What Will The World Look Like In 2050?

 

The world in 2050 is hostile and less fertile, more saturated and less diverse. Compared to 2021, there are more trees, but fewer forests, more concrete, but less stability. The rich return to the holy places with the fresh air behind the high walls regularly.

The World in 2050

Technology will be used to screen, diagnose and cure diseases that reduce the population. Enormous and permanent slums will proliferate in the hotter parts of the world. Credit: Abhijit Bhatlekar/Mint The world in 2050 is more hostile and less fertile, more crowded and less diverse. Compared with 2021, there are more trees, but fewer forests, more concrete, but less stability. The rich have retreated into air-conditioned sanctums behind ever higher walls. The World in 2050 Technology will be used to screen, diagnose and cure diseases that reduce the population. Enormous and permanent slums will proliferate in the hotter parts of the world. The global power balance is poised to undergo a dramatic shift, as the rich lose their economic and military supremacy.

 

The World in 2021

In the course of a few decades the Earth has already changed. In the mid-1980s, the Earth contained nearly six billion people. In the mid-1990s, the population rose to over seven billion. In the mid-2000s, it reached over eight billion. Then, in the 2010s, growth slowed. By 2050, the human population may have topped out at nine billion. The world in 2050 may look very different to the world in 2021. Many countries have already become more concentrated, and nations are reaching a limit of how densely they can place their population, especially in the tropics, where they are already challenged by water shortages and growing desertification. There is no room for a global population of over nine billion.

 

What Changed?

We asked some experts how they predicted the world might look to 2050, from prosperous countries like Sweden and Japan to impoverished ones like India and Nigeria. The changes that made the most impact on their predictions were economic — the introduction of technologies that were cheaper and more productive. Africa: What It Will Look Like In 2050 In a close race, Mali and Niger seem like the most likely candidates to join the club of African countries that appear on the 2030 list. A few small African countries appear on the 2050 list: Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Senegal. North America: What It Will Look Like In 2050 Canada’s northern borders are expected to be open in 2050, with the Northwest Passage connecting Greenland and Canada.

 

What Will We Do?

Well, the equivalent of looking out a window at the future is to take another look at the history of the past few centuries. What did we do in the 20th century? Looked backward. How has the century since 1900 changed the world? What might happen in the next century? This is the “three-step” strategy. The New York Times blog New York Rewind has created a series of timelines showing that our view of the past does little more than to put events into context and describe what went on around them. The United States joined the war against fascism and stood up to the Russians. We won the Cold War. We fought a second one. And then we stood up to the Saudis. We didn’t care much about climate change until it mattered. And we sent signals that we didn’t care about global warming. What Did We Do?

 

Conclusion

I am not a global warming denialist. I do not deny the fact of global warming, or the fact that humans contribute to it. I think it is a reality that will affect the future of humanity, not just the future of this planet. I do however, refuse to see a single global warming trend that is meaningful in the long term. What the climatologists call the “Pause” or “hiatus” of global warming does not disprove anthropogenic global warming, since the planet was heating up in the 1970s and 1980s before it stopped. But it is definitely an anomaly. What caused the “Pause”? Perhaps, the most probable explanation is that the slowdown was due to some unknown external cause. The cause can only be narrowed down if we know what our Sun is doing. We do not, so it is all speculation at the moment.