What about the next 40?

Science and technology have shaped our world immeasurably - so how will it look in another 40? An intriguing and exciting question - we put it to some of our scientist friends, and their answers make for fascinating reading…

Missy Cummings Director, Humans and Automation Laboratory Massachusetts Institute of Technology

I predict that the next 40 years will usher in a new era of aviation – the rise of the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Often called drones in the popular press, this name is misleading because it implies that such aircraft are remotely controlled by a human, who is in direct control of the aircraft. In reality, present-day military UAVs can takeoff, execute missions, and land without ever receiving any real-time human guidance. Indeed, even many commercial aircraft today have such capabilities.

The next 40 years will see dramatic improvements in autonomous guidance and control of UAVs such that not only will military airplanes reliably conduct missions with just high level guidance from humans, but cargo planes and helicopters will become unmanned as well. Companies such as FEDEX and UPS will no longer hire pilots, they will hire operators who will each “fly” multiple cargo planes at one time from a central command centre. We will see UAVs taking over other roles like persistent border patrol, wildlife and crop surveillance, emergency response (such as monitoring unfolding catastrophes like Fukushima), and even more nefarious roles such as a new kind of even more annoying paparazzi.

While there is no technological impedance to making commercial airlines unmanned as well, there are socio-technical issues to consider such as the notion of “shared fate”. Passengers feel better knowing that there is someone in the plane that shares their own fate and will do everything possible to save his or her own life. In addition, just because we won’t necessarily need a dedicated pilot to fly a commercial airline, we still will need some form of supervision for the cabin, perhaps in the form of the super flight attendant who monitors the robotic system that serves drinks and snacks, while also supervising the automation flying the plane!

Professor Chick Wilson, Chair and Head of Physical Chemistry, University of Bath

Last 40 years: The revolution initiated by the invention of the World-Wide Web, the scale of whose impact has frankly has been beyond science fiction.

Next 40 years: The increasing personalisation of medicine and other related services, with enhanced use of wireless sensing assisting the diagnosis, and of localised treatments (therapy patches) that are easy to apply and to tune for individual requirements.

Professor Brian J Ford

When they look back, future scientists won’t know whether to laugh or weep. Science in 40 years’ time will be firmly rooted in the purity of knowledge and the joy of its practical application. Real-world problems will be the focus. People won’t be able to use a ton of steel trailing a towering cloud of carbon dioxide to move themselves around; they will expect everyone to read, while lunacies like food waste and the fairy-tale world of the bankers will be distant memories. Hardly anyone will watch television.

The population (greatly reduced through global pandemics) will have realised that most major developments have always been initiated outside academia, not within it; the rebel will be celebrated, and innovation encouraged. Money for science will be measured and realistic. We have created a current system where we expect to extract funding – in huge amounts – from grant committees whom we titillate with technical terms. The public (including politicians) know so little science that they can easily be hoodwinked into supporting areas like high-cost particle physics, providing expensive executive toys for the cognoscenti who currently use a huge PR operation to blind people with pseudo-science.

In future we will concentrate on areas like palliative care of the dying and the biology of the living cell: clinical reductionism will have been replaced by realism. By then, society will have recognised that religion has no place in a mature society, and our safety lies in the security of knowledge. People won’t just go to medical school to learn medicine – it will be taught in schools from primary level. Children will be as familiar with microscopes as they are currently accustomed to war games on a monitor. They will know the species that surround them, understand health, disease, longevity and nutrition as never before. Science won’t be so much a subject at school, more a way of understanding life – and death, too. No longer will we allow people to become so excruciatingly ill that eventually they die from disease. Death control will be as familiar as birth control is today.

Above all, the confidence trickery of science funding will be over. Future science won’t be dominated by the hard sell, but the whole cell.

Tim Harrison Director of Outreach, University of Bristol

“Climate Catasptrophe Averted.” This would be a great headline to read in 40 years time and it is possible. First, we need to recognise now that human activity is raising levels of greenhouse gases (such as carbon dioxide and methane) and second that this will raise the surface temperature of the Earth. The only issues are how much will the temperature rise and how quickly. So is this headline possible? Yes indeed. There are many things we can do to avert a severe rise in greenhouse gas levels using current technology and over the next forty years we will need to learn to go on a carbon diet and derive energy from other sources. Photovoltaics (solar cells) offer much promise in terms of clean energy as will wave power too. New building standards will mean that less energy is wasted through poor insulation and design. Buildings will be designed to have multi-purpose use and will not sit idle as some do now. The big revolution is already happening in terms of telecommunications, the virtual world will revolutionise business and education, reducing the need for long distance travel for meetings and cutting carbon emissions. People will study at institutes in other countries and never have to visit them as the global village becomes even more of a reality. The drive for low carbon economies will have important impacts not just on science and engineering but also on agriculture as more efficient use of land will be needed. All this, of course, needs the social, political and moral will-power to make it happen and not simply the payment of lip-service to the ideas and the hope that someone else will sort out the problem.

Dr Edward Feil, Department of Biology and Biochemistry, University of Bath

The single biggest development over the last 40 years – the rise of information technologies, the internet and instant access to undreamt processing power, has in many ways changed the very core of how scientific research is conducted. Yet his was almost entirely unpredicted, which is why I tend to avoid making very specific predictions that look beyond the next five years or so!

In the immediate future, we certainly have to look towards more rapid advancements in the ‘omics technologies – particularly sequencing. I still recall the excitement when the first bacterial genome was published in 1995 – yet, I fully expect to be generating complete bacterial genome sequences for undergraduate projects within the next five years. The real work, of course, is in interpreting all these data. In this regard, it will be interesting to see how the current emphasis on “systems biology” pans out. This is a very “a la mode” philosophy which places emphasis away from reductionism and more towards a holistic understanding of how “systems” impact upon each other. I expect this will continue to mature, but perhaps rather ironically may lead to a reversal towards more classical experimental approaches (albeit on far larger scales), as the phenotype steals some thunder back from the genotype.

The other major unpredictable component is that the scientific agenda is likely to be set (or so it seems in my more dystopic moments) by an oncoming “perfect storm” of climate change, infectious disease, population growth and all the related problems of food security. Whereas 40 years ago the more optimistic might still have been dreaming of eradicating most infectious disease, I think these days we are more aware that it will take all our wits and resources just to stop things getting far, far worse.

Dr Jonathan Cox Department of Chemistry, University of Bath

In the next 40 years I hope that someone invents an A4-sized solar-powered tablet. A revolutionary crime-fighting technique to match DNA fingerprinting would also be handy. One that could track a missing person wherever they are in the world.