coda living in the
twenty-first century
In 2009, a team of demographers and physicians studying aging published a paper showing that if trends in life expectancy continue, more than half of all children born in rich countries since 2000 will live to see the year 2100.1
What will that world look like?
I’ve outlined four things in this book that we, as a society, need to do in order to thrive through the twenty-first century:
If we do those things, the twenty-first century is likely to be the richest, most prosperous century humanity has yet seen.
Let me take you on a tour of that world—the world we could build, if we make the right choices.
We start in the countryside. The first thing we might notice is that the areas outside cities are more sparsely populated in 2100 than in 2013. Humanity has all but completed the transition away from spending its time hunting or farming food and toward other professions. Where in our time 1.3 billion people still farm the Earth, and half of those eke out barely enough to survive, by 2100 there will be less than one-tenth as many farmers on the planet, as machines take over the tasks of sowing and reaping in every corner of the world.
The world’s populace, by 2100, will have concentrated in the cities. Today roughly half of the world’s population are city dwellers; in 2100 more than 80 percent will be. Those nine or ten billion people will be rich. Each of them, on average, will be as rich as today’s Americans or Europeans. With their wealth they’ll demand more and richer food—roughly three times as much as the world consumes now. Yet as we look around the countryside, we’ll find that farms use up far less of the land than they do today. If we triple the yields of farms in the rich countries by 2100 (roughly what we did from 1950 to 2010), and if the rising wealth of today’s developing countries brings their yields to parity with the rich countries, then the world will produce six times as much food per acre as it does now. We’ll be able to meet the food demands of humanity with only half the land we use today. And if other trends continue, and if we embrace next-generation genetically modified crops, we’ll grow that food with the use of less pesticide, less nitrogen fertilizer, and less water than ever before.
All that land and the lakes and rivers that flow through it will be cleaner than at any time since the start of the 1900s. The rising wealth of people worldwide will shift their concerns towards environmental protection, just as has happened in rich countries to date. Already, today, the land and water in every rich country are cleaner than they have been for at least forty years. That trend will continue, driving pollutant levels down in the countries that are already rich and in all those that have become rich by 2100. Rivers will be running higher than they have in decades as well, as more water-efficient crops have reduced the amount of water needed on our farms, and smarter market-based pricing of our freshwater commons has increasingly shifted water production toward desalination, rather than draining down the world’s freshwater rivers, lakes, and aquifers.
Other sorts of farms will dot the landscape—energy farms that pull power out of the wind and from the sun’s rays. If per capita energy needs continue to increase around 1 percent per year, those nine to ten billion rich people alive in 2100 will demand roughly three times the amount of energy that we use today. We’ll meet the bulk of that demand through these energy farms—wind farms in the world’s windiest places, solar farms in the world’s deserts—with plentiful energy storage to capture energy for use when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow, and a grid that ships energy from where it’s collected or stored to where it’s needed. Some energy will be collected in more distributed fashions, on the roof tops of homes and factories, on wind turbines above fields, and so on. But the economies of scale and the advantages of the best locations mean that concentrated energy farms will produce the bulk of the world’s energy. Those energy farms will occupy less than 1 percent of world’s land area and capture less than a tenth of a percent of the energy the sun strikes the Earth with, with headroom to grow our energy use at that pace—if, indeed, the pace hasn’t slowed—for another few centuries yet.
Now let’s continue our tour of 2100 by venturing into the wilderness. The world’s forests and savannahs will be regrowing and healthier than they have been in decades. Some of the land once used for farming will be given over to parks and forests once more. That wilderness will bear scars, to be sure. The marks of millennia of human impacts will be there. The impact of the rapid warming of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, in particular, will be apparent. Some species—many, many species—will be lost to us forever. Others may still be on the edge as we nurse them back to health. The world will likely be a warmer place in 2100, no matter what we do now. The species that do remain will be shifted in their distribution, all of them pushing toward the poles, some through simple adaptation, and others because we deliberately helped them along to save them from the impacts of the warming world.
Even so, as we walk through the forests and jungles and savannahs of the world, we’ll see that they have turned a corner and are finally growing in size rather than being whittled away by human farming. They are on their way toward better health rather than worse.
From the forests and jungles we might venture out toward the oceans. Along the shores we’ll see fish farms aplenty—now the source of the large majority of the world’s fish protein. These will not be dirty, disease-spreading fish farms—they’ll be separated tanks, with water filtered between ocean and farm, and with fish production far greater per acre than could ever happen in the wild.
When we reach the ocean itself we’ll see good and bad. As with the onland wilderness, there will be scars. But there will also be more life thriving in the seas than there has been in decades. Massive schools of deep-ocean fish will have returned around the world. The transition from fish-hunting to fish-farming will have given them time and space to heal. Coral reefs will also have benefited from the decline in fishing, which will remove the greatest pressure on them. Some reefs and some calcifier species will have suffered greatly from the acidification of the oceans that happened in the early twenty-first century. But where they’ve suffered the most, new coral species, transplanted from the areas where corals have shown the greatest ability to withstand heating and acidification, will be taking hold. Our oceans will be scarred, but healing, and healthier than they have been in almost two centuries.
Finally, we’ll return to land and move in toward the cities. At the outskirts of those cities we’ll find waste reclamation plants, where those materials that have been thrown out come to be put back into circulation. By 2100, the concepts of “garbage” and “recycling” will have merged. Just as in nature evolution selects for the rise of species that can extract value from any wasted resource, so too our market economy, with the tweaks we’ve made, will select for the extraction of any value we can find in materials that are thrown out. Farther away, we’ll still have mines, of course. Powered by the plentiful energy of the day, they’ll be pulling mineral resources out of the almost unthinkably vast resources in the Earth’s crust—resources large enough to meet the material needs of 9 or 10 billion people living like today’s billionaires. But by 2100, we’ll have found it more efficient and more cost effective to recycle the materials we throw out. The large majority of almost every mineral resource put on the market will be recycled from a previous use.
Inside the city we’ll find wonders. Technological wonders, to be sure. Most of those, I can’t even hazard a guess at. But the most wondrous thing of all will be the people, the ways they connect to one another, and the incredible pace at which they produce new ideas.
These people will be the most affluent humanity has ever seen. Over the course of the twentieth century, the purchasing power of a typical American—measured as the amount of food, energy, housing, transportation, or consumer goods they could buy with an hour of their labor—increased by a factor of more than 20. Touring the world of 2100, we’ll find that the purchasing power of the average resident of a rich country has increased by that much again, and the purchasing power of the average resident of today’s poor countries will have increased even more, dramatically cutting the gap in wealth between nations today. As we walk through the streets of this city, whether it’s in Europe or the Americas or Asia or Africa, we’ll find that people spend less and less of their income on what they need, and more and more of it on what they want. The world’s people will be more freed then ever from the chains of meeting their base necessities, and more able to engage in their desires.
As we look around, we’ll note that the people of 2100 are the healthiest and longest lived to ever inhabit the Earth as well. By 2100, the average person on Earth will live to be more than 90 years old, and the average person in the currently rich countries will likely live to be 100 or more. We’ll do so in greater health, with less pain, less burden of disease, more independence and mobility in our old age.
All that progress in our base physical needs and well-being will provide a foundation for the even more dramatic transformations that are already happening to the way we use the world’s minds. We are closing in on a world where everyone can read, where everyone is connected to the Internet, where everyone gets adequate schooling. It will take us decades more to get there, but the trends are all in the right direction. And in connectivity, in particular, the future means of communicating from person to person will likely make our current Internet and mobile phone connections seem as antiquated, slow, and clumsy as hand-copied scrolls.
By 2100, growing wealth, more widespread and effective schooling, and greater automation of farms and factories will free more and more people from manual labor. The result will be an influx of new, educated, incredibly connected brain power larger than any the world has ever seen. Billions of minds that are now disenfranchised, uneducated, undernourished, or trapped in subsistence farming or menial labor will enter the global market of ideas, as both consumers and creators.
At the outset of the Renaissance, there were perhaps ten million people in the whole of Europe who could read and write. The printing press tightened the connection between those men and women, accelerating the transmission of ideas and their rate of collision and recombination. The early rumblings of the market and, later, the scientific method helped select for the most effective of those ideas through a process of Darwinian evolution.
We’re now on the verge of a world with nine billion literate people, nearly 1,000 times more brainpower than those ten million who spurred the Renaissance, wired to one another through much faster, more powerful communication tools, with better scientific instruments and methods, and, we may hope, a market that is even more effective in valuing the things that matter on this planet. As we walk through a city of 2100, we’ll be walking through a denser hub of brainpower than has ever existed in human history. Each of thousands of cities will contain more available brainpower than all of Europe during the Renaissance. Between now and 2100, worldwide, the number of men and women who can effectively contribute new innovations will triple, at the very least, and the interconnectivity between each of them, their peers, and the world’s stockpiles of knowledge will grow by far more. This is the largest surge in total brainpower humanity has ever seen.
What will all those minds do? We may not be able to guess the specifics, but we can place solid bets on the general patterns. They’ll work to provide things that others value. That is, by and large, how they’ll make a living. And we all value our health, our comfort, our security, the well-being of our families, our ability to travel and experience new things, our ability to communicate with one another, and to access information of all sorts.
If history is any lesson, the market that wires us all together will select for those things, and the unprecedented brain power of humanity will provide them. Even as we turn the tide for the global commons that is our planet, we’ll tremendously enrich the knowledge commons that are left to all future generations.
Just as we live with marvels that medieval kings and princes would lust for, our descendants—not so long from now—will live with comforts and capabilities that would amaze us and that will make the large majority of them, in many ways, richer than the richest men and women who live today.
The world I’ve just described to you isn’t the world we’re guaranteed to have. But it’s not a world out of fantasy, either. It’s the world we can have, if we work hard and smart to bring it into being.
The human mind is the ultimate source of all wealth. We stand poised on the brink of the largest-ever explosion of human mental power, a second Renaissance, more transformative, more far-reaching, and more inclusive than the first. If we make the right choices to empower human minds and encourage innovation, to steer innovation toward the solutions for our planet’s problems, and to embrace the fruits that it offers, then the future will be one of almost unimaginable wealth, health, and well-being.