What Isaac Asimov Taught Us About Predicting the Future

The technological solutions to those problems are predictable by a sufficiently educated person.

Politics is impossible to predict. Even if you're dead on about how a group of people feel in one region, go 200 miles west, you may be completely wrong.

- Advances in wind and solar energy generation in 2018 have pushed those to being the cheapest and most efficient they've ever been. The economic case for wind/solar is now such that it is far cheaper than non-renewable alternatives, and with or without political drive in 2019 there's a chance that pure capitalist greed still pushes past some major thresholds in renewable energy portfolios versus the alternatives.

- Similarly, 2018 seems to have pushed us past several remaining electric vehicle adoption hurdles and promises that we'll really start to feel the affects of that in 2019 and 2020. (VW's electric fleet roll out / course correction due to the dieselgate fallout will particularly be something to watch this year.) Admittedly, without political drivers we're still likely to see an aging ICE long tail, but again this is mixed hope that we have the technology, now we just need to find the will. Here too there is mixed hope economically that costs and supply chains are going to be driven down on EVs enough (maybe not this year, but soon; again my eye is on what will happen with VW's fleet changes as headwind, and also the huge electric fleet leaps happening in China) that we may see some very interesting cases where EVs start to be drastically cheaper than ICE vehicles. The conditions are ripe for some interesting supply chain shakeups in cars over the next few years, possibly to the planet's benefit.

- 2018 saw some really interesting technical developments in meat substitutes (Impossible Foods in particular doing some really interesting stuff). I have no idea if there is political or economic hope that we'll see more adoption of such things in 2019 as a matter of course, but I do know that White Castle sells Impossible Sliders and that seems like a hopeful sign.

- News recently about "sponges" that can capture atmospheric Carbon without impacting atmospheric Nitrogen may mean we are closer to technology breakthroughs in carbon capture than we think. [1]

As only a hobbyist/armchair future historian, I can see room at least for mixed hope. I suppose mixed hope is better than nothing here.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/01/corkscrew-sponge-suc...