23 April 2056: Gaia Day. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ami sets out early, joining her neighbours for the community coming-of-age celebration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhat was life 20 or 30 years ago?\u201d wonders Ami, just turned 18. Late April is scorching hot and she\u2019s wearing her temperature-controlled summer clothes. Her smart assistant interrupts: \u201cThere is a wildfire risk within 20 km. Please monitor for evacuation alerts.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Through the window of the hydrogen-powered robobus, she can see the towering buildings of the city centre, all covered with various membranes \u2013 generating power, capturing carbon, dispersing heat \u2013 decorated with vertical gardens and climbing vines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s even heard about smart disaster-resistant buildings which can change shape as needed, able to withstand even a tsunami.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What about the animals living by the sea, she wonders. How do they survive the storms without technology\u2019s protection?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Why Li Yan? Li Yan has worked for more than two decades at the intersection of China\u2019s environmental transformation and global climate politics. She led Greenpeace East Asia\u2019s climate and energy work in China, participated in successive UN climate negotiations, and served as Greenpeace\u2019s 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 \u201cnew imagination.\u201d 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.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Her destination is an orchard, maintained jointly by several communities, including hers. It\u2019s on a green hillside and cooler than the city. She can\u2019t 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\u2019s cheap, but not particularly tasty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Today she\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ami isn\u2019t 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 \u2013 in the skies, underground and even deep in the ocean.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Earth Ahead<\/p> To mark Dialogue Earth\u2019s 20th anniversary, this special series of essays brings together 20 globally recognised thinkers and practitioners from across continents, specialisations, and lived realities. Together, their very different perspectives map the forces shaping our world today. And the futures that may emerge from them.<\/p><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n Another friend, Motoko, turns up her nose. \u201cSticking around on Earth? Not for me. It\u2019s too small!\u201d She thinks humanity\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Felip, meanwhile, is quiet, munching a pear and lost somewhere behind his smart glasses. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For her birthday, Ami\u2019s parents give her a collectible seed from the Andes \u2013 sealed in a small sphere which can project an image of the mighty tree it would grow into. There\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once the celebrations are over, the children return to their lives away from the orchard \u2013 hotter and more complex.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ami\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u2013 energy, materials, water \u2013 was a problem for all countries.<\/p>\n\n\n\nLooking back, from the future: Riches and scarcity<\/h2>\n\n\n\n