How the world will look in 2025

China will become our global powerhouse, the world’s population will hit 8bn, and we’ll have grown used to biblical floods. Richard Fitzpatrick finds out how Earth will look in 12 years.

A SECOND language might be a redundant skill by 2025, as outdated as calligraphy, because of advances in computer translation, say futurologists. Maybe so; Mandarin, however, will be a useful language to know in 12 years’ time, as China’s population is then set to peak at 1.4bn.

“The global economy is tilting towards Asia,” says the Economist magazine, and towards China in particular, as it is set to bypass the United States in 2018 as the globe’s leading economic tiger.

The country’s urbanisation is happening at 100 times the scale of the world’s first urbanisation — in Britain — and at 10 times the speed.

The world’s population will also hit the 8bn mark in 2025, according to the United Nations. Remarkably, it took 250,000 years for the world to reach a billion people, but it has added a billion people every 12 years, on average, for the last few decades.

Cities like Kolkata (India) and Karachi (Pakistan), along with Dhaka in Bangladesh, will be on our lips in 2025 as some of the world’s 10 most populous cities. Even today, Dhaka is so short of space that people have filled in rivers to make room for new housing.

By the middle of the century, 70% of people will live in urban areas, compared to 50% today.

Lagos, Africa’s largest city, offers a useful test case for how people might live in these cities, as ‘biblical’ floods — such as when Hurricane Sandy hit New York last October — may become a regular occurrence.

Lagos is built around lagoons, creeks and the Atlantic Ocean. Every year, thousands of its houses are washed away, forcing urban planners to consider building waterborne communities that float — wooden, triangular structures that capture solar energy and rain water. The outlook is shuddering in terms of climate change. “Things are looking pretty grim at the moment,” says George Monbiot, writer and environmental activist. “Already, we have far more extremes of temperature than we did 30 years ago.

“This is having major impacts on agriculture, and creating a lot of forest fires, and heat waves that are almost intolerable because they’re close to people’s physiological limits.

“That, and the disappearance of the Arctic ice, are the two things we’re going to feel most strongly. We’re talking about a world that has already had noticeable climate change. “When people 30 years ago looked forward at what the world would look like today, I think they would be surprised at how much has changed already. This is with less than a degree centigrade of global warming, which is tiny by comparison with what we may face in the course of this century — six degrees, which is what those radical tree-huggers, the International Energy Agency and PriceWaterhouseCoopers, are talking about, which is almost unimaginable.

“Six degrees is so extreme, and so far beyond anything we’ve experienced, that it’s very hard to picture what the impact would be. Put it this way, the difference in average global temperature between now and the last ice age was four degrees. We’re talking about huge, disruptive change.

“Predictions begin to fail after a certain point, whether you’re talking about hundreds of millions of people being displaced or billions, or whole areas of continental interiors being desertified and incapable of supporting any forms of crops or livestock. That, too, is quite plausible, as is the erosion of vast areas of coastline, and a very real possibility of mass, global starvation.”

As mankind possibly edges towards obliteration, ironically, medical science is bounding ahead. Life expectancy continues to increase, the result of a variety of factors, including the suppression of infant mortality, and better nutrition and public hygiene. The most ardent advocates of life extension, the immortalists, say there is no limit. The body is a machine like any other, they say, and can be fixed.

Gerontologist Steven Austad studied death rates among children of 11 years, the age at which people are least likely to die, since they have survived the perils of childhood and have yet to suffer the deterioration of age. They are medical ‘immortals’ in so far as they are most likely to die as a result of an accident.

The death rates of 11-year-olds should, therefore, be comparable to those of immortals. Using death rates in 11-year-olds, Austad calculated that a medical immortal would have a life expectancy of 1,200 years. Austad has also bet $500m that somebody living in 2001 will still be alive and sentient in 2150; it is a wager he says he is “feeling very good about”.

Curing cancer, interestingly, would only increase life expectancy by about three years.

The possibilities being explored, however, for a drug that could zap arteriosclerosis, the plaque that congeals and causes heart attacks and strokes, would increase life expectancy by 10 to 13 years.

Then there is the conundrum of dementia and Alzheimer’s.

“The big problem for life extension advocates,” says Bryan Appleyard, the author of How to Live Forever or Die Trying, “is that the brain is plainly only designed for a maximum of around 100 years and there is no obvious way to fix this.”

As people continue to live longer, they will have to keep earning. “It’ll be a good thing that people will have to go on working,” says Charles Handy, management guru. “Good for people’s health, and good for the economy, but they won’t work quite so hard. We’ll have much more part-time work.

“Already in Britain, if you’re a full-time employee you’re in a minority of the working population, because there are so many part-timers, self-employed people, temporary workers and people still in education.

“Out of the 40m people in Britain of working age, only 18m are in full-time, conventional employment. And of those who are part-time, three-quarters want to be part-time. This is a trend that will continue.”

With more leisure time, people will turn to technology to fill the day. The digital butler, an idea that goes back to the 1980s and which is in rudimentary form on smartphones, will come into its own. It will recognise your voice and could be visible as a hologram (perhaps looking and sounding like Scarlett Johansson or George Clooney). From the comfort of your couch, you will be able to command it to do all kinds of things, like search on TV for a good documentary, as it will know your tastes, or order a taxi. Whether or not you would want it making suggestions, or just reacting to your orders, would be at your discretion.

“Some people would want the butler to be very proactive in sorting things out,” says Ian Pearson, futurist. “You know, ‘Good morning, sir. You might be interested to know that such-and-such is going on in town today, would you like me to get you a couple of tickets.’ That sort of pro-activity you might welcome. You probably wouldn’t welcome him saying, ‘Fred’s in town. I’ve arranged for you to meet him down in the pub at lunchtime’.”

* Bryan Appleyard’s How to Live Forever or Die Trying: On the New Immortality is published by Simon & Schuster.

Charles Handy’s Myself and More Important Matters is published by Arrow.