Chapter 9 · What comes next
The Future
The story does not stop at the present. The same science that explains the past sets out what the next century, the next millennium and the deep future could hold.
Big History is not only a story about the past. The same evidence and the same methods that reconstruct the last 13.8 billion years also project forward, and the projections are more solid than most people expect for the next few decades and more open than most people expect for the next few centuries.
This chapter is the one with the most uncertainty in it, and it says so. Climate physics, energy systems, artificial intelligence, biotechnology and space are treated the way every other topic on this site is treated: what is established, what is active research, what is an open question, and where scientists disagree.
It ends in the deep future, with the death of the Sun and the fate of the universe, because a story that began with the first tick of the cosmic year deserves to be followed to its last.
Lessons
- 9.1 The next century: climatePlanned
What the climate models say, what is settled, what is not, and what is still up to us.
- 9.2 Energy after fossil fuelsPlanned
Sun, wind, atoms and storage: the transition that decides what the next century looks like.
- 9.3 Machines that learnPlanned
Artificial intelligence, and whether it counts as a new kind of collective learning.
- 9.4 Editing lifePlanned
Biotechnology, from vaccines to gene editing, and what it means to steer evolution on purpose.
- 9.5 Leaving EarthPlanned
Space as a place to live, and the physics that makes it hard.
- 9.6 The deep futurePlanned
From the year 3000 to the death of the Sun and the fate of the universe.