2020
VISION
Join us as we time-travel
forward 10 years and
look back at a decade of
astonishing change
By MICHAEL ANFT, SCOTT CARLSON,
DAVID DUDLEY, and FARHAD MANJOO
FLYING CARS! ROBOT BUTLERS! SPACE HOTELS!
We know: Crystal-ball gazers have been promising us Jetsons-like
lifestyle inventions for decades—along with cures for cancer, supersonic trains, and other feats of technology. We’re still waiting.
Getting the future wrong is all part of the fun, of course. Back in 2000,
prognosticators who tried to preview the Aughts achieved decidedly
mixed results. (By 2010, one newspaper predicted, we’d be watching
aroma-generating “smellyvision” that would add a new dimension to
TV cooking shows.) So why even bother trying to peer around the corner? Maybe it’s the innate human need to hope for the best and plan for
the worst; maybe it’s simple curiosity about how we’ll live, love, and get
around in days to come. Your car probably won’t fly, but it might drive
itself. And, yes, there will be robots this time—promise.
Since hindsight is...well, you know, we asked scientists and visionaries to leap into the future and look back at what might have happened
during the years leading to 2020. From stem cell breakthroughs to fat-eating pills to virtual sex—it’s not all pretty, but it is pretty provocative.
Illustrations by Viktor Koen
FOOD & DIET
REVENGE OF
THE FOODIES
BREAKING WEBLINE NEWS
ALERT, 9. 24.2020: Americans
are no longer the world’s No. 1
gluttons, though it’s not because
we’ve lost weight. The rest of the
world just got bigger. Meanwhile
a new fat cure is hitting the
grocery shelves: a yogurt loaded
with obesity-fighting bacteria.
Could intestinal microbes help
shrink our bellies? Researchers at
Washington University in St. Louis
are studying links between obesity
and the trillions of bacteria inside
the body that help digest food. The
high-fat Western-style diet, they
found, encourages a type of gut
microbe that extracts calories
more efficiently, which raises
the possibility that we can shed
pounds (or fight malnutrition) by
adjusting our bacterial balance
with probiotics, or microbe-laden
supplements.
The research could not only
produce a fat-fighting bug; it might
help the hundreds of millions of
people who are hungry. Obesity and
malnutrition could double in the
next 10 years, a paradox fed by the
spread of the Western-style diet
and the growing risk of famine from
overpopulation, extreme weather,
and political instability, says Robert
Lawrence, a professor at the Johns
Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. If those trends continue,
says Lawrence, treating the world’s
diet-related ills will “make our current health bill look rather modest.”
His advice: Eat your veggies—
plant-based foods use less land,
water, and energy than meat and
dairy. This will help ensure there’s
enough to go around in 2020.
