A Win-win Roadmap to the Future

Martin Rees

In the 50 years since Future Shock was published, we’ve become ever more interconnected: dependent on electric-power grids, air traffic control, international finance, just-in-time delivery, globally dispersed manufacturing, and so forth. There are consequently new concerns and risks of societal disruption: Unless these globalized networks are highly resilient, their manifest benefits could be outweighed by catastrophic (albeit rare) breakdowns—real-world analogues of what happened in 2008 to the financial system. Our cities would be paralyzed without electricity. Supermarket shelves would be empty within days if supply chains were disrupted. Air travel can spread a pandemic worldwide within days. And social media can spread panic and rumor, and psychic and economic contagion, literally at the speed of light.

There’s also growing concern about the long-term threats that stem from humanity’s ever-heavier collective “footprint”: there are more of us, and we’re more demanding of energy and resources. In the last 50 years world population has doubled. It’s now about 7.7 billion. The main growth has been in East Asia, and it’s there that the world’s human and financial resources will become concentrated—ending four centuries of North Atlantic hegemony. And there’s more urbanization. Preventing megacities from becoming turbulent dystopias will surely be a major challenge to governance.

Population growth seems underdiscussed—partly, perhaps, because doom-laden forecasts in the ’60s and ’70s by, for instance, the Club of Rome and by Paul Erlich—have proved off the mark. Also, some deem population growth to be a taboo subject—tainted by association with eugenics, with Indian policies under Indira Gandhi, and more recently with China’s hard-line one-child policy. As it turned out, food production and resource extraction kept pace with rising population; famines still occur, but they are due to conflict or maldistribution, not overall scarcity.

The world couldn’t sustain its present population if everyone lived as profligately as the better-off Americans do today—each using as much energy and eating as much beef. On the other hand, 20 billion people could live sustainably, with a tolerable (albeit ascetic) quality of life, if all adopted a vegan diet, travelled little, lived in small high-density apartments, and interacted via super-internet and virtual reality. This scenario is plainly improbable, and certainly not alluring. But the spread between these extremes highlights that it’s naive to quote one “headline” figure for the world’s “carrying capacity.”

Even if the birth rate stabilizes at (or below) replacement level in East Asia and Africa, as it already has in the majority of nations, world population will rise to 9 billion by mid-century because most people in the developing world are young, and will live longer. Feeding them will require improved agriculture—low-till, water-conserving, and perhaps GM crops—and maybe dietary innovations: converting insects—highly nutritious and rich in proteins—into palatable food; and making artificial meat. To quote Gandhi, “Enough for everyone’s need but not for everyone’s greed.”

Population trends beyond 2050 are harder to predict. Enhanced education and empowerment of women—surely a benign priority in itself—could reduce fertility rates where they’re now highest. And the demographic transition hasn’t reached parts of India and Sub-Saharan Africa.

But if families in Africa remain large, then according to the UN that continent’s population could double again by 2100, to 4 billion, thereby raising the global population to 11 billion. Nigeria alone would have as big a population as Europe and North America combined. And Africa’s population would be nearly 10 times Western Europe’s.

Optimists say that each extra mouth brings two hands and a brain. But it’s the geopolitical stresses that are most worrying. Sub-Saharan Africa can’t escape poverty as the Asian tigers did by undercutting Western wages—robots can now do that. Those in Africa don’t have sanitation, but they do have smartphones. They know what they’re missing, and the injustice of their fate. It’s a recipe for instability—multiple megaversions of the tragic boat people crossing the Mediterranean today. Wealthy nations, especially in Europe, should urgently promote growing prosperity in Africa, and not just for altruistic reasons.

And another thing: If humanity’s collective impact on land use and climate pushes too hard the resultant “ecological shock” could irreversibly impoverish our biosphere. Extinction rates are rising. A UN report in 2019 claimed that a million species are at risk. That’s 10 percent of the total estimated number of species, many not yet identified. We’re destroying the book of life before we’ve read it.

Biodiversity is crucial to human well-being. We’re clearly harmed if fish stocks dwindle to extinction; there are plants in the endangered rain forest whose gene pool might be useful to us. But for many environmentalists, preserving the richness of our biosphere has value in its own right, over and above what it means to us humans. To quote the great Harvard ecologist E.O. Wilson, “Mass extinction is the sin that future generations will least forgive us for.”

So the world’s getting more crowded. And there’s a second firm prediction: It will gradually get warmer. In contrast to population issues, climate change is certainly not underdiscussed, though it is under-responded-to. The concentration of CO2 in the air has risen by 50 percent since preindustrial times, mainly due to the burning of fossil fuels. The fifth IPCC report presented a spread of projections for different assumptions about future rates of fossil fuel use (and associated rises in CO2 concentration). It’s still unclear how much the climatic effects of CO2 are amplified by associated changes in water vapor and clouds—that’s a further uncertainty.

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Optimists say that each extra mouth brings two hands and a brain. But it’s the geopolitical stresses that are most worrying. Sub-Saharan Africa can’t escape poverty as the Asian tigers did by undercutting Western wages—robots can now do that.

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However, most predictions agree on two things. First, regional disruptions to weather patterns within the next 20-30 years, and more extreme weather, will aggravate pressures on food and water, and enhance migration pressure. And second, under “business as usual” scenarios, we can’t rule out, later in the century, really catastrophic warming, and tipping points triggering long-term trends like the melting of Greenland’s ice cap.

But even those who accept both these statements have diverse views on the optimal policy response. These divergences stem from differences in economics and ethics—in particular, in how much obligation we should feel toward future generations.

Some economists downplay the priority of addressing climate change in comparison with shorter-term efforts to help the world’s poor. But that’s because they apply a “standard” discount rate—and in effect write off what happens beyond 2050. But if you care about those who’ll live into the 22st century and beyond, then you deem it worth paying an insurance premium now to protect those generations against the worst-case scenarios.

So, even those who agree that there’s a significant risk of climate catastrophe a century hence will differ in how urgently they advocate action today. Their assessment will depend on expectations of future growth, and optimism about technological fixes. But, above all, it depends on an ethical issue—in optimizing people’s life-chances, should we discriminate on grounds of year of birth?

(Parenthetically, I note that there’s one policy context in which an essentially zero discount rate is applied—radioactive waste disposal. Depositories are required to prevent leakage for at least 10,000 years—somewhat ironic when we can’t plan the rest of energy policy even 30 years ahead.)

Consider this analogy. Suppose astronomers had tracked an asteroid and calculated that it would hit the Earth in 2080, 60 years from now—not with certainty, but with (say) 10 percent probability. Would we relax, saying that it’s a problem that can be set aside for 50 years—we will then be richer in resources to address the threat, and it may turn out that it’s going to miss the Earth anyway? I don’t think we would. There would surely be a consensus that we should start straight away and do our damnedest to find ways to deflect it, or mitigate its effects.

Politicians won’t gain much resonance by advocating unwelcome lifestyle changes now or a high carbon tax—when the benefits accrue mainly to distant parts of the world and are decades into the future.

But there’s one “win-win” roadmap to a low-carbon future. Nations should invest in R&D into all forms of low-carbon energy generation, and into other technologies where parallel progress is crucial—especially storage (batteries, compressed air, pumped storage, hydrogen, etc.), and smart grids.

The faster these “clean” technologies advance, the sooner their prices will fall and they will become affordable in areas where they can make a crucial timely difference. For instance, in India, where more generating capacity will be needed, where the health of the poor is jeopardized by smoky stoves burning wood or dung, and where there would otherwise be pressure to build coal-fired power stations to meet increased demand.

Sun and wind are of course front-runners, but other methods have geographical niches. Geothermal power, for instance, is readily available in Iceland; harnessing tidal energy seems attractive where the topography induces specially large-amplitude tides.

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The smartphone, the web, and their ancillaries—ubiquitous today—would have seemed magical even just 25 years ago. So, looking several decades ahead, we must keep our minds open, or at least a bit ajar, to transformative advances that may now seem like science fiction.

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Because of local intermittency we’ll need continental-scale DC grids—carrying solar energy from the south to less sunny northern latitudes, and east-west to smooth peak demand over different time zones in North America and—via China’s belt and road initiative—right across Eurasia.

Despite wide ambivalence about nuclear energy, which has led to technical stagnation in this field in recent decades, it’s surely worthwhile to boost R&D into a variety of “Fourth Generation” concepts, which could prove to be safer and more flexible in size. And the potential payoff from fusion is so great that it is surely worth continuing experiments and prototype development.

It would be hard to think of a more inspiring challenge for young engineers than devising clean and economical energy systems for the world.

We should be evangelists for new technology, not Luddites. Without new technology, the world can’t provide food and sustainable energy for an expanding and more demanding population. But we need wisely directed technology. Indeed, many of are so anxious that it’s advancing so fast that we may not properly cope with it—and that we’ll have a bumpy ride through this century.

The smartphone, the web, and their ancillaries—ubiquitous today—would have seemed magical even just 25 years ago. So, looking several decades ahead, we must keep our minds open, or at least a bit ajar, to transformative advances that may now seem like science fiction.

Regulation is already needed for bio- and cybertech. But I’d worry that any regulations imposed (on prudential or ethical grounds, for instance) will be unenforceable worldwide, as is now the case for drug and tax laws. Whatever can be done will be done by someone, somewhere.

And that’s a nightmare. Whereas an atomic bomb can’t be built without large-scale special-purpose facilities, biotech and cybertechnology experimentation involves facilities that are widely accessible. Indeed, biohacking is burgeoning even as a hobby and competitive game.

We know all too well that technical expertise doesn’t guarantee balanced rationality. The global village will have its village idiots, and they’ll have global range. The rising empowerment of tech-savvy groups (or even individuals) in the arenas of bio- and cybertechnology will pose an intractable challenge to governments and will aggravate the tension between freedom, privacy, and security.

As technology gets more powerful, the opportunities opened up are huge, but threats that could cascade globally are looming larger. And pressures from a growing population are pushing us closer to climatic and environmental tipping points. These messages confront us even more insistently today than when Future Shock was written.

Martin Rees is a leading astrophysicist as well as a senior figure in UK science. He has conducted influential theoretical work on subjects as diverse as black hole formation and extragalactic radio sources, and provided key evidence to contradict the Steady State theory of the evolution of the universe. Martin was also one of the first scientists to predict the uneven distribution of matter in the universe, and proposed observational tests to determine the clustering of stars and galaxies. Much of his most valuable research has focused on the end of the so-called cosmic dark ages—a period shortly after the Big Bang when the universe was as yet without light sources. As Astronomer Royal and a past president of the Royal Society, Martin is a prominent scientific spokesperson and the author of seven books of popular science. After receiving a knighthood in 1992 for his services to science, he was in 2005 elevated to the title of Baron Rees of Ludlow.