10 Most Important Things That Will Happen In The Next 20 Years
The future is coming.
In the days of old, people predicted that we would all be wearing shiny silver jumpsuits and zooming around in our flying cars whilst our personal house robot lays out a delicious dinner of vitamin supplements.
Whilst those visions of the future haven't exactly come to fruition, some have. Isaac Asimov once predicted that by 2014 we would have driverless cars, online education and automated kitchen appliances - pretty conservative and pretty spot on.
Despite the fact that we love to ridicule some of the nuttier future predictions of time travel and silver spandex, it would seem that we still haven't learnt our lesson. Experts all around the world are still coming up with their theories of what the world of tomorrow will look like.
We like to think, with our grasp of technology and innovation, that our predictions might be slightly more likely to come true than the futurist visions of the 20th century, but maybe we're just kidding ourselves.
Nowadays, the world changes fast, and you don't need to look that far ahead to see some big differences on the horizon. So, what will it look like by 2035?
10. 3D Printing
We're all well aware for 3D printing by now, you may even own something that was printed by one of these futuristic machines, but they're much more than a fun toy. Many experts believe that 3D printing is going to change the world.
As the technology improves and the price drops, a 3D printer could well become an everyday household item. The big implication of this is that products will be manufactured at or close to the point of their purchase or consumption. You would pay for the raw materials, the printer and the software to make certain items, but the cost of mass manufacture and shipping is eliminated.
There will probably even be free software downloads floating about the internet once the technology becomes commonplace, meaning we may be about the enter an age in which you can pirate a physical object.
This kind of system would completely change the face of manufacturing and basically restructure huge swathes of the economy. It might take us back to an age of cottage industry, in which goods are made and sold on a domestic level. It would also usher in an age of innovation, allowing anyone to design and produce any product and experiment with prototypes with ease.
Scientists are also dabbling in using 3D printing technology in medicine. We would be able to construct incredible prosthetics, reconstruct human tissue and perhaps one day even print organs for transplantation.
Perhaps one day we'll have factories full of 3D printers printing 3D printers, and we will finally know that we have gone too far.