|
What will the world be like in fifty years? This week some top scientists, including Nobel Prize winners, gave their vision of how the world will look in 2056,fron gas-powered cars to extraordinary health advances, John Ingham reports on what the worlds finest minds believe our futures will be. For those of us lucky enough to live that long,2056 will be a world of almost perpetual youth, where obesity is a remote memory and robots become our companions. We will be rubbing shoulders with aliens and colonizing outer space. Better still, our descendants might at last live in a world at peace with itself. The prediction is that we will have found a source of inexbaustible, safe, green energy, and that science will have killed off religion. If they are right we will have removed two of the main causes of war-our dependence on oil and religious prejudice. Will we really, as todays scientists claim, be able to live for ever or at least cheat the ageing process so that the average person lives to 150? Of course, all these predictions come with a scientific health warning. Harvard professor Steven Pinker says: This is an invitation to look foolish, as with the predictions of domed cities and nuclear-powered vacuum cleaners that were made 50 year ago. Living longer Anthony Atala, director of the Wake Forest Institute in North Carolina, belives failing organs will be repaired by injecting cells into the body. They will naturally to straight to the injury and help heal it. A system of injections without needles could also slow the ageing process by using the same process to tune cells. | 
