illustration by Anna Parini

The effects on distant tomorrows of the decisions we make today have never been greater. As we change our planet, ourselves and, potentially, our descendants, in ever more dramatic ways, this issue of Nature takes stock: do we have the brains and the tools to understand and account for the future and, if not, what should be done?

Technology experts foresee a world just a few decades away that is so radically different from today that it is hard to comprehend. The exponential rate of progress in a suite of enabling technologies, ranging from computer-processing power to communication, could drive drastic changes in artificial intelligence, robotics, molecular biology and more (see page 398).

Nature special: Future generations

Some think that the people who inhabit this world might also be irrevocably altered, for the first time, by genetic engineering. The arrival of the powerful genome-editing technology CRISPR–Cas9 might prevent children from being born with some deadly disorders or disabilities, and a feature on page 402 discusses the extent to which this is possible and desirable.

Forecasting is hard and fraught with bias. For example, as Nicholas Stern warns on page 407, current models of climate economics implicitly assume that lives in the future are less important than those today — a value judgement that is rarely scrutinized and difficult to defend. And, as Celine Kermisch writes on page 383, near and remote future generations have very different needs. Hundreds of social-science studies highlight the tensions between our tendencies to care about the well-being of others yet to favour current benefits over future ones. Therefore, on page 413, behavioural economists Helga Fehr-Duda and Ernst Fehr call for the design of sustainable-development policies and schemes that exploit these evolved behaviours.

Finally, John Bongaarts expresses the view on page 409 that the best thing we could do now for future generations is to ensure that there are fewer of them, by doubling the aid spent on family planning.

The only certainties are that tomorrow’s world is difficult to predict, is heading straight for us, and that billions more people will inhabit it. How we account for future impacts in today’s decisions should preoccupy researchers and policymakers more than it does now.

Journal name:

Nature

Volume:

530,

Pages:

397

Date published:

(25 February 2016)

DOI:

doi:10.1038/530397a

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1. 
   Max Klein • 2016-02-27 02:18 AM

   To sustain life is more important than anything, so f we can raise the number of people that can help with the endeavour of sustaining human life, we are on the right path. So there is no "overpopulation". I suggest that massive high speed education to provide the actually needed information, would be the most important thing to do. This means the ability to access and use information and educational software. This will change the notion of "overpopulation" back again to "population". There are too many people, who can't do enough to help themselves because they lack the information to do so, but there are never too many people in itself as long as there is no natural physical limit that is scientifically proven to can't be bypassed. As science is just "observation written down", there are still many limits to come that can be surpassed by some means. If there are no next generations there is no need to live now. To say we aren't willing to educate more people so let's don't give them the gift of life is a probably a realy suicidal thought of a population. I repeat: "Overpopulation is only possible if there is a proven concept that shows that by any means there isn't any more sustainable population possible (and this seems very unlikely)." There is just "temporary overpopulation" if there are people who can't care for themselves and each other with their current information and technology. We also know that education is the best way to speed up disruptive technologies to emerge. We know that because governments try to slow their way to market down with laws that protect the working force. (for prove see the youtube talk of sigmar gabriel (german economics and energy minister with elon musk)) And obviously more educated people can combine more things to create somethng new as they know of the limits of their knowledge. There is still no system to deal with rapid growth of unemployment rates. There is also no system to deal with the necessary education those people need to get back to work as fast as possible though there is automation in every area. We need way better education for people who already worked. If we want to see the future faster. We only live once, so get studying, teach, improve and make children.

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2. 
   Michael Lardelli • 2016-02-24 11:24 PM

   It is clear that most scientists do not consider the path of the future or, when doing so, display that notable, irrational human characteristic of believing what they want to believe because it is convenient and the alternative is unpleasant. While it is great to see Nature openly addressing the topic of population growth, the major determinant of our futures and the ability to support any population will be energy supply. Without energy, those super high-tech futures many of us (as scientists) love to dream about cannot happen. A world starved of transport fuel cannot support the astonishingly complex and intensive just-in-time logistics network that keeps advanced manufacturing going. More importantly, it cannot support increased food production or distribution to feed the billions of people already here or billions still to come. While the mainstream media and some better-known (but apparently rather scientifically illiterate) environmental bloggers/columnists celebrate the “demise” of the Peak Oil idea, the truth is that the world economy is, at its core, an energy system. The current low oil prices are a function of how that system operates but do not indicate future energy abundance. Conventional oil (the great bulk of supply) peaked 10 years ago and the non-conventional that gave marginal overall increases in supply since is currently collapsing as predicted by some (e.g. Art Berman, David Hughes, see www.shalebubble.org). There is nothing that can stop the declines in oil supply (and in other fossil fuels) that are now imminent since they are a function of how our energy-economy operates (look to the discipline of Biophysical Economics, not Neo-Classical Economics, to comprehend it). The head of the International Energy Agency (an organization that has traditionally tried to keep a lid on the idea of energy declines www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/nov/09/peak-oil-international-energy-agency ) has visited Australia and described a 36% total decline in investment in oil production over 2015-2016 – and that at a time when investment in oil production has been showing steadily diminishing returns in any case. So Peak Oil is here and total production will be falling away rapidly by the end of this decade. There is quite a lot of scientific literature out there that does not get much attention but that addresses this issue and shows how the rate and scale of growth of renewable or nuclear energy sources required cannot hope to match the coming declines (if it can even be built without the energy subsidy provided by fossil fuels) and also looks at the effects of future decreases in oil/coal/gas supply on climate change models. If you want to remain objective and obtain a real understanding of where our future is headed then you need to have a cold, hard, honest look at the energy numbers. The finer details may be uncertain but the overwhelming trend is not. Making predictions on future technologies or population sizes in the absence of this understanding of future energy decline is just “science” fiction…..

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