Welcome back. In this video, I'll share with you some stories from my work as a professional futurist, and I'll start to teach you how to play a game that can improve your ability to anticipate hard to predict futures. That sound helpful? Because if there's anything that we've learned since the pandemic started, it's that we all need to get better at expecting the unexpected. The game I'm going to teach you how to play today is a game that I invented and it's called a 100 Ways Anything Could Be Different In The Future. The first thing you need to know about this game is that it's inspired by something known to professional futurists as data is law. What is Data is law? If you were to visit us at the Institute for the future, you would find this law painted right on our front windows. Here's what it says, "Any useful statement about the future should at first seem ridiculous." Let's sit with that for a minute. Any useful statement about the future should at first seem ridiculous. What does that mean? Well, it's easy to prepare for futures that sound normal, that feel familiar, that are similar to today. It's weird stuff that catches us off guard. It's all those ideas that make us instinctively dismiss them and say, that could never happen or I just can't imagine that. Those are exactly the kinds of ideas we need to spend time taking seriously now because those are the futures that will be most disruptive, most shocking, most challenging if they actually happen. I mean, imagine you've been asked to consider these possibilities about the future. It's just a couple of years ago. In the near future, virtually all countries will shut and lock down their international borders. In the near future, a billion young people will stop going to school and do all their learning at home. In the near future, about 25 percent of jobs will be deemed non-essential, and just disappear overnight, leaving vast swaths of humanity with nothing to do. In the near future, it will be illegal to hug your grandmother. Here where I live in California, that's been true for much of the last year. If you had heard these ideas a couple of years ago, would they have seemed ridiculous at first. But what if you'd had that time to prepare? What could you have done to prepare your family or the company you work for, your school? Who could you have helped? We urgently need to stretch our collective imagination. If and when these kinds of unthinkable events come to pass, we're not frozen with anxiety. We're not stuck in old ways of doing things. We can act faster. We can adapt faster. The game that you're about to learn can help you do all of that. But before we play, I want to tell you a quick story that will make you more effective how playing this game. I teach a class at Stanford University's Continuing Studies program called How to Think Like a Futurist. On the first day of class, I always challenge the students to stump if the futurist, that's me, by coming up with a list of things they believe will not be different in the future. I asked them to name things that are true about how the world works today. Things that they believe will definitely still be true ten years from now, no way it will change. The two answers I hear most often are, you'll always need a man and a woman to make a baby, and humans will always need oxygen to breathe. Fair enough, whatever they come up with, I take that list back to my colleagues at the Institute, and together we try to prove my students wrong. We look for evidence that these seemingly unchangeable facts are already starting to change today. What do you know? Very first time I taught this class, this headline popped up just a few weeks in Exclusive. The world's first three parent baby was born." It's a new experimental method called the pronuclear transfer. It combines the genetic material of two women and one man to make one, three parent baby. It's being used today primarily to help parents avoid passing on genetic diseases. The second time I taught the class, a new headline appeared, Cambridge University researchers are figuring out how to create babies with genetic material from two same-sex parents. Not one man and one woman, but just two men or just two women. Another way, the future could be different. By the third time I taught this class, this had happened, scientists in China successfully created healthy mice, babies with same-sex parents using stem cells and gene editing. This is a photograph of a mouse who has two female genetic parents, no male mice involved, and she's already all grown up and has her own mice babies also pictured here. By the last time I taught this class, even more had changed. Now, scientists for talking about creating life from scratch using skin cells and artificial rooms. No traditional genetic parent required at all, no eggs, no sperm, no womb. Now, you may not be thinking about having a baby, let alone a three-parent baby, or a no-parent baby. But this kind of mental habit of always looking for evidence that literally anything can change, even something that has been true for all of human evolutionary history so far. This habit gives you a powerful mental foundation for spotting any kind of change faster. So you can act faster and adapt faster, so let's keep going. What else can't be different in the future? Now, I have to admit this one almost stumped me when a student suggested it. What can't be different in the future? The sun rises in the east and sets in the west once a day, every day. I admit it is very hard to imagine that changing in the next 10 or 20 years. But when I started looking for articles and experts on the future of sunsets, I quickly discovered evidence that for some humans, sunsets could be different in the future. Here's why. Perhaps you recognize this image. This is a sunset not on earth but on Mars. A day on Mars is longer than a day on Earth. So on Mars, you'd get fewer sunsets over the course of your life. The colors of the sunset are different due to different atmospheric gases, the sun looks two-thirds smaller because Mars is farther away from the sun than Earth. But does this really matter? I mean, who's going to see a sunset on Mars besides the rover robot? Well, it could be you or it might be your children. Let's take a look at some more headlines. Check it out. Elon Musk's SpaceX company reports that they are on track to get a million people on Mars by the year 2050. Mars is definitely a place where everything can be different, not just sunsets. To survive on the red planet, we would have to re-invent society, how we eat, how we organize, how we vote, how we live, and who will come up with these ideas? Well, China is already sending teens to a simulated Mars colony in their Gobi Desert, One of the most Mars-like places on Earth. Visitors have a chance to immerse themselves in the environment and try to solve problems they might face on Mars, like food supply and power generation. What fascinates me about this is that now we have the first generation growing up with a reasonable belief that they could step foot someday on another planet. I have to wonder, what are the long-term social impacts of growing up, believing that for you and your peers, there is life beyond Earth. Even if we don't get to go to Mars, even if we don't get to see that sunset, just the effort we're already making to get there may forever change what it means to be human back here on Earth. As scientists are working to go to Mars, researchers are working on ways to edit our genes so that humans are more fit for Mars. They're looking for ways to make us less stinky, which is very important for long-term confinement and small spaceships, looking for ways to make us more resistant to radiation, and even ways to make human beings less dependent on regular food and regular oxygen. As scientists try to create these Mars-ready humans, can you imagine the disruption to Earth if we suddenly had people walking around who didn't need regular food or regular oxygen? Forget going to another planet. What would you do if you didn't need to eat regularly or you didn't need to breathe oxygen regularly. What would you try? All of this is to say that the future is a place where everything can be different, even things that seem impossible to change today. So let's keep on sticking our minds. In the next video, I'm going to teach you the rules of 100 ways anything could be different in the future, and then we're going to play it together. When you're ready, let's go.
