In fact, the number of centenarians will increase more than 50 times – from 500,000 today to over 26 million by 2100. Which is great – but all those senior citizens are going to require care. We won’t just be wrestling with the fact that the world’s population is exploding – but people are living longer than ever, too. “It’s difficult to set aside this time for ethical reflection when new technological possibilities seem to be coming thick and fast.” “Proper reflection on what about us we might want to preserve takes time – it should draw on a wide range of perspectives about what it means to be human,” Nicholas Agar, professor of ethics at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, told BBC Future Now earlier this year. While it’s still not widely used enough to be considered a current “grand challenge”, this is an up-and-coming advancement whose wide-ranging repercussions we need to be prepared for – and it’s all the more reason to ensure ethicists have a seat at the table at every laboratory, university and corporation that might be itching to alter our DNA. Sounds great, right? But what if takes a dark ethical turn, and it turns into a eugenics-esque vanity project to churn out ‘designer babies’, selecting embryos that produce babies that will have a certain amount of intelligence or that have certain physical characteristics? It’s called Crispr (pronounced ‘crisper’) and it’s a means of altering people’s DNA to carve diseases like cancer out of the equation. Here are just some of the potential big issues of tomorrow:ĭebates among scientists started roaring last year over a new technology that lets us edit human DNA.

Over the last few months, BBC Future Now has been examining some of the biggest problems humankind faces right now: land use to accommodate exploding populations, the future of nuclear energy, the chasm between rich and poor – and much more.īut what about the big challenges that are brewing for the future? In 30 years, what might be on the world’s agenda to solve? It’s impossible to predict, but we can get clues from how current trends in science and technology may play out.

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