The Future of the Web

By 2020 Web 2.0- The Social Web- will have developed into a complex multimedia interweaving of ideas, knowledge and social commentary, connecting over three billion people on the planet. In combination with the Semantic Web 3.0 it will automatically analyse, interpret and create new forms of layered knowledge beyond the world of today's blogs, wikis, news, entertainment social networking and virtual worlds.
It will be accessible by all forms of seamless body and neural devices.
Over the next decade these early trends will continue to evolve at a frenetic pace- social networks will both fragment and unify, catering to special groups, but also overlapping and creating within the next few years a global social network of networks. At the same time, social networks and virtual worlds such as Second Life will converge, along with powerful simulation technology, to create the first realistic virtual realities.

By 2030 Web 3.0- advanced versions of the Semantic Web- will have made many important contributions to new knowledge through network relationships, logical inference and artificial intelligence. It will be powered by a seamless, computational mesh, enveloping and connecting most human life and will encompass all facets of our social and business lives- always on and available to manage every need. It will connect not only most of the 8 billion individuals on the planet, but also link with other biological and artificial life forms, as well as countless everyday electronically controlled objects. The Semantic Web and Intelligent Web will have combined.

By 2040, Web 4.0- the Intelligent Web- will be ubiquitous- able to interact with the repository of almost all available knowledge of human civilisation- past and present, digitally coded and archived for automatic retrieval and analysis. Web 4.0 will mark the beginning of a new intelligent entity- a sentient and cognisant multidimensional network, powered not only by billions of ultra-fast tiny processors and unlimited communications bandwidth, but by the first quantum computers, capable of processing trillions of operations in parallel. Human intelligence will have cojoined with advanced forms of artificial intelligence, creating a higher or meta level of knowledge processing. This will be essential for supporting the complex decision-making and problem solving capacity, required for civilisation's future progress.

By 2040, Web 5.0- The Wise Web- will have emerged, embedding all biological and artificial life within a global cooperative intelligence. All critical decisions affecting our planet and life, including those relating to global warming, sharing vital resources and the ethical resolution of conflict and human rights, will be guided by this global intelligence.

The Wise Web will mark the beginning of a new threshold in human civilisation- a new form of global consciousness- in which all life will be embedded.

The Future of Food

By 2015- global warming will be beginning to have a major impact on food production. Dislocation in climate patterns, increasing frequency of droughts and floods-including the drying up of the major river systems of Asia, plus rising population and cultivation of biofuels will result in less arable land and rising costs of food production.

This will lead to increased prices of staple foods such as rice, wheat and maize as well as meat, forcing another 100 million people in developing countries into malnutrition, including 10 million children in India alone. This is in addition to the already 1 billion already affected by poverty and malnutrition.

This will have severe flow on effects for the future of developing countries as malnutrition severely impacts the cognitive capacity of the next generation.

Food aid will also be under pressure from richer countries, as governments are forced to provide priority for food security to their own populations, particularly following a decade of financial turmoil. Friction will also be created as major population countries such as China begin buying up arable land in poorer countries such as africa as a hedge against future food shortages.

By 2025- the world population will have grown to more than 8 billion. Global demand for grain and animal production will now significantly outstrip supply. To satisfy demand, cereal production needs to increase by 50% and animal production by 90%.

Additional arable land equal to 150 million hectares or a minimum 10% of the 1.5 billion hectares already under cultivation will be required to keep pace despite improvements in agricultural management and technology. This is likely to come in the short term from areas such as the Congo and Amazonia, accelerating the onset of global warming and drought as forests are further fragmented.

This will inevitably create global unrest and conflict with waves of mass migrations in developing countries to the cities. In turn this will accelerate the need to make cities and urban environments more food self sufficient, through use of treated sewage, local community food gardens, based on urban harvested water runoff and solar energy collection.

By 2030- major programs will be underway to recover genes from ancestor plant species that originally evolved to cope with drought and salinity, together with a return to original middle eastern and African dry land farming techniques.

There is recognition that conventional breeding techniques for plant traits such as tolerance to dry conditions, may be too complex and time consuming to achieve within the available urgent timeframes. Genetic modification provides the only answer, with accelerated cooperative science initiatives to increase crop yield, drought tolerance and disease resistance.

Bright spots will be a major shift from grains to tuber crops such as potatoes, which need less land and water than grain and are extremely nutritious, with four times as much complex carbohydrate and better quality proteins than grains. In addition meat products will synthesized from culturing the muscle cells of a broad range of animals, bypassing the need to slaughter them.

Animal production as a primary source of protein will also be seen as unsustainable, as is large-scale use of arable land for cattle grazing. Monoculture and irrigation farming is also phased out as unsustainable in terms of inefficient water and land useage. Poultry remains viable on edge of farmland and cities.

World fisheries are also at major risk by 2030, with fish traditionally providing 20% of animal protein. All fish, crustacean and sea mammal stocks are already severely depleted despite greater conservation controls. The oceans are rapidly becoming too acidic to support sea life including plankton and shellfish. Ocean dead zones, depleted of oxygen, are spreading fast.

The UN Food and Agricultural Organization- FAO draws up contingency plans for global food management, planning for relocation of populations from the drying tropical zones to those of the more habitable northern and southern latitudes.

By 2040- glacial and mountain snow fed sources of water will be in full retreat across the globe. As a result the major river systems in Europe, South America and Asia, providing water to the traditional farming areas of southern Europe, Pakistan, China, India, Afghanistan and Vietnam, begin to dry up.

China’s vast rice fields, providing food for 400 million people and India’s wheat, fruit and vegetable farming locus in the Punjab are severely affected. Most of Africa, the Middle East and Australia will be in permanent drought, combined with major depletion and contamination by natural gas extraction of the groundwater aquifers.

Human habitation in the mid latitudinal belts- 30 degrees north and south of the equator, becomes unsustainable. The only regions with adequate rainfall, guaranteed to support stable food production and human society, are in the high latitudes such as- Canada, Greenland, Scandinavia, Russia, Siberia, part of Northern Australia, New Zealand and Antarctica. Small communities continue to survive in drought areas by building shelters and growing food underground, using still active aquifers and solar energy.

By 2050- global warming will be out of control with unsustainable limits to suitable land for agriculture, with contention between retaining forest as a carbon sink and clearing it for agriculture.

Friction reaches flashpoint between the major nations over land, food and water security. Massive human migrations are occurring globally – from poorer to richer countries and from drier to wetter habitats.

Giant solar energy generating belts become operational across North Africa, Middle east, Southern US and Australia, providing power for high density population centers and high intensity farming hubs to feed them.

With the world population reaching 9 billion, an extra 1 billion hectares more land are needed for food production- equal to the landmass of US. At the same time commercial fish and seafood species have collapsed.

It is recognized that only global cooperation beyond national borders can avoid conflict, anarchy and starvation for billions. Global food production, distribution and allocation plans are activated under the auspices of the UN.

Global cooperation in achieving the equitable allocation of land, water, energy and food resources through the advanced communication and knowledge mechanism of the Intelligent web 4.0, becomes the only realistic means of avoiding global anarchy and the disintegration of human civilization.

National boundaries and political hubris become irrelevant when the survival of human life- perhaps the most advanced life-form in the universe - is threatened

The Future of Space Exploration

By 2020- humans will have returned to the moon following the Apollo missions of the 60s and 70s, to create a permanent space colony and a base for future galactic exploration. The space station will continue to play a significant scientific research, communications and training role, supporting future space missions.

India, China and Japan will also have proceeded with their own exploratory missions to the moon and planets, but will increasingly work cooperatively with the US and EU under International Space Treaty protocols administered by the UN. Other middle rank G20 countries such as Russia, Brazil, Turkey, Canada, Australia, UK, Germany, France and South Africa will also be major individual contributors to future space programs.

Most of Mars will have been mapped by the next generation robot explorers, which will finally determine the existence of past and present microbial life on the red planet.

The Constellation Orion Space Shuttle replacement will be launched in 2015, supporting the space station and future lunar missions, providing a means of repair and escape for astronauts if the shuttles are damaged by space junk or solar radiation. Power sources for space vehicles and interstellar probes will routinely combine plutonium nuclear generator, solar energy sail, gravity slingshot and ion drive technologies.

By 2030- most of the solar system's major objects- its planets, moons and larger asteroids will have been visited by probes and tested for signs of life. The potential for life to exist on many extra-solar planets will also be determined as well as the source and nature of organic molecules in space.

The construction and maintenance of the space stations, instrumentation and the lunar colony, will be carried out largely autonomously by robots, involving the mining and transportation of local materials.

Space tourism will become feasible but remain strictly limited because of the prohibitive energy costs and the ability to realistically replicate such experiences safely in virtual reality.

An asteroid and comet defence system will also have been established, capable of tracking and eliminating most major threats to Earth.

By 2040- all navigation, exploration tasks and missions will be automated and managed by the powerful capability of the Intelligent Web 4.0, extended to encompass projects and missions across the solar system. This will include the use of intelligent probes, which will rely on their own decision capability to analyse relevant data and determine items of interest for future exploration.

The entire space enterprise will be linked and coordinated via massive grid e-infrastructure environments such as the European Grid Environment- EGEE, which integrates networks, grids, middleware, computational resources, data repositories, instruments, and operational support for global virtual science collaborations. A vast amount of data will need to be downloaded, stored and processed by global space programs. EGEE currently has access to more than 20,000 petabytes or 20 million billion bytes of storage and 80,000 CPUs, which by 2050 will increase by a factor of 100.

Globalisation and cooperation will have reached an advanced stage on earth in the face of the extreme risks to society from global warming. Therefore the risk of conflict between the major powers over sovereignty rights resulting from space exploration will be minimal. As the space program gathers momentum, humans will increasingly see themselves as belonging to one world- not separate nations.

By 2050- colonisation programs, including Mars and possibly Europa and Titan will be launched, as well as the first interstellar robotic probes. These will be capable of self-replicating and evolving as agents in their own right. This will herald the second phase of the exploration and colonisation of the galaxy, as humans move beyond their own home solar base and accelerate the search for new knowledge and experiences, including other intelligent life.
Starships will follow later in the century, transporting humans and powered by nuclear pulse propulsion systems, allowing the nearest star to be reached in a few decades.

However the major task of exploring space will be carried out by autonomous, self-learning computational probes, managed by a vast communications and knowledge network extending across the galaxy.
This process will proceed exponentially as the ecosystem of smart probes replicates throughout the galaxy.