Looking Back from the Year 3030

What will it be like for a person living in the year 3030 to look back through history to this year, 2020? A perspective from 3030 is…

What will it be like for a person living in the year 3030 to look back through history to this year, 2020? A perspective from 3030 is useful because (1) we will have achieved an sustainable environmental steady state by then, and (2) such a perspective emphasizes the huge number of people that will live between 2020 and 3030, and how the decisions we make now will affect them.

About 140 million people are born every year. If births continue at this rate, 140 billion people will be born in the next thousand years. We expect the birth rate will have to diminish, in order to stabilize the global population, so a reasonable assumption is that about 100 billion people will be born between now and 3030. This is 14 times the current population of Earth, which is about 7 billion. Long-term environmental degradations such as climate change and nuclear impacts will affect a large fraction of the 100 billion who will be born during the next millennium.

We will presumably have reached an environmental steady state. Even a small yearly increase, compounded a thousand times, becomes large. For example a 1% yearly increase, compounded a thousand times, becomes a factor of almost 21 thousand. By 3030 we will have realized we cannot keep increasing the resource demands we make on the planet. We will have become net-zero for GHG emissions, we will have stopped using more land for human purposes, we will have balanced fresh water supplies with demand, we will have stopped the wholesale erosion of topsoil, etc.

How Different will it Be?

Some would say that the differences in human life and living conditions between 2020 and 3030 will be much greater than the differences between 1010 and 2020, and that, in 1010, we could not have predicted how life would be in 2020.

Computers, the Internet, television and radio, airplanes, and other technological innovations have changed our lives, and these inventions could not have been specifically predicted in 1010. Given the rate of recent tech change, it’s likely that innovations will change human life much more between now and 3030 than technological innovation has changed life between 1010 and now.

However, history gives another perspective. Reading about life in ancient China, India, Greece, and Rome, one can see that human concerns and human life were remarkably similar to life today. People now care about family and friends, business and money, religion, and politics, just as they did in 1010 or the year 1. For those of us in the middle class, I’d say our lives are 75% the same as those of folks one two thousand years ago. We can expect that the same will be true in a thousand years.

Intertwined with our technical progress since ancient times is our increased prosperity. GDP was fairly constant for the last two thousand years until the industrial revolution, and then it shot up to around 30 times what it had been before. U.S. GDP, adjusted for price changes, has increased by approximately a factor of four over the last fifty years. These increases bring economic benefits: we can buy more things, eat better, live in bigger houses, take more expensive trips, drive nicer cars, etc. But how much does that really improve our lives? I live in a nicer house, and spend more on things and travel than my parents did, but it hasn’t given me a huge increase in well-being compared to them. For well-being, relationships with other people and satisfying work are much more important than income, once you get above a certain middle-class level.

The benefits of a higher GDP are not shared equally, of course. Thomas Pikettty and Bernie Sanders have recently spotlighted economic inequality, which is increasing now, just as it did in that other gilded age before the Great Depression of the 1930s. But I’m not sure income inequality is greater than in the Ancient Greece or Rome of 2000 years ago. They had a lot of slaves, and freedmen, second-class citizens who together did most of the labor. And a thousand years ago, when the economy was still mostly agrarian, feudalism kept peasants bound to working the land. Why don’t the working people vote to redistribute the wealth? It’s been tried several times since the Roman Revolution two thousand years ago, and hasn’t worked yet.

It’s safe to forecast that, in 3030, there will be technical advances we can barely dream of today, and average incomes will be at least an order of magnitude higher than ours. But, as I discuss at more length in my column on Climate Sustainability, a lot of our current GDP growth comes from the unsustainable use of resources, which will have stopped by 3030. We won’t have economic growth that comes from population growth, or from unsustainable increases in consumption. Economic growth will come mostly from productivity increases. There’s no reason to think that economic inequality will be less in 3030 than it is today.

Climate Change

By 3030 we will have reached net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The global average temperature will keep increasing as long as GHG concentrations in the atmosphere keep increasing. We’re seeing wildfires, heat waves, droughts, seal-level rise, and stronger hurricanes in our world, where GHG emissions have pushed the average temperature up just 1˚ C. These and other artifacts of global heating will continue to grow, causing huge economic and personal damages, until we stop emitting GHGs. We appear to be on a path to a 4˚ C-increase world, and the impacts will be much more than four times the impacts of our current 1˚ C-increase world.

It’s difficult to get GHGs out of the atmosphere. The half-life of CO2 in the atmosphere is several hundred years, so a good proportion of CO2 we emit today will be warming the planet in 3030.

There’s always a group of people who say, about virtually any problem, “don’t worry — as technology improves, we’ll invent a technical fix for the problem, so we don’t need to take drastic measure now, which would hurt the economy.” They’ve said it about population, and they’re saying it about the climate crisis.

The perfect solution would be a little box that could be built cheaply, and which would separate CO2 molecules from the air into two atoms of oxygen and an atom of carbon. The carbon would come out of the machine as a flow of diamonds. The separation would require energy, which would need to come from renewable sources. Why can’t we stop all our worry and fuss about the climate crisis, and put money into research to develop the negative-carbon box? Because we don’t have any assurance that such a box can be built. When we’re unsure, the precautionary principle says that we should err on the side of protecting the environment, not the current economy.

Climate activists often talk about climate change being an existential threat to the human race, which means that it could cause our Homo sapiens species to become extinct. The only scenario I’ve seen where that seems plausible is James Hansen’s Venus Syndrome, which he discusses in his book, Storms of My Grandchildren. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas, and the atmosphere of Venus is hotter than water’s boiling point, so most of the planet’s water is in the atmosphere there. If temperatures on Earth increased past 220˚ F, our water would boil, causing a positive-feedback loop where the boiled water in the atmosphere, a powerful GHG, retains more and more of the outgoing radiation, increasing temperatures even more. It seems plausible to me that a global temperature over 220˚ F could lead to extinction of our species.

But such a huge increase is very unlikely, so I can’t see global heating as an existential threat for humans. But global heating could make a lot more of our planet uninhabitable, as outlined in my Medium column on Whom does the Climate Crisis Harm?. Increasing impacts from the climate crisis will lower the carrying capacity of the planet, and will lower the quality of life for those who survive.

Nuclear

Nuclear weapons are, however, an existential threat, though this threat is out of style among environmentalists and the general public. From a long-term perspective, the fact that the Cold War with Russia is over now doesn’t make much difference in the seriousness of the threat.

Something that has a 1% chance of occurring each year has a 63% likelihood of occurring during the next hundred years, and more than a 99% chance of occurring during the next thousand years.

We still have approximately 14,000 nuclear warheads in the world, mostly belonging to Russia and the U.S., but also possessed by China, the U.K., France, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel. A crazy leader of any one of these states could, during a crisis, initiate a nuclear missile attack, which could result in a series of nuclear counter-attacks, escalating to the point where most big cities in the world are obliterated, and a lot of Earth’s land becomes uninhabitable. This seems likely to occur before 3030, unless we take steps to reduce the risk.

Nations

Since the year 1010, there have been a lot of changes in the status and boundaries of nation-states. Countries have come and gone. It’s unlikely the U.S. will be the dominant world power in 3030. It’s impossible to predict which country will be strongest then. The U.S. seems to be in decline. We rose to a challenge when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, and astonished the world with our production capacity and willingness to sacrifice. Those qualities seem to have abandoned us now; we just want comfortable lives with as little work as possible. China is obviously on the rise. Several historians have theorized that nations go through life-cycle stages like individuals: they’re born, they have a lot of energy as they go through adolescence and early adult life, then settle into complacency in later middle age, and eventually die.

Conflicts between nation-states have caused individuals a lot of grief and hardship in the 20th century. I’d hope that, by 3030, we will have found a better way to resolve the conflicts than war, even though we’ve been trying in vain to do that for several thousand years. The best hope is a world government. The European Union is a good model for how such a government could develop. The EU started as an agreement on coal and steel, and was gradually extended into many other areas of government by treaties among the member states. There is already a network of hundreds of multilateral treaties, and we could gradually build a world government like the EU by adding to them. The biggest obstacle now is the U.S., which has declined to participate in many of the existing multilateral treaties, and has a right-wing fringe virulently opposed to a world government.

Conclusion

Life in 3030 will be very much like it is today, if we don’t destroy the planet with nuclear war. We will have harmed Earth significantly through global heating, and will have lost a large percentage of our plant and animal species because global heating will have destroyed their habitats. We will be richer, but that won’t necessarily make us happier. We can hope we will have improved our institutions to reduce economic inequality and the risk of international conflict.