If you have ever wondered what's
going to happen in the future,
then this is the programme for you.
Because we're going to be asking
the kind of questions that we all have
about our future.
In this very special edition of Horizon we'll be
revealing the ten things you definitely need to know that will,
for better or worse, change our lives.
We'll explore how artificial intelligence
will change the way we work.
Can I enquire, do you have pain in your mouth?
Yes, I do. I see.
We'll look at the likely impact of our changing climate.
It could well top 40 degrees in a few days' time.
And discover how gene therapy will transform medicine.
And he said, "There is no evidence of disease.
"You are cancer-free."
We'll introduce the people already turning themselves into cyborgs...
This last year people just shout at me, Pokemon.
And they try to catch me.
Ask if renewable energy is here to stay...
The place to be might not be down here,
or even up on that hilltop up there.
It's up there.
And reveal how we are mapping our brains...
It's absolutely astonishing.
But jeopardising our very existence.
What we are doing is removing the ability
for us to live on this planet.
We'll also celebrate, finally, the arrival of
that science fiction cliche, the flying car.
That's it, that's all it takes.
So, if you want to know what's in store for you, then keep watching.
Welcome to the future.
Now, we are all going to experience the future
and we all want to know how it will change our lives.
What's going to be the future of our daily commute?
What will we spend our money on?
What's going to happen to our planet?
Now, over the years, many people have made some pretty bold claims,
including science fiction legend Arthur C Clarke,
in an interview that he gave to Horizon in 1964.
I'm perfectly serious when I suggest a world
in which we can be in instant contact with each other,
wherever we may be.
Where we can contact our friends anywhere on Earth
even if we don't know their actual physical location.
It will be possible in that age,
perhaps only 50 years from now,
for a man to conduct his business from Tahiti or Bali,
just as well as he could from London.
Isn't that incredible? Arthur C Clarke, there, in 1964,
accurately describing what is effectively the internet age.
Something, of course, that we all take completely for granted now
but a world that was totally alien to his audience.
But, predicting the future is notoriously tricky.
And while Arthur was bang on the money with that one,
he didn't stop there. Because here he is with his follow-up prediction.
The development of intelligent and useful servants
among the other animals on this planet.
We could certainly solve the servant problem
with the help of the monkey kingdom.
Sorry, come again?
Solve the servant problem with the help of the monkey kingdom.
Of course, eventually our super chimpanzees
would start forming trade unions
and we would be right back where we started.
Well, I suppose one out of two ain't bad.
But it does just go to show that predicting the future
is usually a mug's game.
Flying cars, salad-making robots and living in space colonies
were the embarrassing staples of TV programmes like Tomorrow's World.
Usually, their earnest predictions were way off.
But this programme is different.
And I'm as confident as I can be that these predictions
aren't going to end up being laughed at by a TV audience in 2050.
Because we are basing our predictions
on real data from trusted sources, from today.
And that is why we can confidently tell you that what you're
about to watch really are the ten things
that you need to know about the future.
First up, Dr Kevin Fong on perhaps the biggest question of all.
How can we cheat death and live longer?
In the 1980s, if you wanted some constructive advice
about how to achieve immortality,
you went to see the film and musical Fame.
The star of the piece was very clear about her advice,
"I'm gonna live forever," she told us.
And she was going to do that by becoming famous
and living on forever in the memory of her adoring fans.
And that kind of immortality is all that human beings
have ever been able to aspire to.
To be remembered by as many people as possible
for as long as you possibly can.
Woody Allen had a very different approach, of course.
"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work," he said.
"I want to achieve immortality by not dying."
And if you want to live for longer, not dying is a great place to start.
And the good news is that, on average,
we're living longer today than we ever have in the past.
But how far can we push that?
How long can we expect to live in the future?
Now, births and deaths are one thing that we have quite a lot of data on
here in the UK. And here is some of that data.
This shows you how our life expectancy has changed
over the last 170 years or so.
Now, Kevin Fong, welcome back to the studio.
As a doctor, help me make some sense of these numbers.
Well, I think this is all fascinating data.
When you look at it, this is average life expectancy which, for almost
the whole of human history,
languishes around here, around 40-45 years.
And then you hit the start of the 20th century.
You get this massive kick.
Why? Well, it's all prevention.
It's all about stopping the things that kill you early on in life
shortly after you've been born, like measles, mumps, rubella.
It's all about stopping the diseases of infection.
And that is achieved through vaccination and better sanitation.
So that's what explains this big kick and these early gains here.
So this bit really is all about sort of child mortality?
Yep. Prevention is always better than cure, and that was vaccination.
But it continues to go up past then. What about this bit over here?
So this kick up the top here is us getting better at
advanced modern medicine.
So we have better lifestyles,
but also we get better at treating diseases like heart disease and also
cancer, so that gives us a bit of an extra gain here.
So we still see increases all the way through.
And then what about going forward to the future, then?
Will this continue to increase?
Is there a limit to how long we can live for?
It would be lovely, wouldn't it,
if this line kept going up and up and up to infinity?
It doesn't look like it.
It looks like this data plateaus.
This graph shows that being born in 2011
gives you a very high average life expectancy.
But in terms of maximum possible age,
you're no better off than your early Victorian ancestors.
There's a fundamental limit, it would appear,
at least at the moment, around 110, 120 years,
to which we seem to be limited.
If we want to improve things, and who doesn't,
we could do a lot worse than to investigate the naked mole rat.
It lives at least ten times longer than other rats.
In human terms, that's a potential lifespan of upwards of 700 years.
As it happens, we actually have a naked mole rat expert
here in the studio with your mole rats.
Welcome to the studio, Chris Faulkes.
Tell me about these amazing creatures.
Well, naked mole rats,
just about everything about their biology
is weird and wonderful and exceptional.
And recently they've been generating a lot of interest
because of their extreme longevity.
Which can be... We don't know the upper limit, but more than 30 years.
Gosh. Cos I guess a rat only lives, what, two or three years,
maybe at the most. Yeah, exactly. And these live to 30, did you say?
Yeah. And counting.
Wow. And do they get old in that time?
Well, this is really the remarkable thing.
Because not only do they have a long lifespan,
but their health span is very long,
which means that they go through a huge proportion of their life
without showing any signs of ageing whatsoever,
like an 80-year-old having the body of a 30-year-old.
Well, that would be nice, wouldn't it? It sure would. So, why is that?
What is it about them that means that they have that feature?
Well, it seems that it's not a single thing,
but there's a whole mosaic of adaptations
that have given them very low metabolic rate,
a low body temperature, there's resistance to cancer,
and a whole bunch of other things
which all collectively give them
this really long lifespan and health span.
So, do they not get cancer?
There's been virtually no recorded cases.
As opposed to lab mice, for example, where 70% will die of cancer.
Wow. Gosh, that's extraordinary.
So what is it about them that means that they don't get cancer?
There's a substance in the skin called hyaluronan that we all have.
These guys have a very special version of that substance,
which we think is what gives them their really elasticky skin,
which is useful when you're living in tight tunnels.
And this hyaluronan is implicated in one part of their cancer resistance.
How stretchy is their skin?
It's pretty stretchy.
Do you want me to see if I can demonstrate?
Yeah, go on, why not, let's have a look.
They'll probably all go running off.
And this sort of stretchy substance is one of
the things that protects them against... Oh, my goodness.
Yeah, so, there we go, they don't mind
being picked up like this at all as you can see.
The animal's quite relaxed. But see how really elasticky the skin is.
Incredible. My goodness me.
Let me just pop him back there. There we go.
And he's quite happy. Yeah, no problem.
He has made a run for it, though.
Yes. Well, I guess the question is, really,
how do we get that substance in ourselves?
As labs around the world have been studying
the genomes of naked mole rats,
we're finding a whole bunch of
candidate genes that are responsible,
perhaps, for their longevity.
And, you know, their health span, as well.
And potentially apply them to ourselves.
That could well be the case, I think.
It's not beyond the realms of possibility. Wow.
So, what you need to know about the future of lifespan is this.
The good news is that we are likely to live longer on average.
But, until we crack the secrets of the mole rats' longevity,
it does seem that our luck, on average,
runs out just after the telegram from the Queen arrives.
Right now, one in four of us is likely
to be affected by mental health issues at some point in our lives.
But when it comes to effective treatment,
mental health really does lag behind other diseases.
So, what does the future hold for our state of mind?
Now, there is a very big incentive to answer this question.
And it's because mental health issues
are the number one cause of people being unable to work.
So this graph here from 2010 shows
the amount of money lost by people not being able to work
with different diseases.
And the results here are shown in trillions of dollars.
But the exact numbers here aren't really the story.
The story is that mental health illness
really does top the pile here.
Beating both cardiovascular disease
and also cancer, just there.
And if current trends continue,
then the World Health Organization has made some predictions
for what we can expect by 2030.
And you can see things really are set to get a lot worse.
And what's particularly bad about mental health illness
is that it really is the disease
that people end up living with for the longest.
So this graph here shows you how long
people live with different kinds of illness,
so you can see unintentional injuries just there.
There's cardiovascular diseases down there.
And once again, mental health disorders and neurological disorders
really are very much out in front.
So what is being done to help understand the brain and to
improve these things?
Well, Michael Mosley has been to visit
a research project in London to find out.
The human brain is the most complex object in the known universe.
And for a long time its workings were a complete mystery.
Then, in the 19th century,
scientists identified that some of our abilities,
like being able to speak
are linked to particular regions of the brain.
But an awful lot of what goes on up here is not to do with regions.
It's absolutely to do with connections.
If your brain isn't properly wired up,
then this puts you at greater risk of things like dementia,
schizophrenia and, early in life, autism.
Autism is the result of changes in the way
that the brain processes information.
By studying these physical changes,
it's hoped new light will be shed on the workings of the whole brain.
Here, at Evelina London Children's Hospital,
a team from King's College London are looking at
brain development in babies, using MRI scanners.
Hello, my name is Anna, I'm one of the radiographers, OK?
Even before they're born.
I've never seen an MRI of a foetus.
That is amazing. It is amazing.
It is absolutely astonishing.
I mean, what's really amazing about it,
it's relatively easy to get one quick flash through a scan
but collecting all of the slices
to make a three-dimensional reconstruction is the hard bit.
This is a 3-D model made from one of the images of a baby who is about
three months early. And as you can see, it's very small.
It's very smooth, it's very underdeveloped.
It has a lot more growing to do.
And this is the baby who's about term,
and the growth that has to happen
between there and there is phenomenal.
As the brain grows, more and more connections are made inside.
And the team is able to identify that wiring
using two kinds of MRI scanning.
I have to say, I'm still blown away by those images.
I don't know what I was expecting,
but I wasn't expecting something as clear as that.
I think, to be honest, we're blown away by the images.
Once the MRI data is processed,
it's translated into a basic map of connections,
showing which parts of a baby's brain can talk to each other.
These are much better than the images we used to get in the past.
And the information content has gone up massively.
At birth, the brain already has about 100 billion neurons.
And each one is connected to thousands of others.
So the brain's wiring diagram is enormously complex.
Nonetheless, researchers have started to decipher it.
The resulting map is called the connectome.
And while everyone's individual connectome is unique,
the hope is the average data will give us useful information
about how all our brains work.
So, one of the major uses for this is to define the connectome.
Now, we obviously can't have all the connections in the brain because
we're not looking at single nerve fibres.
But we can get a pretty good idea of what that connection map would be.
I think of it as being a bit like the Tube map of London.
You can't find an individual road on the Tube map but you can find your
way round London on it.
Connectome studies around the world are gathering data
in a bid to understand a whole range of mental health conditions
and brain disorders.
There's autism and ADHD at the beginning of life.
Then psychoses like schizophrenia.
Finally, as the level of connectivity deteriorates
in the ageing brain, dementia.
I do think that mapping the connectome
could be the next big thing in our understanding of the brain.
And that's important, not just because
it will increase our knowledge of a normal brain,
but it could also lead to better treatments when things go wrong.
And now to our national obsession - the weather.
We live, so we're told, in dangerous times.
Planet Earth is getting hotter and that is going to change our climate,
and there is a lot of data around this point.
So here, for instance,
is a map of what's happened around the world in the last 130 years,
compared to an average in the middle of the 20th century.
And as you're in the sort of '20s and '30s you can see a lot of blue
and white on this map, the odd splodge of orange
comes in every now and then.
But, as time rolls on and we get closer to now,
these orange splodges end up connecting to each other
and we see some red coming in, in the north up there.
Now, this effect actually is very extreme.
2016, for instance,
was the hottest year on record that the Earth has ever had.
But what about if we go a bit further back in time?
So this graph here shows you the global temperature
for the last 11,000 years.
Now it's certainly true that we have had
changes in temperature before.
There's an ice age just here, a little hot patch just there,
about the same as we have now.
Another little mini ice age just there.
But what is important about this graph
is this section that we have just over here.
Because this here,
isn't a little flag pointing downwards to the data,
this line IS the data.
The changes that we've seen in global temperature recently
are so quick and so dramatic
that on this graph of 11,000 years,
it looks like a straight line going upwards.
And in fact, if this trend continues,
we expect to see the global temperature ending up looking
something like this as we move forward in time.
But the trouble is that we have heard a lot of this before.
And nothing really seems to change.
It doesn't feel like it's getting any warmer.
But there are some people out there who have already noticed the changes
that global warming is having, literally in their own backyard.
And weatherman Peter Gibbs is one of them.
Gardeners are ruled by the seasons, that annual cycle of sowing,
growing and harvesting.
But global warming has put a spanner in the works,
because spring now arrives
a few days earlier with every passing decade.
For a start, that means I need to start
mowing the lawn earlier in the year.
And while I used to retire the mower for the winter in, say,
late September, it's now not unusual to
cut the grass as late as November.
The growing season is the best part of six weeks longer
than it was before climate change kicked in.
Which is great if you want to grow grapes.
I'm getting a decent crop most years now.
Problem is, because it's all developing so much earlier
in the spring, that extends, surprisingly,
the season over which these little baby grapes
can actually be hit by a rogue frost.
The effects of climate change are frustratingly complicated.
It varies from one kind of plant to the next.
In winter, apple trees and blackcurrant bushes are dormant,
storing up energy reserves for the spring.
But as British winters get steadily warmer,
that chilling time will be cut short,
resulting in poor flowering and a lack of fruit.
The effects of climate change are already pretty apparent,
and that's with just a one-degree rise in temperature.
Trouble is, temperatures are expected to keep on rising.
If and when that happens, the impact will be even more dramatic.
Higher temperatures mean melting ice.
And here is what has been happening to Arctic sea ice since 1980.
It's been reducing at the rate of 13% per decade.
It's not just the sea ice, though.
Melting ice caps means rising sea levels, too.
And climate scientists have run some mathematical models to try and
predict what that will mean for us on land.
So, if all of Greenland melts, which admittedly would be quite dramatic,
but that would have a six metre change in the level of the sea.
And this is what Europe would look like as a result.
Holland - not looking great for Holland.
Norfolk also very badly hit.
And London too.
And over the other side of the Atlantic,
this is what would happen to Florida.
Quite a lot of it would end up being completely underwater,
including Cape Canaveral, just there.
You're going to need a new place to try and launch the rockets from.
But the big question is,
is our weather here in the UK going to be affected
by all of this in the future?
Now, I'm not a meteorologist, but happily Peter Gibbs, who is,
has rushed back from his garden to the BBC Weather Studio,
where he has prepared a weather forecast for 2050.
Hello, and welcome to Weather 2050.
Well, the usual floods and saturated ground that we saw during the winter
months are just a distant memory for most of us now,
as we see the familiar signs of
developing drought now that the summer heat has really kicked in.
And those temperatures are expected to build over the next few days,
so we'll all be cranking up the air-con, avoiding the daytime heat,
and struggling to sleep at night.
And that's certainly true in the south, where we'll hit 35 Celsius,
not unusual these days, of course.
We could well top 40 degrees in a few days' time.
A little bit more comfortable in the north,
thanks to patchy cloud and a breeze coming in from the sea.
But still, pretty humid.
Then eventually that heat will break down into scattered thunderstorms,
the warmer atmosphere of course able to hold more moisture these days,
so there will be some really intense downpours.
Probably won't too much for the droughts, though,
with the rain just running off the parched ground
and causing flash flooding.
So some disruption looks likely.
What you need to know about the weather of the future
is that we expect, on average,
the north to become warmer and wetter,
and in the south, hotter and drier.
But across the whole country,
weather patterns will become a lot more variable, with bigger extremes.
So whoever is doing the forecast then
will have a much more difficult job than I've had.
When it comes to the future of health care,
past triumphs give us good reason to be optimistic.
But what about the big C?
Now, a cure for cancer is something we'd all like to happen,
but how realistic a hope is that?
Well, in the year 2000,
Bill Clinton and Tony Blair announced a very big breakthrough.
We're here to celebrate the completion
of the first survey of the entire human genome.
Without a doubt, this is the most important,
most wondrous map ever produced by humankind.
Well, in just 50 years after the discovery of the structure of DNA,
teams from the US and the UK between them
had mapped all of the genes contained in us.
Now, the Human Genome Project, said Bill and Tony,
would cure all human suffering.
The blind would see, the lame would walk,
and cancers would be a thing of the past.
Well, Bill and Tony are now distant memories.
But what happened to the genome and its bid to end all suffering?
Geneticist Giles Yeo went to New York to find out.
Half of us will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in our lives.
The problem with cancer is that our body's defences
does not recognise it as a threat.
Our immune systems have evolved to distinguish between our
own bodies and those of foreign invaders,
such as bacteria and viruses.
But cancer is simply a mutated version of our own cells,
so it doesn't carry the typical characteristics
of an invading organism.
So our immune system doesn't recognise it, attack it and kill it.
In 2011, Karen was diagnosed with
a form of blood cancer called leukaemia.
It's caused by the uncontrolled production
of abnormal white blood cells.
Karen lived with the disease for three years.
But in 2014, she took a turn for the worse,
and was given two years to live.
That was brutal. Your brain is just going, "Oh, my God,
"now I have this nuclear bomb in my body.
"And it's going to kill me."
But Karen was offered a lifeline.
'In an experimental new treatment,
'Dr Michel Sadelain is able to hack the immune system
'and equip it with the ability to fight back.'
So in many cancers, as in Karen's cancer,
the immune system on its own is not capable of taking over the tumour.
It needs a little help.
Michel's target is a type of white blood cell called a T-cell.
These are the foot soldiers of the immune system,
whose purpose is to attack viruses and bacteria.
The first step was to collect some of Karen's T-cells.
And there a team of scientists and technicians
insert into those T-cells into a gene, a synthetic gene,
that provides this instruction to the T-cell which says,
"Recognise the cancer, seek it out and destroy it."
Michel used a virus to get the new gene into Karen's T-cells.
The T-cells were then infused back into Karen's bloodstream.
He's had some remarkable success with this technique.
The first clinical results showed a dramatic effect
in a majority of patients -
about 85% of these patients went into
what we call a complete remission.
Michel has treated about 100 patients using this technique.
Karen was one of the first.
Never did we expect what we were going to hear.
And he said, "There is no evidence of disease, you are cancer-free."
So what was it like to hear the doctor say, "You are cancer-free?"
It was unbelievable.
I still get... I obviously get emotional about it.
Because we didn't expect it.
For Karen, the results of the trial have been incredible.
I mean, they have saved her life.
But that's only half the story.
You know, because the technique doesn't always work,
and bespoke gene editing for every single patient,
it's just unrealistic.
It is expensive, it is complex, it is lengthy.
And patients have been known to die waiting
during the intervening period for their cells to be re-engineered.
The answer is a new technique called Crispr.
Crispr stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats,
which describes a property of bacterial DNA
that scientists have been able to exploit -
giving them, for the first time,
ultimate accuracy in gene editing.
What Crispr gives you is a pair of tweezers for you to be
able to place the DNA anywhere you want in any cell.
This new-found precision allows Michel to fix a fundamental problem.
The problem in taking someone else's T-cells is that those T-cells will
attack you. Because they will sense that, "It's not my body,
"it's not my molecules, I have to go on the attack."
So what Crispr Cas9 makes possible is the removal of those molecules
that initiate that attack.
It means that T-cells could be provided by a donor,
and can be genetically engineered to only attack the cancer.
From one donor,
you could make cells that could be administered to multiple recipients.
These cells would then be ready, and in pharmacies.
And now, we preserve them.
We may someday have pharmacies of T-cells, frozen vials of T-cells,
ready-made, ready for injection.
So there's the living drug.
Fast asleep in liquid nitrogen.
That's fantastic.
And this would make this form of therapy
accessible to many more individuals.
Donor T-cells have yet to be trialled in humans.
But the idea offers hope that in the future,
many more people could be treated.
We are now entering an unprecedented era of progress for gene therapy.
And we're not just talking about cancer,
because Crispr is now being used to treat muscular dystrophy,
and it's being talked about as an alternative to antibiotics.
What you need to know about the future is
that the Human Genome Project
may finally be delivering on its promise
to revolutionise the way we treat disease.
And now, work.
What will you be doing as a job in the future?
Well, 50 years ago, the world of work was pretty easy to understand.
You either did manual work,
which basically meant supervising machines.
Or you worked in an office,
which basically meant doing a lot of typing,
or getting somebody else to do a lot of typing for you.
Bottom line, people were integral to the workforce.
But no more.
Because, in the 1970s, machines got clever.
Car plants were filled with robots,
helplines were answered by computers,
and almost all bank clerks became extinct.
But I suspect that most of you are saying,
"Well, a robot couldn't possibly take my job."
But are you sure?
Have a look at this.
We sent Dr Zoe Williams to check out
a piece of software which is rumoured
to diagnose illnesses faster and more accurately
than human medical professionals.
So, should I be worried, as a GP?
The thought that a robot or artificial intelligence
could take my job just seems crazy.
I mean, I've spent six years at medical school,
ten years practising as a doctor.
Now, surely all of that can't be boiled down to a few lines of code?
Babylon Health are a medical tech company.
They've just received 60 million of funding
to develop an AI doctor.
The system works by asking questions.
But anyone can ask questions.
If it's going to replace me,
I really want to put it through its paces.
I'm going to pose as a patient and give myself an imaginary condition.
But I'm not going to tell anybody, I'm just going to write it down.
And then we can see just how accurate the machine really is.
May I ask, please, what's troubling you today?
I'm feeling tired all the time.
So, as well as feeling tired, I've been feeling kind of weak.
Let's tell the computer that.
And I've also been feeling...
a bit of dizziness.
Is it OK to ask, "Do you have painful periods?"
There we go, that's better.
Painful periods as well.
Do you get breathless on exertion?
Yes, I do!
Thanks, I've noted this.
So, I've given the computer all of my symptoms now.
And it's come up with a diagnosis.
So, let's see if it's correct.
Here's my bit of paper from earlier.
And you can see that I have put down fibroids.
And the computer has said uterine leiomyoma,
which is actually the same thing.
That's impressive.
But how is it done?
Time to face down the evil genius
hell-bent on replacing me with my laptop.
So, you start off with a knowledge base.
And this is essentially a medical database which contains hundreds of
millions of medical concepts.
That's kind of like being at medical school and all the knowledge that is
inputted into the brain.
Exactly, so this might be all of the textbooks which you've read at
medical school, all of the papers which you've read at medical school,
and then applied to all of that information
we'll apply a set of methods known as machine-learning methods.
Machine learning is the ability of computers
to take vast amounts of data and make sense of it themselves.
Like this network of medical information,
which the computer uses to make a diagnosis.
What these circles represent are diseases,
symptoms and risk factors. OK.
And what those lines represent are the relationships between those.
So, based on that,
the computer has taught itself actually how strongly related those
diseases, symptoms and risk factors are.
OK, so that's how it determines
the probability is from looking at past real-life cases?
Absolutely, and that's why this is machine learning.
As the network learns about more and more symptoms and diseases,
it's tested and refined by a team of doctors and programmers.
It's early days,
but the company sees a big future for their virtual medic.
We want to do with health care what, say, Google did with information.
It'll be in your phone, it'll be in the devices you carry with you.
Do you think that a machine could ever replace my role as a GP?
I don't think this is a competition between machines and humans.
This is machines being an aid to humans.
Half of the world's population has no access or very,
very little access to doctors.
Right? Imagine if you could see so many more because the machines do
the easier part, they save your time.
But can a machine put its hand on your shoulder and say, "Trust me,
"I'll look after you?" That's a different story.
It's not just in medicine that software's on the march.
In banking, AI is approving or not approving loan applications.
And even making investment decisions.
And, with autonomous vehicles on the horizon,
many who drive for a living will soon be superseded.
What you need to know about the future
is that no job is immune from the influence
of artificial intelligence.
If it doesn't take your job,
then it's likely to change the way in which you do it.
Now, whenever we think about the future,
however outlandish we imagine our housing,
our transport or our gadgets to be,
one thing that we never seem to question is that
there will always be a constant supply of electricity.
But if you look at the data, that's not necessarily a safe assumption.
So here is what's been happening in the UK
over the last 100 years or so.
And in the 20th century,
we've become very dependent on fossil fuels.
So you can see coal here in purple,
gas in blue coming in slightly later,
and then a bit of oil there throughout.
Now, there's a bit of nuclear there in red,
which has stayed pretty constant over time.
And some renewables coming in much later in green.
But the main story from this graph
is that we are very dependent on fossil fuels to heat our homes,
provide our transport and to generate our electricity.
Now, if you look at the picture globally,
the demand has been steadily increasing over time.
So you can see a little blip here for the 2008 financial crisis.
But generally speaking, the trend has been upwards.
And if this trend continues, then over the next 50 years,
we can expect the demand for energy consumption to increase by 48%.
But the trouble is, burning fossil fuels is pretty bad for the planet.
And in any case, we're going to run out of oil at some point anyway.
So the question is, how do we keep the lights on
while helping to save the planet?
So, we sent physicist Helen Czerski
to a place where they've already done it.
I'm in Norway, and this stunning country
is one of the world's biggest producers of renewable energy.
Almost all of their electricity comes from hydropower.
And government incentives mean that electric vehicles like this one are
becoming more and more common.
Relying on hydropower is fine if
you've got plenty of mountains and lakes.
But what about the rest of the world?
In the UK, just under half of our renewable energy
comes from wind turbines. But in spite of that,
wind energy only contributes 11% of our total electricity generation.
Part of the problem is finding enough places with strong winds.
But perhaps there are some other opportunities.
This is data from the University of Reading
showing typical wind speeds in this area.
And you can see that down here near the ground,
the wind speeds are almost always really low.
But as you go up, the wind speeds go right up.
And what that suggests is that if you are serious about wind energy,
the place to be might not be down here,
or even up on that hilltop up there.
It's up there.
That's exactly what engineer Dr Lode Carnel is doing
with this tiny plane he calls kitemill.
Kitemill is designed to fly in the high-altitude winds.
The force of the wind will cause it to pull on the tether,
and that generates electricity.
So, the tether's out, the kite's been assembled,
and it's ready to launch.
So the next step is to get it up into the air.
Here we go!
It's tiny in the sky.
It looks so, so small.
The idea that that could generate any energy at all
is really quite weird.
And it's fast, wow! Look at that!
So, the kite's up in the sky and it's doing two things.
It's either sitting flat, or it's going round and round in circles.
What are the circles about?
Yes, so when the system is located on the ground,
we need to take it up to a certain altitude,
and then it will fly in a circle, a pattern that we now see,
during which it can produce electricity.
Once the plane is high enough,
it glides upwards into a corkscrew pattern,
pulling on the tether.
So, here we have the ground station where we generate the energy.
You have the drum, where the tether is wound around.
But it is connected directly to a
motor or a generator, which is on the back.
So, when we wind off, the motor turns in one direction
and produces energy.
And so how much energy is this generating at the moment?
Two kilowatts roughly now,
which is roughly the consumption of one family in the UK.
Our next model has a capacity of 30 kilowatts.
That can power automatically 20 families in the UK.
However, this is not the end.
We need to scale up.
We want to produce energy with the lowest possible cost.
So then we are talking 500 kilowatts,
and that will be sufficient to power 300-400 families in the UK.
Once it reaches the end of its tether,
5% of the energy it's generated is used to reel it back in,
and the process starts again.
The plan is for the plane to stay up indefinitely, but this test is over,
so the plane is brought back in to land.
It's hard to imagine it working in the airspace
above our already crowded cities.
But it could have advantages in remote locations
and in developing countries.
And you can put it in places where you can't put a wind turbine.
That's important, isn't it?
This can extract energy from places
that are not accessible at the moment.
Correct, places where there is for example low wind speeds close to the
ground, but higher wind speeds at higher altitudes could use this
technology. Also, it's quite movable.
It's a flexible technology, so one truck can come,
and you can install everything.
Contrary to windmills,
where you need a lot of infrastructure and so on.
Kitemill alone isn't the answer to our energy crisis.
Power will have to come from a range of renewable sources.
I'm optimistic about the future
because I see lots of new technologies
like kitemill coming along,
each appropriate at a specific place or in a specific time.
And together, these are the building blocks
that will let us design a much more sophisticated energy future.
A lot of people look to science fiction
for a steer on what's going to happen in the future.
And if sci-fi tells us one thing,
it's that the future is littered with cyborgs.
Now, the idea of some kind of human-machine hybrid is certainly an
interesting one, and it's been explored in a number of different TV
programmes, from Six Million Dollar Man
all the way through to Star Trek.
But so far, the reality hasn't quite managed
to measure up for most of us.
Now, is that a relief, or an opportunity missed?
My name is James Young.
And I am a cyborg.
OK, and relax.
Terrible.
Taking a load off here.
Just over five years ago, I lost an arm and a leg in a train accident.
While I was coming to terms with the loss of my arm,
I won a competition to have something different made.
Yeah.
It's not great!
It was created to be more of an art piece,
so it was like a prototype from the day it was made.
It's got the lights that work and the hand...
four of the digits work on the hand, so it's kind of like...
it's trying, it's trying its best,
but it's not in tiptop condition, basically.
My brief taste of being a cyborg has left me wanting more.
I'm now looking at prostheses that attach
directly to my skeleton and nervous system.
If I can replace my old abilities,
then can I go a step further and gain new ones?
The idea of expanding my abilities beyond
the human baseline is something that really, really intrigues me.
And because I almost studied cybernetics when I was considering
university, and it's a field that
everybody's kind of thinking about now,
because you get Elon Musk starting up initiatives to find, like,
a neural lace that would enhance human abilities
to kind of compete with AI and computing.
If you're really serious about becoming a cyborg,
tapping into the brain is the way you have to go.
There's been a lot of research into this.
Some brains have already been linked to a variety of devices in a bid to
help people with disabilities.
But I'm going to meet someone
who's hacked their brain in a different way.
At age 11, Neil Harbisson was diagnosed with
a condition called achromatopsia.
A form of total colour blindness,
meaning Neil has only ever seen in grayscale.
But in 2003, as part of an art project,
Neil found a new way to perceive colour.
By integrating technology into his skull.
He can now hear colour.
Could you explain how your antenna works front to back?
What's it... Well, I thought that I should have a new body part,
a new sensory organ, specifically for colour perception.
So the light frequency goes inside the antenna,
and then it touches a chip inside my bone that vibrates,
so these vibrations in my head create inner sounds,
so I can hear different notes for different colours.
We created an app that tries to mimic
the sounds that I hear for each colour. So you'll notice...
This is the sound of yellow.
Cool.
So it's kind of like... Pink is a higher frequency.
A frequency shift.
This is the sound of my jacket.
So I'm wearing electronic music!
So, with your antenna, is it kind of like when you have a new watch and
you have to become used to
the weight and feel of it when you're moving around?
I'm not using or wearing technology - I am technology.
So that's the difference.
I guess it's... I can't compare it with anything else,
because it's part of my skeleton.
Meeting Neil has given me an insight into what it might be like to have
genuine cyborg abilities.
What has it been like, you being in the public with your extra sense?
Some children ask me if it was some kind of extendable selfie stick!
And since last year, people just shout at me, Pokemon,
and they try to catch me!
So it changes, what people think it is.
Cyborgs are already amongst us, but it's not for everybody just yet.
So, for now, maybe it's kind of up to people like Neil and I,
who want to augment our bodies, to push the envelope.
Next up, nature.
Now, we all love nature,
and we know this because of the vast audiences that
BBC's Natural History Department gets, and also the fact that
David Attenborough is now Sir David Attenborough.
But, as much as we all claim to love the natural world,
apparently it is vanishing before our eyes.
If you have a little look at this graph here,
this is what has been happening to vertebrate populations from 1970 all
the way up to now. Now, this group,
they track the populations of almost 4,000 different species,
and come up with a score to say how well they are doing.
It turns out, not great.
Both the number of species
and the number of animals is in steady decline.
On land, there has been a 38% decrease in animal numbers.
In the sea, there has been a 36% decrease.
And worst of all, in freshwater,
there has been a huge 81% drop in population numbers.
And we can see from this graph that if this trend continues,
by 2020 we can expect to see a 67% drop based on what we had in 1970.
So, to find out if this really is as bad as it sounds,
evolutionary geneticist, writer and Renaissance man,
my very good friend Dr Adam Rutherford
is here to help us with the science.
Adam, we've been here before.
There have been extinctions before, right?
Yes, there have. In fact, over the last billion years or so,
the evolutionary trajectory of life on Earth,
extinction is completely the normal state of affairs.
I've got my own graph here.
If you look at the last 542 million years,
what this shows is extinction rates over that time period.
And there are five big peaks.
So there have been five great extinction events.
Everyone knows about the one that happened 66 million years ago,
it is called the K-Pg boundary,
and that was when a meteor dropped out of the sky.
The dinosaurs. It did for the dinosaurs.
But also, 75% of all species on land and in the sea.
And that's not even the big one.
The big one is called the Great Dying, or the P-T boundary,
and that happens 252 million years ago.
95% of all species go extinct.
So, what's so different about this one?
The timescale is what's different.
So, the full extent of the Great Dying
really pans out over a million or two million years.
The dinosaur one, 66 million years.
We find dinosaurs 10,000 years after that happened.
What you just said was, 67% of species
will be lost since the 1970s.
If this is the start of another mass extinction,
its speed means that ecosystems and food chains will break down
catastrophically.
For some species, it is already too late.
Human activity means that coming generations
will never see a live white rhino or a Sumatran orangutan.
But what's worse is the potential impact
of losing less charismatic wildlife.
In the sea, rising temperatures have already disrupted
the food chain by killing coral.
And if the predicted further rises occur,
Asian seagrass could go extinct within 50 years,
causing the collapse of the entire
marine ecosystem in that part of the world.
In the future, our children will
almost certainly see less diversity of animals.
But unchecked, these changes also mean that
they themselves could be facing much more serious problems.
And as humans, are we immune to this?
No, absolutely not.
We are special, but we are living on this planet.
And what we are doing is removing the ability for us to live on this
planet whilst letting many, many species go extinct.
And I think the key thing is to recognise that we have created this
situation, and we also have the power to stop it.
Flying cars - there you go, I've said it.
Well, it wouldn't be a programme
about the future if someone didn't mention them.
But, let's be honest, they certainly would be pretty handy,
because our love of earthbound cars
has seen a steady increase in how many cars
there now are on the roads.
This graph here shows you how far we travel in motor vehicles since 1949.
And you can see here that car journeys, in red,
really have become all-conquering.
We're travelling a lot further, and we're doing it in cars.
And that makes the experience of actually driving them
a lot less appealing.
In fact, the average speed of traffic in central London
is now 7.3mph.
Basically, you'd be better off on a horse.
Now, we need to travel faster.
And dynamicist Teena Gade, who works
for Formula 1 team Sahara Force India,
she knows all about travelling quickly.
And she has been looking at, well,
there's no other way to put this, really - flying cars.
The worst thing about city driving is the traffic.
I think we're probably doing five, maybe 10mph, if that.
Right now, if my car could fly,
I'd take off and I'd jump this long queue of people in front of me
and be at my destination in no time.
History is littered with attempts at the fabled flying car.
Most of them hard to take seriously.
And moving it around is a job for a secretary
rather than a highly skilled and highly expensive helicopter pilot.
But prototypes for personal flying machines
have started to appear once again.
This time with serious financial backing.
I would absolutely love a personal flying car.
I think that would be absolutely fantastic.
Imagine going to work every day
and not having to sit in the traffic queues.
It might not be a good idea, though,
for everyone to have their own personal flying machine.
As I'm showing here, occasionally I can keep control of it,
but some of the time I'm not doing a very good job.
Right, that's it down. I'm just going to go and get it.
So, if we're all going to buzz around our cities in personal flying
machines, how do we keep from crashing into each other?
To find out, I've come to Zurich to meet robotics expert
Professor Raffaello D'Andrea.
He developed the Kiva robot system.
A network of thousands of bots
that work together to fulfil online orders.
This is basically a very large warehouse
where orders come in and they need to be fulfilled.
So, the system figures out which robots need to go to which pods,
pick it up and bring it to the perimeter of the warehouse,
where then people take things off of the pods
and put them into the orders which eventually go out.
There's a lot of robots in action here.
How come they don't collide?
The robots have to generate trajectories and plans.
And those plans are then shared to a coordinator,
which then figures out how they should go and execute their plan
so that they don't hit each other.
And with over 80,000 in operation,
the Kiva bots are the largest network of
autonomous vehicles in the world.
And so far, there haven't been any accidents.
If only something similar could be done with flying machines.
Oh, wow! That's incredible.
So what do we have here?
A swarm of 32 of these flying machines.
And they're going to do a little choreographed performance.
'This is more like it.'
What they are doing right now is a choreography
that is pre-programmed,
and ensures that they do not collide with each other.
So, what's in one of these?
How are these made? They have four motors for propellers.
They have a cage to keep the propellers
away from other vehicles
and from people, and they have some custom electronics
that creates all the magic and intelligence.
And now, we just move out of the way.
Oh, they're coming in to land. If I put my hand out...
I can catch one! Exactly.
So, if you could have this level of automation and planning in personal
flying machines, then perhaps they could become a reality.
How would that lead us to, for example, a transport system?
Well, so, what they would share with a transport system is the use of a
global positioning system.
We've developed an indoor global positioning system,
just like the one that exists outdoors.
And this is important, because then the vehicles
know where they are in space.
How it would differ is that the choreographies,
the trajectories wouldn't be preplanned.
The system is going to have to be much more reactive
when people want to fly from point A to point B.
Is this now setting us up for having our own personal flying machines?
I think we've certainly come a long way.
We can make flying machines that can do vertical take-off and landing,
fully electric, which has its own benefits.
I think that we will, in the near future.
Could this be the aerial highway of the future in miniature?
These drones were designed to perform at live events.
But they offer a glimpse into
what the cities of the future might look like.
Many of the big questions around safety
can be answered with current tech.
So what you need to know about the future of transport is
we may finally get our flying cars.
Making predictions about the future is a pretty risky business.
And many people have come unstuck in the past.
But I'm pretty confident that most
of what we've covered in this programme will actually happen.
But I'm also confident of something else.
The tenth thing that you need to know about the future
is that there will be many other developments
that none of us have even thought of.
Because, although Arthur C Clarke may have predicted
universal mobile communication,
even he would have been surprised that we now carry around
with us a little hand-held device that contains a typewriter,
a camera, a postbox, a television, a calculator, a calendar, a light,
a record player, a tape recorder, and not forgetting a telephone.
And that, for me at least,
is a lot cleverer and certainly a lot cleaner than a genetically
engineered monkey servant.
To find out more about the innovations that are changing
our health, our leisure and our work,
and will continue to shape our future,
go to bbc.co.uk/horizon and follow the Open University link.