Oil, electricity and the internet have profoundly altered our planet, but what will come next? Gaia Vince wants your help in predicting them.
Look ahead five years... ten years... fifty years, perhaps. You will be different. Older. Perhaps no longer alive. Now think about where you will live in years to come. Think about the world as a whole. It too will be different, but it's harder to imagine how.
When we try to imagine the future, we tend to look to the past for clues and extrapolate forwards. But we are living at a time of planetary change. Over the past century, humans have utterly transformed the planet on such a scale that many believe we are entering a new geological era, the Anthropocene. In recent decades we have been polluting the atmosphere and changing global climates, reducing biodiversity, re-plumbing rivers and other waterways, raising sea levels and acidifying the oceans, depleting the world's mineral and natural resources, among many other things.
Will we continue on this trajectory? Or will something happen to shift us onto a new course?
We’ve experienced similar moments before. In 1700, no one could have predicted the impact that James Watt's steam engine would have on industry, broader society and the global environment. Similarly, who would have foretold how transformative Thomas Edison's inventions, such as a commercially practical electric light bulb, would prove to be?
With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to pinpoint global transformers that shifted the trajectory of this human planet, for example by spurring globalisation or city building, or by increasing the human population. I'm thinking of things like World Wars I and II, the creation of the Suez Canal, the invention of elevators, air travel, reinforced concrete, the internet, antibiotics, etc.
In August 1859, Edwin Drake, a railroad conductor-turned oil prospector, drilled into ground near Titusville, Pennsylvania, and struck black gold. It was a discovery that would change the world. The crude oil was refined primarily into clean lamp oil, which spelled the death of the highly lucrative international whaling industry – just in time to prevent extinction in a number of species. It wouldn't be long before petroleum and countless other products were made from the subterranean deposits.