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In 2009, a team of demographers and physicians studying aging published a paper showing that if trends in life expectancy continue, more than half of all children born in rich countries since 2000 will live to see the year 2100.1 What will that world look like? I’ve outlined four things in this book that we, as a society, need to do in order to thrive through the twenty-first century: 1. Fix our markets to properly account for the value of the commons. 2. Invest in R&D to fund long-range innovation. 3. Embrace the technologies that stand poised to improve our lives while bettering our planet, even when they seem alien. 4. Empower each of the billions of minds on this planet, to turn them into assets that can produce new ideas that benefit all of us. If we do those things, the twenty-first century is likely to be the richest, most prosperous century humanity has yet seen. Let me take you on a tour of that world—the world we could build, if we make the right choices. We start in the countryside. The first thing we might notice is that the areas outside cities are more sparsely populated in 2100 than in 2013. Humanity has all but completed the transition away from spending its time hunting or farming food and toward other professions. Where in our time 1.3 billion people still farm the Earth, and half of those eke out barely enough to survive, by 2100 there will be less than one-tenth as many farmers on the planet, as machines take over the tasks of sowing and reaping in every corner of the world. The world’s populace, by 2100, will have concentrated in the cities. Today coda living in the twenty-first century 304 c o d a roughly half of the world’s population are city dwellers; in 2100 more than 80 percent will be. Those nine or ten billion people will be rich. Each of them, on average, will be as rich as today’s Americans or Europeans. With their wealth they’ll demand more and richer food—roughly three times as much as the world consumes now. Yet as we look around the countryside, we’ll find that farms use up far less of the land than they do today. If we triple the yields of farms in the rich countries by 2100 (roughly what we did from 1950 to 2010), and if the rising wealth of today’s developing countries brings their yields to parity with the rich countries, then the world will produce six times as much food per acre as it does now. We’ll be able to meet the food demands of humanity with only half the land we use today. And if other trends continue , and if we embrace next-generation genetically modified crops, we’ll grow that food with the use of less pesticide, less nitrogen fertilizer, and less water than ever before. All that land and the lakes and rivers that flow through it will be cleaner than at any time since the start of the 1900s. The rising wealth of people worldwide will shift their concerns towards environmental protection, just as has happened in rich countries to date. Already, today, the land and water in every rich country are cleaner than they have been for at least forty years. That trend will continue, driving pollutant levels down in the countries that are already rich and in all those that have become rich by 2100. Rivers will be running higher than they have in decades as well, as more water-efficient crops have reduced the amount of water needed on our farms, and smarter market-based pricing of our freshwater commons has increasingly shifted water production toward desalination, rather than draining down the world’s freshwater rivers, lakes, and aquifers. Other sorts of farms will dot the landscape—energy farms that pull power out of the wind and from the sun’s rays. If per capita energy needs continue to increase around 1 percent per year, those nine to ten billion rich people alive in 2100 will demand roughly three times the amount of energy that we use today. We’ll meet the bulk of that demand through these energy farms—wind farms in the world’s windiest places, solar farms in the world’s deserts—with plentiful energy storage to capture energy for use when the sun doesn’t shine and the...

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