Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

We have an aging population and many places have a flat birthrate. We need to solve how to deal with this consequences.<p>Who will care for these people? How will we deal with the consequences of flat population growth? How will we deal with the stock market&#x27;s expectations of perpetual growth when the underlying population itself is not growing (and especially since productivity has also been relatively flat)?

The UN has identified 17 sustainable development goals (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sdgs.un.org&#x2F;goals" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sdgs.un.org&#x2F;goals</a>) and the AI for good Global Summit <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aiforgood.itu.int&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aiforgood.itu.int&#x2F;</a> (which was held last week) focused on exactly that.<p>If you check the recordings, some sessions were directly focused on connecting problem experts, data access, computing resources and people with skills or idea or passion. The opportunities span from students or researchers, up to what will take innovative companies or bigtech to solve, or government and international organizations.<p>It was also the place were a lot of discussions about AI regulation took place. The discussions and the decisions that will follow from that meeting will shape the world to come IMHO.

The biggest problem domain worth pursuing is figuring out fusion. If we can unlock what is effectively limitless power a lot of problems become far more tractable. Everything else is a distraction. We need cheaper and more available power.<p>Every physicist and engineer in the world should probably try dedicating at least one or two month of their life to figuring out fusion.<p>If humanity could pay a trillion dollars to instantly unlock fusion it would still be considered a bargain. And yet we don&#x27;t treat research into that field as something with such a potentially massive impact.

Unpopular opinion: One of the biggest challenges facing humanity in the next 2 decades is avoiding a catastrophic &quot;Great Simplification&quot; as we run out of oil. If this were allowed to happen, we&#x27;d suddenly be unable to practice industrial scale agriculture, and I&#x27;d estimate 90% of humanity would starve to death.<p>The US produces large amounts of oil via fracking, which requires more resources to drill and produce than previous methods. At the same time, the wells tend to decline at 40% per year. These wells are making up a larger percentage of our fossil fuel production as time goes by. At some point the energy and resources required to drill a well will match the possible production, and new wells won&#x27;t make sense, leading to collapse.<p>Without fossil fuels for transportation, and especially as chemical feedstock to creating fertilizers, food shortages would quickly appear world-wide.<p>We need to transition away from fossil fuels to avoid this fate. In doing so, we&#x27;ll also help reduce, and perhaps eliminate the addition of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, which is a far more immediate concern in the minds of many.

Unpopular opinion: Secure general purpose computing isn&#x27;t available for the masses. In fact, most people here on HN don&#x27;t have access to it either. Our current crop of widely used operating systems all share the same flaw, the ambient authority granted to any program that is run to access anything that the user account is permitted to access.<p>This causes a host of problems, and almost nobody is aware of them, or incorrectly assigns them to other causes. This results in a patchwork of &quot;solutions&quot; like virus scanners, signatures on executables, and a need for users to be exceedingly cautious about what they do with their computers. Because of this need for caution, users don&#x27;t feel free to experiment with novel programs or web sites, lest their computer be infected with malware, etc.<p>Imagine your house without circuit breakers, or fuses. Imagine that there were no widespread use of them. The first shorted cord could potentially take down the power grid, and plunge millions into darkness. We can generally agree that circuit protection is a good idea.<p>When you run a program, you could explicitly specify the resources it is to have access to, instead of giving access to all of your files and folders. In fact, it doesn&#x27;t even have to work differently in many cases, just replace the calls to file selection dialogs with equivalent calls to &quot;power boxes&quot; which return file access capabilities for the calling program. This allows the user to quickly and easily work in the manner to which they are accustomed, while simultaneously preventing malicious or just buggy code from accessing anything outside of the wishes of the user, no matter how evil the code is.<p>Spreading awareness of such systems, incorporating capability based security, is a worthy pursuit over the next decade.

Renewable power production is wasted due to curtailment.[1] All this free power is being wasted, which could be used to charge cars. The US has 2 billion parking lots, 290 million cars and cars are idle 23+ hours every day. All we need is a cable from nearest building to parking lot to charge electric cars. The technology exists.<p>This is a win-win opportunity, accelerate renewables and wean off of fossil fuels. I&#x27;m working with middle&#x2F;high school kids on improving charging: HOA managed parks (a LOT of them), parks, schools, utility poles, apartment garages, all new construction ready for EVs (residential, retail and commercial).<p>curtailment is the deliberate reduction in output below what could have been produced in order to balance energy supply: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Curtailment_(electricity)" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Curtailment_(electricity)</a>

Government.<p>Someone threw in the rise of authoritarianism. The issue is much broader. It&#x27;s one of efficiency; understanding and respect of technology and science (past, current and potential); influence of religions, mobs and fads (including scientific fads and mobs); understanding and respect for economics (mostly taken as a joke and molded to other obsessions); understanding and respect for time scale including the power of engineering at scale (as opposed to the next election or coup).<p>In general humanity has tremendous resources and potential power - and makes sad and shitty use of it. Yes, different people have different ideas on what is the right thing to do, but that&#x27;s where the problem is. We need to become more effective at sorting that out. It&#x27;s hopefully not simply a question of &quot;enlightened authoritarianism can do it&quot;. This all deserves work and progress and our systems are dated and don&#x27;t seem to be progressing currently (I mean over the past 20 years).<p>And corruption (in broad terms, not just money), and alignment, etc, etc.

The animals and ecosystems wide scale extinction seems to be a major threat I think. It’s something people don’t seem to notice much as it isn’t in the news constantly, but 60% of wild life disappearing in the last 70 years seems like a disaster snowball that is growing fast.<p>I think this is the threat that will be largely ignored, and because it is purposely ignored it will keep growing in the background until it takes us all down as a storm of natural disasters.

As much as we are all about laissez-faire when it comes to dating and romance - I think we’re getting to a point that might cause some real strife in the western world. Seeing 60%+ of young men be single when only 30% of young women are single - it’s… worrying.<p>There’s no simple solution when we’ve become such an atomized society and so hyper individualistic. It’s a problem that we rarely care about as well. As soon as someone is no longer alone, they no longer care about this problem that society is going through. As long as the majority of people are getting together (even if it’s a slim majority), nothing will be done.<p>I think the fall of romantic relationships is a contributor to society becoming more individualistic. I’m not worried about birth rates like everyone else. I’m worried about our happiness.<p>Being single and alone and without any intimacy is a very unenjoyable existence for most people - and I don’t think there’s ever going to be a cure for it other than to be with someone who loves you.

Fundamentally we have only 1 problem worth solving: how to support 11bn people sustainably and equitably by 2050 (that&#x27;s when the population peaks and levels out).<p>you can do a Wardley map that shows the needs of those people, then you can move down the chain of needs, until you find something you&#x27;re apt to solve.<p>Personally I&#x27;m working on reducing eWaste by providing a global solution to carrying multiple mobile phones as many people do this for work.

Climate change is a problem.<p>Bret Victor did a good subdivision into sub-problems for a technologist here - which probably suits this audience:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;worrydream.com&#x2F;ClimateChange" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;worrydream.com&#x2F;ClimateChange</a>

A lot of a billionaires which:<p>1. Exist<p>2. Actively making us not noticing their existance by shitting us with some fake problems like gays, drugs, foreigners, terrorists, etc (different set of fake problems per country).

Some things I&#x27;d love to work on if I could make it work.<p>1. Food: Current farming practices emit a lot of CO2, hurts local ecosystems (nitrogen runoff), and consumes a lot of water&#x2F;fertilizer. Currently proven methods could fix many of these problems.<p>2. Housing: Bringing modern technology to the construction of homes&#x2F;apartments could dramatically lower costs. Kit homes are an example where only focusing on the tech and not the zoning&#x2F;social issues doesn&#x27;t improve the issues. I think realistically we could build a lot of high efficient, safe (much safer than codes require), and comfortable housing and drive down rental prices substantially while turning a huge profit (if you can sort out zoning).<p>3. Programming: Working in a large monorepo is amazing. Many people who work at a big tech company which has one will tell you about the amazing stuff you can do in this environment. Open source does not have one and most developers only ever see the multi-repo approach to software development. Building a parallel SWE-tooling stack which was &quot;the monorepo of $FAANG but open source&quot; would allow OSS devs to collaborate and build really cool things.<p>4. Compute: Non-profit compute infra for common good. Right now everyone is focused on decentralized apps and it&#x27;s possible these are just too complicated for end users (I certainly am confused but I don&#x27;t know if I&#x27;m just too old). If there was a not-profit-focused compute infra which gave out free compute&#x2F;bandwidth&#x2F;storage to open source public commons software that might be a good thing.

The world population is collapsing at a rapid pace.<p>Our economic growth is based on a growing productive population.<p>Our economic prosperity is based on a growing productive population.<p>Different parts of the world are dealing with population collapse.<p>Look at Japan, a xenophobic country facing population collapse. The total GDP has remain stagnant over the past 20 years.<p>Look at UAE, a country facing population collapse and acknowledging reality by handing our long-term residency permits to affulent immigrants, mostly Indian Hindus. They are even building the first Hindu temple in Islamic middle-east in Dubai!<p>Look at Africa, where the population growth combined with sectarian warfare is making for a troublesome living - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pudding.cool&#x2F;2018&#x2F;07&#x2F;airports&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pudding.cool&#x2F;2018&#x2F;07&#x2F;airports&#x2F;</a> South Africa is even regresssing. Rich businessman of Asian Indian origin who have lived for generations are already heading for UK&#x2F;Canada. And with them tax base would collapse like Uganda (90% tax revenue came from Asian Indians in Uganda in 1972 - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;world-africa-36132151" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;world-africa-36132151</a>).<p>Look at USA&#x2F;Canada&#x2F;Australia, all of them have low birth rate but compensate by being genuinely immigration friendly. They will grow while sucking even more productive population out of rest of the world.<p>The Europe would keep importing cheap labour (by choice) and welfare-loving immigrants from middle-east &amp; Africa (by virtue of proximity). And they would transform Europe, how they tranformed Lebanon - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=WubIe3c5NGc">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=WubIe3c5NGc</a>, further imagine how the voting blocks would look like when whites are rich &amp; old while non-whites are poor &amp; young. Why would they not demand higher taxation and lower welfare policies?<p>China would have same fate as Japan. Xenophobia with a collapsing population. China would appear a lot of more timid.<p>12,000 years ago, when sea levels rose, Tasmania lost connection to mainland Australia, and this lead to decline of knowledge and tools over time.<p>We might see the same in our world.<p>So, I believe population collapse is a huge problem.

Technology: (1) getting off “free” platforms aka adtech. (2) Software quality aka actually providing good software that is intuitive to use and does what people need.

The rise of authoritarianism. We need computing, banking, communication and other solutions that are more robust to governments and people generally that want to control what people can do. Decentralized (I don&#x27;t mean anything to do with crypto nonsense) and simplified methods are needed, e.g currently any nontrivial computer and internet use require relying on a bunch of parties that could quickly turn hostile.

As someone who grew up in the 1980s, I find very amusing how no one seems to be worried about the nuclear war. Even though NATO is de facto in a war against Russia and could face China as well soon.

Climate and the reason that nothing significant have been done regarding that in 40+ years.<p>Problems will not stop to appear while that is not solved. The whole system becomes fragile, and minor disturbances will become major ones.

Phone addiction. I know plenty of people that average 10+ hours a day of screen time. Teenagers are even worse. We have tons of worrying signs and for now we’re not doing anything about it. Unfortunately not a problem that’s easily solved and the algorithms are only getting better.

Climate change, environmental remediation, therapeutics solving for cancer and similar maladies.

A website or app that turns exactly this question into action.<p>This post will fade away in a day or two. However, there could be a place where the answers are condensed into targets to which all available information is added. Structures could form that provide education, information and resources which lead to answers and implementations.

Universal basic services. Food, clothing, shelter, education, safety, healthcare.

Here are a few that an organization would be able to work on right now according to the researchers at Charity Entrepeneurship. They might even take less than a decade to solve if things go well:<p>1. An organization that addresses antimicrobial resistance by advocating for better (pull) funding mechanisms to drive the development and responsible use of new antimicrobials.<p>2. An advocacy organization that promotes academic guidelines to restrict potentially harmful “dual-use” research.<p>3. A charity that rolls out dual HIV&#x2F;syphilis rapid diagnostic tests, penicillin, and training to antenatal clinics, to effectively tackle congenital syphilis at scale in low-and middle-income countries.<p>4. An organization that distributes Oral Rehydration Solution and zinc co-packages to effectively treat life-threatening diarrhea in under five year olds in low-and middle-income countries.<p>5. A charity that builds healthcare capacity to provide “Kangaroo Care”, an exceptionally simple and cost-effective treatment, to avert hundreds of thousands of newborn deaths each year in low-and middle-income countries.<p>6. An organization that aims to reduce stock-outs of contraceptives and other essential medicines by improving the way they are delivered and managed within public health facilities.<p>Source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.charityentrepreneurship.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;announcing-our-2023-charity-ideas-apply-now" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.charityentrepreneurship.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;announcing-our-...</a>

Soil. It&#x27;s more of a &quot;how do we get along of people on board to take 5-20 years to rebuild what they have or are near&quot;.<p>Soil scouts, with patches for an acre that sequestors x amount units of carbon, or another that rewards those that have y ppms of living microbes.<p>If someone could recruit, deploy messaging, and enable long term action, at a minimum it&#x27;d be symbolic. In tandem it could be hopeful, and with success could be valuable.<p>Part biology, part humint.<p>See: JADAM and Korean natural farming.

Outside of the &#x27;tech&#x27; realm: China&#x27;s path in International Relations.<p>The next decade is decisive for China&#x27;s future. She must make her moves soon or is very likely to be shut out of any path to hegemony for the century. What will be the response of the NATO+ countries to Chinese moves? Essentially, are we finally, for really-real-reals this time, going to see the &#x27;end of history&#x27;?

Reports released by IPCC and other organizations [0] indicate that we have 15 years to take drastic action on the environment. This tracks with the extremely accurate prediction from The Limits to Growth [1] published in 1972.<p><i>If we do not take action on climate _now_ then _nothing_ is going to matter.</i><p>We will enter into an irreversible feedback loop that causes human extinction, yet it won&#x27;t be apparent until it is literally on the doorstep for people to realize.<p>If you are not quitting your job and working to advance the existential threat of climate change and the main driver of the catastrophe (capitalism and perpetual growth) then you are wasting your (and your children&#x27;s) time.<p>An excellent book on what needs to be done is Less is More by Jason Hickel [2]. This is the <i>only</i> problem that matters since literally existence depends on solving it. The time for deep concern is over. Action is needed and it is needed now. Education, degrowth, reuse, technology. So put everything else aside or you are laboring (and living) for nothing.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;s41893-023-01157-x" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;s41893-023-01157-x</a><p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Limits_to_Growth" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Limits_to_Growth</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jasonhickel.org&#x2F;less-is-more" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jasonhickel.org&#x2F;less-is-more</a>

Grand problems for any decade until there are figured out.<p>- General artificial intelligence - being able to effectively model how the world works, and search for solutions in that model.<p>- Energy - nuclear fusion, cheap artificial photosynthesis, cheap solar such that we can have solar on almost every surface facing the sun.<p>- Molecular assembly - figure out how to custom program DNA from scratch to build what we need. Imagine building more efficient trees where it captures CO2 and sunlight into gasoline, or strong timber directly.<p>Each of these can go quite wrong if not developed with safety in mind.<p>I call it the Mind (intelligence), Body (molecular assembly), Energy (putting energy to work) problems.

Fake news and mass media control. And their effect destroying democracy

AI will upend the economy before we create skynet. All the people worried about AI destroying society are looking in the wrong direction: they think some evil AGI will somehow hack the nukes and kill us all, but we&#x27;ll kill each other over the increasingly scarce share of global wealth as our jobs are eliminated one by one.

Privacy, longevity, nutrition science, trust, deep space exploration.

Amazed not to see Biorisk in the comments.<p>A pandemic brought a ton of global infrastructure to it&#x27;s knees, and it could have been so much worse.<p>What if that happened again?

I’ve got a second grader and myself &amp; other parents are wondering how useful a public school education will be in 10 years when they are graduating

- Figuring out how to build resilient, long-lasting kinship structures capable of surviving reduced state and market capacity. This means comms platforms that are encrypted, easy to set up and use, decentralized, and safe.<p>- Novel food sources (we just had the four hottest days on record, in succession)<p>- Adversarial health care (e.g. getting an abortion in a dominionist state)

In vitro gametogenesis (IVG) and artificial wombs.

Actually unpopular opinion: Existential risk from AI.<p>I think people think &quot;AI is overhyped&quot; etc, but there is a difference between there being too many low value AI startups right now (a bubble) and whether a few top labs will produce an AI that threatens humanity.<p>Even if it&#x27;s a ten percent chance, it&#x27;s a huge problem that we need to address.

Plastic pollution

Reducing propaganda and breaking-up banking.

Javascript of course.

imho. with the perspective of 2023, there are only 2 major problems;<p>* (real) war<p>eg. &quot;large&quot; ones between superpowers ... not decimating goat-herders equipped with not much more than ak47 &amp; towels around their heads somewhere in the lesser developed areas of the planet.<p>* climate-change<p>eg. taming the resource-hunger of capitalism.

Addressing climate change and sustainability is crucial. Investing in renewable energy, promoting circular economy practices, and developing innovative solutions for waste management are worthwhile endeavors.

Rapid increases of health problems we haven&#x27;t dealt with for decades already that we need more information rapidly to figure out better solutions. Mast cell disorders are a good example here. Autoimmunity as well.

How to survive as a human race when AI takes over the world?

Finding compatibility between America’s gun rights and the growing mental health&#x2F;mass shooter problem.

Storing excess renewable energy, which means solving the hydrogen problem.<p>Emphasizing metabolic (mitochondrial) holistic health approaches in medicine.

Surely working on Carbon capture dwarfs anything else we could possibly be worried about?

The biggest threat is health. The whole world have become helpless in front of Corona. World class medical institution, labs, scientist, colleges were weeping like an orphaned child. Don&#x27;t think other than health. If we will remain, then we will think and work. For anything else human life needs.

Some of these? They&#x27;re not problems to be solved, they are dilemmas to suffer. Your ingenuity is not all-powerful and it&#x27;s about time someone knocked the &quot;software will eat the world&quot; ego trip out of this crowd.<p>Technology is not going to &quot;save&quot; humanity. It raised standards of living, and it created problems where previously there were none. This crowd has a habit of saying that technology is neutral, that the positive and negative consequences that come from it are people problems. Technology is a people problem, but besides that, they take the hypocritical stance of taking credit for the positive consequences of technology yet pushing the responsibility for negative consequences of technology onto individuals - individuals who <i>react</i> to emerging technology, not create it. Parents are supposed to limit a teen&#x27;s phone time to prevent addiction but only lip service is paid to disincentivizing the psyops that Big Tech use to create the addiction in the first place.<p>Swap your stats, trade a little intelligence for wisdom. How many times here have people brought out the could-vs-should quote, completely oblivious to the fact that <i>they</i> were the scientist fools, I&#x27;ve lost count.<p>The fascination with technological solutions and the marrow-deep, if well-hidden abhorrence of nature will kill us all, and sooner than many here think. How hot are the waters off Florida? How long is Arizona&#x27;s record breaking heatwave? How many floods did we have this week? You. Won&#x27;t. TeChNoLoGy. Your. Way. Out. Of. These. &quot;Problems&quot;.<p>Patterns hold, <i>until they don&#x27;t</i>. Population isn&#x27;t going to keep growing forever just because Malthus was wrong in his time. Progress isn&#x27;t guaranteed just because you wished really hard to santa that the singularity would happen in your lifetime. &quot;Humanity has never suffered an extinction event, so it never will&quot; is an abysmally stupid sentence that anyone here should be ashamed of unironically spewing from their mouths. Humanity also couldn&#x27;t harness nuclear power, <i>until suddenly it could</i>. On the existential threats humanity faces - as many here are so fond of sneering at AI-doomers, <i>reality isn&#x27;t fiction</i>, so we&#x27;re NOT guaranteed a plucky hero who clutches victory from the jaws of defeat, as the media that brought us Skynet would have you believe.<p>Making money the be-all end-all of business and then making business encroah on every other sphere of life is why standards of living are dropping, and every time you feed the beast with rent-based economies you make life worse. When you maximize profit, it comes at the cost of everything else, up to and including your life.<p>Growth isn&#x27;t infinite, except for the stupidity of hopium smokers here. Please explain how a planet made of finite mass and energy can keep GDP going up, up, up forever? Based in reality, please.<p>Limits - <i>they&#x27;re okay to have</i>. The obsession with breaking all limits, with <i>optimizing</i> for <i>maximum efficiency</i>, are biological edicts taken to an extreme too far to walk back from.<p>&quot;One of the more annoying and least explicable features of life in the 21st Century is our hubris in glibly assuming that because we have better technology, we are smarter, wiser, and more virtuous than our ancestors.&quot; (and also immune to the things that brought down civilizations in the past. History doesn&#x27;t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.)

Creating an open source graph of health symptoms, illnesses, medications etc. so that there can be statistical models &#x2F; AIs that do a valuable pre-assessment to inform clients and support doctors. If we had something like this, maybe risk factors for critical immune reactions on COVID vaccination would&#x27;ve been known earlier and that could&#x27;ve prevented unnecessary deaths.

Water and water rights.

It reads like this was both asked and answered by AIs.

Such a low effort post. What do you expect?

Survival. No &#x2F;s intended.

The Riemann hypothesis.

High interest rates

My wild-ass guesses of where the future is going and its associated problems:<p>I think we are going to see additional polarization in online discussion and we will continue to see this spill into the physical world as violence. This level of division has not been seen at this level in modern western societies. More people have taken on their political sports team as the very thing they identify with and their opposing team(s) have been painted as conspiratorial psychopaths, preventing discussion across the aisle from even happening at a meaningful level. In the US, we will see a clear bifurcation of states where any remaining purple states will solidify their leaning during the 2024 election and we won’t see this shift again in a meaningful way for at least a few election cycles.<p>We are going to see massive, non-collateralized debt defaults and financial companies will attempt to claw back that money, with those who continued to borrow above their means and were hit with variable APR that doubled or tripled interest on their accounts, minimum payments go up, and it becomes unsustainable. We will see a 50% rise in bankruptcies over the next 18 months and a 100-200% increase over the next 5 years. Student loan default will be rampant as payment of these loans will become due again in October, destroying any hope of credit access in the near future to these people. Banks will foreclose but not be have the bandwidth to repossess all the property, leaving empty shells of neighborhoods. The labor market will sharply flip in favor of the employers and labor will lose a lot of bargaining power or other gains received over the last few years. Rent will go up, private equity will buy houses for cheap, mortgage rates will stay just under 10%.<p>China’s one child policy that began 40 years ago is starting to be felt, with only half as many people at their full earning potential (30s-40s) trying to support an aging population. The bottom has fallen out of their labor force, the CCP’s grip on the people is becoming tighter, but one day they are going to flip the light switch in their home and will be without power. Their strong, centralized government will falter and diminish or outright just fail, the north China plateau will revert to its wasteland type state, formerly propped up by will of the government. Tianjin will be the only city to survive and will receive the majority of refugees from the northern areas. Tianjin, Shanghai and Hong Kong&#x2F;Shenzhen will revert to city states and will self-govern. Fragmented China will become a huge consumer of global food as they will be incapable of growing their own, with the supply of nitrogen fertilizer and potash being clinched by the Russo-Ukraine war and reserves dwindling, global food shortages will be occur within the next two years.<p>Russia will continue sending every able bodied man into the nato-powered meat grinder of Ukraine until a proper overthrow of Putin occurs or they run out of people. This will create an absence of men in this generation which will be worse than their losses sustained during WWII. The vacuum of power within the hollowed-out Russia will not last long and I worry to think who will rise up as the next leader. Ukraine east of the Dnieper river will be mostly leveled by then, further exacerbating the food shortages. Ukraine will eventually join NATO, Russia will attempt to create the USSR 2.0 from mainly the west Asian countries.<p>We may be see a collapse of generalized globalization if the US Navy decides it’s not in its best interest to keep peace on the high seas causing insurance rates to skyrocket and shipping via international waters becomes a dangerous prospect. A lot of our production will move to Mexico where there is an educated and motivated population that is already producing goods of higher quality than China. Trade between the US-Canada-Mexico will become increasingly important due to access to both resources and labor that all 3 bring proped up by agreed upon free trade. This transition will be long and will come with challenges.<p>The EU will lose more membership and if Germany is unable to fully replace its energy needs, the EU as a whole will diminish. The Anglosphere may create its own free trade agreement, maybe even going so far to allow for free travel amongst the group (but this will be symbolic as very few counties share land boarders). This will create tensions with N. American free trade and Mexico, perhaps prompting Latin America counties into creating its own Schengen-type zone. America-Mexico relations will sour but the trade relations will be to solidified to do anything.

Fresh water

Xanax&#x2F;benzos are the most effective psych medicine, deserve to be over the counter, but can be fatally overdosed. All mental drugs and others such as chemotherapy need to be precisely targeted at limited part of an organ.<p>2030 4 high-NA EUV fabs will have 1.4 nano RiscV chips; rollable microLED; solid state battery. That&#x27;s still not paper thin all day phones.<p>1 passenger, only autopilot drones should transport snakebite victims in dangerous countries.