Keywords

The pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world.—Klaus Schwab

Those who had the privilege to visit the renowned university town of Cambridge in the United Kingdom most likely will never forget the “Chronophage,” a time eating monster devouring each minute as it passes with the snap of its jaws, as it sits atop the Corpus Clock. A special feature of this clock is that it stops at irregular intervals but then synchronizes again to catch up with real time.

The ancient Greeks referred to time using two different concepts, “chronos” and “kairos.” The first refers to our traditional time, measured by a ticking clock, whereas the latter was referred to by philosophers as “deep time,” when you feel the flow, perceiving that time stands still and everything is possible. Kairos moments in life are those to treasure with a pinch of serendipity.

This last chapter of the book is not “the end” but marks the beginning of a journey, a time travel with the aim to create a community for building a better future, joining efforts with kindred initiatives like the United Planet (UP), Futurian, Regenopolis, and others:

  • The United Planet (UP) Game, founded by Lucian Tarnowski, is a civilization design game. A time traveling immersive reality where participants create as their timeless selves. The game unites athletes of transformation as Gaians, together designing a thriving civilization in harmony with life. It is based on the premise that it is more effective to cooperatively reverse engineer solutions from the future than it is to build incrementally from the mess of the present. The community unites geniuses, artists, musicians, elders, and wisest most innovative, visionary people from around the world to create the “Age of We.”

  • Futurians cofounded by Georgie Benardete and David Hanley are gathered at inflection points in time, using their leverage to shift the world to a more favorable axis. They are leaders, thinkers, and creatives with a vision for a bluer, greener future to catalyze the actions needed to realize that future.

  • Regenopolis founded by Diane Binder builds on the premise that the majority of people do want positive change, but there are no sufficient physical locations to gather in a trustful and creative environment, allowing for transformational experiences and serendipitous collaborations.

Concurrently, the WORLD 50.0 movement will be working from its dedicated headquarters, hosted in the newly constructed Future Center in the building of the new Agriculture College and Innovation Center (ACIC) in Gagarin Valley in Armenia. The Future Center will become a global agora for research, exchange, sharing, and training of a new generation of leaders with a new mindset, including multidisciplinary future literacy skills, enabling them to create a better, more inclusive, and sustainable future. The Gagarin Valley was named after cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who was the first person to orbit the Earth and view our planet as home to all humans, requiring our collective attention, nurturing, and care.

The world's top scientists, thinkers, and innovators are working continuously on inventing the future. A glimpse into their laboratories and their minds through this book allows us to share their dreams:

  • We are transitioning to become a “multi-planetary species,” due to the inherent risk of a large asteroid hitting the Earth in the future. Self-replicating robots could help us build a new human habitat on another planet.

  • Brain-human interfaces combined with exoskeletons will be a game changer on how we interact with each other. The Internet may transform into a brain-net, able to send emotions instead of emojis, revolutionizing human interaction, communication, and entertainment.

  • Nanomedicine will reform health care, including cancer treatments. Your toilet will become the first wall of defense against different types of cancer, able to detect initial cancer colonies circulating in your body, allowing timely treatment and eradication of many type of cancers.

The aim of the WORLD 50.0 movement is to build our future together faster—a better future that we want our children and their children to inherit. Making this an ongoing project, crowdsourcing inputs on a global scale, continuously engaging and scaling our community of contributors, and producing relevant and digestible outputs for the general public, which can also be used by policymakers and business leaders to make better sense of the future and ultimately contribute to building a better world.

This book aligns with other anticipatory approaches such as Michio Kaku's work on predicting the future based on interviews with hundreds of scientists and its complementary to such initiative as the Geneva Science and Diplomacy Anticipator (GESDA) Science Breakthrough Radar.

A major cohort of Young Global Leaders (YGL) of the World Economic Forum contributed to this book. YGLs thrive to find ways to collectively accelerate their efforts to improve the state of the world. They are working together to dramatically affect the lives of future generations and craft innovative responses to address global and regional challenges. The YGL community enables leaders to turn their personal success into global significance through the scaling up of ideas that lead to impactful change, aiming at 2050 and beyond.

Collaborating and working together on this multigenerational project is imperative. The majority of indicators are pointing in the right direction. Cautious optimism seems to be the norm among YGLs and other contributors, even after the COVID-19 pandemic.

One of the most rewarding questions to ask our contributors was “what values and skills do you want to pass on to your kids in order to thrive in the future?”. Clearly, the most important aspect of preparing for what the future may hold is education. However, it needs to go hand in hand with the right mindset and attitude to tackle the newly emerging problems of the world. It is also essential to create a harmonious society with respect between different groups and without extremism.

Most people think in an arithmetic way today. With dramatically increasing computational power and more efficient technologies, resulting in new gadgets intertwining our daily lives, we may be moving toward more “computational thinking.” Our biological identity will only be a single and transient phase of our existence. Neurological mapping, imaging technologies, and manipulation at the nanoscale will allow us to transition wholly into the digital domain. Is singularity a matter of time; where we will soon be able to “download” ourselves into the digital domain and pull the plug on our biological identities?

Some people are inspired by the potential of virtual reality, teleportation, or cloning, which could allow them to be present at a boring meeting while at the same time taking a siesta in an exotic Cuban beach, enjoying the sound of the ocean. Science can help understand the brain and how human consciousness works, which is possibly the most mysterious thing of all. But human beings will remain complicated. We should find new ways to connect us, telling our stories and sharing them with each other, as easily as sharing a hug. Ultimately, it will come down to following your passion and looking at the big picture to see how you can apply your strengths in the best way possible.

Eventually, core skills such as embracing change, adaptability, enduring to live in difficult conditions, collaborating with others, and highly sophisticated problem-solving will be high on demand and required in all walks of life. In the coming years, we are planning to initiate a generic university Master's Program curriculum to improve our collective future's literacy. Young people of any discipline will be able to take this program in order to gain complementary future literacy skills, allowing them to exploit their capacities to create a better, more enabling future. Of all human activities today, education is probably the most important. To this end, we are partnering with universities around the globe, including the EARTH University, committed to help build the global movement of leaders that can make this critical transition happen.

In an effort to improve global future literacy, our readers are able to explore their Future Intelligence or Future Quotient (FQ)—a measure of the future readiness to positively cope with and overcome the various complexities as a result of foreseeable and unforeseeable future changes in the economy, society, and the environment—through a self-administered questionnaire included in the annex of this book.

How will we organize our societies in the future? If we manage to conquer other planets, we will likely live in Star Trek-like colonies, requiring a very different approach to living on Earth. In order to prepare for that not-so-distant future, we should empower our polymath kids to lead us into a better future and not ask them what they want to be but what problem in the world they want to solve?