If you’re 40 this year, you were born in 1978 and using today’s life expectancy estimates you’ll live, on average, another 40-years until 2058. Of course, life expectancy is going to change, but given that equation as a reference what do you think you’ll see in your lifetime?
One way to predict how things might change is to look back and see how things changed during the last 40 years and how they are now.
Population will drive many social and economic changes. In 1978 the world’s population was 4.3 billion; it will exceed 7.5 billion in 2018, a 74 percent increase. The U.S. population increased a more manageable 45 percent from 223 million to 324 million, but California’s increase of 17 million, from 23 million to 40 million, mirrored the world, not national, rate. San Benito County’s population increase of 34,360, or 150 percent, topped all three.
Population change rates are subject to enormous natural and artificial pressures, but if those historical rates held the world population in 2058 would be 13 billion, the U.S. 470 million, California 69 million, and San Benito County 147,500. What are your predictions?
The known potential for significant health-related changes lie with genetic and stem cell-based therapies. It wasn’t until 1978 that stem cells were discovered in human cord blood. Together they offer the possibility of preventing and/or treating many serious diseases, some with a renewable source of replacement cells and tissues. When do you believe those benefits might be generally available, if ever?
The availability of computing power, the Internet, and personal communications devices have already changed the world and all are less than 40 years old when it comes to general availability. The World Wide Web springs from the 1980s and its “revolutionary impact” from the mid-1990s. Considering the “portable” 24-pound Osborne 1 computer, with a 5-inch CRT screen was released in 1981 and the first commercial wireless call was placed in 1983 on a 1.75-pound Motorola phone with a retail cost of $3,995, what will those technologies look like in four decades – if they even exist?
Much of San Benito County’s population works in thriving Silicon Valley, but innovation and entrepreneurship are about attitude, not geography. Will Silicon Valley still exist as now, will it be duplicated many times, or shifted to a new node?
Finally, what is it that we don’t know, we don’t know? That’s always the hardest prediction of all.
It’s unlikely I’ll be around in 2058, so I’m going to count on you to honestly remember your own predictions and see how good you were at foreseeing the future.