Humanity has a special talent for imagining the future – encompassing both our deepest fears and our loftiest dreams. Hollywood is particularly good it. Think of Stanley Kubrick's 1968 existential conversation between an astronaut and his computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey; the 2013 film Her, which explored the relationship between a man and his virtual assistant; and 2008's post-apocalyptic Wall-E, which showed us an uninhabitable planet Earth 700 years from now, to name just a few.
Here at Cosmos, we like to imagine the future too, but with a little more science to guide us: in 2006, our feature story “Life in 2020” hit the stands in Issue 9, taking a look at what life then might be like. The topics we discussed bore an uncanny resemblance to those explored by Hollywood but with a little more grounding.
As Cosmos celebrates 100 issues, we look at what science predicted for the 2020s: what we got right, what we got wrong – and what we still don't know. The questions, somewhat depressingly, are largely the same. How long can our planet continue to support us? How will artificial intelligence change our lives and will that change benefit or undo us? Is there life in the Solar System, or further afield – or are we all alone?
Perhaps the greatest question for you, the Cosmos reader, is the role of science in all this rapid technological, political and social change. Dr Alan Finkel, Australia's chief scientist from 2016 to 2020, remains hopeful.
“The role of science goes up and down in society,” says Finkel. “2020 was definitely a good year for science: political leaders and society turned to medical science in particular during COVID. And now in 2023 you're starting to see it collapse again. But science just keeps doing what it should do, which is – do the research, find the evidence and communicate the evidence. Science in the long term will prevail.”
The 2020 scorecard
In 2006, writer Robin McKie asked astrophysicists, climatologists, oncologists, ecologists, robotics specialists and renewable energy experts what they thought life in 2020 would be like. There were some big predictions (“by 2020 we will have good evidence that we have neighbours somewhere in the galaxy”), some that fell differently to prophecy (“intelligent clothes” made from “special fabrics, fitted with monitors that will
