In principle I could still be alive in 2050 or 2060 to see the Brave New World, whatever it is. Life expectancy would get me to about 2040-2045. By then we can reasonably hope that life expectancy is a good ten or twenty years more than today.

The demographic curve is a bit tight, given the resource base we have to support all these people, but we might be able to get over the hump.

The next problem is resources--many of our reserses of earth elements are only good for ten or twenty years. No doubt we have barely begun to scratch the surface of the Earth for some of these metals, while asteroid and Moon mining could supply vast amounts of rare elements with relatively low impact (apart from the rocket fuel used, but rockets can burn kerosene, our oldest fossil fuel-based petroleum product).

Our SF writers have been ahead of us for fifty years, so we have a good sense of where we might be going, both in the dystopian and the utopian direction.

The environment remains a big concern. Even if climate change turns out to be best case rather than worst case, we are facing the onging mass extinction. We are likely to lose some of our most photogenic animals and a lot of the productive capacity of our oceans and soils. It is not going to be easy to feed nine to eleven billion people, and it's going to be even harder to maintain growth rates that will support growing energy consumption.

The one billion people we had in 1800 could easily be supported with the resources that exist now and the greater resources that existed then. Living economically but well was possible for the human race then and probably at least until the population boom of the 1950s and 1960s.

We started to notice problems, unintended consequences and so forth then. I think this is not coincidence. We only started to realize the problems when they became big enough to see, which is to say when we were already pushing the limits of healthy consumption. Since then, a lot of our growth has been unhealthy and we know it. Even the denialists know it. They are afraid the bills might come due and that they, rather than innocent victims, might have to pay those bills.

Well, there are more of us than ever. As they say, most of the scientists who ever lived are alive today. So are most of the lard-butt couch potatoes.

We can fix this and many other things.

But there will be new generations of denial.

As a a famous Israeli diplomat said of Americans,  (in a quip that is also attributed to Sir Winston Churchill) we will eventually do the right thing when we have exhausted all the alternatives.

Until then, things should get very interesting for a lot of humanity. Interesting as in the old Scottish curse, may you live in interesting times.

I hope I get to celebrate the 200th Anniversary of the end of the American Civil War in a world where racism is largely cured. I hope it is in a world that has not bombed Nagasaki with nuclear weapons more than once. That would be a great birthday present to me in my last year on Earth. And I hope to see my coffee plantation on Baffin Island finally turning a profit. Not really. I doubt if it will ever get that far, despite all the fossil crocodiles and turtles that scientists dig up in the Far North from the last time the Earth was warm enough to turn the Arctic into a brackish, almost fresh water sea on top of cold salty ocean.