Steward Brand (USA)
Editor and publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog. Co-founder of The Long Now Foundation to build a 10,000-year Clock and co-founder of the All Species Inventory to document all of life on earth in 25 years.

Having a guess at what might be the world within 25 years is even more tricky than it appears.
Our assumptions are often contradicted by a reality check.

“Demography is the destiny”
Twenty-five years ago, it looked like the planet was going to be overcrowded, that we were making too much babies. Now, we can saiy that nothing of the kind has happened. But what is sure is that the population is getting older. The young revolutionary artists, those who try to make things move faster are gonna be even more a minority.

A common and recurrent vision is that in the short term things are gonna be worse (“Oh! God! Imagine Bush second term”). But if we take a look back at history in the long term, we see that things are considerably better, so things might get better after all. When he was young (he admitted being 65 now), the nuclear was going to anihilate the world, but it didn’t happen.