essay about life in the year 2050

What Will Life on Earth Be Like in 2050?

Scientists Look Ahead Five Decades In State-Of-The-Planet Report, Explore Ways To Solve Earth's Problems

Washington, D.C.

January 19, 2006

Megan Rabbitt

[email protected]

The number of extreme events, such as hurricanes and famine, affecting at least one million people will increase over the next 45 years if a certain scenario of world development plays out. Demand for water will increase enormously — between 30% and 85% — especially in Africa and Asia, by the year 2050. But human health may improve as public health measures advance vaccine development and lessen the impact of epidemic diseases such as HIV/AIDS. These are just a few of the many findings of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) published in a 4-volume set by Island Press and released today.

The MA is the product of a 4-year global research initiative, commissioned by the United Nations, in which 1,300 scientists from 95 nations explore the complex interactions between human well-being and the environment.

“The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment tells us that there is an inextricable link between the health of humans and the health of the planet. We can no longer ignore the enormous economic and social benefits, such as climate regulation and water purification, provided by nature’s fragile ecosystems,” said Timothy E. Wirth, President of the United Nations Foundation. “The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment is an extensively researched, scientifically grounded roadmap for why and how we should slow or reverse today’s ecosystem degradation and chart a path toward sustainable human development.”

The MA looks ahead 50 years from the year 2000 to paint four alternate pictures, or scenarios, of life on earth. Current estimates of 3 billion more people and a quadrupling of the world economy by 2050 show that our consumption of biological and physical resources will skyrocket putting much more pressure on ecosystems. But the scenarios demonstrate that the condition of ecosystems in the future could be significantly worse or better than in the present – depending on policy choices. For example, wise use of environmental technology, investing in education and health, and reducing poverty can reduce pressure on ecosystems.

“Despite what looks like steady global decline, this is a story of hope. The MA gives us a powerful way to explore the possible impacts of broad policy directions for life on Earth and tells us that changes in policy can make a difference,” said Dr. Stephen Carpenter, Professor of Limnology at the University of Wisconsin and one of the chief authors of the MA.

For example, MA scientists examine how the problem of excess nutrients in the Gulf of Mexico will change under each of the scenarios in order to identify the best approach to reducing the Gulf’s dead zone, caused by decades-old land use decisions. With more sophisticated management of the delta and main stem and better coordination between upstream and downstream, the dead zone would shrink, according to one scenario. Another scenario shows that a decrease in global trade would boost agricultural production in the U.S. and, combined with other factors, would mean that more nutrients would enter the Mississippi River and flow to the Gulf, widening the dead zone.

“Many of the policies identified by the MA as positive for both the environment and mankind are used somewhere today. So if we have the political will, we have the ability to implement them on a global scale,” added Carpenter.

The four scenarios are descriptions of plausible futures – based on changes in such factors as economic and population growth, climate change, and trade – told from the point of view of someone looking back from 2050 at what has happened in the world since 2000.

If certain assumptions play out by 2050, according to the MA, water will be more plentiful in nearly all regions because of climate change, but pressure on ecosystems to provide water to meet growing demand increases. Food security is likely to remain out of reach for many people, despite increasing food supply, but child malnutrition, while not eradicated, will likely drop over the coming decades.

By the end of the century, climate change may be the predominant driver of biodiversity loss and changes in ecosystem services globally. The Earth’s surface temperature is projected to increase 2.0 – 6.4 degrees Celsius bringing more incidents of floods and droughts. Sea levels will rise (50 – 70 centimeters by 2100). Biodiversity damage will grow worldwide as the rate of change in climate escalates.

“Ecosystem services have dramatically improved human wellbeing over the past centuries. People are better nourished and live longer and healthier lives than ever before, incomes have risen, and political institutions are more open,” stated Dr. Walter Reid, Director of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and Professor with the Institute for the Environment at Stanford University. “But these gains have been achieved at a growing cost. It’s now time for us to measure the economic value of these services so we can make better decisions about our future.”

“Payments for ecosystem services can be an effective way to protect services that people rely on, such as clean water, while also protecting the environment,” said Dr. Prabhu Pingali of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. “By placing a monetary value on these services, we will be smarter about using them while creating alternative sources of income for people, from farmers in the United States to tribes in developing countries.”

Three parts of the world may undergo faster changes in ecosystems than other regions and should be closely monitored by scientists, according to the MA. For example, Central Africa could see a rapid increase in demand for food and water which will intensify farming and raise the risk of water contamination from fertilizers and pesticides. Other hot spots are the Middle East, where rapid population growth could increase dependence on food imports, and South Asia where deforestation and industrial farming may “break” the region’s ecosystems.

The MA represents the first time scientists have looked at how the health of the environment contributes to human well-being and how policy decisions we make today shape the world of tomorrow. It is also the first time that scientists have examined changes – not just to nature – but to the benefits people receive from nature (identified as ‘ecosystem services’ in the MA), such as providing food, filtering air and water, controlling disease, building soil, pollinating crops and aesthetic and spiritual benefits.

What Will Your Life Be Like in 2050?

Will it be just like today, but electric? Or will it be very different?

essay about life in the year 2050

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New Scientist magazine's chief reporter Adam Vaughan recently published "Net-zero living: how your day will look in a carbon-neutral world ." Here, he imagines what a typical day would be like in the future—through the lens of Isla, "a child today, in 2050"—after we've cut carbon emissions. Vaughan says “most of us are lacking a visualization of what life will be like at net zero” and acknowledges the writing is fiction: "By its nature, it is speculative – but it is informed by research, expert opinion, and trials happening right now.”

Isla lives in the south of the United Kingdom—will it still be a united kingdom in 2050?—and her life looks pretty much like life does today: She has a house, a car, a job, and a cup of tea in the morning. There are wind turbines, great forests, and giant machines sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. It all sounds like a green and pleasant land, but it didn’t sound like the future to me.

It’s an interesting exercise, imagining what it will be like in 30 years. I thought I would give it a try: Here is some speculative fiction about Edie, living in Toronto, Canada in 2050.

Edie’s alarm goes off at 4:00 a.m. She gets up, folds up the bed in the converted garage in an old house in Toronto that is her apartment and workshop, and makes herself a cup of caffeine-infused chicory; only the very rich can afford real coffee 1 .
She considers herself to be very lucky to have this garage in what was her grandparents’ house. The only people who live in houses these days either inherited them or are multi-millionaires from all over the world, but especially from Arizona and other Southern states 2 , desperate to move Canada with its cooler climate and plentiful water and can afford the million-dollar immigrant visa fee.
She hurries to prepare her pushcart, actually a big electric cargo bike, filling it with the tomatoes, and preserves and pickles she prepared with fruits and vegetables she bought from backyard gardeners. Edie then rides it downtown where all the big office buildings have been converted into tiny apartments for climate refugees. The streets downtown look very much like Delancey Street in New York looked like in 1905, with e-pushcarts lining the roads where cars used to park.
Edie is lucky to be working. There are no office or industrial jobs anymore: Artificial Intelligence and robots took care of that 3 . The few jobs left are in service, culture, craft, health care, or real estate. In fact, selling real estate has become the nation’s biggest industry; there is a lot of it, and Sudbury is the new Miami.
Fortunately for Edie, there is a big demand for homemade foods from trustworthy sources. All the food in the grocery stores is grown in test tubes or made in factories. Edie sells out and rides home in time for siesta. There may be lots of electricity from wind and solar farms, but even running tiny heat pumps 4 for cooling is really expensive at peak times. The streets are unpleasantly hot, so many people sleep through the midday.
She checks the balance in her Personal Carbon Allowance (PCA) account to see if she has enough to buy another imported battery for her pushcart e-bike 5 after her nap; batteries have a lot of embodied carbon and transportation emissions and might eat up a month’s worth of her PCA. If she doesn’t have enough then she will have to buy carbon credits, and they are expensive. She sets her alarm for 6:00 p.m. when the streets of Toronto will come alive again on this hot November day.

The New Scientist article is illustrated with an image showing people walking and biking, turbines spinning, electric trains running, with kayaks, not cars. This is not an uncommon vision: There are many who suggest we just have to electrify everything and cover it all with solar panels and then we can keep on with the happy motoring.

I am not so optimistic. If we don't keep the global rise in temperature to under 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) then things are going to get messy. So this story was not just a speculative fantasy but based on previous writing about the need for sufficiency and worries about the embodied carbon of making everything , with some notes from previous Treehugger posts:

  • Thanks to climate change, "Coffee plantations in South America, Africa, Asia, and Hawaii are all being threatened by rising air temperatures and erratic rainfall patterns, which invite disease and invasive species to infest the coffee plant and ripening beans." More in Treehugger.
  • "Dwindling water supplies and below-average rainfall have consequences for those living in the West." More in Treehugger.
  • "We're witnessing the Third Industrial Revolution Playing out in real time." More in Treehugger.
  • Tiny heat pumps for tiny spaces are probably going to be common. More in Treehugger.
  • Electric cargo bikes will be a powerful tool for low-carbon commerce. More in Treehugger.
  • 2022 in Review: The Year E-Cargo Bikes Took Over
  • This Mass Timber Passivhaus Rental Building Is Perfect for Active Adults
  • Building a Sustainable Condo Today Involves Designing for the Future
  • Five, Just Five, Solutions to Roll Back Greenhouse Gas Emissions
  • A Car Ban Will Improve the State of the Climate, But Is It Ableist?
  • Nobody's Perfect, and You Don't Have to Be
  • What's the Right Way to Build in a Climate Crisis?
  • 2021 in Review: The Year in Tiny Living
  • 2021 in Review: The E-Bike Revolution Hits the Streets
  • Two Views of the Future of the Office
  • Is Any Party in the Canadian Election Taking Climate Seriously?
  • The Rise of Tall Wood
  • Best of Green Awards 2021: Eco Tech
  • The Future of Main Street, Post-Pandemic
  • How We Get Around Determines What We Build, and Also Determines Much of Our Carbon Footprint
  • Best of Green Awards 2021: Sustainable Travel

Climate 2019

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Hello From the Year 2050. We Avoided the Worst of Climate Change — But Everything Is Different

How We Solved Climate Change

L et’s imagine for a moment that we’ve reached the middle of the century. It’s 2050, and we have a moment to reflect—the climate fight remains the consuming battle of our age, but its most intense phase may be in our rearview mirror. And so we can look back to see how we might have managed to dramatically change our society and economy. We had no other choice.

There was a point after 2020 when we began to collectively realize a few basic things.

One, we weren’t getting out of this unscathed. Climate change, even in its early stages, had begun to hurt: watching a California city literally called Paradise turn into hell inside of two hours made it clear that all Americans were at risk. When you breathe wildfire smoke half the summer in your Silicon Valley fortress, or struggle to find insurance for your Florida beach house, doubt creeps in even for those who imagined they were immune.

Two, there were actually some solutions. By 2020, renewable energy was the cheapest way to generate electricity around the planet—in fact, the cheapest way there ever had been. The engineers had done their job, taking sun and wind from quirky backyard DIY projects to cutting-edge technology. Batteries had plummeted down the same cost curve as renewable energy, so the fact that the sun went down at night no longer mattered quite so much—you could store its rays to use later.

And the third realization? People began to understand that the biggest reason we weren’t making full, fast use of these new technologies was the political power of the fossil-fuel industry. Investigative journalists had exposed its three-decade campaign of denial and disinformation, and attorneys general and plaintiffs’ lawyers were beginning to pick them apart. And just in time.

These trends first intersected powerfully on Election Day in 2020. The Halloween hurricane that crashed into the Gulf didn’t just take hundreds of lives and thousands of homes; it revealed a political seam that had begun to show up in polling data a year or two before. Of all the issues that made suburban Americans—women especially—­uneasy about President Trump, his stance on climate change was near the top. What had seemed a modest lead for the Democratic challenger widened during the last week of the campaign as damage reports from Louisiana and Mississippi rolled in; on election night it turned into a rout, and the analysts insisted that an under­appreciated “green vote” had played a vital part—after all, actual green parties in Canada, the U.K. and much of continental Europe were also outperforming expectations. Young voters were turning out in record numbers: the Greta Generation, as punsters were calling them, made climate change their No. 1 issue.

How We Solved Climate Change

And when the new President took the oath of office, she didn’t disappoint. In her Inaugural Address, she pledged to immediately put America back in the Paris Agreement—but then she added, “We know by now that Paris is nowhere near enough. Even if all the countries followed all the promises made in that accord, the temperature would still rise more than 3°C (5°F or 6°F). If we let the planet warm that much, we won’t be able to have civilizations like the ones we’re used to. So we’re going to make the changes we need to make, and we’re going to make them fast.”

Fast, of course, is a word that doesn’t really apply to Capitol Hill or most of the world’s other Congresses, Parliaments and Central Committees. It took constant demonstrations from ever larger groups like Extinction Rebellion, and led by young activists especially from the communities suffering the most, to ensure that politicians feared an angry electorate more than an angry carbon lobby. But America, which historically had poured more carbon into the atmosphere than any other nation, did cease blocking progress. With the filibuster removed, the Senate passed—by the narrowest of margins—one bill after another to end subsidies for coal and gas and oil companies, began to tax the carbon they produced, and acted on the basic principles of the Green New Deal: funding the rapid deployment of solar panels and wind turbines, guaranteeing federal jobs for anyone who wanted that work, and putting an end to drilling and mining on federal lands.

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Since those public lands trailed only China, the U.S., India and Russia as a source of carbon, that was a big deal. Its biggest impact was on Wall Street, where investors began to treat fossil-fuel stocks with increasing disdain. When BlackRock, the biggest money manager in the world, cleaned its basic passive index fund of coal, oil and gas stocks, the companies were essentially rendered off-limits to normal investors. As protesters began cutting up their Chase bank cards, the biggest lender to the fossil-fuel industry suddenly decided green investments made more sense. Even the staid insurance industry began refusing to underwrite new oil and gas pipelines—and shorn of its easy access to capital, the industry was also shorn of much of its political influence. Every quarter meant fewer voters who mined coal and more who installed solar panels, and that made political change even easier.

As America’s new leaders began trying to mend fences with other nations, climate action proved to be a crucial way to rebuild diplomatic trust. China and India had their own reasons for wanting swift action—mostly, the fact that smog-choked cities and ever deadlier heat waves were undermining the stability of the ruling regimes. When Beijing announced that its Belt and Road Initiative would run on renewable energy, not coal, the energy future of much of Asia changed overnight. When India started mandating electric cars and scooters for urban areas, the future of the internal-combustion engine was largely sealed. Teslas continued to attract upscale Americans, but the real numbers came from lower-priced electric cars pouring out of Asian factories. That was enough to finally convince even Detroit that a seismic shift was under way: when the first generation of Ford E-150 pickups debuted, with ads demonstrating their unmatched torque by showing them towing a million-pound locomotive, only the most unreconstructed motorheads were still insisting on the superiority of gas-powered rides.

Other easy technological gains came in our homes. After a century of keeping a tank of oil or gas in the basement for heating, people quickly discovered the appeal of air-source heat pumps, which turned the heat of the outdoors (even on those rare days when the temperature still dropped below zero) into comfortable indoor air. Gas burners gave way to induction cooktops. The last incandescent bulbs were in museums, and even most of the compact fluorescents had been long since replaced by LEDs. Electricity demand was up—but when people plugged in their electric vehicles at night, the ever growing fleet increasingly acted like a vast battery, smoothing out the curves as the wind dropped or the sun clouded. Some people stopped eating meat, and lots and lots of people ate less of it—a cultural transformation made easier by the fact that Impossible Burgers turned out to be at least as juicy as the pucks that fast-food chains had been slinging for years. The number of cows on the world’s farms started to drop, and with them the source of perhaps a fifth of emissions. More crucially, new diets reduced the pressure to cut down the remaining tropical rain forests to make way for grazing land.

In other words, the low-hanging fruit was quickly plucked, and the pluckers were well paid. Perhaps the fastest-growing business on the planet involved third-party firms that would retrofit a factory or an office with energy-efficient technology and simply take a cut of the savings on the monthly electric bill. Small businesses, and rural communities, began to notice the economic advantages of keeping the money paid for power relatively close to home instead of shipping it off to Houston or Riyadh. The world had wasted so much energy that much of the early work was easy, like losing weight by getting your hair cut.

But the early euphoria came to an end pretty quickly. By the end of the 2020s, it became clear we would have to pay the price of delaying action for decades.

For one thing, the cuts in emissions that scientists prescribed were almost impossibly deep. “If you’d started in 1990 when we first warned you, the job was manageable: you could have cut carbon a percent or two a year,” one eminent physicist explained. “But waiting 30 years turned a bunny slope into a black diamond.” As usual, the easy “solutions” turned out to be no help at all: fracked natural-gas wells were leaking vast quantities of methane into the atmosphere, and “biomass burning”—­cutting down forests to burn them for electricity—was putting a pulse of carbon into the air at precisely the wrong moment. (As it happened, the math showed letting trees stand was crucial for pulling carbon from the atmosphere—when secondary forests were allowed to grow, they sucked up a third or more of the excess carbon humanity was producing.) Environmentalists learned they needed to make some compromises, and so most of America’s aging nuclear reactors were left online past their decommissioning dates: that lower-carbon power supplemented the surging renewable industry in the early years, even as researchers continued work to see if fusion power, thorium reactors or some other advanced design could work.

The real problem, though, was that climate change itself kept accelerating, even as the world began trying to turn its energy and agriculture systems around. The giant slug of carbon that the world had put into the atmosphere—more since 1990 than in all of human history before—acted like a time-delayed fuse, and the temperature just kept rising. Worse, it appeared that scientists had systematically underestimated just how much damage each tenth of a degree would actually do, a point underscored in 2032 when a behemoth slice of the West Antarctic ice sheet slid majestically into the southern ocean, and all of a sudden the rise in sea level was being measured in feet, not inches. (Nothing, it turned out, could move Americans to embrace the metric system.) And the heating kept triggering feedback loops that in turn accelerated the heating: ever larger wildfires, for instance, kept pushing ever more carbon into the air, and their smoke blackened ice sheets that in turn melted even faster.

This hotter world produced an ongoing spate of emergencies: “forest-fire season” was now essentially year-round, and the warmer ocean kept hurricanes and typhoons boiling months past the old norms. And sometimes the damage was novel: ancient carcasses kept emerging from the melting permafrost of the north, and with them germs from illnesses long thought extinct. But the greatest crises were the slower, more inexorable ones: the ongoing drought and desertification was forcing huge numbers of Africans, Asians and Central Americans to move; in many places, the heat waves had literally become unbearable, with nighttime temperatures staying above 100°F and outdoor work all but impossible for weeks and months at a time. On low-lying ground like the Mekong Delta, the rising ocean salted fields essential to supplying the world with rice. The U.N. had long ago estimated the century could see a billion climate refugees, and it was beginning to appear it was unnervingly correct. What could the rich countries say? These were people who hadn’t caused the crisis now devouring their lives, and there weren’t enough walls and cages to keep them at bay, so the migrations kept roiling the politics of the planet.

essay about life in the year 2050

There were, in fact, two possible ways forward. The most obvious path was a constant competition between nations and individuals to see who could thrive in this new climate regime, with luckier places turning themselves into fortresses above the flood. Indeed some people in some places tried to cling to old notions: plug in some solar panels and they could somehow return to a more naive world, where economic expansion was still the goal of every government.

But there was a second response that carried the day in most countries, as growing numbers of people came to understand that the ground beneath our feet had truly shifted. If the economy was the lens through which we’d viewed the world for a century, now survival was the only sensible basis on which to make decisions. Those decisions targeted not just carbon dioxide; these societies went after the wild inequality that also marked the age. The Green New Deal turned out to be everything the Koch brothers had most feared when it was introduced: a tool to make America a fairer, healthier, better-educated place. It was emulated around the world, just as America’s Clean Air Act had long served as a template for laws across the globe. Slowly both the Keeling Curve, measuring carbon in the atmosphere, and the Gini coefficient, measuring the distribution of wealth, began to flatten.

That’s where we are today. We clearly did not “escape” climate change or “solve” global warming—the temperature keeps climbing, though the rate of increase has lessened. It’s turned into a wretched century, which is considerably better than a catastrophic one. We ended up with the most profound and most dangerous physical changes in human history. Our civilization surely teetered—and an enormous number of people paid an unfair and overwhelming price—but it did not fall.

People have learned to defend what can be practically defended: expensive seawalls and pumps mean New York is still New York, though the Antarctic may yet have something to say on the subject. Other places we’ve learned to let go: much of the East Coast has moved in a few miles, to more defensible ground. Yes, that took trillions of dollars in real estate off the board—but the roads and the bridges would have cost trillions to defend, and even then the odds were bad.

Cities look different now—much more densely populated, as NIMBY defenses against new development gave way to an increasingly vibrant urbanism. Smart municipalities banned private cars from the center of town, opening up free public-transit systems and building civic fleets of self-driving cars that got rid of the space wasted on parking spots. But rural districts have changed too: the erratic weather put a premium on hands-on agricultural skills, which in turn provided opportunities for migrants arriving from ruined farmlands elsewhere. (Farming around solar panels has become a particular specialty.) America’s rail network is not quite as good as it was in the early 20th century, but it gets closer each year, which is good news since low-carbon air travel proved hard to get off the ground.

What’s changed most of all is the mood. The defiant notion that we would forever overcome nature has given way to pride of a different kind: increasingly we celebrate our ability to bend without breaking, to adapt as gracefully as possible to a natural world whose temper we’ve come to respect. When we look back to the start of the century we are, of course, angry that people did so little to slow the great heating: if we’d acknowledged climate change in earnest a decade or two earlier, we might have shaved a degree off the temperature, and a degree is measured in great pain and peril. But we also know it was hard for people to grasp what was happening: human history stretched back 10,000 years, and those millennia were physically stable, so it made emotional sense to assume that stability would stretch forward as well as past.

We know much better now: we know that we’ve knocked the planet off its foundations, and that our job, for the foreseeable centuries, is to absorb the bounces as she rolls. We’re dancing as nimbly as we can, and so far we haven’t crashed.

This is one article in a series on the state of the planet’s response to climate change. Read the rest of the stories and sign up for One.Five, TIME’s climate change newsletter.

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An unsettling peek into the reality of life in 2050

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essay about life in the year 2050

Rather than just imagine the future, what if we could walk around in it? In an installation, designer Anab Jain invites visitors to enter an apartment in the middle of the 21st century.

What will our world look like in 30 years?

Many of us fear the worst. Today, violent storms and wildfires are ripping through the world; we’re rapidly losing crop biodiversity ; and large numbers of people are already suffering from chronic food insecurity . Any of these situations, it seems, could spiral out of control over the coming decades.

But why just worry about the future when you can step into it? Anab Jain , a TED Fellow and the cofounder of London future-design studio Superflux (watch her TED Talk: “ Why we need to imagine different futures ”), builds potential tomorrows that people can experience firsthand right now — and gain insights that we could apply to take control of our destinies. “A lot of us in the West don’t think climate change is our problem; we always think about it as somebody else’s problem,” Jain says. “It’s too big and too difficult to deal with. We take in the data, but we don’t apply it to what this means for our own lives.” In an installation called Mitigation of Shock , the Superflux team aim to show us what our lives might be like if we do nothing to combat global warming, by taking us into a flat in London — in the year 2050. Let’s step in ….

essay about life in the year 2050

A door marked “64” takes you into a small apartment. There’s a couch that looks like it was just sat on. Shelves contain a family’s worth of books, toys and gadgets, and a coffee table holds a partial cup of coffee and a half-eaten cookie. Beyond the dining room table is a kitchen counter with recipe books; shelves overhead are full of containers of home-preserved food. The radio is tuned to the news. So far, it’s not that different from many apartments you could find in Europe today.

But as you look around, your gaze falls on a newspaper on the coffee table. The headline reads “Worldwide crop failures in 2049: How will we eat?” You hear the radio announcer talking about eco-terrorists, the hijacking of supermarket trucks, extreme weather and poor air quality. Flip through a ledger on the dining room table, and you’ll see a record of the family’s experiments in growing food, next to vials of carefully labeled seeds. The jars of preserves on the shelves turn out to be marked with the month, year and place where the food was foraged. Scan the cookbooks on the shelves, and you’ll see titles like How to Cook in Scarcity and, more alarmingly, Pets as Protein . Recipes tacked to the kitchen wall offer ways to prepare mealworms and foxes.

essay about life in the year 2050

Turning the corner into the next room, you realize that you’ve wandered into a factory of sorts. The humming space is bathed in a fluorescent glow, and the industrial shelving units are filled with boxes of plants growing in a swirling fog circulated by tiny fans. Oyster mushrooms are being cultivated on the top shelves, along with smaller plastic containers full of live mealworms. As you peer out a window above a table brimming with a jumble of hardware, you can see storm clouds darkening the sky as people squabble over food in the streets.

“We created this living space to imagine what we might need to live in a world where some of the most drastic impacts of climate change have already occurred,” says Jain. Mitigation of Shock — which is now on view at Barcelona’s Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) — is part of an exhibition called “After the End of the World,” which envisions the future toll of centuries of human impact and negligence. The installation takes what’s happening now and fast-forwards the action in one specific direction. In that way, it’s less a calculated prediction than an educated extrapolated guess of the future.

essay about life in the year 2050

The scenario is fictionalized, as are the recipe books (thank goodness). However, the solutions that Superflux co-founder Jon Ardern and the studio team have built are very real. The plants on the shelves are being fed using fogponics and LED lights, all controlled using Arduinos, or microcontroller units. “The Arduinos are connected to ultrasonic sensors in a box of nutrient-rich water,” says Jain. “When the Arduino tells the sensor to go off, it converts the water into a nutrient mist that is dispersed to the plants’ roots by using computer fans.”

This is only one possible future of many, Jain hastens to add. “There could be others — worse or better,” she says. Right now, many people in developed nations can go to the supermarket and buy whatever they fancy, from Peruvian avocados to Kenyan green beans. But the way things are going, there’s a chance that this casual abundance will start to vanish. After visiting the installation, the Superflux team hopes that people walk away with a more visceral idea of what living with food insecurity might look like.

essay about life in the year 2050

They also want people to realize we already have some of what we need to adapt. “Fogponics and hydroponics already are in use, although people currently see them as a hobby. Foraging, home preserving, growing food on allotments, and local food networks exist, too, but not as a form of survival,” says Jain. “We made the food production system using off-the-shelf stuff that we bought and hacked together and coded. The question then becomes, what if your life—your family’s life—depended on it?”

The apartment is also cluttered with discarded gadgets. There’s an unused surveillance camera, something that resembles a Nest smart thermostat, and a smart cup that will tell you when your drink is hot enough. “There’s also a fridge with a smart panel that tells you it’s run out of milk, but there’s nowhere to buy milk,” says Jain. “In our scenario, these things are now irrelevant — detritus, just lying around. We wanted to hint at the shiny future that is being predicted by tech companies and corporations. The lived reality will be somewhere in the middle.”

essay about life in the year 2050

Jain has been intrigued by the response from visitors so far. “A lot of people have told me that they feel freaked out by it,” she says. “And some have said, ‘This feels totally normal — it’s already happening.’ It’s very different, depending on your emotional connection to what’s happening around you. How much time have you spent absorbing and internalizing the information we’ve been given and the changes that have already occurred?” Jain’s best-case scenario for the installation would be for folks leave wanting to make some behavioral shift. “We’re still buying from supermarkets; most of us are still not feeling that shortage, insecurity or vulnerability,” she says. “I think the news is like a fire outside the window. You close the window if you think the fire’s going to be bad. But what if the fire starts coming in through the window? That’s the feeling we want to give people: that it’s happening now, but we also have the tools, strategies and, most importantly, the imagination for whatever comes next.”

Mitigation of Shock was on exhibit at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona through April 29, 2018.

essay about life in the year 2050

About the author

Karen Frances Eng is a contributing writer to TED.com, dedicated to covering the feats of the wondrous TED Fellows. Her launchpad is located in Cambridge, UK.

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Study Today

Largest Compilation of Structured Essays and Exams

Essay on Year 2050 | What Life Style will be in the year 2050?

March 3, 2018 by Study Mentor Leave a Comment

Human and his immaculate calculations are inseparable. Since yesterday’s mankind has lived life around mathematical.

And they have kept on evolving theories, axioms, innovation and invention. He/she lives in present day but the top most part of his body always lured him to indulge either in past or future.  

To explore past, they become archaeologist and studies every possible aspect that could have existed. They don’t leave any stone upturned.

They have discovered how early man would probably have looked like. How he evolved into hi- tech super robotics sought of human from ape species.

What he used to eat and how he use to cook when devices like gas burner, oven and microwave oven were not imaginable.

How he used to build houses, which concrete did they use? They have been able to calculate the time span of various species of human being.  

This is all possible because of technological advancement. From the root of hair, experts can find out the DNA of that person.  

Not only exploring past has become viable but also the future is more or less under the control of human being.

Though they yet to have total control but human does have a considerable control over future. This is a fact you can’t argue for.  

Year 2050 is not very far from 2017. Just 33 years away and then we would land in year 2050. The year is not so far away that we can’t assume what probably would be the scenario then.

Yet the year is not so nearby either that we could exactly predict how will be the environment exactly.   

Predictions could be made about facilities that could come up with time. Though the year is not so far away that we could imagine human evolution but habits would undergo changes.

May be students won’t move out of their houses to go to school. E- Schools will take the charge to build the educated foundation of nation. Houses would have all the high end technological devices.   

Robot

One may eat as many number of chocolates they want to eat but calories concern would not dare to destroy the taste.

Foodies will have the ultimate gift of technology that eat, sleep and then eat. Leave the weight gain worries on to super machines.  

Portable cars is not an exaggeration to think of. Portable furniture has come to real life from reel life. Then portable cars are not far behind in league.

40 years back imagining devices that could give you ease to walk and talk was remote off thought.   To see live the caller was inconceivable.

But it is reality today. More than reality the device to enable life changing has gain the status of necessity.  

Human has made computers and super computers. The rapid pace of development would someday enable computer to generate human.

Machines are getting wittier with each passing day. They have replaced humans in factories. So it’s quite imaginable that one day machines will take part in human production process.  

Space visit no longer would be the monopolies of astronaut. People would be able to visit other planets the same way as they go and visit market nearby them.  

Self-driven vehicles which are being tested now a day would be a common sight. The especially abled will at least become little more independents with this step.

Robots will do house hold chores and also will act as friends with conscious mind. Mannerism will be trait of robots at least.  

Non-renewable resources of energy will deplete and human would have to depend totally on renewable sources of energy.

Solar energy would be greatest source of energy. The steps are being taken in this direction to promote more use of solar energy as source of energy.  

Underwater hotels, air crafts like the one in science fiction movies will be alive. May be teleportation will take charge of whole scenario of air travel.  

Emotional front will also face changes. Human would be more mechanical and emotions will take a back seat.

Communication and accessibility will be at an all-time high. Fast food, entertainment, and news would be ready for our consumption at our will.  

But technology has its side effects too. With more and more of advancement materialistic approach is guiding power. Relations are for namesake.

As long as people derive benefits from relation they carry it. Once they realize that they are giving more and gets lesser in relationship, they quit it.  

Things will only worsen with time. Parental love will have held no place in kid’s life.

If parents would be capable of fulfilling desires of kids they will be treated as part of family. Otherwise kids will not give it a second thought in leaving parents for friends.  

Tress will be preserved in museum as it will be among endangered species. Deforestation would leave little of fresh air for coming generation. People will move out of houses wearing oxygen mask.   

By the year 2050, the world’s population will reach nine billion. The demand on the world’s resources – energy will be severe.

But the road from now to then need not be bleak. There is a path to a future filled with opportunities, with amazing individuals and extraordinary projects leading the way.  

Human species need to be future ready but that preparation should not cost our present. They have to strike the perfect balance for the fear of sinking of boat.

Human beings are dependent on environment for their very existence so it is important to maintain a perfect harmony between human and natural environment.  

Health should be protected and promoted because if health is lost, life sounds miserable. To live healthy life one has to act today.

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Regions & Countries

Looking ahead to 2050, americans are pessimistic about many aspects of life in u.s..

essay about life in the year 2050

A narrow majority of U.S. adults (56%) say they are somewhat or very optimistic about what the country will be like in 2050, according to a new Pew Research Center survey . But optimism gives way to pessimism when Americans are asked about some of the specific ways in which the United States might change.

Most Americans expect income inequality to worsen over the next three decades. Majorities say the economy will be weaker, the nation’s debt burden will be heavier, the environment will be in worse condition and health care will be less affordable than today. Most believe the U.S. will play a less important role in the world. About two-thirds predict that domestic political divisions will become more pronounced. Indeed, Democrats and Republicans have strikingly different priorities when it comes to the policies they believe would help improve the quality of life for future generations.

Below are nine key findings from the survey, which was conducted among 2,524 U.S. adults in December 2018.

Americans expect income gaps to widen by 2050 – and many say living standards will worsen

While Democrats and Republicans agree that income inequality will grow by 2050, they disagree over the extent to which the federal government should prioritize reducing the gap between the rich and the poor. Roughly six-in-ten Democrats (58%) say this should be a top priority, but only about a quarter of Republicans agree (23%).

More generally, the public is skeptical that the standard of living for average American families will improve in the future: 44% expect the living standard to get worse by 2050, about double the share who believe it will get better (20%). About a third (35%) believe there will be no real change.

Most say older adults will be less financially prepared for retirement in the future

Concerns about the Social Security system are widespread. Just 16% of U.S. adults who are not retired expect there will be enough money in the system to provide benefits at current levels in 2050. By contrast, 42% say there will not be enough money to provide any benefits at all and another 42% say benefits will be provided, but at reduced levels.

Whatever their views about the viability of Social Security in the future, Americans are clearly opposed to a reduction in benefits. Roughly three-quarters of U.S. adults (74%) say Social Security benefits should not be reduced in any way, while only a quarter say some reductions for future retirees will need to be made.

Democrats and young adults voice greater concern over climate change

Roughly four-in-ten adults (41%) say they are very worried about climate change when they think about the future. Young adults are significantly more concerned about this than their older counterparts: 52% of those ages 18 to 29 are very worried, compared with 41% of those ages 30 to 49 and 37% of those 50 and older.

4 Most Americans expect widespread job automation in the future, and few see this as a good thing for the U.S. Around eight-in-ten adults (82%) say, 30 years from now, robots and computers will definitely or probably do much of the work currently done by humans, though only 37% of employed adults say robots or computers will definitely or probably do the type of work that they personally do.

Americans are far more likely to see widespread automation as a negative than positive development for the country. Among those who see this as likely, 69% say it would be a very or somewhat bad thing, while only 31% say it would be very or somewhat good.

Around three-quarters of Americans (76%) say inequality between the rich and the poor would increase if robots and computers perform most of the jobs currently being done by humans, and a majority (66%) say it is unlikely that this kind of widespread automation would create many new, better-paying jobs for humans.

Public has mixed views on the impact of having a majority nonwhite population by 2050

While most of the public sees a majority nonwhite population as either a positive or neutral development for the country, a greater share of adults say this change will lead to more conflicts between racial and ethnic groups (49% say this) than say it will lead to fewer conflicts (26%). The public is also more likely to say this shift will weaken American customs and values (38%) than to say it will strengthen them (30%).

6 Large majorities expect a woman and a Hispanic person to become president by 2050 . Around nine-in-ten (87%) say a woman will definitely or probably be elected president by 2050, while 65% say a Hispanic person will definitely or probably become chief executive. These views are held by majorities across parties and among most demographic groups. Nearly identical shares of Republicans and Democrats, for instance, say a woman will become president by 2050 (86% and 88%, respectively).

7 Americans see a smaller role for the U.S. on the world stage. Six-in-ten adults say the country will be less important in the world in 2050 than it is today. The public is divided over how prominent China will be in the future: 53% say China will definitely or probably overtake the U.S. as the world’s main superpower, while 46% believe this definitely or probably won’t happen.

8 Americans expect political divisions to intensify, and many are very worried about dysfunction in Washington. The public has very little confidence in the federal government or its leaders to deal with the challenges that lie ahead. About half of Americans (49%) say they are very worried about the way the government in Washington works, including 53% of Democrats and 45% of Republicans. A similar share (48%) say they are very worried about the ability of political leaders to solve the country’s biggest problems. Democrats are more likely than Republicans to be very worried about this (54% vs. 40%).

In addition, 65% of adults say the U.S. will be more politically divided in 2050 than it is today, and this belief is held across partisan lines: 68% of Republicans say this, as do 62% of Democrats.

9 Partisans have starkly different ideas about what steps the federal government should take to improve life in the future. Democrats and Republicans differ notably in the policies they believe the federal government should enact to improve life for future generations. About two-thirds of Republicans (65%), for example, say reducing the number of undocumented immigrants coming into the U.S. should be a top priority for the federal government, but just 17% of Democrats agree. And while 83% of Democrats say providing high-quality, affordable health care for all should be a top priority, a much smaller share of Republicans (48%) agree.

Republicans and Democrats have different ideas about what government should do to improve the lives of future generations of Americans

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How the attitudes of West and East Germans compare, 30 years after fall of Berlin Wall

Republicans, democrats both see less reason for optimism in 2019 than they did in 2018, many italians are deeply pessimistic ahead of general election, going into election, germans are happy with their economy and political establishment, most popular.

About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts .

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Perspectives

The Science of Sustainability

Can a unified path for development and conservation lead to a better future?

October 13, 2018

Aerial view of roads cutting through a forest of trees.

  • A False Choice
  • Two Paths to 2050
  • What's Possible
  • The Way Forward
  • Engage With Us

The Cerrado may not have the same name recognition as the Amazon , but this vast tropical savannah in Brazil has much in common with that perhaps better-known destination. The Cerrado is also a global biodiversity hotspot, home to thousands of species only found there, and it is also a critical area in the fight against climate change, acting as a large carbon pool.

But Brazil is one of the two largest soy producers in the world—the crop is one of the country’s most important commodities and a staple in global food supplies—and that success is placing the Cerrado in precarious decline. To date, around 46% of the Cerrado has been deforested or converted for agriculture.

Producing more soy doesn’t have to mean converting more native habitat, however. A new spatial data tool is helping identify the best places to expand soy without further encroachment on the native landscapes of the Cerrado. And with traders and bankers working together to offer preferable financing to farmers who expand onto already-converted land, Brazil can continue to produce this important crop, while protecting native habitat and providing more financial stability for farmers.

The Cerrado is just one region of a vast planet, of course, but these recent efforts to protect it are representative of a new way of thinking about the relationship between conservation and our growing human demands. It is part of an emerging model for cross-sector collaboration that aims to create a world prepared for the sustainability challenges ahead.

Is this world possible? Here, we present a new science-based view that says “Yes”—but it will require new forms of collaboration across traditionally disconnected sectors, and on a near unprecedented scale.

Thumbnail of The Science of Sustainability download

Download a PDF version of this feature. Click to see translated versions of this page.

I.  A False Choice

Many assume that economic interests and environmental interests are in conflict. But new research makes the case that this perception of development vs. conservation is not just unnecessary but actively counterproductive to both ends. Achieving a sustainable future will be dependent on our ability to secure both thriving human communities and abundant and healthy natural ecosystems.

The Nature Conservancy partnered with the University of Minnesota and 11 other organizations to ask whether it is possible to achieve a future where the needs of both people and nature are advanced. Can we actually meet people’s needs for food, water and energy while doing more to protect nature? 

The perception of development vs. conservation is not just unnecessary, but actively counterproductive to both ends.

To answer this question, we compared what the world will look like in 2050 if economic and human development progress in a “business-as-usual” fashion and what it would look like if instead we join forces to implement a “sustainable” path with a series of fair-minded and technologically viable solutions to the challenges that lie ahead.

In both options, we used leading projections of population growth and gross domestic product to estimate how demand for food, energy and water will evolve between 2010 and 2050. Under business-as-usual, we played out existing expectations and trends in how those changes will impact land use, water use, air quality, climate, protected habitat areas and ocean fisheries. In the more sustainable scenario, we proposed changes to how and where food and energy are produced, asking if these adjustments could result in better outcomes for the same elements of human well-being and nature. Our full findings are described in a peer-reviewed paper— “An Attainable Global Vision for Conservation and Human Well-Being” —published in  Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment .

These scenarios let us ask, can we do better? Can we design a future that meets people’s needs without further degrading nature in the process?

Our answer is “yes,” but it comes with several big “ifs.” There is a path to get there, but matters are urgent—if we want to accomplish these goals by mid-century, we’ll have to dramatically ramp up our efforts now. The next decade is critical.

Furthermore, changing course in the next ten years will require global collaboration on a scale not seen perhaps since World War II. The widely held impression that economic and environmental goals are mutually exclusive has contributed to a lack of connection among key societal constituencies best equipped to solve interconnected problems—namely, the public health, development, financial and conservation communities. This has to change.

The good news is that protecting nature and providing water, food and energy to a growing world do not have to be either-or propositions. Our view, instead, calls for smart energy, water, air, health and ecosystem initiatives that balance the needs of economic growth and resource conservation equally. Rather than a zero-sum game, these elements are balanced sides of an equation, revealing the path to a future where people and nature thrive together.

View of the English Bay in Vancouver, Canada at sunset.

II. Two Paths to 2050

This vision is not a wholesale departure from what others have offered. A number of prominent scientists and organizations have put forward important and thoughtful views for a sustainable future; but often such plans consider the needs of people and nature in isolation from one another, use analyses confined to limited sectors or geographies, or assume that some hard tradeoffs must be made, such as slowing global population growth, taking a reduction in GDP growth or shifting diets off of meat. Our new research considers global economic development and conservation needs together, more holistically, in order to find a sustainable path forward.

What could a different future look like? We’ve used as our standard the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a set of 17 measures for “a world where all people are fed, healthy, employed, educated, empowered and thriving, but not at the expense of other life on Earth.” Our analysis directly aligns with ten of those goals. Using the SDGs as our guideposts, we imagine a world in 2050 that looks very different than the one today—and drastically different from the one we will face if we continue in business-as-usual fashion.

A sustainable future is possible.

To create our assessment of business-as-usual versus a more sustainable path, we looked at 14 measurements including temperature change, carbon dioxide levels, air pollution, water consumption, food and energy footprints, and protected areas.

Business as usual compared to conservation pathway showing changes in temperature, air quality, fisheries, and protected land.

Over the next 30 years, we know we’ll face rapid population growth and greater pressures on our natural resources. The statistics are sobering—with 9.7 billion people on the planet by 2050, we can expect a 54 percent increase in global food demand and 56 percent increase in energy demand. While meetings these growing demands and achieving sustainability is possible, it is helpful to scrutinize where the status quo will get us.

The World Health Organization, World Economic Forum and other leading global development organizations now say that air pollution and water scarcity—environmental challenges—are among the biggest dangers to human health and prosperity. And our business-as-usual analysis makes clear what many already fear: that human development based on the same practices we use today will not prepare us for a world with nearly 10 billion people.

To put it simply, if we stay on today’s current path, we risk being trapped in an intensifying cycle of scarcity—our growth opportunities severely capped and our natural landscapes severely degraded. Under this business-as-usual scenario, we can expect global temperature to increase 3.2°C; worsened air pollution affecting 4.9 billion more people; overfishing of 84 percent of fish stocks; and greater water stress affecting 2.75 billion people. Habitat loss continues, leaving less than 50 percent of native grasslands and several types of forests intact.

However, if we make changes in where and how we meet food, water and energy demands for the same growing global population and wealth, the picture can look markedly different by mid-century. This “sustainability” path includes global temperature increase limited to 1.6°C—meeting Paris Climate Accord goals—zero overfishing with greater fisheries yields, a 90 percent drop in exposure to dangerous air pollution, and fewer water-stressed people, rivers and agricultural fields. These goals can be met while natural habitats extend both inside and outside protected areas. All signatory countries to the Aichi Targets meet habitat protection goals, and more than 50 percent of all ecoregions’ extents remain unconverted, except temperate grasslands (of which over 50 percent are already converted today).

Behind the Science

Discover how TNC and its partners developed the models for 2050.

Aerial view of wind turbines on agricultural land.

III. What's Possible

Achieving this sustainable future for people and nature is possible with existing and expected technology and consumption, but only with major shifts in production patterns. Making these shifts will require overcoming substantial economic, social and political challenges. In short, it is not likely that the biophysical limits of the planet will determine our future, but rather our willingness to think and act differently by putting economic development and the environment on equal footing as central parts of the same equation.

Climate, Energy and Air Quality

Perhaps the most pressing need for change is in energy use. In order to both meet increased energy demand and keep the climate within safe boundaries, we’ll need to alter the way we produce energy, curtailing emissions of carbon and other harmful chemicals.

Under a business-as-usual scenario, fossil fuels will still claim a 76 percent share of total energy in 2050. A more sustainable approach would reduce that share to 13 percent by 2050. While this is a sharp change, it is necessary to stanch the flow of harmful greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

essay about life in the year 2050

The reduction in carbon-based energy could be offset by increasing the share of energy from renewable sources to 54 percent and increasing nuclear energy to one third of total energy output—delivering a total of almost 85 percent of the world’s energy demand from non-fossil-fuel sources.

Additionally, we will only achieve the full extent of reduced climate impacts if we draw down existing carbon from the atmosphere. This can be done through greater investment in carbon capture and storage efforts, including natural climate solutions—land management strategies such as avoiding forest loss, reforestation, investments in soil health and coastal ecosystem restoration.

The net benefit of these energy redistribution efforts is twofold. First, they lower the rate at which greenhouse gases are flowing into the air—taking atmospheric carbon projections down to 442 parts per million, compared to business-as-usual estimates that put the level closer to 520 ppm.

Second, these energy source shifts would create a marked decline in particulate air pollution. Our models show that the higher fossil fuel use in the business-as-usual scenario is likely to expose half the people on the planet to poorer air quality by 2050. Under the sustainable scenario, that figure drops to just 7 percent of the world’s inhabitants, thanks to lower particulate emissions from renewable and nuclear energy sources.

Case Studies: 

  • Forests That Fight Climate Change: Brazil’s Serra da Mantiqueira region demonstrates how reforestation can tackle climate change, improve water supplies, and increase incomes in rural communities.  Learn More
  • Can Trees Be a Prescription for Urban Health?:  Conservationists, community organizations and public health researchers joined forces to plant trees in Louisville, Kentucky and monitor their impact on air quality and residents’ health.  Learn More

Near Cachoeira Reservoir, Brazil.

Food, Habitat and City Growth

Meeting the sustainable targets we propose requires a second front on land to shift how we use available real estate and where we choose to conduct necessary activities. Overall, the changes we include in our more sustainable view allow the world to meet global food, water and energy demands with no additional conversion of natural habitat for those needs—an outcome that is not possible under business as usual.

While transitioning away from fossil fuels is essential to meet climate goals, new renewable energy infrastructure siting will present land-use challenges. Renewable energy production takes up space, and if not sited well it can cause its own negative impacts on nature and its services to people. In our more sustainable path, we address this challenge by preferencing the use of already converted land for renewables development, lessening the impact of new wind and solar on natural habitat. We also exclude expansion of biofuels, as they are known to require extensive land area to produce, causing conflicts with natural habitat and food security.

Perhaps most encouraging, we show that it is possible to meet future food demands on less agricultural land than is used today. Notably, our scenario keeps the mix of crops in each growing region the same, so as not to disrupt farmers’ cultures, technologies, capacity or existing crop knowledge. Instead, we propose moving which crops are grown where within growing regions, putting more “thirsty” crops in areas with more water, and matching the nutrient needs of various crops to the soils available.

Unlike some projections used by others, for this scenario we left diet expectations alone, matching meat consumption with business-as-usual expectations. If we were able to reduce meat consumption, especially by middle- and high-income countries where nutritional needs are met, reducing future agricultural land, water and pollution footprints would be even easier.

Meanwhile, on the land protection front, our analysis is guided by the Convention on Biological Diversity, the leading global platform most countries have signed. Each signatory country has agreed to protect up to 17 percent of each habitat type within its borders. While many countries will fall short of this goal under business as usual, it can be achieved in our more sustainable option.

Use already degraded land for energy development.

By making changes in food, water and energy use, we can better protect nearly all habitat types.

We acknowledge 17 percent is an imperfect number, and many believe more natural habitat is needed to allow the world’s biodiversity to thrive. Looking beyond protected areas, we see additional differences in the possible futures we face. Our more sustainable option retains 577 million hectares more natural habitat than business as usual, much of it outside of protected areas. Conservation has long focused on representation—it is not only important to conserve large areas, but to represent different kinds of habitat. Under business as usual, we will lose more than half of several major habitat types by mid-century, including temperate broadleaf and mixed forests, Mediterranean forest, and temperate grassland. Flooded and tropical grasslands approach this level of loss as well.

But with the proposed shifts in food, water and energy use, we can do better for nearly all habitats in our more sustainable scenario. The one exception is temperate grasslands, a biome that has already lost more than 50 percent of its global extent today. In all, the more sustainable scenario shows a future that would be largely compatible with emerging views that suggest protecting half of the world’s land system.

 Case Study:

  • Managing Sprawling Soy:  A partnership between businesses and nonprofit groups in Brazil will help farmers plant soy in the areas where it is has the smallest impact on natural habitats.  Learn More

The gravel bottoms and braided channels of rivers leading into Iliamna Lake in southwest Alaska are ideal for the many king salmon that spawn in the lake's waters.

Drinking Water, River Basins and Fisheries

Water presents a complex set of challenges. Like land, it is both a resource and a habitat. Fresh water resources are dwindling while ocean ecosystems are overburdened by unregulated fishing and pollution. Business-as-usual projections estimate that 2.75 billion people will experience water scarcity by 2050 and 770 water basins will experience water stress. Africa and Central Asia in particular would see fewer water stressed basins in the sustainable scenario.

essay about life in the year 2050

Changes in energy sources and food production (see above sections) would lead to significant water savings by reducing use of water as a coolant in energy production and by moving crops to areas where they need less irrigation. Thanks to these changes, our more sustainable option for the future would relieve 104 million people and biodiversity in 25 major river basins from likely water stress.

Meanwhile, in the seas, we find an inspiring possibility for fisheries. Continuing business-as-usual fisheries management adds further stress to the oceans and the global food system as more stocks decline, further diminishing the food we rely on from the seas. But more sustainable fisheries management is possible, and our projections using a leading fisheries model shows that adopting sustainable management in all fisheries by mid-century would actually increase yield by over a quarter more than we saw in 2010.

And, while we know that aquaculture is a certain element of the future of fish and food, many questions remain about precisely how this industry will grow, and how it can be shaped to be a low-impact part of the global food system. Given these unknowns, we kept aquaculture growth the same in both our views of the future.

essay about life in the year 2050

 Case Studies:

  • Cities and Farmers Find Common Ground on Water: Smarter agricultural practices in the Kenya’s Upper Tana River Watershed are resulting in better yields for farmers and more reliable water supplies for the city of Nairobi.  Learn More
  • Technology Offers a Lifeline for Fish:  A new mobile application being piloted in Indonesia is helping fill a crucial gap in fisheries management—providing accurate data about what species are being caught where.  Learn More

The land meets the sea in Uruma City, Japan

IV.  The Way Forward

This analysis does not represent a panacea for the growing need for economic development across the planet or for the environmental challenges that are ahead. But it does provide an optimistic viewpoint and an integrated picture that can serve as a starting point for discussion.

Our goal is to apply new questions—and ultimately new solutions—to our known problems. We present one of many possible paths to a different future, and we welcome like-minded partners and productive critics to share their perspectives with us. We encourage people from across society to join the conversation, to fill gaps where they exist, and to bring other important considerations to our attention. Most of all, we call on the development (e.g. energy, agriculture, infrastructure), health, and financial communities—among others—to work with us to find new ways of taking action together.

Ultimately, by illustrating a viable pathway to sustainability that serves both the needs of economic and environmental interests—goals that many have long assumed were mutually exclusive—we hope to inspire the global community to engage in the difficult but necessary social, economic and political dialogue that can make a sustainable future a reality.

Protecting nature and providing water, food and energy to the world can no longer be either-or propositions. Nature and human development are both central factors in the same equation. We have at our disposal the cross-sector expertise necessary to make informed decisions for the good of life on our planet, so let’s use it wisely. Our science affirms there is a way.

Join us as we chart a new path to 2050 by helping people and nature thrive—together.

Testimonials

essay about life in the year 2050

Opportunities to Engage

Designing strategies to address global challenges for people and nature requires integration of diverse bodies of evidence that are now largely segregated. As actors across the health, development and environment sectors pivot to act collectively, they face challenges in finding and interpreting evidence on sector interrelationships, and thus in developing effective evidence-based responses.

Learn more about these emerging coalitions that offer opportunities to engage and connect with shared resources.

essay about life in the year 2050

Bridge Collaborative

The Bridge Collaborative unites people and organizations in health, development and the environment with the evidence and tools to tackle the world’s most pressing challenges. Learn More

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SNAPP envisions a world where protecting and promoting nature works in concert with sustainable development and improving human well-being. Learn More

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Life In The Future (2050) (Essay Sample)

Table of Contents

Introduction

How far into the future have you gone in your daydreaming or reflections? I recently took the time to think about what life in the future may look like.

For this essay, I asked myself, “What will life be like in 2050?” 2050 seems far away but with modern technology, economic development, scientific advances, and climate change, we will find ourselves in that day and age soon.

Want to write about life in the year 2050? You can read the essays below for your guidance. If you need extra help, think about availing our affordable essay writing services .

What will life be like in 2050 essay

The 2000s came with innovations in many fields and sectors across the world. Most notably, the Internet kicked in and revolutionized the world, connecting people globally and creating an international village of Internet citizens.

Social media took it further by establishing a platform where you could manage your network of relationships.

From 2010, more new inventions were introduced to the global population, and the trend seems to be continuing at a steady rate. Life ahead seems to hold more surprises.

This paper aims to outline possible future scenarios of what life may look like after the next few decades, specifically by 2050.

Heading into the 21st century

Space explorations.

The 21st century brought to the fore more technology-oriented inventions than ever before.

Free stock photo of adult, adventure, astronauts

While the 20th century saw man land on the moon, the 21st century will witness man visit several of the many planets that dot the universe.

The first to be explored will be Mars, also called the Red Planet. The mission is likely to be accomplished by 2030, as planned by NASA. This will write a new chapter in history and set a precedent for future explorations by subsequent human generations.

Discovering the cure for AIDS

Moreover, increased investment in research activities is likely to pave the way for the discovery of a vaccine for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS).

Photo Of Woman Looking Through Microscope

Increased acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community

Sex and gender issues are another aspect that will change by 2050.

Homosexuality has become a familiar topic of conversation in the current generation. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) issues are slowly being talked about and recognized amid heated debates among more conservative groups.

Photo of Woman Holding Rainbow Flag

By 2050, they are likely to be such a universally accepted community that the law will require employers across the world to set aside a percentage of their employment vacancies for LGBT candidates. Such a mandate will be implemented alongside the existing gender-based directive of the equal female-and-male employee ratio.

The digitization of media

Media technology continues to rapidly evolve. At present, social media is taking the lead in relaying quick news bits and community engagement. Without question, it poses a threat to traditional sources of media including television, newspapers, radios, and magazines.

White Samsung Laptop Computer Near Black Ceramic Plant Vase

By 2025, some traditional media sources, specifically print newspapers, will have a diminished readership as online news sites and social media will have penetrated their share of readership.

The rise of e-commerce and e-cars

Mobile phones will play a greater role in retail shopping and financial transactions. Electronic money will replace paper money.

A Woman Doing Online Shopping

Additionally, with declining oil reserves across the world, electric cars will step in for petrol cars in the next few decades. Consequently, there will be a major shift in job trends, as some roles will be taken over by AI or will no longer be relevant.

Two White and Red Tesla Charging Station

The ever-changing face of US politics

The United States made history in 2016 by electing a president with no prior experience in politics. The electorate is breaking away from the traditional mentality of choosing experienced politicians with track records.

To say that a female president will be elected into office after President Donald Trump’s era is not shallow speculation. By 2050, the U.S. will have tasted female leadership.

Also, if Trump’s anti-immigration policy and deportation of illegal immigrants get adequate support in subsequent leaderships, the United States may have stunted population growth and few cases of immigration. These kinds of policies will impact America’s role as a global influencer.

Global warming continues to be a problem

Finally, global warming will become an even bigger problem. We will continue to see a rise in sea levels. At the same time, pollution will damage our freshwater sources.

Woman in Blue Jacket Holding White and Black I Am Happy to Be Happy Print Paper

From another perspective, dictatorships, chiefly in Asia, will destabilize the world. North Korea, China, and other emerging nuclear-armed countries will become major security threats to the entire world.

While such countries may trigger increased regional wars, World War 3 will not occur. In addition to this, terrorist groups will dominate major regions of the world.

With many changes up ahead – good and bad – in the coming decades, it would be good to prepare and anticipate how it will personally affect us.

Life In The Future 2050 Short Essay

In this day and age where we live in a developed world, it would be so easy to let our imaginations run wild when we think of what society would look like in the year 2050.

Nowadays, the technological advances we’ve made in almost every industry show incredible progress. Virtual reality is shaping the world of gaming, as well as e-learning and employee onboarding. Artificial intelligence is helping us run our households. Solar energy is being featured in many progressive homes and structures.

What about if we fast-forward to 2050? We may see a completely different list of developing countries as we continue to witness technology changing the lives of the global population. Self-driving cars may be a common occurrence as we seek to find ways to promote safer roads. More environmentally-friendly products and services will be used in homes and offices as we become more aware of the effects of climate change. Finally, robots may change the face of manufacturing. Manual labor may no longer be needed, which will result in tremendous job losses.

These are just a few of many life-altering changes that we could see happening in the coming years.

How to Write an Essay About The Future

A good way to envision the future is to daydream. When we describe something that hasn’t happened yet, we largely utilize our imagination. As such, we need to take time to sit down and think about our image of the future.  Ask yourself all sorts of questions that will stimulate your imagination. Will we be able to finally contact other planets? How will genetic engineering cause demographic changes? Are we going to care more deeply about renewable resources? What will the state of the ozone layer be given our current trend? After asking yourself all these questions, the next step is to do some actual research. Look for credible sites and authors that focus on forecasting and predicting. See how they line up with your speculations. Choose the trends that most accurately align with each other.

Will Life Be Better In The Future?

It depends on what you mean by “better.” Are driverless cars really the best way to ensure road safety? Will young people truly benefit from the progress we make as a society? Will technology really bring people together? In other words, will these revolutionary changes really be for a more connected and happy society or simply a matter of convenience? It is hard to answer this question definitively. We don’t know if life will be better for every member of the global population in 2050, but we know that it will certainly be different for everyone.

essay about life in the year 2050

FOX News

What life was like 50 years ago in America, compared to now in 2024

It may be safe to say that life is pretty different today, compared to 50 years ago. 

From popular music, movies and haircuts to monumental political moments, notable economic statistics and more, here are some examples of how the U.S. has changed from 1974 to 2024.

In 1974, the top song in the U.S. was "The Way We Were" by Barbra Streisand, according to Billboard’s Hot 100 list.

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It was released on Dec. 28, 1974.

In 2023, Brenda Lee's holiday hit, "Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree," reached No. 1 on the Billboard’s Hot 100 list. 

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The song was originally released in 1958.

The layered look, with varying lengths of locks, was a popular hairstyle for men and women in the 1970s, according to the Hair & Makeup Artist Handbook, an online resource that provides media hair and makeup training.

In an overview of 1970s hairstyles, the hair and makeup website wrote that shag haircuts are "a unisex, no frills cut that involves evenly progressing layers with graduated sides and a full fringe."

Celebrity hairdresser Paul McGregor reportedly created the style for Jane Fonda’s character Bree Daniels in the film "Klute" (1971).

Other celebrities who donned the shag haircut throughout the '70s included rock ‘n’ roll star Joan Jett, singer Suzi Quatro, the pop boy band Bay City Rollers and "Partridge Family" actor David Cassidy, according to the Hair & Makeup Artist Handbook’s overview.

Shag haircuts reportedly have made a comeback in pop culture, according to multiple fashion and beauty magazines.

The 46th Academy Awards, hosted at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in the Los Angeles Music Center on April 12, 1974, honored films that were released in 1973, according to the Oscars website.

The film that won the Best Picture award was "The Sting," directed by George Roy Hill; it starred Robert Redford and Paul Newman.

Nominees for the 96th Academy Awards, scheduled to air on March 10, 2024, are not yet officially announced. 

THESE WERE THE TOP BABY NAMES IN AMERICA 50 YEARS AGO: SEE IF YOURS MADE THE LIST

Variety named several Best Picture contenders for 2024 in a recent report, including "Oppenheimer," "Barbie," Killerso of the Flower Moon," "Poor Things," The Holdovers," "American Fiction," "Maestro" and more.

On average, the cost of gas in the U.S. in 1974 was 53 cents per gallon, according to data from the Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy.

Now, national gasoline retail prices average around $3.36 per gallon, according to an updated Short-Term Energy Outlook forecast from the Energy Information Administration.

The median family income rose to $11,100 in 1974. 

This was an increase of about 6%, which is "over the 1973 median of $10,500," according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

The national household median income rose to $74,580 in 2022, a 2.3% decline from the 2021 estimate of $76,330, according to the Census Bureau’s "Income in the United States: 2022" article, published in September 2023.

In January 1973, the median sales price of a new home sold in the U.S. was $29,900, according to data published by the U.S. Census Bureau. 

By the end of the year, median home prices rose to $35,700.

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In 1974, "recession struck again," according to gobankingrates.com, "with an extended decline that actually began the prior year and lasted all the way until March 1975." 

Prices of homes then jumped to a median of $35,900.

The median sales price of new homes sold in November 2023 was $434,700, with the average sales price being $488,900, according to Monthly New Residential Sales data the Census Bureau released on Friday, Dec. 22.

Gerald R. Ford took the presidential oath of office on Aug. 9, 1974.

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Ford was sworn in as the 38th president of the United States of America as he declared, "I assume the presidency under extraordinary circumstances … This is an hour of history that troubles our minds and hurts our hearts," according to whitehouse.gov.

He was referencing, of course, the resignation of Richard Nixon (see below). 

During Ford's first two years in the White House, he sent the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Marines to take back the American freighter Mayaguez, which was illegally seized by Cambodian communists, according to the Gerald R. Ford Library.

PRESIDENTS DAY 2023: FASCINATING FACTS TO KNOW ABOUT AMERICA'S GREATEST LEADERS

He also cut inflation by more than half — and nearly four million Americans had found jobs since the bottom of the recession, according to the same source.

The Watergate trial began on Jan. 10, 1973, according to the U.S. Senate website. 

The five men who broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at The Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., on June 17, 1972, pleaded guilty and two were convicted by a jury.

"Chief Federal District Judge John Sirica expressed skepticism that all the facts in the case had been revealed," the U.S. Senate website says. 

"Judge Sirica urged those awaiting sentencing to cooperate with the soon-to-be-established Senate Select Committee."

In February 1973, the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities was established to investigate the campaign activities related to the presidential election of 1972.

The committee submitted its final report in 1974. 

The Watergate scandal ultimately led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation on the evening of Aug. 8, 1974.

The Senate’s website says the Watergate investigation "remains one of the most significant congressional inquiries in U.S. history."

For more Lifestyle articles, visit www.foxnews.com/lifestyle .

Original article source: What life was like 50 years ago in America, compared to now in 2024

The Runaways were an all-female American rock band that performed in the 1970s. Pictured left to right: Cherie Currie, Joan Jett, Sandy West, Lita Ford and Jackie Fox.

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The Lure of Divorce

Seven years into my marriage, i hit a breaking point — and had to decide whether life would be better without my husband in it..

Portrait of Emily Gould

This article was featured in One Great Story , New York ’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.

In the summer of 2022, I lost my mind. At first, it seemed I was simply overwhelmed because life had become very difficult, and I needed to — had every right to — blow off some steam. Our family was losing its apartment and had to find another one, fast, in a rental market gone so wild that people were offering over the asking price on rent. My husband, Keith, was preparing to publish a book, Raising Raffi, about our son, a book he’d written with my support and permission but that, as publication loomed, I began to have mixed feelings about. To cope with the stress, I asked my psychiatrist to increase the dosage of the antidepressant I’d been on for years. Sometime around then, I started talking too fast and drinking a lot.

I felt invincibly alive, powerful, and self-assured, troubled only by impatience with how slowly everyone around me was moving and thinking. Drinking felt necessary because it slightly calmed my racing brain. Some days, I’d have drinks with breakfast, lunch, and dinner, which I ate at restaurants so the drink order didn’t seem too unusual. Who doesn’t have an Aperol spritz on the way home from the gym in the morning? The restaurant meals cost money, as did the gym, as did all the other random things I bought, spending money we didn’t really have on ill-fitting lingerie from Instagram and workout clothes and lots of planters from Etsy. I grew distant and impatient with Keith as the book’s publication approached, even as I planned a giant party to celebrate its launch. At the party, everyone got COVID. I handed out cigarettes from a giant salad bowl — I had gone from smoking once or twice a day to chain-smoking whenever I could get away with it. When well-meaning friends tried to point out what was going on, I screamed at them and pointed out everything that was wrong in their lives. And most crucially, I became convinced that my marriage was over and had been over for years.

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I built a case against my husband in my mind. This book of his was simply the culmination of a pattern: He had always put his career before mine; while I had tended to our children during the pandemic, he had written a book about parenting. I tried to balance writing my own novel with drop-offs, pickups, sick days, and planning meals and shopping and cooking, most of which had always been my primary responsibility since I was a freelancer and Keith had a full-time job teaching journalism. We were incompatible in every way, except that we could talk to each other as we could to no one else, but that seemed beside the point. More relevant: I spent money like it was water, never budgeting, leaving Keith to make sure we made rent every month. Every few months, we’d have a fight about this and I’d vow to change; some system would be put in place, but it never stuck. We were headed for disaster, and finally it came.

Our last fight happened after a long day spent at a wedding upstate. I’d been drinking, first spiked lemonade at lunch alone and then boxed wine during the wedding reception, where I couldn’t eat any of the food — it all contained wheat, and I have celiac disease. When we got back, late, to the house where we were staying, I ordered takeout and demanded he go pick it up for me. Calling from the restaurant, he was incensed. Did I know how much my takeout order had cost? I hadn’t paid attention as I checked boxes in the app, nor had I realized that our bank account was perilously low — I never looked at receipts or opened statements. Not knowing this, I felt like he was actually denying me food, basic sustenance. It was the last straw. I packed a bag as the kids played happily with their cousins downstairs, then waited by the side of the road for a friend who lived nearby to come pick me up, even as Keith stood there begging me to stay. But his words washed over me; I was made of stone. I said it was over — really over. This was it, the definitive moment I’d been waiting for. I had a concrete reason to leave.

A few days later, still upstate at my friend’s house, I had a Zoom call with my therapist and my psychiatrist, who both urged me in no uncertain terms to check myself into a psychiatric hospital. Even I couldn’t ignore a message that clear. My friend drove me to the city, stopping for burgers along the way — I should have relished the burger more, as it was some of the last noninstitutional food I would eat for a long time — and helped me check into NYU Langone. My bags were searched, and anything that could be used as a weapon was removed, including my mascara. I spent my first night there in a gown in a cold holding room with no phone, nothing but my thoughts. Eventually, a bed upstairs became free and I was brought to the psych ward, where I was introduced to a roommate, had blood drawn, and was given the first of many pills that would help me stop feeling so irrepressibly energetic and angry. They started me on lithium right away. In a meeting with a team of psychiatrists, they broke the news: I had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder; they weren’t sure which kind yet. They gave me a nicotine patch every few hours plus Klonopin and Seroquel and lithium.

I wasn’t being held involuntarily, which meant I could write letters on an official form explaining why I ought to be released, which the psychiatrists then had three days to consider. I attached extra notebook pages to the letters explaining that I was divorcing my husband and was terrified I would never be able to see my kids again if I was declared unfit because I was insane. These letters did not result in my release; if anything, they prolonged my stay. I got my phone back — it would soon be revoked again, wisely — but in that brief interim, I sent out a newsletter to my hundreds of subscribers declaring that I was getting a divorce and asking them to Venmo me money for the custody battle I foresaw. In this newsletter, I also referenced Shakespeare. The drugs clearly had not kicked in yet. I cycled through three different roommates, all of whom were lovely, though I preferred the depressed one to the borderline ones. We amused ourselves during the day by going to art therapy, music therapy, and meetings with our psychiatrists. I made a lot of beaded bracelets.

In the meetings with the shrinks, I steadfastly maintained that I was sane and that my main problem was the ending of my marriage. I put Keith, and my mother, on a list of people who weren’t allowed to visit me. Undaunted, Keith brought me gluten-free egg sandwiches in the morning, which I grudgingly ate — anything for a break from the hospital food. My parents came up from D.C. and helped Keith take care of our children. I was in the hospital for a little more than three weeks, almost the entire month of October, longer than I’d ever been away from my kids before in their lives. I celebrated my 41st birthday in the hospital and received a lot of very creative cards that my fellow crazies had decorated during art therapy. Eventually, the drugs began to work: I could tell they were working because instead of feeling energetic, I suddenly couldn’t stop crying. The tears came involuntarily, like vomit. I cried continuously for hours and had to be given gabapentin in order to sleep.

essay about life in the year 2050

On the day I was released, I didn’t let anyone pick me up. I expected the superhuman strength I’d felt for months to carry me, but it was gone, lithiumed away. Instead, I felt almost paralyzed as I carried my bags to a cab. When I arrived at my apartment, I couldn’t figure out where I should sleep. It didn’t feel like my home anymore. We couldn’t afford to live separately, even temporarily, but the one thing that our somewhat decrepit, inconveniently located new apartment had in its favor was two small attic bedrooms and one larger bedroom downstairs. I claimed this downstairs room for myself and began to live there alone, coming into contact with Keith only when we had to be together with our children.

You might assume that my fixation on divorce would have subsided now that my mental health had stabilized and I was on strong antipsychotic medication. But I still did not want to stay in my marriage. If anything, I felt a newfound clarity: Keith and I had fundamentally incompatible selves. Our marriage had been built on a flaw. My husband was older, more established and successful in his career. These were the facts, so it had to be my job to do more of the work at home. Unless, of course, I decided to take myself and my work as seriously as he took his. But that was unappealing; I had managed to publish three books before turning 40, but I didn’t want to work all the time, like he does.

I wondered if my marriage would always feel like a competition and if the only way to call the competition a draw would be to end it.

We picked the kids up from school and dropped them off, or really mostly Keith did. I appeared at meals and tried to act normal. I was at a loss for what to do much of the time. I attended AA meetings and the DBT meetings required by the hospital outpatient program, and I read. I read books about insanity: Darkness Visible, The Bell Jar, An Unquiet Mind, Postcards From the Edge. I tried to understand what was happening to me, but nothing seemed to resonate until I began to read books about divorce. I felt I was preparing myself for what was coming. The first book I read was Rachel Cusk’s Aftermath, which has become the go-to literary divorce bible since its 2012 publication. In it, Cusk describes the way her life shattered and recomposed after the dissolution of her marriage, when her daughters were still very young. She makes the case for the untenability of her relationship by explaining that men and women are fundamentally unequal. She posits that men and women who marry and have children are perpetually fighting separate battles, lost to each other: “The baby can seem like something her husband has given her as a substitute for himself, a kind of transitional object, like a doll, for her to hold so that he can return to the world. And he does, he leaves her, returning to work, setting sail for Troy. He is free, for in the baby the romance of man and woman has been concluded: each can now do without the other.”

At our relationship’s lowest moments, this metaphor had barely been a metaphor. I remembered, the previous winter, Keith going off on a reporting trip to Ukraine at the very beginning of the war, leaving me and the kids with very little assurance of his safety. I had felt okay for the first couple of days until I heard on the news of bombing very close to where he was staying. After that, I went and bummed a cigarette from a neighbor, leaving the kids sleeping in their beds in order to do so. It was my first cigarette in 15 years. Though that had been the winter before my mania began, I believe the first seeds of it were sown then: leaving the children, smoking the cigarette, resenting Keith for putting himself in harm’s way and going out into the greater world while I tended to lunches, homework, and laundry as though everything were normal.

In Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, as in Aftermath, I found an airtight case for divorce. The husband was the villain and the wife the wronged party, and the inevitable result was splitting up. I felt an echo of this later on when I read Lyz Lenz’s polemic This American Ex-Wife, out this month, marketed as “a deeply validating manifesto on the gender politics of marriage (bad) and divorce (actually pretty good!).” The book begins by detailing how Lenz’s husband rarely did household chores and hid belongings of hers that he didn’t like — e.g., a mug that said WRITE LIKE A MOTHERFUCKER — in a box in the basement. “I didn’t want to waste my one wild and precious life telling a grown man where to find the ketchup,” Lenz writes. “What was compelling about my marriage wasn’t its evils or its villains, but its commonplace horror.”

This was not quite the way I felt. Even though I could not stand to see my husband’s face or hear his voice, even though I still felt the same simmering resentment I had since I entered the hospital, I also found myself feeling pangs of sympathy for him. After all, he was going through this too. When we were inevitably together, at mealtimes that were silent unless the children spoke, I could see how wounded he was, how he was barely keeping it together. His clothes hung off his gaunt frame. And at night, when we passed in the kitchen making cups of tea that we would take to our respective rooms, he sometimes asked me for a hug, just a hug. One time I gave in and felt his ribs through his T-shirt. He must have lost at least 15 pounds.

It began to seem like I only ever talked to friends who had been through divorces or were contemplating them. One friend who didn’t know whether to split up with her husband thought opening their marriage might be the answer. Another friend described the ease of sharing custody of his young daughter, then admitted that he and his ex-wife still had sex most weekends. In my chronically undecided state, I admired both of these friends who had found, or might have found, a way to split the difference. Maybe it was possible to break up and remain friends with an ex, something that had never happened to me before in my entire life. Maybe it was possible to be married and not married at the same time. Then I went a little further in my imagination, and the idea of someone else having sex with my husband made me want to gag with jealousy. Maybe that meant something. I was so confused, and the confusion seemed to have no end.

I read more books about divorce. I received an early copy of Sarah Manguso’s Liars, marketed as “a searing novel about being a wife, a mother, and an artist, and how marriage makes liars out of us all.” In it, John, a creative dilettante, and Jane, a writer, meet and soon decide to marry. Liars describes their marriage from beginning to end, a span of almost 15 years, and is narrated by Jane. The beginning of their relationship is delirious: “I tried to explain that first ferocious hunger and couldn’t. It came from somewhere beyond reason.” But the opening of that book also contains a warning. “Then I married a man, as women do. My life became archetypal, a drag show of nuclear familyhood. I got enmeshed in a story that had already been told ten billion times.” I felt perversely reassured that I was merely adding another story to the 10 billion. It made it seem less like it was my fault.

The beginning of my relationship with my husband wasn’t that dramatic or definitive. I thought I was getting into something casual with someone I didn’t even know if I particularly liked, much less loved, but was still oddly fascinated by. I wanted to see the way he lived, to see if I could emulate it and become more like him. He lived with roommates in his 30s — well, that was the price you paid if you wanted to do nothing but write. I wanted what he had, his seriousness about his work. We went on dates where we both sat with our laptops in a café, writing, and this was somehow the most romantic thing I’d ever experienced. On our third date, we went to his father’s home on Cape Cod to dog-sit for a weekend, and it was awkward in the car until we realized we were both thinking about the same Mary Gaitskill story, “A Romantic Weekend,” in which a couple with dramatically mismatched needs learn the truth about each other through painful trial and error. Our weekend was awkward, too, but not nearly as awkward as the one in the story. On the way home, I remember admiring Keith’s driving, effortless yet masterful. I trusted him in the car completely. A whisper of a thought: He would make a good father.

In Liars, cracks begin to form almost immediately, even before John and Jane get engaged; she is accepted to a prestigious fellowship and he isn’t, and he is forthright about his fear that she will become more successful than he is: “A moment later he said he didn’t want to be the unsuccessful partner of the successful person. Then he apologized and said that he’d just wanted to be honest. I said, It was brave and considerate to tell me. ”

Through the next few years, so gradually that it’s almost imperceptible, John makes it impossible for Jane to succeed. He launches tech companies that require cross-country moves, forcing Jane to bounce between adjunct-teaching gigs. And then, of course, they have a baby. The problem with the baby is that Jane wants everything to be perfect for him and throws herself into creating a tidy home and an ideal child-development scenario, whereas John works more and more, moving the family again as one start-up fails and another flourishes. Jane begins to wonder whether she has created a prison for herself but pacifies herself with the thought that her situation is normal: “No married woman I knew was better off, so I determined to carry on. After all, I was a control freak, a neat freak, a crazy person.” The story John tells her about herself becomes her own story for a while. For a while, it’s impossible to know whose story is the truth.

I thought about Keith’s side of the story when I read Liars. Maybe it was the lack of alcohol’s blur that enabled me to see this clearly for the first time — I began to see how burdened he had been, had always been, with a partner who refused to plan for the future and who took on, without being asked, household chores that could just as easily have been distributed evenly. Our situation had never been as clear-cut as it was for Lyz Lenz; Keith had never refused to take out the trash or hidden my favorite mug. But he worked more and later hours, and my intermittent book advances and freelance income could not be counted on to pay our rent. As soon as we’d had a child, he had been shunted into the role of breadwinner without choosing it or claiming it. At first, I did all the cooking because I liked cooking and then, when I stopped liking cooking, I did it anyway out of habit. For our marriage to change, we would have needed to consciously decide to change it, insofar as our essential natures and our financial situation would allow. But when were we supposed to have found the time to do that? It was maddening that the root of our fracture was so commonplace and clichéd — and that even though the problem was ordinary, I still couldn’t think my way out of it.

Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story, by Leslie Jamison , is in some ways the successor to Aftermath — the latest divorce book by a literary superstar. It is mostly an account of Jamison’s passionate marriage to a fellow writer, C., and the way that marriage fell apart after her career accelerated and they had a child together. It then details her first months of life as a single mother and her forays into dating. In it, she is strenuously fair to C., taking much of the blame for the dissolution of their marriage. But she can’t avoid describing his anger that her book merits an extensive tour, while his novel — based on his relationship with his first wife, who had died of leukemia — fails commercially. “It didn’t get the reception he had hoped for,” Jamison writes, and now, “I could feel him struggling. He wanted to support me, but there was a thorn in every interview.” C. grows distant, refusing to publicly perform the charming self that Jamison fell in love with. “I wished there was a way to say, Your work matters, that didn’t involve muting my own,” Jamison writes.

For all my marriage’s faults, we never fought in public. Friends encouraged us to reconcile, saying, “You always seemed so good together.” (As if there were another way to seem! Standing next to each other at a party, it had always been easy to relax because we couldn’t fight.) And we never did anything but praise each other’s work. Until this last book of my husband’s, that is. I had read Raising Raffi for the first time six months before it was published, while I was out of town for the weekend. I had, at that time, enjoyed reading it — it was refreshing, in a way, to see someone else’s perspective on a part of my own life. I even felt a certain relief that my child’s early years, in all their specificity and cuteness, had been recorded. This work had been accomplished, and I hadn’t had to do it! There had been only a slight pang in the background of that feeling that I hadn’t been the one to do it. But as publication drew nearer, the pang turned into outright anger . The opening chapter described my giving birth to our first son, and I didn’t realize how violated I felt by that until it was vetted by The New Yorker ’s fact-checker after that section was selected as an excerpt for its website. Had a geyser of blood shot out of my vagina? I didn’t actually know. I had been busy at the time. I hung up on the fact-checker who called me, asking her to please call my husband instead. (In case you’re wondering, Keith has read this essay and suggested minimal changes.)

I related to the writers in Splinters trying to love each other despite the underlying thrum of competing ambitions. But most of all, Jamison’s book made me even more terrified about sharing custody. “There was only one time I got on my knees and begged. It happened in our living room, where I knelt beside the wooden coffee table and pleaded not to be away from her for two nights each week,” she writes. Envisioning a future in which we shared custody of our children made me cringe with horror. It seemed like absolute hell. At the time we separated, our younger son was only 4 years old and required stories and cuddles to get to bed. Missing a night of those stories seemed like a punishment neither of us deserved, and yet we would have to sacrifice time with our kids if we were going to escape each other, which seemed like the only possible solution to our problem. Thanksgiving rolled around, and I cooked a festive meal that we ate without looking at each other. Whenever I looked at Keith, I started to cry.

We decided to enter divorce mediation at the beginning of December. On Sixth Avenue, heading to the therapist’s office, we passed the hospital where I’d once been rushed for an emergency fetal EKG when I was pregnant with our first son. His heart had turned out to be fine. But as we passed that spot, I sensed correctly that we were both thinking of that moment, of a time when we had felt so connected in our panic and desperate hope, and now the invisible cord that had bound us had been, if not severed, shredded and torn. For a moment on the sidewalk there, we allowed ourselves to hold hands, remembering.

The therapist was a small older woman with short curly reddish hair. She seemed wise, like she’d seen it all and seen worse. I was the one who talked the most in that session, blaming Keith for making me go crazy, even though I knew this wasn’t technically true or possible: I had gone crazy from a combination of sky-high stress and a too-high SSRI prescription and a latent crazy that had been in me, part of me, since long before Keith married me, since I was born. Still, I blamed his job, his book, his ambition and workaholism, which always surpassed my own efforts. I cried throughout the session; I think we both did. I confessed that I was not the primary wronged person in these negotiations, and to be fair I have to talk about why. Sometime post–Last Fight and pre-hospitalization, I had managed to cheat on my husband. I had been so sure we were basically already divorced that I justified the act to myself; I couldn’t have done it any other way. I had thought I might panic at the last minute or even throw up or faint, but I had gone through with it thanks to the delusional state I was in. There aren’t many more details anyone needs to know. It was just one time, and it was like a drug I used to keep myself from feeling sad about what was really happening. Anyway, there’s a yoga retreat center I’ll never be able to go to again in my life.

At the end of the session, we decided to continue with the therapist but in couples therapy instead of divorce mediation. It was a service she also provided, and as a bonus, it was $100 cheaper per session. She didn’t say why she made this recommendation, but maybe it was our palpable shared grief that convinced her that our marriage was salvageable. Or maybe it was that, despite everything I had told her in that session, she could see that, even in my profound sadness and anger, I looked toward Keith to complete my sentences when I was searching for the right word and that he did the same thing with me. As broken as we were, we were still pieces of one once-whole thing.

My husband would have to forgive me for cheating and wasting our money. I would have to forgive him for treading on my literary territory: our family’s life, my own life. My husband would have to forgive me for having a mental breakdown, leaving him to take care of our family on his own for a month, costing us thousands of uninsured dollars in hospital bills. I would have to forgive him for taking for granted, for years, that I would be available on a sick day or to do an early pickup or to watch the baby while he wrote about our elder son. I would have to forgive him for taking for granted that there would always be dinner on the table without his having to think about how it got there. He would have to forgive me for never taking out the recycling and never learning how to drive so that I could move the car during alternate-side parking. I would have to forgive him for usurping the time and energy and brain space with which I might have written a better book than his. Could the therapist help us overcome what I knew to be true: that we’d gone into marriage already aware that we were destined for constant conflict just because of who we are? The therapist couldn’t help me ask him to do more if I didn’t feel like I deserved it, if I couldn’t bring myself to ask him myself. I had to learn how to ask.

No one asked anything or forgave anything that day in the couples therapist’s office. After what felt like months but was probably only a few days, I was watching Ramy on my laptop in my downstairs-bedroom cave after the kids’ bedtime when some moment struck me as something Keith would love. Acting purely on impulse, I left my room and found him sitting on the couch, drinking tea. I told him I’d been watching this show I thought was funny and that he would really like it. Soon, we were sitting side by side on the couch, watching Ramy together. We went back to our respective rooms afterward, but still, we’d made progress.

After a few more weeks and a season’s worth of shared episodes of Ramy, I ventured for the first time upstairs to Keith’s attic room. It smelled alien to me, and I recognized that this was the pure smell of Keith, not the shared smell of the bedrooms in every apartment we’d lived in together. I lay down next to him in the mess of his bed. He made room for me. We didn’t touch, not yet. But we slept, that night, together. The next night, we went back to sleeping alone.

Pickups and drop-offs became evenly divided among me and Keith and a sitter. Keith learned to make spaghetti with meat sauce. He could even improvise other dishes, with somewhat less success, but he was improving. I made a conscious effort not to tidy the house after the children left for school. I made myself focus on my work even when there was chaos around me. Slowly, I began to be able to make eye contact with Keith again. At couples therapy, we still clutched tissue boxes in our hands, but we used them less. Our separate chairs inched closer together in the room.

That Christmas, we rented a tiny Airbnb near his dad’s house in Falmouth. It had only two bedrooms, one with bunk beds for the kids and one with a king-size bed that took up almost the entirety of the small room. We would have to share a bed for the duration of the trip. The decision I made to reach across the giant bed toward Keith on one of the last nights of the trip felt, again, impulsive. But there were years of information and habit guiding my impulse. Sex felt, paradoxically, completely comfortable and completely new, like losing my virginity. It felt like sleeping with a different person and also like sleeping with the same person, which made sense, in a way. We had become different people while somehow staying the same people we’d always been.

Slowly, over the course of the next months, I moved most of my things upstairs to his room, now our room. We still see the therapist twice a month. We talk about how to make things more equal in our marriage, how not to revert to old patterns. I have, for instance, mostly given up on making dinner, doing it only when it makes more sense in the schedule of our shared day or when I actually want to cook. It turns out that pretty much anyone can throw some spaghetti sauce on some pasta; it also turns out that the kids won’t eat dinner no matter who cooks it, and now we get to experience that frustration equally. Keith’s work is still more stable and prestigious than mine, but we conspire to pretend that this isn’t the case, making sure to leave space for my potential and my leisure. We check in to make sure we’re not bowing to the overwhelming pressure to cede our whole lives to the physical and financial demands, not to mention the fervently expressed wants, of our children. It’s the work that we’d never found time to do before, and it is work. The difference is that we now understand what can happen when we don’t do it. I’m always surprised by how much I initially don’t want to go to therapy and then by how much lighter I feel afterward. For now, those sessions are a convenient container for our marriage’s intractable defects so that we get to spend the rest of our time together focusing on what’s not wrong with us.

The downstairs bedroom is now dormant, a place for occasional guests to stay or for our elder son to lie in bed as he plays video games. Some of my clothes from a year earlier still fill the drawers, but none of it seems like mine. I never go into that room if I can help it. It was the room of my exile from my marriage, from my family. If I could magically disappear it from our apartment, I would do it in a heartbeat. And in the attic bedroom, we are together, not as we were before but as we are now.

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"The Sopranos" helped save my sweet mom's life

I will never forget the first time i heard my 80-year-old mother say, "someone’s gonna get whacked tonight", by barbara neal varma.

" The Sopranos " turned 25 this year, stirring memories of the groundbreaking HBO series that made fictional mob boss Tony Soprano, played by the late James Gandolfini, a TV icon. I know I’ll never forget the very first time I heard “Someone’s gonna get whacked tonight!” Especially since it came from my sweet 80-year-old mom. 

I pressed the phone closer to my ear. “What’d you say, Mom?”

“Someone’s gonna get whacked tonight. On 'The Sopranos.' It’s a little gruesome,” she confessed, "but they really pull you in.”

I’m not sure what surprised me more: My own mother going gangster, or the sudden excitement in her voice.

“Wait, where are you seeing 'The Sopranos'?” 

“On TV. It comes on after ' The View .'”

It was a bit disconcerting to think my normally soft-spoken mommy was watching a show I thought too violent to watch myself. 

“And you’re OK watching it?” I asked.

“I have to close my eyes sometimes. Have you seen it? It’s getting real good. I think Christopher’s going to make his bones tonight.”

Looking back, I credit the show with contributing to the extended length and quality of my mom’s life after what would’ve presumably been a debilitating diagnosis.

A laugh escaped me then. I couldn’t help it. Good for Christopher , I thought, good for him "making his bones ," whatever the heck that meant. Anything that made my mom sound so happy back then was gold to me. 

Just two weeks prior, during a routine chest X-ray, they’d noticed a suspicious bulge where a suspicious bulge shouldn’t be, sitting on her aorta. The thing about aneurysms, Dr. Google said, was they tend to grow over time, leading to stroke or instant . . . good God.

Mom used to dance in the kitchen when I was growing up, making up her own moves to songs she’d record off the radio using the little cassette player she carried around the house. I’d watch, entranced and entertained, peering over my PB&J as she’d pop in a cassette and then spin around or rock back and forth. Her favorite was “My Guy” by Mary Wells. She’d really rev up the engine then, shaking her hips and tapping a wooden spoon in the air, still damp from stirring her homemade spaghetti sauce. 

Mom also spent much of my childhood lying on her bed, obsessing for hours about the latest life event to test her fragile nerves. Big stuff, little stuff, it didn’t matter. Her anxiety had a way of leveling the playing field: Making the “wrong” move at her bridge game became as triggering as finding out her firstborn, my oldest brother, had Type 1 diabetes.

Soon after being told about the aneurysm, she’d taken to her bed again, depressed and afraid to leave the house, lest something happened.

Then she met Tony. 

She’d fallen asleep on the couch watching "The Andy Griffith Show" reruns. When she woke up hours later, Andy and Barney had been replaced with a balding guy holding a gun to the temple of a guy with a full head of hair, to hear her tell it. It startled her when the gun went off. The blood spattered. But for that shocking, magical moment, she forgot all about her sorrow. She kept watching.

"And if we do nothing?” Mom asked. “Will I just go out in a blaze of glory?"

Of course, being a sudden fan of the show made her a bit of a wild card in public. Mom never took up swearing or dropped any F-bombs, but she’d often repeat some adults-only phrases that Tony would say while failing to use her indoor voice. Noisy malls were fine. Movie theaters, less so. The center, red-leather booth at the Ruby’s Diner that we liked to frequent? Fuhgeddaboudit.

Barely a week after the initial diagnosis, we were back for the consult with her heart doctor. More bad news. Any surgery to reduce or remove the aneurysm would be risky considering its proximity to her spinal cord. The chance of paralysis was high.

“And if we do nothing?” Mom asked. “Will I just go out in a blaze of glory?”

Doc’s eyebrows went up.

“She’s been watching 'The Sopranos,'” I explained.

The eyebrows went down. “Actually, these things, when they resolve, tend to be quick and painless,” he said before quickly moving on. “The good news is the aneurysm is small enough to forestall surgery.” 

They would check it again in a few months with another X-ray. Meantime, she was told to keep her blood pressure down — that was key. 

As was keeping up with “The Sopranos.” Looking back, I credit the show with contributing to the extended length and quality of my mom’s life after what would’ve presumably been a debilitating diagnosis. Instead, inspired by Tony’s survival-at-all-cost attitude, she dutifully took her blood pressure meds, walked laps around her small condo for exercise, and even vicariously benefited from Tony’s therapy sessions — “He has panic attacks, too,” she told me — with Dr. Jennifer Melfi, played by Lorraine Bracco.

Three months in, we went in for the follow-up chest X-ray. 

Two days later: “It appears to have grown.” 

They did a CT scan just to make sure. Later that night, the phone rang. It was her doctor’s office asking me to please bring my mom in the next morning to hear the results.  

We arrived early. I guided Mom into the waiting room and grabbed the last two empty seats in a row of cushioned chairs, sitting her on the end to ensure her shy tush would only have to touch her daughter’s. She’d been quiet on the drive over. Me, too. 

“So, what’s going on with Tony and the guys?” I asked, playing my ace.

She brightened. “Well, let’s see. Last night one of the guys got mad because another guy said his wife was fat.” She gave me a telling glance over her glasses. “You don’t say something like that to a mobster.”

“I imagine not.”

“So then the guy — the one who said the other guy’s wife was fat, wanted to—” She glanced around then whispered, “You know.”

“Whack him?” 

She laughed and patted my knee, eyes sparkling. Then just as quickly, they turned sad. “I’m sorry you have to go through all this again.” 

I knew what she was talking about. Years back, we’d lost my dad too soon, too fast to pancreatic cancer. We’d gone from shock to grief in zero to 60 days, give or take. There had been many waiting room vigils then, too.

I covered her hand with mine. “All what? You mean hearing your 'Sopranos' stories and catching stink-eye from everyone in the room?” I flashed her a devilish grin. “Wouldn’t miss it for the world.” Then I went back to reading my magazine, blinking back tears.

The inner door opened and the doctor himself called us in, guiding us through his office and into a smaller, darker room save for the lightboards across one wall. 

He pulled three X-ray sheets free from their manila envelope and posted them against the glowing panels. An assortment of strange white shapes stood out against the black backgrounds. Mom and I stared at the array, two stargazers searching for answers. 

Doc pulled a pen from his shirt pocket and outlined the outer edge of a fuzzy, misshapen splotch about the size of my thumb. There it was. The silver bullet.

He held the radiologist’s report in his hand. I held my breath. 

“CT scans can show us so much more than a chest X-ray,” he began. “Which is a good thing, because in this case, it looks like it hasn’t grown after all.”

I heard the words but didn’t move, afraid even the slightest motion would scare the good news away. Mom stood just as still next to me. Seeing no response, he said it again. This time joy broke through. 

“Hear that?” I said, laying an arm across my mother’s shoulders and hugging her close. “It hasn’t grown.” I kissed the top of her head, her silky white hair felt feather soft against my lips. 

A few days later I rang Mom’s doorbell to announce my arrival for our weekly grocery run. Her door flew open, and who appeared but Dancing Mom, beckoning me with swaying arms into the living room.

“It’s 'The Sopranos,'” she said as she twirled around once, twice for good measure. Sure enough, there on the TV screen was her buddy Tony smoking his cigar and steering his way through Jersey during the show’s opening credits. Mom rocked her hips to the theme song and stirred the air with an imaginary spoon. She even threw in a knee twirl — balancing herself on an end table first, thank God — for good measure. I tossed down my coat and keys and happily joined in. Vons could wait.

The aneurysm did finally catch up with Mom, but not until five well-lived years later. Until then, we savored every moment, every laugh, every hug, lest it be our last. Truth is, we’re all living on borrowed time and would be advised to treat each waking day as a gift. Danger lurks, but so does grace.

As for that much-talked-about "Sopranos" finale, she never saw it. 

At the time, Mom said she didn’t want to know how it ended. Me neither, actually; there was something jinxy about it. Besides, Mom was doing so well. Even the aneurysm seemed to be behaving. Better to go out for ice cream instead.

But thanks to the anniversary of the show's first season, I kept seeing Tony’s face front and center on the Max menu, double-dog daring me to come on, watch the end, already! What—was I a wuss?

Yes. Yes, I was; afraid it’d be too emotional without Mom sitting next to me, telling me when to close my eyes. (Which turned out to be the scene when Phil’s head encountered his wife’s car, by the way. You’re welcome.)  

Eventually, though, Tony’s stare wore me down. So I watched it, killing a box of Kleenex in the process, missing her so much.

During the final season of her life, my Mom had lived vicariously through a fictional TV character, notorious mob boss Tony Soprano, and in some ways, she’d died that way, too. The day before, my husband and I took her to Ruby’s Diner again where she enjoyed a tall glass of vanilla shake, mercifully oblivious of what the next day would bring.  

Thankfully, when the gun in her chest finally went off, it was as quick and painless (I want to believe) as her doctor had predicted. No blaze of glory or violent, final scene. For Tony, either. Only the reward of a silent, peaceful end. One second, there is life; the next, it’s gone, cut to black.

Except I’m sure for my brave, dancing mom, instead of darkness, there was light.

about "The Sopranos"

  • Westeros is the Garden State: Everything I love about "Game of Thrones" I learned from New Jersey
  • David Chase always planned to end "The Sopranos" with Tony’s death, then changed his mind
  • How "The Sopranos" elevated and complicated the mob wife

Barbara Neal Varma’s essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Boston Globe Magazine and Writer’s Digest. She’s currently working on her debut novel, a suspense story she hopes will make readers both laugh and lose a little sleep at night. She still misses her mom. Visit her at  barbaranealvarma.com .

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The UAE Electric Vehicle Grand Prix Set for March 2 in Abu Dhabi

The UAE Electric Vehicle Grand Prix Set for March 2 in Abu Dhabi

More than 400 students from 28 high schools in the UAE, USA, Italy, and Egypt will race their hand-built electric cars

The second UAE Electric Vehicle Grand Prix (UAE EVGP) for high school teams will be held on March 2 at Al Forsan International Sports Resort in Abu Dhabi. The race will draw more than 400 high school students in teams from 21 UAE schools, five teams from the US, and one team apiece from Egypt and Italy. 

NYU Abu Dhabi is the academic partner for the event, which is organized by both Global EEE, a US-based non-profit organization focused on education, energy, and the environment, as well as the UAE-based 3elm Education and Training Consultancy focused on talent development and labor market alignment.

The teams use engineering principles to build single-person electric cars from standard kits, with room for customization and innovation. Then, they race them in an efficiency challenge, applying classroom knowledge to real-world problems. 

The teams have received guidance and support from their teachers and technical experts. They also attended an orientation session and subsequent mini-conference at NYU Abu Dhabi’s campus.

The UAE EVGP is a platform for hands-on exploration of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics concepts in an exciting real-world context. The competition is designed to enable students to embrace their soft skills through teamwork, time management, leadership, innovation, and self-confidence. 

The students will compete on the Al Forsan closed karting  track while carefully managing their limited battery capacity. Teams are ranked based on the most laps completed, and the top three receive the winners’ trophies. Other awards include the fastest qualifying time, technical innovation, women in science and engineering (WISE) award (individual or team), the coveted ProjoTech award, and more. 

The panel of judges comprises experts from the private sector, academia, and government, including representatives from the US Department of Transportation and the Washington DC Department of Energy and Environment.

This year the UAE EVGP is made possible with the partnership of key organizations, including the US Mission in the UAE, ProjoTech, Al Forsan International Sports Resort, and PepsiCo.

Mariët Westermann, Vice Chancellor of NYU Abu Dhabi

“NYU Abu Dhabi has a vital role in the wider academic community in nurturing and inspiring young minds and fostering sustainable innovation among high school students. We are delighted to collaborate with Global EEE in providing a hands-on environment where students apply what they learn in the classroom to devise real-world solutions in an exciting setting. This learning experience requires teamwork, critical thinking, leadership, problem-solving, and communication, and will undoubtedly prompt curiosity and ideas for a more sustainable tomorrow.” NYU Abu Dhabi Vice Chancellor Mariët Westermann
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Trump’s Harsh Punishment Was Made Possible by This New York Law

The little-known measure meant hundreds of millions in penalties in the civil fraud case brought by Attorney General Letitia James.

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Letitia James sits in court behind Donald Trump, who is blurred and out of focus.

By Ben Protess and Jonah E. Bromwich

The $355 million penalty that a New York judge ordered Donald J. Trump to pay in his civil fraud trial might seem steep in a case with no victim calling for redress and no star witness pointing the finger at Mr. Trump. But a little-known 70-year-old state law made the punishment possible.

The law, often referred to by its shorthand, 63(12), which stems from its place in New York’s rule book, is a regulatory bazooka for the state’s attorney general, Letitia James. Her office has used it to aim at a wide range of corporate giants: the oil company Exxon Mobil, the tobacco brand Juul and the pharma executive Martin Shkreli.

On Friday, the law enabled Ms. James to win an enormous victory against Mr. Trump. Along with the financial penalty , the judge barred Mr. Trump from running a business in New York for three years. His adult sons were barred for two years.

The judge also ordered a monitor, Barbara Jones, to assume more power over Mr. Trump’s company, and asked her to appoint an independent executive to report to her from within the company.

A lawyer for Mr. Trump, Christopher M. Kise, reacted with fury, saying “the sobering future consequences of this tyrannical abuse of power do not just impact President Trump.”

“When a court willingly allows a reckless government official to meddle in the lawful, private and profitable affairs of any citizen based on political bias, America’s economic prosperity and way of life are at extreme risk of extinction,” he said.

In the Trump case, Ms. James accused the former president of inflating his net worth to obtain favorable loans and other financial benefits. Mr. Trump, she argued, defrauded his lenders and in doing so, undermined the integrity of New York’s business world.

Mr. Trump’s conduct “distorts the market,” Kevin Wallace, a lawyer for Ms. James’s office, said during closing arguments in the civil fraud trial.

“It prices out honest borrowers and can lead to more catastrophic results,” Mr. Wallace said, adding, “That’s why it’s important for the court to take the steps to protect the marketplace to prevent this from happening again.”

Yet the victims — the bankers who lent to Mr. Trump — testified that they were thrilled to have him as a client. And while a parade of witnesses echoed Ms. James’s claim that the former president’s annual financial statements were works of fiction, none offered evidence showing that Mr. Trump explicitly intended to fool the banks.

That might seem unusual, but under 63(12), such evidence was not necessary to find fraud.

The law did not require the attorney general to show that Mr. Trump had intended to defraud anyone or that his actions resulted in financial loss.

“This law packs a wallop,” said Steven M. Cohen, a former federal prosecutor and top official in the attorney general’s office, noting that it did not require the attorney general to show that anyone had been harmed.

With that low bar, Justice Arthur F. Engoron, the judge presiding over the case, sided with Ms. James on her core claim before the trial began, finding that Mr. Trump had engaged in a pattern of fraud by exaggerating the value of his assets in statements filed to his lenders.

Ms. James’s burden of proof at the trial was higher: To persuade the judge that Mr. Trump had violated other state laws, she had to convince him that the former president acted with intent. And some of the evidence helped her cause: Two of Mr. Trump’s former employees testified that he had final sign-off on the financial statements, and Mr. Trump admitted on the witness stand that he had a role in drafting them.

Still, her ability to extract further punishments based on those other violations is also a product of 63(12), which grants the attorney general the right to pursue those who engage in “repeated fraudulent or illegal acts.”

In other fraud cases, authorities must persuade a judge or jury that someone was in fact defrauded. But 63(12) required Ms. James only to show that conduct was deceptive or created “an atmosphere conducive to fraud.” Past cases suggest that the word “fraud” itself is effectively a synonym for dishonest conduct, the attorney general argued in her lawsuit.

Once the attorney general has convinced a judge or jury that a defendant has acted deceptively, the punishment can be severe. The law allows Ms. James to seek the forfeit of money obtained through fraud.

Of the roughly $355 million that Mr. Trump was ordered to pay, $168 million represents the sum that Mr. Trump saved on loans by inflating his worth, she argued. In other words, the extra interest the lenders missed.

The penalty was in the judge’s hands — there was no jury — and 63(12) gave him wide discretion.

The law also empowered Justice Engoron to set new restrictions on Mr. Trump and his family business, all of which Mr. Trump is expected to appeal.

The judge also ordered a monitor to assume more power over Mr. Trump’s company, who will appoint an independent executive who will report to the monitor from within the company.

Even before she filed her lawsuit against the Trumps in 2022, Ms. James used 63(12) as a cudgel to aid her investigation.

The law grants the attorney general’s office something akin to prosecutorial investigative power. In most civil cases, a person or entity planning to sue cannot collect documents or conduct interviews until after the lawsuit is filed. But 63(12) allows the attorney general to do a substantive investigation before deciding whether to sue, settle or abandon a case. In the case against Mr. Trump, the investigation proceeded for nearly three years before a lawsuit was filed.

The case is not Mr. Trump’s first brush with 63(12). Ms. James’s predecessors used it in actions against Trump University, his for-profit education venture, which paid millions of dollars to resolve the case.

The law became so important to Ms. James’s civil fraud case that it caught the attention of Mr. Trump, who lamented the sweeping authority it afforded the attorney general and falsely claimed that her office rarely used it.

He wrote on social media last year that 63(12) was “VERY UNFAIR.”

William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting.

Ben Protess is an investigative reporter at The Times, writing about public corruption. He has been covering the various criminal investigations into former President Trump and his allies. More about Ben Protess

Jonah E. Bromwich covers criminal justice in New York, with a focus on the Manhattan district attorney's office, state criminal courts in Manhattan and New York City's jails. More about Jonah E. Bromwich

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