the future breakthroughs that will shape our world — and beyond

The Roman sage Marcus Aurelius said we should never let the future disturb us. But then he never had a conversation with the futurologist Nick Bostrom about the state of the world in 2050.

“There’s a good likelihood that by 2050, all scientific research will be done by superintelligent AI rather than human researchers,” Bostrom said in an e-mail. “Some humans might do science as a hobby, but they wouldn’t be making any useful contributions.”

Time to rethink your career options, Nature readers!

150 years of Nature — an anniversary collection

To adapt a cliché about computer models, predictions of the future are usually wrong, but some are interesting. And Nature has a long history of seeking stimulation in forecasts, projections and auguries about how research might unfold in the coming decades. Most notably, the journal marked the end of the twentieth century and the onset of the twenty-first with supplements dedicated to scientific soothsaying, and a bold prediction, from then-editor Philip Campbell, that life based on something other than DNA would be discovered by 2100. (It was a statement he called foolish then, but stands by today.)

So, with peer review suspended and Nature’s stated aim of discussing the “interpretation of topical and coming trends” firmly underlined, let’s set the controls of our (stubbornly still undiscovered) time machine for 2050 and take a cautious peek outside. Prepare for technological leaps, solving the puzzle of dark matter and perhaps being able to study enough people to wave goodbye to many diseases.

Hot times

You should probably brace yourself before opening the door. “It will be worse than we had anticipated in terms of climate change,” says Guy Brasseur, a modeller at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany.

The world will have barrelled past the crucial threshold of 2 °C of average warming above pre-industrial levels by 2040, he suggests. (To avoid that, given the inertia in the climate system, the International Panel on Climate Change says that global emissions needed to peak in 2025 and then decline sharply; see go.nature.com/4prom5j.) So, by 2050, political debate on the reality of a warming world could have melted with the glaciers.

Arguments might rage instead about whether or not to try to cool the planet, most probably by injecting shiny particles into the upper atmosphere that keep sunlight from hitting the surface. Although this geoengineering technique is unproven and untested at significant scale, severe climate impacts by 2050 could encourage an affected nation or even a company to stage such an atmospheric intervention.

“You could have some countries that are using it unilaterally,” Brasseur says, “just thinking that it will solve their problem without looking at the consequence for others.” The intervention could change rainfall patterns and disrupt other aspects of the weather, perhaps making the situation even worse. “I think it should be forbidden,” Brasseur says.

Geopolitical tensions mean that forecasts of future climate to 2050 must increasingly account for more than atmospheric physics, Brasseur and his colleagues pointed out in a 2025 study¹. A decade ago, climate scientists were celebrating global recognition of climate change with the Paris agreement. Today, those in the United States are being forced to delete the term from government reports and websites. Meanwhile, other priorities have taken over.

“If we talk about climate science, people just don’t want to hear about it because they’re much more scared by other issues. They want food, they want peace,” he says. All of that points to the world in 2050 facing the prospect of 3 °C or more of warming by the end of the century.

Here’s another, more optimistic, option. By 2050, removing carbon dioxide from the air could become such a business opportunity that companies find ways to draw down the circulating greenhouse gas and turn a profit in doing so.

“We will make different stuff from carbon dioxide,” says Elina Hiltunen, a futures researcher at the National Defence University in Helsinki. “It could be plastics or fuels or medication. But they are all manufactured from air.”

Future shock

The vast gulf between these two possible scenarios illustrates the dilemma for futurologists and others who try to map progress and pitfalls beyond the next election cycle. How much can the future be projected from current trends? To what extent will it be driven by disruptive events and inventions that seem unlikely or haven’t been conceived yet? And at which point do predictions become, well, just a bit silly?

Futurology — the systematic, interdisciplinary study of future trends — is best placed to imagine a time 10—15 years away, suggests Richard Watson, co-author of The Children’s Book of the Future (2024) and a former futurist in residence at Imperial College London and the University of Cambridge, UK.

“Under five years, you just get the gravitational pull of the present and you end up talking about next Tuesday,” he says. “Over about 20 years, it gets very sci-fi very quickly. I’ve run workshops for banks, and the minute you go to the 2050s you invariably get aliens living on the moon.”

Still, 2050 is a prominent timestamp and a seductive deadline for those who want to set goals and steer investment to reach them. Space agencies, for example, routinely plan that far ahead because it can take a couple of decades for missions to be conceived, approved, designed, built and launched.

The European Space Agency, for one, has already canvassed the research community for ideas for projects for 2050. Submissions include an orbiting antimatter detector, bringing frozen samples of a comet’s icy body back to Earth and landing a robot explorer on the surface of Mercury.

Then there’s Mars. US President Donald Trump restated a goal earlier this year for NASA to send humans to Mars well before 2050, whereas Elon Musk has claimed that his company SpaceX could send an uncrewed starship to the red planet as soon as 2026, as part of a plan to send people there in the 2030s.

Emilia Javorsky, director of the Futures Program at the Future of Life Institute, a think tank in Campbell, California, that analyses transformative technologies, is sceptical about people making that trip, given the risks of space radiation and the long-term impacts of microgravity.

“This is a field that’s driven predominantly by engineers, aerospace engineers, mechanical engineers that greatly underestimate the biological challenges,” she says. “Everyone assumes that we’ll find some material, some way to sort of hack ourselves out of it.”

Rise of the machines

Any vision of the future has to try to account for the continuing ascent of artificial intelligence. But at what pace?

“I could give you a relatively good view of what AI will look like in 2027, 2028. But I don’t know if I can be confident about where we’d be in 2030,” says Alex Ayad, co-founder of the London research and foresight company Outsmart Insight.

The picture beyond then is even fuzzier, but some in the AI field argue that by 2050, a machine-learning system could do science worthy of a Nobel prize.

Bostrom, who is based in Oxford, UK, and authored Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014), expects artificial general intelligence to arrive by 2050, and with it the capacity to answer “most of the questions that we are currently interested in, and that can in principle be answered by science”.

Even without a superintelligence takeover, AI could make the process of science look very different by 2050. Combined with robotic experimenters, autonomous systems driven by algorithms will increasingly pursue biotechnology problems 24–7 in dedicated “lights out labs”, Ayad says — so named because no people would be involved.

Lessons from 150 years of science

That’s an example of a future determined by technologies that enable new types of scientific research and progress. In many cases, the knowledge generated would then feed into new and better technologies in a symbiotic relationship that unlocks more new science, and so on.

Advances in quantum science and cosmology could, for example, combine to make great strides by 2050, says Juan Carlos Hidalgo, a physicist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Cuernavaca.

Building on the Nobel-winning generation of attosecond laser pulses, researchers are currently developing ways to detect changes in the faint magnetic and electrical fields from single-electron and nuclear spins². Incorporated into detectors for gravitational waves, such quantum sensors could allow cosmologists to identify smaller objects than is possible at the moment, including hypothetical primordial black holes, says Hidalgo.

Formed soon after the Big Bang, these could hold mass that is currently unaccounted for in the Universe and, when combined with other observations, might unlock some cosmological conundrums. “All those will help us elucidate the nature of dark energy or even dark matter,” Hidalgo says.

Such a discovery, he suggests, could finally produce a successor to the generally accepted standard model of cosmology. which is already creaking under the weight of data, published in 2024, that called into question the model’s predicted rate of expansion of the Universe.

And, in a cautious prediction that could finally silence the jibes about fusion energy always being 30 years away, Hidalgo adds that things look “promising” for the technology to finally come of age by 2050.

“Certainly, nuclear fusion has progressed more in the last 5 years than it has in the previous 50,” he says.

External factors

The scientific progress made in the past 75 years has emerged from broad public support for research, but that trend might not last.

The continued rise of populism and its lure of quick solutions to complex problems, for example, could leave the next generation of scientists struggling to justify the years of patient work needed to provide the foundation for advances that seem to be rapid.

The continued squeeze on public spending in sluggish economies, combined with political attacks on the value of science, could mean that researchers find themselves under increasing pressure to justify the expense of their work, says Patrick van der Duin, a foresight consultant based in The Hague, the Netherlands, and co-editor-in-chief of the journal Futures. “That’s not very good for the future of science.”

It could also tip the always-precarious balance between pure and applied research heavily towards science that governments see as explicitly supporting narrow political goals. With the population ageing in many countries, for example, governments will probably expand their investments in medical research aimed at curing and preventing chronic diseases. But technological progress alone can’t ensure these advances.

“I think we’re going to embark on a decade of realizing that data is one of our big bottlenecks,” says Javorsky.

Addressing the shortfall in data will mean relying on volunteers, probably many millions of them, who are willing to give up their time and health details with no or little benefit to themselves personally. And that won’t happen quickly.

“We need to get those spun up and we need to get that data collected and curated and made publicly available,” she says.

Under one optimistic scenario, such people power could finally reveal biomarkers — detectable in a person’s proteome or metabolome, say — to better diagnose and treat psychiatric and neurological disorders. “Measurement will move us beyond the poetry of psychiatry to the quantitative realm,” she says.

By 2050, the language of the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the field’s diagnostic tool, could look as archaic as the early editions — which were based on Freudian psychodynamics — already seem to us now, says Javorsky. “It’ll be something studied in classrooms the same way we read the ancient Greeks and their description of disease.”

Life chances

Another way to build scenarios for 2050, Hiltunen says, is to look for ‘weak signals’ — ideas and technologies in their infancy that could develop in many possible ways, some of which will take everyone by surprise.

These disruptive technologies of the future might be being discussed today as nothing more than a punchline. “The first bulky mobile phones were the weak signals of today’s smartphones,” Hiltunen says. “They were laughed at because only yuppies and rich people had them.”

Science-fiction writers often pick up on and describe the impact of such weak signals on future society, she adds, which is why many futurologists take the genre seriously — as does the military. Hiltunen studies reports about science fiction that have been commissioned by armies and defence organizations, which tend to look further ahead than those produced by companies and academics.

The use of small, disposable drones by both sides in the war in Ukraine has surprised many commentators. But it was widely foreshadowed in a 2016 exercise by the US Army (the unfortunately titled Mad Scientist Initiative) that asked science-fiction writers to describe future war scenarios to 2050³.

What other current weak signals could dominate by 2050, according to science fiction? Hiltunen says that the emerging field of claytronics will advance to produce programmable materials, made up of swarms of microscale robots that can change their form and function on demand. “So, if you have a chair, then you can turn it into a table by reprogramming the material.”

Beyond shape-shifting furniture, progress on claytronics could also mould the future of research on a vast array of fields, ranging from materials science to building replicas of diseased organs to plan and test treatments.

And, of course, science fiction regularly plays out scenarios concerning one of humanity’s biggest questions, which even AI might struggle to answer by 2050: are we alone in the Universe?

A simple extrapolation of the rate of exoplanet discovery suggests that scientists could have found 100 million by 2050. Will any show an atmosphere holding the traces of life? Some exoplanet hunters think so. A small, informal survey at a 2019 meeting in Budapest showed significant support for the idea that exoplanet researchers would win a Nobel Prize by 2050 for the discovery of extraterrestrial life⁴.

René Heller, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen, Germany, who conducted the survey, is more circumspect: “I doubt that within the next 25 years, we will have the technical abilities and theoretical abilities combined to give the extraordinary evidence I think will be required.”

He does expect such a claim to be made, but then not accepted: “Maybe there will be candidates, and I think many of them will be refuted or at least contested.”

In any case, confirmation of a claim for life away from Earth could take decades of arguments. “It would be a converging process to an accepted theory. Maybe towards the end of the century, if we’re lucky,” he says — which will at least give Nature something to write about when it revisits this future-gazing exercise in 2050.

Especially if it looks as if the claimed alien life isn’t based on DNA …