Back to the future: The abundance and scarcity of a remade 2056

Ami’s Coming of Age

23 April 2056: Gaia Day.  

Ami sets out early, joining her neighbours for the community coming-of-age celebration.

Her smart assistant tells her that 80 years ago a British scientist, James Lovelock, put forward the Gaia hypothesis. Named for the mother of all creation in Greek myth, it proposed that the Earth is a super-organism able to self-regulate. In 2031, and ravaged by repeated climate disasters, humanity designated a Gaia Day, on the day after Earth Day, to remember that humanity must treasure the planet and all its inhabitants.

“What was life 20 or 30 years ago?” wonders Ami, just turned 18. Late April is scorching hot and she’s wearing her temperature-controlled summer clothes. Her smart assistant interrupts: “There is a wildfire risk within 20 km. Please monitor for evacuation alerts.”

Through the window of the hydrogen-powered robobus, she can see the towering buildings of the city centre, all covered with various membranes – generating power, capturing carbon, dispersing heat – decorated with vertical gardens and climbing vines.

Many have been rebuilt to withstand floods and typhoons, and the lower floors are no longer residential. At the top they are connected by walkways and drone platforms. She’s even heard about smart disaster-resistant buildings which can change shape as needed, able to withstand even a tsunami.

What about the animals living by the sea, she wonders. How do they survive the storms without technology’s protection?

Why Li Yan? Li Yan has worked for more than two decades at the intersection of China’s environmental transformation and global climate politics. She led Greenpeace East Asia’s climate and energy work in China, participated in successive UN climate negotiations, and served as Greenpeace’s China chief representative from 2018 to 2022. Today, Li is executive director of the Abundant Climate Action Institute, founded in 2024 to explore new forms of Chinese climate action across innovative finance, green manufacturing and what it calls “new imagination.” Her recent work has deliberately brought climate policy into conversation with science fiction, storytelling and futures thinking, asking not only how societies decarbonise, but how people imagine the worlds they end up creating.

Her destination is an orchard, maintained jointly by several communities, including hers. It’s on a green hillside and cooler than the city. She can’t wait for the feast. Her city lies between mountains and sea, and with plenty of cheap clean power comes plenty of food. But she usually eats printed meat from the factories and the vegetables from the vertical farms. It’s cheap, but not particularly tasty.

Today she’ll be eating real food grown in real soil. True luxury! The climate crisis shrunk the quantity and quality of farmable soil. Restrictions on trading farmland had to be put in place and their community orchard was only given land as it is run for the common good. Ami savours every bite. Of the potatoes from the soil, rice from paddy, even an ice-cream cake, made with real milk.

Ami isn’t a fan of technology and screenwork. She hopes to go and live in the mountains. But her friend Xiao Jun is a big technology fan. He thinks it is needed to help restore the damage done to nature and he hopes to join the Gaia Intelligent Symbiotic System. This is an AI+geoscience megaproject which has taken shape over the past two decades. He wants to work maintaining the data nodes scattered all over the planet – in the skies, underground and even deep in the ocean.

Another friend, Motoko, turns up her nose. “Sticking around on Earth? Not for me. It’s too small!” She thinks humanity’s destiny lies in the stars, and that it must learn to use all the energy the solar system has to offer. She plans to become a terraforming engineer on Mars.

Felip, meanwhile, is quiet, munching a pear and lost somewhere behind his smart glasses. It’s rare to see him out of the house. What, after all, could possibly be more interesting than the virtual world? The real world seems claustrophobic to him.

For her birthday, Ami’s parents give her a collectible seed from the Andes – sealed in a small sphere which can project an image of the mighty tree it would grow into. There’s also a high-denomination Carbon Coin, a digital currency endorsed by a consortium of central banks, paid directly into her account. All citizens and registered organisations in countries signed up to the Climate Agreement can open an account and accumulate low carbon assets through verified emissions cuts.

Once the celebrations are over, the children return to their lives away from the orchard – hotter and more complex.

Looking back, from the future: Riches and scarcity

Ami’s smart assistant tells her about the major historical events of 30 years ago. Technological breakthroughs and competition. The collapse and rebuilding of the financial system. Geopolitical shifts and conflicts. Nobody escaped the impact of wave after wave of change and disruption. The outcome, of all the choices made, was this not-so-bad world of 2056.

One of the biggest changes was in energy technology. With the costs falling for energy storage and wind and solar power, and the technology maturing for tidal barrages, geothermal power and nuclear fusion, energy abundance was within reach. In some places, cheap low-carbon electricity and electrification changed the face of industry and agriculture, making near-zero emissions in the 2050s possible.

A more profound change was the synergy between that energy revolution and AI. In the 2020s, people discovered the relationship between electricity and computation and how the two could drive each other. The two began to grow in sync, first on land, then in the oceans, the deserts, and urban street corners. Everywhere, electricity was being generated, turned into tokens, used to power computation that enhances the efficiency of power generation in return. This bounty, however, was not evenly distributed. Some countries became fully electrified, while others merely managed to provide enough power for basic needs and struggled to catch up with the techno-industrial upgrade.

Nor was there an infinite supply of energy. One bottleneck was material scarcity. The key minerals required for the energy transition and the digital economy soon replaced fossil fuels as the most important strategic resource, and their scarcity soon led to new regional conflicts. Heatwaves and droughts, meanwhile, worsened water challenges. Managing the trio of needs – energy, materials, water – was a problem for all countries.

Some chose capital-intensive routes, desalinating seawater and increasing the efficiency of resource recycling. Others opted for a more circular economy of less resource use and more durable or biodegradable products. But countries without technology or capital found themselves trapped.

Just as the AI revolution was underway, another one started, as humanity learned to better understand and manage the natural world. The combination of AI and an omnipresent network of sensors created a “planetary-scale intelligence”: this was the Gaia Intelligent Symbiotic System, a network of sensors covering the skies, the land and the ocean feeding into systems driven by complexity theory and AI computing. When Gaia fell out of balance, humanity could now respond accurately rather than fumbling around in the dark.

The first task for the system was to help cope with disasters. By the late 2050s, emissions had been reduced to almost zero, avoiding the worst possible outcomes of climate chaos and collapse. But the delays in cutting emissions still knocked climate systems off track. By the time a new normal emerged, the world was a different place.

In some areas, a deadly combination of extreme high temperatures, drought and wildfires was the threat. In coastal and low-lying areas, more frequent and severe floods and storms became part of daily life. More accurate and responsive warnings were needed urgently to help humanity manage the risks. At the same time, sci-fi scenarios – transformable cities built from resilient materials, 3D-printed floating cities – all became possible.

Energy was now cheap but minerals and materials more expensive and climate-risk exposure had to be reconsidered. Over three decades, economic and financial systems underwent a re-evaluation. Global green financial investments such as the Carbon Coin became a common part of the financial system, setting a carbon price beyond economic cycles and becoming integral to linking the climate crisis with economic activity.

From the vantage of now: Back to the future

In my description of Ami’s life in 2056, I asked myself some questions: how would culture, ideals and values change?

That is more complex than technical and financial issues, and of more profound significance. Currently, our attention is grabbed by AI, by ruptures, and by conflict. As AI and automation replace our labour, as the world gets hotter and more vulnerable to disasters, we will soon need new soil for the soul to withstand disaster and emptiness, and to form new values of international cooperation, action and innovation.

The geneses of that new ecological culture are around us, but they need to be found, to be developed, to be combined. As we move from now into the future, our old order is collapsing and the new one has not yet formed. Changes of various sorts will combine into powerful forces. This is not just a matter of technological and institutional transformation. It is a deep remaking of our civilisation, of how we understand ourselves and our home. It is a coming of age for us, the planet’s children. That Gaia Day coming-of-age celebration for Ami and her friends may seem distant, but the conditions for it to happen are here today.