The World in 2050_ Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future - Laurence C. Smith [3]
The Thought Experiment
This is a book about our future. Climate change is but one component of it. We will explore other big trends as well, in things like human population, economic integration, and international law. We will study geography and history to show how their preexisting conditions will leave lasting marks on the future. We will look to sophisticated new computer models to project the futures of gross domestic product, greenhouse gases, and supplies of natural resources. By examining these trends collectively, and identifying convergences and parallels between them, it becomes possible to imagine, with reasonable scientific credibility, what our world might look like in forty years’ time, should things continue on as they are now. This is a thought experiment about our world in 2050.
It can be fun imagining what our world might look like by then. Robots and flying cars? Custom-grown body parts? A hydrogen economy? As any disappointed sci-fi buff will tell you, the pace of reality is usually slower than human imagination. Fans of George Orwell’s book 1984, the television series Lost in Space and Space 1999, the films 2001: A Space Odyssey, and (it’s looking like) Blade Runner—set in a perpetually raining 2019 Los Angeles—see their landmark years come and go. But outside of the ongoing technical explosions in information and biotechnologies, our lives are considerably less different than the writers of these fictional works imagined they would be.
We’ve discovered quarks and flung people into space, yet still depend on the internal combustion engine. We’ve cracked DNA and grown a human ear on a mouse’s back, yet are still dying of cancer. We’ve created fluorescent green pigs by inserting jellyfish genes into them (Green Eggs and Ham, anyone?), yet still catch wild fish from the sea and use dirt and water to grow our food. Nuclear power is but a pale shadow of what was hoped for it in the 1950s. We still use boats, trucks, and trains to move goods. And even in this unprecedented era of globalization, the fundamental principles of our markets and economies differ surprisingly little from the days of Adam Smith, more than two hundred years ago.
But in other, sneakier ways, things have changed profoundly. Imagine describing to a 1950 California tomato farmer how in the next fifty years he would grow genetically programmed seeds, see the water in his state tilted from one end to the other, and experience a tripling of the state’s population. Imagine explaining he would one day compete with Chinese farmers to sell tomatoes to Italians who would blend them with beans from Mexico to make canned goods for British supermarkets.7
Any of these would blow our yesteryear farmer’s mind. But to us, they are familiar, even boring. They fly below our radar because they have crept upon us, hiding in plain sight over the course of decades. But that doesn’t mean transformations like these aren’t huge, fast, and profound. Big changes often just sort of ease their way in. And quietly change the world.
What will our world look like in 2050? Our distribution of people and power? The state of the natural world? Which countries will lead, and which ones suffer? Where do you think you’ll be in 2050?
The answers to these questions, at least in this book, derive from a core argument: The northern quarter of our planet’s latitudes will undergo tremendous transformation over the course of this century, making them a place of increased human activity, higher strategic value, and greater economic importance than today. I loosely define this “New North” as all land and oceans lying 45° N latitude or higher currently held by the United States, Canada, Iceland, Greenland (Denmark), Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia.
These eight countries, which control vast territories and seas extending as far north as the Arctic Ocean, comprise a new “Northern Rim” roughly encircling that ocean. Developments in these Northern Rim countries, here coined the NORC countries, or “NORCs,” are explored in Parts II and III (Chapters 5 through 10).