapons, climate change, and especially pandemics and AI – to be the most dangerous known risks, but unfortunately these are not the only risks. There are several other risks that could potentially lead to large catastrophes. For a broader discussion of existential risks I recommend The Precipice by Toby Ord.

See the references in the footnote before the previous one.

“Isaac Asimov (1979) – A Choice of Catastrophes: The Disasters that Threaten Our World.

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5 Shock Events to the World That Are Already in Sight

I n 2023, we have witnessed plenty of shock events: consider, for instance, Hamas’ attack on Israel and Israel’s subsequent siege on Gaza, Chinese " spy balloons, ” the assassination of Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, and even UFOs that may be extraterrestrial . Shock events are risks—or threats to stability—that, while they are in the realm of possibility, are very hard to predict. That said, attempting to determine what they are can serve as a useful tool to help decision makers, from policymakers and investors to businesses and nonprofits, prepare for unexpected challenges in the future.

Based on a four-year research project with graduate students in international relations at New York University where I teach and experts at consultancy Wikistrat where I’m a lead analyst, we leveraged open source information and our collective work expertise to crowdsource geopolitical, political, economic, and social shock events that may rock our post-pandemic world by 2025.

Here are five to consider:

A billionaire “hacks” the planet

2022’s COP27 reminded us that we will fail to meet our 1.5C target, and in truth, not much changed at COP28 in December 2023. Indeed, the Loss and Damage Fund—an emergency program announced in 2022 to help countries prepare for the impacts of climate change—was “historic.” But the commitments are not where we need them to be: only 700 million was pledged this year when an estimated 400 billion a year is needed.

Leaders at COP28 called for a just "transition away" from fossil fuels by 2050—yet governments continue to spend billions to support that industry. Countries also might need 300 billion a year in adaptation financing, according to the UN , which wasn’t given sufficient attention at COP28. All signs point to the fact that we should expect more fossil fuel usage, climate events, and community displacement in the years to come.

Read More: Was COP28 a Success or Flop? Depends Who You Ask

Without sufficient climate action, the potentiality of a private actor, particularly a billionaire, to take matters into their own hands by “hacking” the planet is rising. One such strategy is solar geoengineering . U.S.-based startup Make Sunsets , for instance, has already started this in a minor way, with reflective clouds released into the stratosphere that reflect the sun's rays and cool the planet. But it would be worth it, then, for us to keep an eye out for a sole private investor to back this type of initiative or even another cooling approach in a major way. George Soros, for one, has already endorsed a similar cause in the Arctic.

Solar geoengineering is controversial (the U.S . and EU are already considering regulation of the practice) and could even lead to conflict , if, for instance, one country attempts it and it has a spillover effect on its neighbor—or even the world. Yet, billionaire-backed climate tech like solar geoengineering seems plausible by 2025 and inevitable this decade.

Eco-terrorism makes an ugly comeback

Another high probability risk if governments fail to stop fossil fuels is more climate action—but not just in terms of protests. It might become more violent in nature. Of course, we can expect more youth-driven activist protests against governments and oil firms, as well as more pushback against ESG investing and more activist investors in boardrooms pressuring companies to go green. We will also see more lawsuits against local governments (similarly to what a group of young people did this August when they sued Montana for their climate impacts) and oil companies for climate damages (like California and the UN attempted to do in May ) .

The shock event here, however, would be if people so devastated by a massive climate event form a violent uprising against climate-inactive governments or oil companies . Yes, eco-terrorism has some historical precedent with groups like the Earth Liberation Front. But it’s plausible that a new form of militant activism emerges as citizen frustration grows. This could also create a dangerous cycle of violence as climate deniers and eco-terrorists clash, while legitimate activists may be scapegoated and targeted by governments.

The U.S. dollar is replaced in international trade

The dollar is a key marker (and weapon ) of American hegemonic power. While it’s unlikely to be replaced as the global reserve currency, its role in international trade is definitely under attack. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, there were recurrent discussions of a new currency proposed by intergovernmental organization BRICS, and calls by China to use its own currency in more trade. Yet it had limited traction.

This sentiment has come back with a vengeance in our post-pandemic world. At South Africa's 2023 BRICS Summit , discussions of a new currency resurfaced as this China-driven, anti-Western initiative found enthusiastic new members like Argentina, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Saudi Arabia . More oil trade has already moved away from the dollar, with China and India leveraging their own currencies. But now non-oil trade is also looking beyond the dollar: for instance, the UAE and Sri Lanka are exploring rupee transactions with India.

Regional currencies may still be perceived as a pipe dream, but the momentum for them is also building in Latin America , South East Asia , and Africa ; and there’s always a chance that cryptocurrencies make a comeback or central bank digital currencies finally cement their status in international finance. As a result, the shock would come when more trade is done in other currencies relative to the U.S. dollar; 2025 is likely too soon but this trend will evolve this decade, eroding U.S. financial power by 2030.

AI sparks more conflict

We’ve all heard the shocking predictions from tech leaders like Sam Altman and intellectuals like Yuval Noah Harari : AI, if not regulated, has the potential to destroy humanity. But while it’s certainly not possible by 2025, there is legitimate concern about AI tools triggering war.

It could be a deep fake video that accelerates tensions between two longtime rival countries, or cyberattacks that ensure a presidential run, or simply the use of AI weapons that many researchers and industry leaders have warned could lead to World War 3. This is why technologists like Inflection’s Mustafa Suleyman are calling for regulation now—before negative actors find a way to leverage it for their cause.

Read More: How We Can Have AI Progress Without Sacrificing Safety or Democracy

We also may see conflict within societies. The reality is that much of the population will lose our jobs to automation, generative AI, and whatever AI trend is next. It’s estimated that 85 million jobs will be lost to AI worldwide by 2025, according to a 2020 World Economic Forum report . It's fair to assume that governments will fail to prepare all of us to immediately fit into this new AI-driven economy—at least not by 2025. As a result, many may lose our occupational identity .

We must look for more unexpected outbursts of anti-tech activity. It could be anti-tech protests that are destabilizing for our societies, but it could also be direct attacks on tech firms or tech leaders themselves, who are so public about the change that is upon us but simply can’t save everyone from unemployment.

Trump returns to the U.S. presidency

In November 2023, most prediction markets still envisioned an incumbent President Joe Biden win, but they are currently favoring former President Donald Trump’s return—though so far it’s too close to tell, according to some polls . A lot can happen between now and November 2024 and polls can be wrong. But at this stage, it is impossible to ignore the fact that President Biden’s poll numbers are weakening, Trump has raised millions for his campaign, his indictments appear to have made him more popular among his voters and his party. In fact, a November 2023 New York Times /Siena College poll reveals he has the edge in five battleground states.

Short of him being convicted before the election, being disqualified from more ballots, or another Republican (or independent) candidate rising to the occasion, it is hard to see his momentum slowing down. The concern about Biden’s health (and polls reaffirming this) further support a Republican win. Trump’s return seems the most plausible of these shocks by 2025—and the most dangerous. It will mean a resurgence in domestic and global instability. For instance, in the U.S., hate crimes have the potential to surge as far right extremists become emboldened by Trump, who recently said he would expel pro-Hamas immigrants at a rally.

Globally, major risks like climate change would be put on the back burner such that climate disasters would become more frequent, creating more climate refugees and conflict. He would stop aid to Ukraine, which would dramatically change the outcome of the Ukrainian-Russian war; he would battle it out with China over Taiwan; he would reject Gazan refugees in support of Israel, and so on. Another Trump presidency would further destabilize our world order. It’s clear that our post-pandemic world is ultimately being shaped by wars, climate challenges, and new technologies—and yet it may increasingly be driven by such unexpected shock events, too. Why is this the case? One possible, overarching reason is that we have moved on from a post-Cold War era that is no longer exclusively shaped by enduring global leadership, democratic ideals, globalization, and liberal values. Instead, it is shaped by the lack of consensus about our world order more than anything else.

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The world in 2065: what do social scientists think the future holds?

A writing competition held by the Economic and Social Research Council asked PhD students to look 50 years into the future. Here are the winning pieces

Ignorant as I am, I don’t think I’d ever fully appreciated the breadth of disciplines involved in social science until I was asked to help judge the Economic and Social Research Council’s (ESRC) writing competition this year.

Held in conjunction with academic publisher Sage , and celebrating the ESRC’s 50th anniversary, the competition invited ESRC-funded PhD students from across the UK to use their creative and analytical skills and write a prediction of impact the social sciences and current research will have in 2065.

Science communication is currently something of a buzz phrase in the academic world, so it was particularly interesting to see how this crop of up-and-coming scientists set about encapsulating their hopes and fears for their disciplines over the next 50 years in under 800 words.

The overall winner was James Fletcher, and entries by Gioia Barnbrook and Josephine Go Jefferies were highly commended. All three winning entries are below; they’re very different in tone, style and focus. They make thought-provoking reading and I hope you enjoy them as much as I and my fellow judges did. They are reproduced here exactly as they were submitted to the judging panel.

CITY Inc. by James Fletcher

On February 12 th 2015, I moved to London to begin my PhD. During my subsequent 50 years as a sociologist studying and living in them, cities have undergone momentous transitions. This brief history charts their recent prosperity through the story of London, a tale of decentralisation enabling visionary corporate finance and social science to recast the physical and socioeconomic architecture of cities.

I arrived in London just as the social sciences were beginning to develop the approaches that would ensure their success, focussing on practical impact, interdisciplinary collaboration and corporate involvement. I moved into the borough of Tower Hamlets, London’s economic powerhouse, with an economy worth £6billion annually and a young populace; more of whom had been born in Bangladesh than the UK. This wealth production, youth and diversity was representative of London more generally. Conversely, the rest of the UK had a faltering economy and an ageing conservative population with increasing immigration concerns. Thus, London and the UK were diverging. 2015 also saw unprecedented election gains for the Scottish National Party, triggering increased devolvement to Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and some cities. Strong SNP election performances in 2020 and 2025 forced the government to offer federalisation in 2027 to avoid a referendum on secession. Eventually, on December 12 th 2042, England, Wales and Northern Ireland were also federalised, mirroring a global decentralisation trend.

Amidst decentralisation, London continued to grow, steadily gaining devolved powers. As 2043 arrived, the city into which I had moved 28 years previously was unrecognisable. From the 900m high tower in which I now lived, I surveyed a transforming cityscape, embracing recent technological developments. In 2022, Saudi Arabia completed Kingdom Tower, the world’s first kilometre high building. Besides technological innovation, it also had profound cultural implications; a range of social science consultants having pioneered community creation models. Under their guidance, its 5.5million ft 2 of floor space offered offices, malls, accommodation and even artificial forests, stimulating a self-contained society with a culture of independence. Twelve years and four towers later, Kingdom City was a thriving metropolis of 2.1 million people. It represented a triumph for private finance and social science collaboration, setting a precedent for socially conscious corporation rule with minimal state involvement. Kingdom City prompted numerous equivalent developments throughout the Middle East and Asia in the late 2030s; social theory informed, self-contained, and privately administered. These express-cities dealt with population problems and boosted economies with ease, vindicating social planning.

Meanwhile, London had developed an immense housing crisis; its ballooning population shackled by construction regulation. London was desperate to emulate aforementioned eastern successes. It turned to its collection of world leading institutions, representing internationally renowned social psychologists, human geographers and many more, to plan ground-breaking reinvention. Throughout the 2040s, backed by multinational finance, London set about implementing their vision. Whilst primarily based around sociological community-seeding-housing ideas, this also facilitated a transport revolution. London already scorned cars, championing cycling and enjoying an unrivalled underground system following four Crossrail projects. Driverless electric vehicles had been increasingly present since the mid-2020s as battery technology improved. By the mid-30s, London proposed banning all human-driven petrol-fuelled vehicles, but the UK government was opposed; concerned that decreased fuel imports might jeopardise Gulf State relations. By the early-2040s, London was powerful enough to press ahead. Again the social sciences, bolstered by increasingly successful corporate ventures into city design, were instrumental in infrastructure planning, embedding the belief that public and corporate desires for liveability and efficiency were compatible. Resultantly, in 2053, the last human drove through the city. Simultaneously, influential internet scholars drove complete 5G rollout, providing unparalleled internet access. Contrastingly, large parts of the rest of the UK lacked 4G, creating a national digital divide. The scene was now set for divorce. In 2056 the government accepted a federalisation referendum. On May 4 th 2058, London voted to become the UK’s fifth state.

Today, whilst technically federalised, London is essentially sovereign. Since the early-50s, state involvement has been nominal, particularly following parliament’s relocation to Manchester. London, like many 20 th century capitals, now more closely resembles the Martian colonies than the nation surrounding it. These old nation states, largely unaltered from 2015, are increasingly inferior, especially as Space X’s mines and hydroponic innovations further improve city living standards. Social science’s guidance of private capital has enabled Jakarta, Doha and many more to smoothly transcend state structures, each now existing as a well-organised corporate amalgamation. This change is evident in my current work. Whilst trickledown economics and stringent immigration controls have all but ended real-term deprivation, inequality remains entrenched. Employed by London Inc., who are concerned by talent prevention, I am currently developing proposals to stimulate social mobility. This is just one example of how corporate-social science synergy is cultivating prosperous city societies in 2065.

The World in 2065: A rapidly changing climate and a renewed social science by Gioia Barnbrook

It is one of the most iconic visual representations of climate change: a lone polar bear stands on a thin ice floe, surrounded by a sea so grey it reaches the horizon and simply merges with the sky. In some variations the polar bear perches instead on rocks, its fur scraggly and muddy, standing protectively over cubs. Either way, the intended impact is the same; the picture tells us that these are the victims of the melting Arctic. It is rarer, at the moment at least, to see images of the human cost of climate change. We see its impacts primarily in terms of the natural world, and rarely think in terms of social costs. Communities in the Arctic, and the researchers who work alongside them, are already noticing drastic changes in their environment: rising temperatures are affecting sea ice and making traditional subsistence hunting activities far more precarious and dangerous; people have died travelling by snowmobile across previously solid ice that rising temperatures have made fragile. At the other extreme, record high temperatures across parts of Europe, Asia and the Middle East have led to fatalities. At present we in the UK are protected by our location, but we know from past experience that the intricacies of global markets, resource trading and politics mean that difficulties in other parts of the world have global impact. What happens in any one part of the world can have global ramifications.

If, for the moment, we still think primarily in terms of the natural consequences of climate change, in 2065 it will be impossible to ignore its social and humanitarian impacts: food and water shortages, mass migration and resource wars seem likely, coupled with large-scale political and economic unrest. Perhaps it is fitting that some of the most popular books and films of the last decade have been set in dystopian futures. Dreams of tomorrow, once populated by hover-boards, flying cars and holidays to Mars, now seem far less hopeful: they no longer come to us in the technicolour joy of the sixties and seventies, but in a muted, washed-out sepia.

From this vantage point, the future looks decidedly bleak, and we may well wonder what use we will have for the social sciences in a world of catastrophic environmental decline and change.

This would be a mistake. The social sciences are unique in their ability to enable us to understand the complexity of the conditions, networks and interconnections that influence human behaviour, and can operate on both the large and small scale. This information will be essential in aiding governments, NGOs and policy-makers with developing appropriate responses to the humanitarian and social crises climate change will bring. Those social sciences that emphasise long-term qualitative research, such as my own discipline of anthropology, will be of particular value in developing regional and group-specific responses. Anthropologists working in the Canadian Arctic and sub-arctic have already begun to work collaboratively with indigenous communities and scientific researchers in documenting the impacts of climate change and developing possible resilience and adaptation strategies. These studies also show how important interdisciplinary approaches are that involve local, scientific and social scientific perspectives: in the future we will be struggling with issues that have both natural and social causes and impacts, and we will need research that can synthesise these perspectives. Sustained ethnographic research, surveys and statistical modelling will help us to develop inter-disciplinary approaches that can do justice to the complexity of these challenges. In 2065 we will need the social sciences more than ever before.

They know how much oxygen I breathe, which is fine by me by Josephine Go Jefferies

As they say: High! Welcome to the Scafell Pioneering Neighbourhood! Did you enjoy the view of the algae farm terraces on your way up? They’re here to keep us comfortable, rather than for survival per se, although thinking about it, they do provide mitochondrial biofuel to maintain vast server systems, so you could argue they are, in fact, for survival.

So far from sea level, we get most of our potable water through our aspiration of the atmosphere aided by hyaluronic acid supplements. We are clean air fanatics up here, and it’s nice to recycle and know that the quality you put in is what you get out in water terms.

Your visit is sponsored by our historic brigade of mountain rescue volunteers – now that we’re all moving to higher ground where it’s cooler and drier, we do what we can, and hope you will too, to let your data be tracked while you’re up here to help advance the science of controlling human and natural conflagrations.

I’ve trained as a Mountain Search and Rescue Volunteer but we’re all standing members of the Fire Service, as we anticipate global warming to trigger more drought and forest fires, especially in the lowlands. Our hope is to make wildfire and combustion relics of the past. Only nostalgia buffs and the most privileged innovators can afford to burn oxygen - really who would want to? We all agree it’s precious.

Fire fighting is quite an interesting spectacle, actually, I don’t know if you’ll ever get to witness one unless it’s during a commemorative public fixture. Planned tabula rasa combats conflagration by asphyxiation - literally dialling down the oxygen in the atmosphere. It’s harder to control oxygen in the more populated areas, but they’re working on it.

Ooh, good question! I think it was someone who thought of reversing the power of flash mobs – I mean it’s still about solidarity but now it’s kind of organised to maintain the balance of power in society – so everyone does their bit. I think there’s less inequality now, do you know what I mean?

Forgive me, because I’m not an expert, but I think it started with experimental smart cities and they took up the idea from Zuurmond’s infocracies – I mean, the reason we managed to go solar initially is because the server farms required it, right? The power needed to run anticipatory rather than participatory democracies?

Some say they manufacture dissent - for drama, and catharsis – but I think it’s also to flush out the data flow from shadow populations who are more apathetic – make everyone a heavy breather, at least for a little while, you know, just enough to register a reading and get a snapshot of oxygen consumption at a given time. You know what they say: Sport is good. Data rules... right? Anyway, during the spontaneous census they will interview me to see why I’m in favour of this and against that. Just to ensure my opinions haven’t been hacked, you know, to guard against corruption by harmful private interests. Data rules infocracies, and democracies people do!

So how it works is the actions we take are screened for relevance to any given question. We consent to our acts and opinions being counted, and it’s made transparent in the continuous count so we understand the implications of our acts and opinions as a collective. Any inconsistencies are flagged, and we get an option to compare ourselves against the values of the electorate.

What, actual elections? They’re kind of just ceremonial, really. I guess it’s less dramatic but we’re a more steady community - without all that manipulative rhetoric flying about in what’s left of the news media, making everyone angry and anxious. Life’s tough enough up here without making enemies of your neighbours. The small things seem to matter more these days, which I’m in favour of.

My paid job is to test these wearables designed to optimise blood oxygen saturation. We’re all extreme sportswomen up here! Implants? Nah, it’s easier to upgrade with skins and surfaces are minimally invasive. Go smooth systems! These info drones help me to train at altitude, and will accompany the family on holiday soon. My Search and Rescue duties, my job and my life are intertwined. There were great ideological battles in the past about work-life balance, but that was before ubiquitous streaming, which gives our team advantages on the happiness meter, earning time-off in lieu. It’s just the idea of time-off, really, but ideas count! I think happiness matters more than bitcredit, care dollars and the million other point schemes you could choose. Anyway, while I’m on holiday, as long as the geo-climactic conditions and my exertion levels show positive alignment, I get professional development credit and a dopamine rush! Everyone’s happy!

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Management Development Essay Example

With reference to the literature, what are the main trends in MD and how will it evolve in the future? Do you think leadership development and management development will continue to co-exist or will one supplant the other?

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Realizing the Future of Wireless Data Communications The Need for Software Radios and programmable radio chipsets

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Home — Essay Samples — Environment — World Problems — How I See The World In 100 Years

How I See The World in 100 Years

• Categories: World Problems

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Published: Dec 16, 2021

Words: 808 | Pages: 2 | 5 min read

Works Cited

• Bostrom, N. (2014). Superintelligence: Paths, dangers, strategies. Oxford University Press.
• Frey, C. B., & Osborne, M. A. (2017). The future of employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerization? Technological Forecasting and Social Change , 114, 254-280.
• Harari, Y. N. (2015). Homo Deus: A brief history of tomorrow. Harper.
• Kurzweil, R. (2006). The singularity is near: When humans transcend biology. Penguin Books.
• Michio, K. (2011). Physics of the future: How science will shape human destiny and our daily lives by the year 2100. Doubleday.
• National Intelligence Council. (2017). Global trends: Paradox of progress. Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
• Schwab, K. (2017). The fourth industrial revolution. Crown Business.
• Tegmark, M. (2017). Life 3.0: Being human in the age of artificial intelligence. Knopf.
• World Economic Forum. (2020). The Global Risks Report 2020. World Economic Forum.
• Yuval-Davis, N., & Kannabiran, K. (Eds.). (2018). The futures we want: Global sociology and the struggles for a better world. Agenda Publishing.

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Life of the Future Essay

Life of the future looks very different from what we are surrounded by these days. The progress in all spheres of life is moving really fast (Bardoel, 2012). In the years when our parents were born a simple cell phone would seem like some alien super technology. Five years may change the face of our digital world drastically. It goes without saying that in fifteen years our lives will no longer be what they are now.

A morning in fifteen years will still begin at home, an apartment of the future does not need to be too spacious as most of the furniture will be easy to transform, fold and hide. A kitchen can be easily turned into an office or a living room, or a bedroom (The Future of Work, 2013). The age of heavy furniture that constantly occupies half of the room is over. TV sets and music players are gone; they are fully replaced by the new computers. Showering, making a breakfast and washing the dishes can be quickly done just by pressing a couple of buttons. The future household appliances and devices are also multifunctional and easy to transform. In the life of the future everything is about time and speed- the faster you move, the more successful you are.

Travelling the way from home to the office is considered a huge waste of time. It only has to be done for three days a week for social purposes. Working process is exactly the same when an employee works from home, plus no time has to be spent for getting ready and putting on office clothes. There is a new type of dress-code for online office employees. A worker must wear their avatar for communication with the clients and co-workers (Maitland & Thompson, 2011).

Avatar is a special computer designed look made by a program, it helps making work more effective. Avatar program of an office worker is something like a personal advertisement campaign – socially oriented, worldly, pleasant, designed to attract larger number of clients and represent not only the worker wearing it, but also the company the employee is working for. Avatars help in creating a company image for the clients and other companies. A worker has to design their own avatar – the quality of avatar will be reflected directly on the productivity of this worker’s future success. Being able to design a profitable avatar is a necessary skill an office worker has to possess.

Going to the office is obligatory for social purposes – the co-workers must be able to socialize not only through the technologies. A day at the office is much less productive than a work day at home. A standard shift has three necessary breaks to make people go out to the park, have meals together, participate in recreational activities. The look of offices has changed too. Since future offices are all about communication and socializing – the cubicles are gone, replaced by joined tables to make people sit in groups (Waters-Lynch & Butcher, 2013).

Offices have lounge zones for the break periods, balconies, cafes, lawns, rooms for yoga exercises. Offices still have secretaries, but these jobs are no longer done by humans. Instead there are intelligent robots that work like answering machines capable of sorting the calls, receiving messages and directing them to the employees, answering frequently asked questions. Employees that are involved into making calls must be educated and skilled at communicating with these robot secretaries in order to achieve the best results.

Another crucial part of office management of the future is improvement leisure time and communication between the co-workers. While working from homes the employees are constantly connected by video conferences. This creates an impression of being around many people, but it does not replace real communication. There are committees involved into planning every office’s social program full of physical activities as office employees do not normally lead a very active lifestyle. As the life of future is all about multitasking – most employees become too involved into the work process which influences their health in a negative way and damages their quality of life (Skinner, 2013).

Social program committees are designed to distract employees from work and help them relax and switch to other activities. A typical workday in the office is full of various activities and it is shorter than eight hours. A work day at home is very productive, full of information, learning and keeps employees extremely busy on the mental level.

The city of the future is not as busy. Traffic problems are minor because in big cities personal vehicles are unnecessary; this is why public transport is working twenty four hours a day, very actively, so that the citizens do not have to wait in traffic lines. Cities are equipped with air improving devices as air pollution has been noticed to increase. The sizes of the cities grew – more people moving to the urban areas required more housing. The cultural faces of the big cities have developed more diversity and became more eclectic (Urban Development Plan 2025, n.d.).

Reference List

Bardoel, A. (2013). Tool or Time Thief? Technology and the Work-Life Balance . Web.

Maitland, A., & Thomson. P. (2011). Future work: How businesses can adapt and thrive in the new World. New York, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Web.

Skinner, N. (2013). You’ve Got Mail, 24-7: a work-life blessing or curse? . Web .

The Future of Work. (2013). Slideshare . Web.

Urban Development Plan 2025 (n.d.). Smart City Wien. Web.

Waters-Lynch, J. & Butcher, T. (2013). Quitting a Cubicle Farm of Co-Working . Web.

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The Next Frontier? Philosophy in Space.

By Joseph O. Chapa

Dr. Chapa is a U.S. Air Force officer and the author of “Is Remote Warfare Moral?”

The window to apply to be a NASA astronaut — a window that opens only about every four years — closes this month, on April 16. Though I’ve submitted an application, I don’t expect to make the cut.

The educational requirements for the astronaut program are clear: Applicants must possess at least a master’s degree in a STEM field (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), a doctorate in medicine or a test pilot school graduate patch. Though I have a Ph.D., it’s in philosophy. (And though I’m an Air Force pilot, I’m not a test pilot.)

I hesitate to tell NASA its business. But I think its requirements are closing the astronaut program off from important insights from the humanities and social sciences.

Of course, the requirement for astronauts to have technical training makes some intuitive sense. NASA was founded in 1958 “to provide for research into problems of flight within and outside the earth’s atmosphere.” Who better to solve flight problems than scientists and engineers? What’s more, NASA’s space missions have long conducted science experiments to learn how plant and animal life behaves in the far-flung emptiness between us and the moon.

But the need for STEM in space might be waning — just as the need for humanities and the social sciences waxes. After all, the “problems of flight” that once tethered us to this planet have largely been solved, thanks in no small part to all those scientist and engineer astronauts who blazed the trail to space.

By contrast, the future of our relationship with the cosmos — a colony on the moon? Humans on Mars? Contact with intelligent alien life? — will require thoughtful inquiry from many disciplines. We will need sociologists and anthropologists to help us imagine new communities; theologians and linguists if we find we are not alone in the universe; political and legal theorists to sort out the governing principles of interstellar life.

Naturally, some scholars can study these topics while still earthbound. But so can many of today’s astronauts, who often end up working on projects unrelated to their academic training. The idea behind sending people with a wider array of academic disciplines into the cosmos is not just to give scholars a taste of outer space, but also to put them in fruitful conversation with one another.

My own discipline, philosophy, may be better suited for this kind of exploration than some might think. To be sure, much philosophy can be done from an armchair. Descartes arrived at his famous conclusion, “I think, therefore, I am,” while warming himself by the fire and, as he noted, “wearing a winter dressing gown.”

But some of the greatest philosophical breakthroughs occurred only because their authors had firsthand experience with extreme and uncomfortable conditions. We might not have the Stoic philosophy of Epictetus had he not faced the hardship of slavery in Nero’s court. We might not have Thomas Hobbes’s “Leviathan” (and his principle of the “consent of the governed,” so central to the American experiment), but for his flight from the English Civil War. And we might not have Hannah Arendt’s insights on the “banality of evil” had she not attended the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a chief architect of the Holocaust.

Not all philosophers who want to learn what it means to be human in this vast and expanding universe need to experience living in space. But perhaps some of us should.

Throughout the history of Western philosophy, space has often served as stand-in for life’s deepest truths. Plato thought that the things of this world were mere images of true reality, and that true reality existed in the heavens beyond. What inspired admiration and awe in Immanuel Kant was not just the moral law within all of us but also the “starry heavens above.” The Platos and Kants of today are in a position to take a much closer look at those very heavens.

In general, the work of philosophy is to ask, “And suppose this proposition is right, what then?” When faced with a proposition — say, “The mind and body are separable,” or “One must always act to achieve the greatest happiness for the greatest number” — the philosopher takes another step and asks, “What are the implications of such a view?”

Though Earth has been our only home, it may not be our home forever. What are the implications of that proposition? What might that mean for our conception of nationhood? Of community? Of ourselves and our place in the world? This would be the work of space philosophers.

These days, unfortunately, the prestige of STEM continues to eclipse that of the social sciences and humanities. It seems unlikely that NASA will buck this trend.

That would be bad news for me, personally — but I think also for humanity at large. One day we may all echo Jodie Foster’s character in the sci-fi movie “Contact . ” When the mysteries of space-time were unfurled before her, all she could manage to say was, “They should have sent a poet.”

Joseph O. Chapa ( @JosephOChapa ) is a U.S. Air Force officer and the author of “Is Remote Warfare Moral?”

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Inside the i-Soon papers and China’s secret world of hackers-for-hire

Newly leaked files from a private Chinese hackers-for-hire company provide a fresh look into China’s “cyber industrial complex” — and it appears to be bigger and more mature than observers had previously imagined. Dina Temple-Raston, host and managing editor of the Recorded Future News podcast “Click Here,” has the story.

• By Dina Temple-Raston

Illustration by Megan J. Goff

Courtesy of "Click Here" podcast

A recent leak of secret contracts, presentations, client lists and chat logs are pulling back the curtain on China’s secret world of hackers for hire.

The target of the leak is a Chinese intelligence company called i-Soon.

The FBI has charged seven Chinese nationals and what it has called a sinister plot. The suspects hacked into online accounts of US and foreign critics of China, as well as businesses and politicians. The leak of documents from China suggests that this kind of hack is likely not the work of just a few people.

As Dina Temple-Raston from the "Click Here" podcast reports, the leak provided concrete evidence of just how closely China’s cybersecurity community is working with the Chinese government to hack adversaries inside and outside of China.

Click above to hear the full story.

An  earlier version of this story  appeared on the " Click Here " podcast from Recorded Future News. Additional reporting by Sean Powers.

Related:  China's dominant role in producing hacking bugs

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6 expert essays on the future of biotech

Big data, big potential in the field of biotech Image:  Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

What exactly is biotechnology, and how could it change our approach to human health?

As the age of big data transforms the potential of this emerging field, members of the World Economic Forum's Global Future Council on Biotechnology tell you everything you need to know.

Elizabeth Baca, Specialist Leader, Deloitte Consulting, and former Deputy Director, California Governor’s Office of Planning and Research & Elizabeth O’Day, Founder, Olaris, Inc

What if your doctor could predict your heart attack before you had it – and prevent it? Or what if we could cure a child’s cancer by exploiting the bacteria in their gut?

These types of biotechnology solutions aimed at improving human health are already being explored. As more and more data (so called “big data") is available across disparate domains such as electronic health records, genomics, metabolomics , and even life-style information, further insights and opportunities for biotechnology will become apparent. However, to achieve the maximal potential both technical and ethical issues will need to be addressed.

As we look to the future, let’s first revisit previous examples of where combining data with scientific understanding has led to new health solutions.

Biotechnology is a rapidly changing field that continues to transform both in scope and impact. Karl Ereky first coined the term biotechnology in 1919. However, biotechnology’s roots trace back to as early as the 1600s when a Prussian physician, Georg Ernst Stahl, pioneered a new fermentation technology referred to as “zymotechnology.”

Over the next few centuries, “biotechnology” was primarily focused on improving fermentation processes to make alcohol and later food production. With the discovery of penicillin, new applications emerged for human health. In 1981, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) defined biotechnology as, “the application of scientific and engineering principles to the processing of materials by biological agents to provide the goods and services.”

Today, the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO) defines biotechnology as “technology based on biology - biotechnology harnesses cellular and biomolecular processes to develop technologies and products that help improve our lives and the health of our planet.

In the Fourth Industrial Revolution, biotechnology is poised for its next transformation. It is estimated that between 2010 and 2020 there will be a 50-fold growth of data .

Just a decade ago, many did not even see a need for a smart phone, whereas today, each click, step we take, meal we eat, and more is documented, logged and analyzed on a level of granularity not possible a decade ago.

Concurrent with the collection of personal data, we are also amassing a mountain of biological data (such as genomics, microbiome, proteomics, exposome, transcriptome, and metabolome). This biological-big-data coupled with advanced analytical tools has led to a deeper understanding about fundamental human biology. Further, digitization is revolutionizing health care, allowing for patient reported symptoms, feelings, health outcomes and records such as radiographs and pathology images to be captured as mineable data.

As these datasets grow and have the opportunity to be combined, what is the potential impact to biotechnology and human health? And better still, what is the impact on individual privacy?

Disclaimer: The authors above do not necessarily reflect the policies or positions of the organizations with which they are affiliated.

Daniel Heath, Senior Lecturer in the University of Melbourne's Department of Biomedical Engineering & Elizabeth Baca & Elizabeth O’Day

One of the most fundamental and powerful data sets for human health is the human genome. DNA is our biological instruction set composed of billions of repeating chemical groups (thymine, adenine, guanine, and cytosine) that are connected to form a code. A person’s genome is the complete set of his or her DNA code, ie the complete instructions to make that individual.

DNA acts as a template to produce a separate molecule called RNA through the process of transcription. Many RNA molecules in turn act as a template for the production of proteins, a process referred to as translation. These proteins then go on to carry out many of the fundamental cellular tasks required for life. Therefore any unwanted changes in DNA can have downstream effects on RNA and proteins. This can have little to no effect or result in a wide range of diseases such as Huntington’s disease, cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anaemia, and many more.

Genomic sequencing involves mapping the complete set, or part of individual’s DNA code. Being able to detect unwanted changes in DNA not only provides powerful insight to understand disease but can also lead to new diagnostic and therapeutic interventions.

The first human genome sequence was finished in 2003, took 13 years to complete, and cost billions of dollars. Today due to biotech and computational advancements, sequencing a person’s genome costs approximately $1,000 and can be completed in about a day.

Important milestones in the history of genomics

1869 - DNA was first identified

1953 - Structure of DNA established

1977 - DNA Sequencing by chemical degradation

1986 - The first semi-automated DNA sequencing machine produced

2003 - Human genome project sequenced first entire genome at the cost of $3 billion

2005 - Canada launches personal genome project

2007 - 23andMe markets first direct to consumer genetic testing for ancestry of autosomal DNA

2008 - First personal genome sequenced

2012 - England launched (and finished in 2018) 100K genome project

2013 - Saudi Arabia launched the Saudi Human Genome Program

2015 - US launched plan to sequence one million genomes

2015 - Korea launched plan to sequence 10K genomes

2016 - US launched All of Us Research cohort to enroll one million or more participants to collect lifestyle, environment, genetic, and biologic data

2016 - China launched the Precision Medicine initiative with 60 billion RMB

2016 - France started Genomic Medicine 2025 Project

Treatments available today due to DNA technology

Knowing the structure and function of DNA has also enabled us to develop breakthrough biotechnology solutions that have greatly improved the quality of life of countless individuals. A few examples include:

Genetic screenings for diseases. An individual can scan his or her DNA code to look for known mutations linked to disease. Newborns are often screened at birth to identify treatable genetic disorders. For instance, all newborns in the US are screened for a disease called severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID). Individuals with this genetic disease lack a fully functional immune system and usually die within a year, if not treated. However, due to regular screenings, these newborns can receive a bone marrow transplant, which has a more than 90% of success rate to treat SCID. A well-known example in adults is screening women for mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes as risk factor for developing breast cancer or ovarian cancer.

Recombinant protein production. This technology allows scientists to introduce human genes into microorganisms to produce human proteins that can be introduced back to patients to carry out vital functions. In 1978, the company Genentech developed a process to recombinantly produce human insulin, a protein needed to regulate blood glucose. Recombinant insulin is still used to treat diabetes.

CAR T cells . CAR T cell therapy is a technique to help your immune system recognize and kill cancer cells. Immune cells, called T-cells, from a cancer patient are isolated and genetically engineered to express receptors that allow them to identify cancer cells. When these modified T cells are put back into the patient they can help find and kill the cancer cells. Kymriah, used to treat a type of leukemia, and Yescarta, used to treat a type of lymphoma are examples of FDA approved CAR T cell treatments.

Gene therapy. The goal of gene therapy is to replace a missing or defective gene with a normal one to correct the disorder. The first in vivo gene therapy drug, Luxterna, was approved by the FDA in 2017 to treat an inherited degenerative eye disease called Leber’s congenital amaurosis.

Disclaimer: The authors above do not necessarily reflect the policies or positions of the organizations with which they are affiliated .

Frontiers in DNA technology

Our understanding of genetic data continues to lead to new and exciting technologies with the potential to revolutionize and improve our health outcomes. A few examples being developed are described below.

Organoids for drug screening . Organoids are miniature and simplified organs that can be developed outside the body with a defined genome. Organoid systems may one day be used to discover new drugs, tailor treatments to a particular person’s disease or even as treatments themselves.

CRISPR-Cas9 . This is a form of gene therapy - also known as genetic engineering - where the genome is cut at a desired location and existing genes can either be turned off or modified. Animal models have shown that this technique has great promise in the treatment of many hereditary diseases such as sickle cell disease, haemophilia, Huntington’s disease, and more.

We believe sequencing will become a mainstay in the future of human health.

While genomic data is incredibly insightful, it is important to realize, genomics rarely tells the complete story.

Except for rare cases, just because an individual has a particular genetic mutation does not mean they will develop a disease. Genomics provides information on “what could happen” to an individual. Additional datasets such the microbiome, metabolome, lifestyle data and others are needed to answer what will happen.

Elizabeth O’Day & Elizabeth Baca

The microbiome is sometimes referred to as the 'essential organ', the'forgotten organ', our 'second genome' or even our 'second brain'. It includes the catalog of approximately 10-100 trillion microbial cells (bacteria, archea, fungi, virus and eukaryotic microbes) and their genes that reside in each of us. Estimates suggest we have 150 times more microbial DNA from more than 10,000 different species of known bacteria than human DNA.

Microbes reside everywhere (mouth, stomach, intestinal tract, colon, skin, genitals, and possibly even the placenta). The function of the microbiome differs according to different locations in the body and with different ages, sexes, races and diets of the host. Bacteria in the gut digest foods, absorb nutrients, and produce beneficial products that would otherwise not be accessible. In the skin, microbes provide a physical barrier protecting against foreign pathogens through competitive exclusion, and production of antimicrobial substances. In addition, microbes help regulate and influence the immune system. When there is an imbalance in the microbiome, known as dysbiosis, disease can develop. Chronic diseases such as obesity, inflammatory bowel disease, diabetes mellitus, metabolic syndrome, atherosclerosis, alcoholic liver disease (ALD), nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), cirrhosis, hepatocellular carcinoma and other conditions are linked to improper microbiome functioning.

Milestones in our understanding of the microbiome

1680s - Dutch scientist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek compared his oral and fecal microbiota. He noted striking differences in microbes between these two habitats and also between samples from individuals in different states of health.

1885 - Theodor Escherich first describes and isolates Escherichia coli (E. coli) from the feces of newborns in Germany

1908 - Elie Metchnikoff, Russian zoologist, theorized health could be enhanced and senility delayed by bacteria found in yogurt

1959 - Germ-free animals (mice, rats, rabbits, guinea pigs, and chicks) reared in stainless steel in plastic housing to study the effects of health in microbe-free environments

1970 - Dr. Thomas D. Luckey estimates 100 billion colonies of microbes in one gram of human intestinal fluid or feces.

1995 - Craig Venter and a team of researchers sequence the genome of bacterium Haemophilus influenza, making it the first organism to have its genome completely sequenced.

1996 - The first human fecal sample is sequenced using 16S rRNA sequencing.

2001- Scientist Joshua Lederberg credited with coining term “microbiome”.

2005 - Researchers identify bacteria in amniotic fluid of babies born via C-section

2006- First metagenomic analysis of the human gut microbiome is conducted

2007- NIH sponsored Human Microbiome Project (HMP) launches a study to define how the microbial species affect humans and their relationships to health

2009- First microbiome study showing an association between gut microbiome in lean and obese adults

2011- German researchers identify 3 enterotypes in the human gut microbiome: Baceroids, Prevotella, and Ruminococcus

2011- Gosalbes performed the first metatransciptomic analysis of healthy human gut microbiota

2012 - HMP unveils first “map” of microbes inhabiting healthy humans. Results generated from 80 collaborating scientific institutions found more than 10,000 microbial species occupy the human ecosystem, comprising trillions of cells and making up 1-3% of the body’s mass.

2012 - American Gut Project founded, providing an open-to-the-public platform for citizen scientists seeking to analyze their microbiome and compare it to the microbiomes of others.

2014 - The Integrative Human Microbiome Project (iHMP), begins with goal of studying 3 microbiome-associated conditions.

2016 - The Flemish Gut Flora Project, one of the world’s largest population-wide studies on variations in gut microbiota publishes analysis on more than 1,100 human stool samples.

2018 - The American Gut Project publishes the largest study to date on the microbiome. The results include microbial sequence data from 15,096 samples provided by11,336 participants across the US, UK, Australia and 42 other countries.

What solutions are alre ady (or could be) derived from this dataset?

Biotechnology solutions based off microbiome data have already been developed or are in the process of development. A few key examples are highlighted below:

Probiotics . Probiotics are beneficial bacteria that may prevent or treat certain disease. They were first theorized in 1908 and are now a common food additive. From yogurts to supplements, various probiotics are available for purchase in grocery stores and pharmacies, claiming various benefits. For example probiotic VSL#3 has been shown to reduce liver disease severity and hospitalization in patients with cirrhosis.

Diagnostics . Changes in composition of particular microbes are noted as potential biomarkers. An example includes the ratio of Bifidobacterium to Enterobacteriaceae know as the B/E ratio. A B/E greater than 1 suggests a healthy microbiome and a B/E less than 1 could suggest cirrhosis or particular types of infection.

Fecal Microbiome transplantation (FMT). Although not FDA-approved, fecal microbiome transplantation (FMT) is a widely used method where a fecal preparation from a healthy stool donor is transplanted into the colon of patient via colonoscopy, naso-enteric tube, or capsules. FMT has been used to treat Clostridium difficile infections with 80-90% cure rates (far better efficacy than antibiotics).

Therapeutics. The microbiome dataset is also producing several innovative therapies. Development of bacteria consortia and single strains (both natural and engineered) are in clinical development. Efforts are also underway to identify and isolate microbiome metabolites with important function, such as the methicillin-resistant antibiotics that were identified by primary sequencing of the human gut microbiome.

By continuing to build the microbiome dataset and expand our knowledge of host-microbiome interactions, we may be able correct various states of disease and improve human health.

Pam Randhawa, CEO and founder of Empiriko Corporation, Andrew Steinberg, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University, Elizabeth Baca & Elizabeth O’Day

For centuries, physicians were limited by the data they were able to obtain via external examination of an individual patient or an autopsy.

More recently, technological advancements have enabled clinicians to identify and monitor internal processes which were previously hidden within living patients.

One of the earliest examples of applied technology occurred in the 1890s when German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen discovered the potential medical applications of X-rays.

Since that time, new technologies have expanded clinical knowledge in imaging, genomics, biomarkers, response to medications, and the microbiome. Collectively, this extended database of high quality, granular information has enhanced the physician’s diagnostic capabilities and has translated into improved clinical outcomes.

Today’s clinicians increasingly rely on medical imaging and other technology- based diagnostic tools to non-invasively look below the surface to monitor treatment efficacy and screen for pathologic processes, often before clinical symptoms appear.

In addition, the clinician’s senses can be extended by electronic data capture systems, IVRS, wearable devices, remote monitoring systems, sensors and iPhone applications. Despite access to this new technology, physicians continue to obtain a patient’s history in real-time followed by a hands-on assessment of physical findings, an approach which can be limited by communication barriers, time, and the physician’s ability to gather or collate data.

One of the largest examples of clinical data collection, integration and analysis occurred in the 1940s with the National Heart Act which created the National Heart Institute and the Framingham Heart Study. The Framingham Original Cohort was started in 1948 with 5,209 men and women between the ages of 30-62 with no history of heart attack or stroke.

Over the next 71 years, the study evolved to gather clinical data for cardiovascular and other medical conditions over several generations. Prior to that time the concepts of preventive medicine and risk factors (a term coined by the Framingham study) were not part of the medical lexicon. The Framingham study enabled physicians to harness observations gathered from individuals’ physical examination findings, biomarkers, imaging and other physiologic data on a scale which was unparalleled.

The adoption of electronic medical records helped improve data access, but in their earliest iterations only partially addressed the challenges of data compartmentalization and interoperability (silos).

Recent advances in AI applications, EMR data structure and interoperability have enabled clinicians and researchers to improve their clinical decision making. However, accessibility, cost and delays in implementing global interoperability standards have limited data accessibility from disparate systems and have delayed introduction of EMRs in some segments of the medical community.

To this day, limited interoperability, the learning curve and costs associated with implementation are cited as major contributors to physician frustration, burnout and providers retiring early from patient care settings.

However, an interoperability platform known as Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR, pronounced "FIRE") is being developed to exchange electronic health records and unlock silos. The objective of FHIR is to facilitate interoperability between legacy health care systems. The platform facilitates easier access to health data on a variety of devices (e.g., computers, tablets, cell phones), and allows developers to provide medical applications which can be easily integrated into existing systems.

As the capacity to gather information becomes more meaningful, the collection, integration, analysis and format of clinical data submission requires standardization. In the late 1990s, the Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC) was formed “to develop and support global, platform-independent data standards which enable information system interoperability to improve medical research”. Over the past several years, CDISC has developed several models to support the organization of clinical trial data.

Milestones in the discovery/development of clinical data and technologies

500BC - The world's first clinical trial recorded in the “Book of Daniel” in The Bible

1747 - Lind’s Scurvy trial which contained most characteristics of a controlled trial

1928 - American College of Surgeons sought to improve record standards in clinical settings

1943 - First double blinded controlled trial of patulin for common cold (UK Medical Research Council)

1946 - First randomized controlled trial of streptomycin in pulmonary tuberculosis conducted (UK Medical Research Council)

1946 - American physicists Edward Purcell and Felix Bloch independently discover nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR).

1947 - First International guidance on the ethics of medical research involving human subjects – Nuremberg Code

1955 - Scottish physician Ian Donald begins to investigate the use of gynecologic ultrasound.

1960 - First use of endoscopy to examine a patient’s stomach.

1964 - World Medical Association guidelines on use of human subjects in medical research (Helsinki Declaration)

1967 - 1971 - English electrical engineer Godfrey Hounsfield conceives the idea for computed tomography. First CT scanner installed in Atkinson Morley Hospital, Wimbledon, England. First patient brain scan performed - October 1971.

1972 - First Electronic Health Record designed

1973 - American chemist Paul Lauterbur produces the first magnetic resonance image (MRI) using nuclear magnetic resonance data and computer calculations of tomography.

1974 - American Michael Phelps develops the first positron emission tomography (PET) camera and the first whole-body system for human and animal studies.

1977 - First MRI body scan is performed on a human using an MRI machine developed by American doctors Raymond Damadian, Larry Minkoff and Michael Goldsmith.

1990 - Ultrasound becomes a routine procedure to check fetal development and diagnose abnormalities.

Early-Mid 1990 - Development of electronic data capture (EDC) system for clinical trials (electronic case report forms)

1996 - International Conference on Harmonization published Good Clinical Practice which has become the universal standard for ethical conduct of clinical trials.

Late 1990s - The Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC) was formed with the mission “to develop and support global, platform-independent data standards that enable information system interoperability to improve medical research”

2009 - American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 passed including $19.2 Billion of funding for hospitals and physicians to adopt EHRs

2014 - HL-7 International published FHIR as a "Draft Standard for Trial Use" (DSTU)

Emerging Solutions

The convergence of scientific knowledge, robust clinical data, and engineering in the digital age has resulted in the development of dynamic healthcare technologies which allow for earlier and more accurate disease detection and therapeutic efficacy in individuals and populations.

The emergence of miniaturized technologies such as handheld ultrasound, sleep tracking, cardiac monitoring and lab-on-a-chip technologies will likely accelerate this trend. Among the most rapidly evolving fields in data collection, has been in clinical laboratory medicine where continuous point-of-care testing, portable mass spectrometers, flow analysis, PCR, and use of MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry for pathogen identification provide insight into numerous clinically relevant biomarkers.

Coupled with high resolution and functional medical imaging the tracking of these biomarkers gives a metabolic fingerprint of disease, thereby opening a new frontier in “Precision Medicine”.

Beyond these capabilities, artificial intelligence (AI) applications are being developed to leverage the sensory and analytic capabilities of humans via medical image reconstruction and noise reduction. AI solutions for computer-aided detection and radiogenomics enable clinicians to better predict risk and patient outcomes.

These technologies stratify patients into cohorts for more precise diagnosis and treatment. As AI technology evolves, the emergence of the “virtual radiologist” could become a reality. Since the humans cannot gather, collate and quickly analyze this volume of granular information, these innovations will replace time-intensive data gathering with more cost-effective analytic approaches to clinical decision-making.

As the population ages and lives longer, increasing numbers of people will be impacted by multiple chronic conditions which will be treated contemporaneously with multiple medications. Optimally these conditions will be monitored at home or in another remote setting outside of a hospital.

Platforms are under development where the next generation of laboratory technologies will be integrated into an interoperable system which includes miniaturized instruments and biosensors. This will be coupled with AI driven clinical translation models to assess disease progression and drug effectiveness.

This digital data will be communicated in real time to the patient’s electronic medical record. This type of system will shift clinical medicine from reactive to proactive care and provide more precise clinical decision-making.

With this enhanced ability to receive more granular, high quality clinical information comes an opportunity and a challenge. In the future, the ability to leverage the power of computational modeling, artificial intelligence will facilitate a logarithmic explosion of clinically relevant correlations.

This will enable discovery of new therapies and novel markers which will empower clinicians to more precisely manage risk for individuals and populations. This form of precision medicine and predictive modeling will likely occur across the disease timeline, potentially even before birth.

Stakeholders will need to pay close attention to maintaining the privacy and security of patient data as it moves across different platforms and devices.

However, the potential benefits of this interoperability far outweigh the risks. This will raise a host of ethical questions, but also the potential for a series of efficiencies which will make healthcare more accessible and affordable to a greater number of people.

Jessica Shen, Vice President at Royal Philips, Elizabeth Baca & Elizabeth O’Day

In medicine and public health there is often tension between the effect of genetics verses the effect of the environment, and which plays a bigger role in health outcomes. But rather than an either or approach, science supports that both factors are at play and contribute to health and disease.

For instance, one can be genetically at risk for diabetes, but with excellent diet and exercise and a healthy lifestyle, the disease can still be avoided.

In fact, many people who are newly diabetic or pre-diabetic can reverse the course of their disease through lifestyle modifications. Alternatively, someone at risk of asthma who is exposed to bad air quality can go on to develop the disease, but then become relatively asymptomatic in an environment with less triggers.

The growing literature on the importance of lifestyle, behaviours, stressors, social, economic, and environmental factors, (the latter also known as the social determinants of health), have been relatively hard to capture for real time clinical information.

It has been especially challenging to integrate all of the data together for better insight. However, that is changing. In this new data frontier, the growth of data in the lifestyle and environment area offer huge potential to bridge gaps, increase understanding of health in daily life, and tailor treatments for a precision health approach.

1881 - Blood pressure cuff invented

2010 - Asthmapolis founded with sensor to track environmental data on Asthma/COPD rescue inhalers

2011 - First digital FDA blood pressure cuff approved and links to digital phone

2012 - AliveCor receives FDA approval for EKG monitor with Iphone

2017 - 325,000 mobile health apps

2017 - FDA releases Digital Health Innovation Action Plan

2018 - FDA approves first continuous glucose monitor via implantable sensor and mobile app interface

What are some of the benefits suggested with the use of lifestyle data?

Mobile technology has enabled more continuous monitoring in daily life outside of the clinic and in real world settings. As an example the traditional blood pressure cuff invented over 130 years ago was only updated in the last decade to allow remote readings which are digitally captured.

Sensors are now being included to measure environmental factors such as air quality, humidity, and temperature. Other innovations are allowing mood to be captured in real time, brain waves for biofeedback, and other biometrics to improve fitness, nutrition, sleep, and even fertility.

The personal analytics capabilities of devices designed to collect lifestyle data can contribute to health by aiding preventive care and help with the management of ongoing health problems.

Identification of health problems through routine monitoring may evolve into a broad system encompassing many physiologic functions; such as:

• sleep disturbances (severe snoring; apnea)
• neuromuscular conditions (identification of early Parkinson’s with the analysis of muscular motion)
• cardiac problems such as arrhythmias including atrial fibrillation
• sensors to detect early Alzheimer’s disease via voice changes

The Apple Watch has provided documentation on the use of the device for arrhythmia detection, the series 4 version can generate a ECG similar to a Lead 1 electrocardiogram; claims related to these functions were cleared by FDA (Class II, de Novo). Additional wearable technologies are likely to incorporate such functions in the future.

The instant feedback available with the use of a wearable sensory device can serve as an aid to the management of many chronic conditions including but not limited to diabetes, pulmonary problems, and hypertension.

Many studies have documented the cardiovascular benefits of life-long physical activity. Several biotechnology solutions, designed to track activity with analytical feedback tools provide the opportunity to encourage physical activity to promote health, perhaps even modifying behaviour. A Cochrane Review (Bravata, 2007. PMID 18029834) concluded there was short-term evidence of significant physical activity increase and associated health improvement with the use of a pedometer to increase activity. The feedback associated with today’s data driven health improvement applications should increase the effectiveness over a simple mechanical pedometer. Studies are underway in multiple settings to support the use of activity trackers and feedback-providing analysis tools as beneficial to longer-term health.

Use in research settings

In many circumstances, the collection of clinical data for a formal trial or for use in longitudinal studies is facilitated by direct observation as provided by a network-attached sensor system.

What may future developments support?

The development of ‘smart clothing’ and wearable tech-enabled jewellery as well as implantable devices will lead to less obtrusive observation instruments recording many more physiological indicators.

Wireless networking, both fixed and mobile, continue their stepwise jumps in speed and this capacity growth (5G and Wifi-6 with megabit internet) will support massive increases in the volume of manageable data.

Connecting sensor derived observations to other indicators of health such as medical history and genetics will further expand our understanding of disease and how to live our most healthy lives.

However, for this potential to be realized significant technical and ethical issues must first be addressed.

Elissa Prichep, Precision Medicine Lead at the World Economic Forum, Elizabeth Baca & Elizabeth O’Day

The Global Future Council on biotechnology has examined the exponential growth of data across different areas which has lead to breakthrough technologies transforming human health and medicine. Yet let us be clear: it was not some abstract understanding of data that lead to these solutions, it was real data, derived from real individuals, individuals like you. Your data, or data from someone like you, led to those solutions. Did you know that? Did you consent to that?

We believe individuals should feel empowered by contributing to these datasets. You are changing human health- there’s perhaps nothing more important. However, in going through this analysis we were repeatedly concerned about the whether the individuals (“data-contributors”) were properly informed or consented by “data collectors” to use their data?

As we have documented here, amazing, breakthrough technologies and medicines can arise from these datasets. However, there are nefarious situations that could develop as well.

We believe new norms between "data-collectors" and "data contributors"need to be established if we want data to continue to drive the development of biotech solutions to improve human health.

How we think about privacy will change

Although the emergence of digital data through electronic health records, mobile applications, cloud storage and more have had great benefits, there are also privacy risks.

The identification of parties associated with ‘anonymous’ data becomes more likely as more sophisticated algorithms are developed; data that is secure and private today may not be so in the future. Data privacy concerns and data theft along with device hacking are a serious concern today and will only become more so as the volume and types of data collected increase.

As more data is combined, there is a greater risk of reidentification or privacy breaches. For example, when a Harvard professor was able to reidentify more than 40% of the participants in the anonymous genetic study, The Personal Genome Project.

Additionally, as other types of data are added in for health purposes, in retail for example, there is the risk that reidentification can expose private health details, for example when Target identified the pregnancy of a teenage girl to her family.

There must be value from these solutions to entertain the risks associated with combining the data. Integrating patient and participants at the centre of design ensures informed consent and a better likelihood of value that balances the risks and trade-offs.

Inclusion of diverse populations is important for the new insights to have a positive impact

The benefits and risks a patient can expect from an intervention can depend heavily on that person’s unique biological make-up. A 2015 study found that roughly 20% of new drugs approved in the previous six years demonstrated different responses across different racial and ethnic groups.

However, therapeutics are often put on the market without an understanding of the variability in efficacy and safety across patients because that is not assessed in clinical trials, either due to lack of diversity in the trial, lack of asking the right questions, or both. In the US, it is estimated that 80-90% of clinical trial participants are white despite FDA efforts to expand recruitment.

Without an intentional effort, the amassed new knowledge through biotech solutions, if not done with a diverse population, will not yield accurate insight. If the biotech solutions are not representative of the population, there is the potential to increase health disparities.

For example, genetic studies incorrectly inferred an increased risk of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy for African Americans since the genetic insights were largely gathered from anglo populations.

There are many reasons that participation has been so low in research, but authentic engagement, understanding the historical context, and intentionally funding research to increase participation and improve diversity in translational efforts are already on their way such as the All of Us Cohort and the California Initiative to Advance Precision Medicine.

Inclusive participation will help understand where people truly are in their health journey

In the clinical setting, patient centeredness also needs to occur. Healthy individuals are amassing more and more data about themselves and patients with chronic disease are also starting to rely on applications to track everything from sleep to environmental exposures to mood, but this is currently not used to increase insight for health and illness.

As patients and healthy people take charge of their data, it can only be used if they agree to share it. As biotech solutions are developed, integrating data across all the various areas will be vital to truly have an impact.

Next Steps in Biotech Health Solutions

At the start of this series, we asked: what if your doctor could predict your heart attack before you had it? Research is underway to do just that through combining data from the proteome, patient reported symptoms, and biosensors.

Big data analysis is also already yielding new leads to paediatric cancer when looking at the genetic information of tumors. In the future, this is likely to move beyond better treatment to better prevention and earlier detection. And in the case where treatment is needed, a more tailored option could be offered.

The impact of this data on improved health is exciting and impacts each of us. As data grows, increased understanding does as well. Each of us has the opportunity to be a partner in the new data frontier.

References:

- History of ‘Biotechnogy.’ Nature article Feb 1989 - Allan T. Bull, Geoffrey Holt, and Malcolm D. Lilly, Biotechnology: International Trends and Perspectives (Paris: OECD, 1982) - https://www.bio.org/what-biotechnology - https://insidebigdata.com/2017/02/16/the-exponential-growth-of-data/ - Goodrich, et al. 2014. Human genetics shapes the gut microbiome. Cell. 159(4): 789-99. - https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/primer/traits/longevity - https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamtanner/2013/04/25/harvard-professor-re-identifies-anonymous-volunteers-in-dna-study/#203da9c992c9 - https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/06/big-data-whats-even-creepier-than-target-guessing-that-youre-pregnant.html - https://www.healio.com/cardiology/genetics-genomics/news/online/%7B006969bb-6ca2-44aa-843a-31c12874b0dc%7D/genetic-tests-may-be-misdiagnosing-hypertrophic-cardiomyopathy-in-black-americans - http://opr.ca.gov/ciapm/ https://allofus.nih.gov - http://opr.ca.gov/ciapm/ - http://opr.ca.gov/ciapm/projects/2016/Early_Prediction_Cardiovascular_Events.html - http://opr.ca.gov/ciapm/projects/2015/California_Kids_Cancer_Comparison.html

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Essay: Russia Is Back to the Stalinist Future

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Russia Is Back to the Stalinist Future

With a Soviet-style election, Vladimir Putin’s Russia has come full circle.

• Human Rights

In 1968, the American scholar Jerome M. Gilison described Soviet elections as a “ psychological curiosity ”—a ritualized, performative affirmation of the regime rather than a real vote in any sense of the word. These staged elections with their nearly unanimous official results, Gilison wrote, served to isolate non-conformists and weld the people to their regime.

Last Sunday, Russia completed the circle and returned to Soviet practice. State election officials reported that 87 percent of Russians had cast their vote for Vladimir Putin in national elections, giving the Russian president a fifth term in office. Not only were many of the reported election numbers mathematically impossible , but there was also no longer much of a choice: All prominent opposition figures had been either murdered , imprisoned , or exiled . Like in Soviet times, the election also welded Russians to their regime by serving as a referendum on Putin’s war against Ukraine. All in all, last weekend’s Soviet-style election sealed Putin’s transformation of post-Communist Russia into a repressive society with many of the features of Soviet totalitarianism.

Russia’s return to Soviet practice goes far beyond elections. A recent study by exiled Russian journalists from Proekt Media used data to determine that Russia is more politically repressive today than the Soviet Union under all leaders since Joseph Stalin. During the last six years, the study reports, the Putin regime has indicted 5,613 Russians on explicitly political charges—including “discrediting the army,” “disseminating misinformation,” “justification of terrorism,” and other purported crimes, which have been widely used to punish criticism of Russia’s war on Ukraine and justification of Ukraine’s defense of its territory. This number is significantly greater than in any other six-year period of Soviet rule after 1956—all the more glaring given that Russia’s population is only half that of the Soviet Union before its collapse.

In addition to repressive criminal charges and sentences, over the last six years more than 105,000 people have been tried on administrative charges, which carry heavy fines and compulsory labor for up to 30 days without appeal. Many of these individuals were punished for taking part in unsanctioned marches or political activity, including anti-war protests. Others were charged with violations of COVID pandemic regulations. Such administrative punishments are administered and implemented rapidly, without time for an appeal.

On March 4, 2022, a little over a week after the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, Russia’s puppet parliament rapidly adopted amendments to the Russian Criminal Code and Criminal Procedure Code that established criminal and administrative punishments for the vague transgressions of “discrediting” the Russian military or disseminating “false information” about it. This widely expanded the repressive powers of the state to criminally prosecute political beliefs and activity. Prosecutions have surged since the new laws were passed, likely leading to a dramatic increase in the number of political prisoners in the coming years. In particular, punishments for “discrediting the army” or “justification of terrorism”—which includes voicing support for Ukraine’s right to defend itself—have resulted in hundreds of sentences meted out each year since the war began. The most recent such case: On Feb. 27, the 70-year-old co-chairman of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning human rights group Memorial, Oleg Orlov, was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for “discrediting” the Russian military.

As the Proekt report ominously concludes, “[I]n terms of repression, Putin has long ago surpassed almost all Soviet general secretaries, except for one—Joseph Stalin.” While this conclusion is in itself significant, it is only the tip of the iceberg of the totalitarian state Putin has gradually and systematically rebuilt.

A man votes in Russia’s presidential election in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk on March 15. ladimir Nikolayev/AFP via Getty Images

As in the Soviet years, there is no independent media in Russia today. The last of these news organizations were banned or fled the country after Putin’s all-out war on Ukraine, including Proekt, Meduza, Ekho Moskvy, Nobel Prize-winning Novaya Gazeta, and TV Dozhd. In their place, strictly regime-aligned newspapers, social media, and television and radio stations emit a steady drumbeat of militaristic propaganda, promote Russian imperialist grandeur, and celebrate Putin as the country’s infallible commander in chief. In another reprise of totalitarian practice, lists of banned books have been dramatically expanded and thousands of titles have been removed from the shelves of Russian libraries and bookstores. Bans have been extended to numerous Wikipedia pages, social media channels, and websites.

Human rights activists and independent civic leaders have been jailed, physically attacked, intimidated into silence, or driven into exile. Civic organizations that show independence from the state are banned as “ undesirable ” and subjected to fines and prosecution if they continue to operate. The most recent such organizations include the Andrei Sakharov Foundation, Memorial, the legendary Moscow Helsinki Group, and the EU-Russia Civil Society Forum . In their place, the state finances a vast array of pro-regime and pro-war groups, with significant state resources supporting youth groups that promote the cult of Putin and educate children in martial values to prepare them for military service. Then there are the numerous murders of opposition leaders, journalists, and activists at home and abroad. Through these various means, almost all critical Russian voices have been silenced.

Private and family life is also increasingly coming under the scope of government regulation and persecution. The web of repression particularly affects the LGBT community, putting large numbers of Russians in direct peril. A court ruling in 2023 declared the “international LGBT movement” extremist and banned the rainbow flag as a forbidden symbol, which was quickly followed by raids and arrests . Homosexuality has been reclassified as an illness, and Russian gay rights organizations have shut down their operations for fear of prosecution. Legislation aimed at reinforcing “traditional values”—including the right of husbands to discipline their wives—has led to the reduction in sentences and the decriminalization of some forms of domestic violence.

Russia’s Military Is Already Preparing for Its Next War 

Moscow is rebuilding its military in anticipation of a conflict with NATO in the next decade, Estonian officials warn.

It’s Time to Declare Putin an Illegitimate Leader

Russia’s sham elections next month—with voting on occupied Ukrainian territory—should not be recognized.

Ukraine Isn’t Putin’s War—It’s Russia’s War

Jade McGlynn’s books paint an unsettling picture of ordinary Russians’ support for the invasion and occupation of Ukraine.

Many of the techniques of totalitarian control now operating throughout Russia were first incubated in territories where the Kremlin spread war and conflict. Chechnya was the first testing ground for widespread repression, including massive numbers of victims subjected to imprisonment, execution, disappearance, torture, and rape. Coupled with the merciless targeting of civilians in Russia’s two wars in Chechnya, these practices normalized wanton criminal behavior within Russian state security structures. Out of this crucible of fear and intimidation, Putin has shaped a culture and means of governing that were further elaborated in other places Russia invaded and eventually came to Russia itself.

In Russian-occupied Crimea and eastern Ukraine since 2014, there has been a widespread campaign of surveillance, summary executions, arrests, torture, and intimidation—all entirely consistent with Soviet practice toward conquered populations. More recently, this includes the old practice of forced political recantations: A Telegram channel ominously called Crimean SMERSH (a portmanteau of the Russian words for “death to spies,” coined by Stalin himself) has posted dozens of videos of frightened Ukrainians recanting their Ukrainian identity or the display of Ukrainian symbols. Made in conjunction with police operations, these videos appear to be coordinated with state security services.

In the parts of Ukraine newly occupied since 2022, human rights groups have widely documented human rights abuses and potential war crimes. These include the abduction of children, imprisonment of Ukrainians in a system of filtration camps that recall the Soviet gulags, and the systematic use of rape and torture to break the will of Ukrainians. Castrations of Ukrainian men have also been employed.

As Russia’s violence in Ukraine has expanded, so, too, has the acceptance of these abominations throughout the state and in much of society. As during the Stalin era, the cult of cruelty and the culture of fear are now the legal and moral standards. The climate of fear initially employed to assert order in occupied regions is now being applied to Russia itself. In this context, the murder of Alexei Navalny ahead of the presidential election was an important message from Putin to the Russian people: There is no longer any alternative to the war and repressive political order he has imposed, of which Navalny’s elimination is a part.

All the techniques and means of repression bespeak a criminal regime that now closely resembles the totalitarian rule of Stalin, whom Putin now fully embraces. After Putin first came to power in 1999, he often praised Stalin as a great war leader while disapproving of his cruelty and brutality. But as Putin pivoted toward war and repression, Russia has systematically promoted a more positive image of Stalin. High school textbooks not only celebrate his legacy but also whitewash his terror regime. There has been a proliferation of new Stalin monuments, with more than 100 throughout the country today. On state-controlled media, Russian propagandists consistently hammer away on the theme of Stalin’s greatness and underscore similarities between his wartime leadership and Putin’s. Discussion of Stalinist terror has disappeared, as has the memorialization of his millions of victims. Whereas only one in five Russians had a positive view of Stalin in the 1990s, polls conducted over the last five years show that number has risen to between 60 percent and 70 percent. In normalizing Stalin, Putin is not glossing over the tyrant’s crimes; rather, he is deliberately normalizing Stalin as a justification for his own war-making and repression.

Putin now resembles Stalin more closely than any other Soviet or Russian leader. Unlike Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, Konstantin Chernenko, and Yuri Andropov—not to mention Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin—Putin has unquestioned power that is not shared or limited in any way by parliament, courts, or a Politburo. State propaganda has created a Stalin-like personality cult that lionizes Putin’s absolute power, genius as a leader, and role as a brilliant wartime generalissimo. It projects him as the fearsome and all-powerful head of a militarized nation aiming, like Stalin, to defeat a “Nazi” regime in Ukraine and reassert hegemony over Eastern and Central Europe. Just as Stalin made effective use of the Russian Orthodox Church to support Russia’s effort during World War II, Putin has effectively used Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill as a critical ally and cheerleader of Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine. And just like Stalin, Putin has made invading neighboring countries and annexing territory a central focus of the Kremlin’s foreign policy.

A young Communist holds a flag depicting Stalin before placing flowers on his tomb in Moscow on March 5, during a memorial ceremony to mark the anniversary of the Soviet leader’s death. Alexander Nemenov/AFP via Getty Images

Putin’s descent into tyranny has been accompanied by his gradual isolation from the rest of society. Like the latter-day Stalin, Putin began living an isolated life as a bachelor even before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Like the later Stalin, Putin lacks a stable family life and is believed to have replaced it with a string of mistresses, some of whom are reported to have borne him children for whom he remains a remote figure. Like Stalin, he stays up late into the early-morning hours, and like the Soviet dictator, Putin has assembled around him a small coterie of trusted intimates, mostly men in their 60s and 70s, with whom he has maintained friendships for decades, including businessmen Yury Kovalchuk and Igor Sechin, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, and security chief Nikolai Patrushev. This coterie resembles Stalin’s small network of cronies: security chief Lavrentiy Beria, military leader Kliment Voroshilov, and Communist Party official Georgy Malenkov. To others in leadership positions, Putin is a distant, absolute leader who openly humiliates seemingly powerful officials, such as spy chief Sergey Naryshkin , when the latter seemed to hesitate in his support during Putin’s declaration of war on Ukraine.

Through near-total control of domestic civic life and media, his widening campaign of repression and terror, relentless state propaganda promoting his personality cult, and his vast geopolitical ambitions, Putin is consciously mimicking the Stalin playbook, especially the parts of that playbook dealing with World War II. Even if Putin has no love for Soviet Communist ideology, he has transformed Russia and its people in ways that are no less fundamental than Stalin’s efforts to shape a new Soviet man.

Putin’s massive victory in a Soviet-style election last weekend represents the ratification by the Russian people of his brutal war, militarization of Russian society, and establishment of a totalitarian dictatorship. It is a good moment to acknowledge that Russia’s descent into tyranny, mobilization of society onto a war footing, spread of hatred for the West, and indoctrination of the population in imperialist tropes represent far more than a threat to Ukraine. Russia’s transformation into a neo-Stalinist, neo-imperialist power represents a rising threat to the United States, its European allies, and other states on Russia’s periphery. By recognizing how deeply Russia has changed and how significantly Putin is borrowing from Stalin’s playbook, we can better understand that meeting the modern-day Russian threat will require as much consistency and as deep a commitment as when the West faced down Stalin’s Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War.

Adrian Karatnycky is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, the founder of Myrmidon Group, and the author of Battleground Ukraine: From Independence to the War with Russia , to be published by Yale University Press in June 2024.

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