Predicting the future is hard. Knowing what technological marvels await us in the next few years is almost impossible; what to say then about the next eighty? Nevertheless, Gizmodo decided to put together a list of ten cool, advanced and amazing technologies that must be around 2100. Some of these technologies are already "almost here", but the same can be said about what was promised to us many years ago. And no matter how incredible the things described below may seem to you, most of them - if not all - should simply appear at the turn of the 22nd century. The reason for this lies in an innovation that is not on this list: . As computer scientist I. J. Good aptly put it in the 1960s, "the first superintelligent machine will be the last invention to be made by man."

As soon as the machine acquires intelligence that surpasses the human - and this may happen as early as the 2050s - the words "technically possible" will no longer make sense. Intelligent machines will replace humans as designers and engineers, will create technology from all our fairy tales and fantasies, and even more. Here are ten such technologies that could change almost everything.

Brain-connected virtual reality

Wearable virtual reality devices like the Oculus Rift are all cool and good, but no matter how sophisticated such devices are, the “true” feeling of being in a parallel reality will always remain out of reach. Something more…introducing is needed. By 2100, we will definitely find a way to make the experience of virtual reality indistinguishable from this very reality. What is remarkable, this experience will be directly fed to our brain, bypassing the usual senses and making everything that happens incredibly reliable.

To get a material sense of what is happening, we need to get to the source of all experience: in human brain. Essentially, the brain (and everything else) is a sensory processing device. Everything that we feel from day to day, whether it is the smell of old socks or the alluring glow of the monitor, everything passes through the brain. But what is real? When we talk about what we feel, what we hear, what we see and taste, only the electrical signals read by the brain are "real".

Futurist Ray Kurzweil explained how this could happen in his book The Singularity Is Near.

He believes that everything will start with nanorobots in our bodies and brains. Nanobots will keep us healthy, provide full immersion in virtual reality right from within our nervous system, provide direct communication between the brain and the brain via the Internet and significantly expand the mental capabilities of a person. But do not forget that non-biological intelligence “gets smarter” twice a year, while biological intelligence essentially stands still. By the 2030s, the non-biological part of our intelligence will supplant the biological part.

Kurzweil's timeline is, of course, a little optimistic, but his words are not without meaning; we will find new ways to break the blood-brain barrier and create microscopic machines that can travel throughout the body. And we are also working on compiling detailed map brain, which also includes areas that process incoming sensory information.

After being implanted in the brain, Kurzweil's nanorobots could detect various sensory inputs in the brain and close them (that is, prevent the passage of electrical signals from the retina of the eye, ear, etc.), making a person completely cut off from the real environment. This would be the perfect sensory deprivation chamber. Instead of these signals, nanorobots receiving wireless signals would send their own to the brain and feed it with artificial feelings. A person will feel as if he was in another world.

utility mist

Nanotechnology innovator J. Storrs Hall envisions utility fog (or service nanomog) as a swarm of nanobots, or "foglets," that can take on the shape of virtually any object and change shape on the fly. Storrs came up with the idea when he was trying to imagine the seatbelt of the future. Instead of static belts and airbags, Hall introduced a smart cloud of connected snowflake foglets that can move according to any object nearby, including passengers in the car.

The utility fog defies the imagination in terms of technological sophistication. Each foglet will be only 10 microns across (the size of a human cell), equipped with a tiny, rudimentary on-board computer that will control its actions (and externally supported by an artificial intelligence system), and a dozen telescopic limbs that will stretch outward in the shape of a dodecahedron. By linking, the two foglets will form a circuit that allows the transfer of energy and communication over the network. These foglets will not be able to float, but rather form a lattice structure that stretches in all 12 directions.

The utility fog will work as a programmable matter, will be able to move, envelop and even transport an object or person. Perhaps such fog could even be used to create a virtual world around a person.

Space solar energy

As our civilization tries to mitigate the effects of climate change and move towards a more sustainable energy economy, it seems that we will never be able to meet our insatiable energy needs. Space energy, an idea that was proposed back in the 1960s, could solve this problem once and for all.

Approximately 60 years ago, Peter Glaser introduced solar satellites capable of transmitting captured solar energy to the Earth's surface via microwaves. Since then, various schemes have been proposed for using this idea, and in Japan. The SBSP system is a Japanese orbital farm that will maintain a stationary orbit 36,000 kilometers above the equator and transmit power to Earth via laser beams. Each satellite will target a 3 km wide receiving station that will generate a gigawatt of electricity. That's enough to power half a million homes. For the sake of safety, the receiving stations will be located far from where people live, in the desert or on an island.

At the turn of the 22nd century, many people will prefer a purely digital existence, free from all biological restrictions. Consciousness uploading or whole-brain emulation would allow exact replication of an existing biological brain. The scan will capture every detail down to the molecular level and include memories, associations and even a person's personal quirks.

Futurists don't yet know exactly when mind-uploading will become available, but an important step is to make sure that all the critical parts of the brain are copied, especially those tied to human feeling identity (namely, the parahippocampus and the retrosplenal cortex). We will also have to resort to "destructive" copying, when the existing brain is cut or even removed in order to record the state and memories of a person. Alternatively, one could use a brain scanner powerful enough to take casts of the brain and then "paste" them into a computer capable of transmitting this information to a functioning mind. In order for the uploaded person to function normally, he will also need a virtual body and environment.

An important scientific and philosophical question to ask is whether this process will be a true "transfer" of consciousness, and not a copy of the human brain. Moreover, it is not entirely clear whether self-awareness can be recreated on a digital substrate. The scary thing is that each download can produce some kind of zombie that will behave like a person in the past, but in fact act according to the script, like a program.

weather control

It is highly unlikely that our species will be able to completely control the weather by the end of this century, but it is quite possible to seriously influence it. We are already seeding clouds with particles to stimulate precipitation; California has been doing it for 50 years. During the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, Chinese authorities fired 1,100 rockets into the clouds to create rainstorms before storms reached the capital. Sometimes laser pulses are even fired into thunderclouds in the hope of triggering lightning.

In the future, weather engineers will be able to build massive wall-like structures that will prevent destructive tornadoes from forming, or they will build massive - very massive - turbines in the sea that will suck energy from hurricanes. A 2014 study showed that a wind farm consisting of tens of thousands of individual wind turbines could reduce wind speeds by 148 km/h and reduce storm surges by 79%. In essence, this means bringing the hurricane to naught.

More interestingly, we could end up building a weather machine to create programmable weather. A particularly curious global plan calls for a thin cloud of small transparent balls that rise into the atmosphere and can reflect incoming sunlight. Inside each balloon will be placed a mirror and a GPS module, an attitude control mechanism and a small computer. A "programmable greenhouse gas" lifted by hydrogen will be 30 kilometers above the Earth's surface. When millions of mirrors look away from Earth, they will be able to reflect sunlight back into space. This system, controlled by artificial intelligence, will be able to change the weather patterns around the world and turn less habitable places into temperate regions.

Nanoassemblers

Think 3D printers are cool? Then wait for the appearance of molecular assemblers (nanoassemblers), hypothetical machines described by one of the fathers of nanotechnology, Eric Drexler. Drexler described the nanoassembler as a device capable of manipulating individual atoms to create a desired product.

Drexler specifically emphasized that biological assemblers already exist and produce complex and amazing structures like bacteria, trees, me and you. Using the same logic, he believes we will eventually be able to tap into the mechanical properties of ultra-small objects and use similar principles to create objects of any shape or consistency.

Nanoassemblers can lead the world into an era of "cardinal abundance", allowing us to produce objects and materials that would otherwise be impossible to build, literally from scratch (or, more accurately, from molecules). Such devices could even cook our food. To make a steak, the nanoassembler will need carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen, from which it will combine amino acids and proteins, and then assemble it into a steak.

geoengineering

The effects of climate change are likely to be irreversible. No matter what we do from now until 2100, the levels of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere will continue to warm the planet.

To avert many of the environmental disasters that will follow from climate change - from rising sea levels and super droughts to super storms and mass extinctions - we must, albeit reluctantly, begin to change the planet through geoengineering.

Some notable geohacking proposals include cirrus cloud seeding to reduce reflectivity, stratospheric particle injection to control solar radiation, sulfur aerosol injection to cause global dimming, and simple solutions like restoring rainforests to restore carbon balance. Other ideas include a giant cosmic reflector (although specifically that may be beyond our technological capabilities by 2100), fertilizing the oceans to grow carbon-sucking algae, and increasing the alkalinity of the oceans to make them less acidic. Obviously, there is no shortage of ideas.

The problem with geoengineering, of course, is that we can confidently destroy the planet if something goes wrong, and also become dependent on it. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and we will rely on sophisticated climate models and supercomputers.

Communication of minds

Advances in communications technology and neuroscience will transform humanity into a literally telepathic species.

The advent of a direct mind-to-mind connection will further connect us as individuals and presumably lead to "swarm consciousness" - a vast network of interconnected minds working together via the Internet. In such a future, we will observe the dissolution of the individual and the rise of the collective mass consciousness.

Remarkably, such a future may be closer than we think. Back in 2014, an international team of researchers was the first to demonstrate a direct and completely non-invasive brain-to-brain communication system. During the experiments, the participants were able to exchange mentally projected words, although they were separated by hundreds of kilometers. A year later, another team of scientists transmitted brain signals over the Internet, controlling the movements of another person's hand. These systems, now only in their infancy, hint at a future where we can use the power of thought to communicate with each other and telekinetically control smart devices in our environment.

Fusion power

Earlier this year, physicists in Germany used a 2-megawatt microwave pulse to heat low-density hydrogen plasma to 80 million degrees. This experiment did not produce any energy and lasted only a quarter of a second, but was a major step forward in the effort to launch nuclear fusion, an extremely promising form of energy production.

Unlike nuclear fission, in which the nuclei of an atom are divided into smaller parts, nuclear fusion creates a single heavy nucleus from two light ones. As a result, the change in mass generates great amount energy, which, according to scientists, can be used as a working source of clean energy. could replace fossil fuel burning and traditional nuclear reactors.

But to do this, scientists need to figure out how to reliably and safely manage the conditions that are commonly found in the sun. The problem is that fusion plasma is very difficult to limit; freely flowing streams of protons and electrons are ejected. Our sun holds the plasma in place with powerful gravity, but Earth has to rely on magnets and lasers to replicate this feat. Once a tiny piece of plasma escapes, it can mess up the machine's wall, so the fusion reactor shuts down.

artificial life forms

Not wanting to stop at genetic engineering, the scientists of the future will certainly want to create new organisms from scratch - from microscopic synthetic bacteria to new people. This burgeoning discipline of artificial life began with an attempt to recreate a purely biological phenomenon, and in this it is helped by computers and other synthetic media.

The drive to create synthetic life forms is already well underway. Earlier this year, scientists at the Institute of Synthetic Genomics successfully created an artificial bacterial genome that had a meager set of 473 genes, fewer than found in any organism in nature. Further breakthroughs in this area will help biologists explore the basic functions of life and classify the most important genes in cells. Scientists can use the "building blocks" of cells to create organisms with abilities not found in nature, such as bacteria that can consume plastic and toxic waste, and microorganisms that act as medicines for our bodies.

Any of the technologies listed above can change our civilization. What is less clear is how these wonders will work among themselves; technology cross-effects are often difficult to predict. For example, the connection of brain-connected virtual reality, mind uploading and artificial intelligence could lead to the creation of a computer civilization consisting of real people and artificial intelligence. Geoengineering systems of the future may include a weather control system. And so on.

The more predictions we make about future technologies, the harder it is to figure out what the future might actually look like.

A map of present-day Antarctica showing the rate of retreat (2010-2016) of the "cohesion line" where glaciers lose contact with the seafloor, and ocean temperatures. The lone red arrow in East Antarctica is the Totten Glacier, which contains enough water to raise the world's sea level by 3 meters.

Everything that happened to us is just a prologue.
– William Shakespeare, The Tempest

The year 2100 looks like a line of restrictive flags at the finish line of climate change - as if all our goals end there. But, to paraphrase the warning on the rearview mirror, he's closer to us than he looks. Today's children will have their grandchildren when they live to see the end of all climate projections.

However, in 2100 the climate will not stop changing. Even if we successfully limit warming this century to 2 ºC, the CO 2 content in the air will be 500 parts per million (ppm). Our planet has not seen such a level since the middle of the Miocene, 16 million years ago, when our ancestors were still great apes. Then the temperature was -8 ºC higher, not 2 ºC, and sea levels were 40 meters higher, or even more - not the half a meter expected by the end of this century, according to the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) from 2013.

Where did the gaping gap between predictions for the end of the century and what happened in the past of the Earth come from? Does the planet's climate history tell us that we have missed something?

Time

One big reason for the gap is simple: time.

The earth needs time to react to changes in greenhouse gases. Some changes last for years, others take a whole generation to reach a new equilibrium. The melting of ice and permafrost, the heating of the ocean depths, the formation of peat layers, the reorganization of vegetation cover - these processes take centuries and millennia.

This type of slow response is not taken into account in climate models. This is partly due to the lack of computer power to calculate them, partly because we are only focusing on what will happen in the next few decades, partly because these processes are not 100% predictable. But while climate models are successful in predicting observed changes, uncertainties exist even for fairly fast reactions, such as cloud formation or increased polar warming.

Earth's past, on the other hand, shows us how climate change actually played out, summing up the entire spectrum of the planet's fast and slow responses. During past climate changes, during which the Earth had ice caps (as it does today), it typically warmed by 5 ºC to 6 ºC for each doubling of CO 2 levels, and the entire process took about a thousand years. This is about twice the Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS) values ​​used in climate prediction models up to 2100, which are calculated mainly from historical observations.

“Everything that happened to us is just a prologue” – engraving on the National Archives building in Washington D.C.

“We do expect the Earth's system sensitivity (change CO 2 and all systems respond - ice caps, plants, methane levels, aerosols, etc.) to be above the ECS. Our study of the Pliocene says about 50% higher, although this is not the limit,” Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, told me.

Or, as Dana Royer of Wesleyan University puts it: “Put simply, climate models tend to underestimate the extent of climate change relative to the geological evidence.”

Part of the reason for the higher level of change is slow-responding Earth systems responsible for overall warming. Even if absolutely all emissions of greenhouse gases stopped tomorrow, sea levels will continue to rise for many more centuries due to thermal expansion and melting of glaciers; the ice caps of Antarctica and Greenland will also continue to melt due to the temperature already accumulated by the climate over several decades. And because CO 2 stays in the atmosphere for a long time, in the absence of geoengineering solutions to remove it, the world will pass any temperature limit set for the end of the century, and it will remain high for several hundred more years.

But this does not fully explain the gap, which means that we do not take into account some other reinforcing feedback. As the 2017 U.S. National Climate Assessment puts it: “Model mismatches with past warming data suggest that climate models are missing at least one, and possibly more, process that is critical for future warming, especially in the polar regions.”

Can the Miocene tell us the future?

The Mid-Miocene Climate Optimum (MMCO) was an ancient climate warming during which CO 2 levels jumped from less than 400 ppm to . The content of CO 2 in antiquity was measured by various indirect methods, such as the content of boron and carbon isotopes in fossil and ancient soils, or by pores in fossil leaves. The cause of the jump was a rare volcanic phenomenon, the “large pyrogenic province”, during which huge amounts of basalt were erupted to the surface in the west of the present-day United States 16.6 million years ago. Yvette Eley and Michael Hren of the University of Connecticut studied how this affected the climate.

They used such a tool as fat molecules left in the sediments after the plants and microbes that lived at that time. Elay and Horseradish extracted the chemical remains of Miocene microbes from the muds of that period in Maryland, and then converted the percentage of various fat molecules into soil temperature using calibrations based on more than a decade of studying microbial fats in modern soils from around the planet. “Definitely the timing of these basalt flows and the timing of climate change are very closely linked,” Eley said. “Our biomarkers definitely track the behavior of CO 2 . Whatever caused the changes in the planet's ecology system, it certainly followed the pCO 2 “.

But among various examples of climatic fluctuations, the MMCO was very mild, compared to the end of the Permian, the Triassic, and other events associated with mass extinctions. Miocene CO 2 emissions were slow enough to avoid significant ocean acidification, unlike today or extreme examples from the past.

They similarly calculated the temperature of the seas using the chemical remains of marine microbes: “We got a relative change in sea surface temperature during the MMCO of 4-5 degrees – and then the sea temperature was 6 degrees warmer than today,” Eley said.

Warmer, wetter, drier?

Life in the middle of the Miocene in the territory of modern Spain in the view of the artist

Judging by European plants, there was less temperature difference between seasons.

If modern sea level rise is similar to that of the Pliocene, 1.2 m per hundred years, or Miocene, 2.4 m per hundred years, and not like IPCC - half a meter per century, then our future will be quite different. Rising sea levels, exacerbated by tidal flooding and storms, will render vast amounts of coastal infrastructure and holdings useless in a couple of generations.

Another melting accelerator is water melting on the surface, which requires reaching temperatures above freezing. It penetrates the cracks, freezes, and splits the ice like a wood splitter - this phenomenon was observed during the disappearance of the Jakobshavn glacier in Greenland. Even today, surface melting occurs in parts of Antarctica. Such melt-enhancing processes have only recently been added to new computer models, and they now show that rates of sea level rise observed in antiquity may be seen by our descendants.

Ice retreat amplifies warming as the bright, light-reflecting surface is replaced by dark, heat-absorbing water and land. As a result, temperatures will slowly rise further.

What the Antarctic ice sheet might have looked like in the Miocene, 14 to 23 million years ago

Hope for uncertainty?

Could the gap between the Miocene climate and our supposed future exist simply because of the lack and inaccuracy of ancient climate data?

“Changes in CO 2 levels during the middle Miocene may exceed the estimated median value. Nothing is known about other factors. Methane or N 2 O levels were not determined. The amount of ozone or soot (from fires or from plants) is also little known,” Gavin told me. "So even if we had perfect indicators of global temperature (which we don't), sensitivity estimates obtained by simply dividing temperature by CO 2 cannot be compared with today's ECS estimates."

And yet, despite the scatter of level values, they tend to accumulate around a value of 500 ppm for the middle Miocene. Some studies even talk about the possibility of lower CO 2 levels, but leading to higher temperatures. The picture of a relatively warm climate is supported by geological evidence of high sea levels and fossils found around the world, including the seabed off the coast of Antarctica.

Was the climatic optimum increased due to orbital cycling? Although individual glacial cycles of the Miocene depended on orbital fluctuations, as was the case with the last ice age, warm weather and maximum ice retreat persisted through several orbital and glacial cycles, along with higher levels of atmospheric CO 2 . So we can't just pin the optimum increase on the Earth's orbit around the Sun.

Even more confusing is that the beginning of the Miocene was different from today. The climate of the early Miocene was warmer than our pre-industrial times, there were fewer grassy areas, and the oceans communicated with each other in a different way. The current from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean went where Panama is now located, and the Bering Strait was blocked. However, scientists believe that these currents may not have affected the climate that much, and in many ways the planet was very similar to today.

So there are big uncertainties about how well the situation in the Miocene describes the future of our descendants. And, of course, at least in the last 66 million years there were no processes similar in terms of such a high rate of emissions into the atmosphere. On these grounds, one can justifiably refuse to compare the situation with any ancient analogues. It is only necessary to remember that uncertainty is a double-edged sword: it can work not only in a more favorable direction for the evaluator.

If all this seems too depressing to you, then know that there is hope! It lies in the slow response of the Earth, which opens up a small window of opportunity for us.

Hand on fire

If you run your hand through the flame of a candle fast enough, you won't get burned. The same principle applies to the Earth - if we minimize the time that the planet spends under the influence of temperatures exceeding pre-industrial temperatures, then we may be able to avoid a rise in ocean levels comparable to that of the Miocene.

But this assumption will only be true if negative emission technologies can be deployed on a large scale as early as the 2030s – a scenario with “limited realistic potential.” Every five years, delays in implementation condemn our descendants to an extra meter of sea level by the year 2300. Also, such a scenario implies that in the process of combating warming, we will not trigger a large-scale collapse of the ice sheets. Otherwise, this process will become irreversible on a scale of several millennia, even if we manage to remove CO 2 from the atmosphere.

Our current window of opportunity won't stay open for long - scientists are trying to figure out if the collapse of the ice sheets around one of West Antarctica's largest glaciers has already begun. “Things are changing very, very quickly compared to everything we've found in the geological record,” Eley says. “I would really like to believe we don’t have one of the worst case scenarios on our hands, but I think we are already on our way to those levels.”

“In the middle of the Miocene, CO 2 levels rose by 100-200 ppm. Since the beginning of the industrial age, we have already reached an increase of 127 ppm. So we're already halfway down this path,” said Horseradish. “The uncertainty is not only in what levels of CO 2 we end up with, but also in how the system will respond to such rapid changes.”

Think the world is already overpopulated? It's still flowers.

The world's population is expected to grow by another billion people over the next 15 years, and as a result, the total population of the planet will increase from 7.3 billion in mid-2015 to 8.5 billion in 2030, 9.7 billion in 2050 and 11.2 billion by 2100 - this is evidenced by the latest UN data.

Currently, 60% of the world's population lives in Asia, 16% in Africa, 10% in Europe, 9% in Latin America and the Caribbean, and only 5% in North America and Oceania. The largest countries are China and India, their total population is about 40% of the world.

But the situation will soon change. The charts below were created by Data Analyst Tariq Khokhar for a blog World Bank based on average UN estimates, show how our world will change in the near future.

1. By 2100, the population will grow by 4 billion people

Humanity is growing more and more slowly, but nevertheless these are large numbers. Now the world's population is adding 83 million people a year, which is about the same as the population of Germany, but ten years ago, humanity grew at 1.24% per year, and now at only 1.18%, and the UN expects that the pace will continue to slow down.

According to the UN forecast, with a probability of 25%, the world's population will stabilize or begin to fall even before 2100.

How reliable are these numbers? In the past, the UN's predictions about the population as a whole were justified, for example, in 1948, the organization predicted that by the year 2000 the world's population would reach 6 billion people, and this is only 5% less than the real numbers.

Of course, good result in the past is no guarantee of accuracy in the future. There are several factors that can skew the prognosis. The UN mentions in its report that the birth rate in countries where families are accustomed to having many children is falling rapidly. Experts expect a significant reduction in this parameter, but this will depend on investment in women's health and increased access to birth control.

2. Future growth is driven almost exclusively by Africa

Now the population of Africa is 16% of the world, and the UN believes that this proportion will grow to 25% by 2050, and to 49% by 2100.

This is mainly due to the youth of people, as well as high level fertility. In 2015, exactly half of the continent's inhabitants were under the age of 24. Many of them will have children of their own in the next few decades, having a significant impact on global demographics.

Conversely, as the graph above shows, Asia's population will peak and then decline as residents of many Asian countries age. The number of people in Latin America, Europe, North America and Oceania will remain relatively constant.

The charts below show how much Africa's contribution to the human population will change.

3. Nigeria will soon become the third most populous country in the world

By 2050, Nigeria will overtake the United States and become the third most populated country in the world. By this time, more than 300 million people will live in China, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan and the United States.

Also, UN statistics show that almost half of the world's population growth by 2050 will be concentrated in nine countries: India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Democratic Republic Congo, Ethiopia, Tanzania, USA, Indonesia and Uganda.

4. India will overtake China in the near future

Those who are interested in demography will not be surprised by this fact: India will soon become the most populated country on the planet. Now China has 1.38 billion people and India 1.31 billion. By 2022, both countries will grow to 1.4 billion people, after which the situation in China will stabilize due to the aging of the population, and India by 2030 will reach 1. .5 billion people, and by 2050 - 1.7 billion.

5. Europe is getting old

About a quarter of Europeans are now 60 years of age or older. In 2050 and 2100 there will be more than a third of them.

By 2050, every part of the world except Africa will have a quarter of the population or more over the age of 60. By 2050, the population of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Romania, Serbia and Ukraine will decrease by more than 15%.

One way to measure the aging of the world's population is to calculate the median age. This is the number that divides the world's population into two equal parts. Now it is 29.6 years and will rise to 36 years in 2050 and 42 in 2100.

The world's population is about to change in the future. According to the Deutsche Bank analysis, it is now just over 7 billion and will peak at 8.7 billion by 2055. Further, it is waiting for a gradual reduction. The most important changes concern the age pyramid: the population is steadily aging, both in Europe and in Africa.

We invite you to familiarize yourself with the change in the population of 15 countries from 2000 to 2100, which Martin de Wulf calculated based on UN data.

France is an exception among Western states. It consistently has the highest birth rate in Europe (an average of two children per woman), and its population will rise from its current 65 million to nearly 80 million in 2100, twice its 1950 population.

However, the age pyramid is gradually flattening: by the end of the century, there will be as many 70-year-olds as there are one-year-old babies, 14-year-old teenagers and adults in their 30s, while today the 50-year-old age group is the most represented. The reason for this increase in the proportion of elderly people is the increase in life expectancy.

The situation is similar in the UK: the population of the country will increase from 62 million people in 2010 to 75.6 million by the beginning of the 22nd century. Similar changes will affect the age of people: the proportion of older citizens in future generations will increase markedly.

The population of Germany, in turn, will become smaller: it will decrease from 82 million people in 2010 to 70.1 million in 2090, but still grow to 70.3 million by 2100. The reason for this decline is the low birth rate.

A similar situation is observed in Japan, where the decline will not stop even at the end of the century. Its population will decrease from 125 million to 91 million, which is 27.2% in 100 years! This is not to mention aging ... Already in 2020, 20% of the Japanese will be over 70 years old.

China's population will give way to Indians in the coming years and fall below the one billion mark in the 2090s. At the same time, a completely different trend will be observed in Hong Kong: the number of city dwellers will increase from 6.7 million in 2010 to 10.3 million by the end of the century.

Russia is also in decline. The population will slowly decline to 111 million in 2100. Minus 24% over 100 years.

In America, steady growth will continue until 2100, when the population will increase from the current 310 million to 478 million, with a similar flattening of the age pyramid.

One would think that the population of the growing strength of Brazil will follow the country's economic growth. In reality, by the end of the century, the situation will be different: the population will increase from the current 194 million to a maximum of 224 million in 2040, followed by a gradual decline to less than 180 million in 2090.