A History Class Imagines the Future

This website began as a project in a unique history course taught at Georgetown University by the environmental historian Dagomar Degroot. The course, “Existential Risk,” was based on a little-known story uncovered by Professor Degroot while writing his book, Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean: An Environmental History of Our Place in the Solar System.

Professor Degroot learned that, in 1967, a professor at MIT organized a course around a threat making headlines for the first time: the possibility of a world-threatening asteroid impact. The professor, Paul Sandorff, challenged his students to come up with a plan to deflect an asteroid with existing technology. During the semester, they worked out the principles of what would later be called planetary defense: the effort to protect the Earth from an inbound asteroid or comet. In time, their principles would inform asteroid detection and deflection programs that dramatically reduced a risk to human survival.

In teaching “Existential Risk,” Professor Degroot followed Sandorff’s example. He asked his students to create something – anything – that could help mitigate a pressing threat to humanity. Students in the course voted to tackle the risk of global warming, and the geoengineering efforts that could soon be launched to stop global warming. They opted to plan out this website, which is modelled on AI 2027, a project that maps alternative futures with vivid storytelling and data visualizations.

In planning this website, the students sought to answer a simple question: if global warming continues as expected and the world warms by about 2°C by 2046, relative to the late nineteenth century “preindustrial” temperature, what happens next?

Rather than giving one answer, they worked with Professor Degroot to begin to imagine different timelines that trace how the future could unfold in their lifetimes. They decided that these timelines could be written from the perspective of history students looking back in 2100, around the end of the lifespans of today’s university students.

How will the students of the future look back on the coming century? Will they have a future to look forward to, or one to dread? What will be lost, and what might still be preserved? Here, today’s history students provide possible answers.

Dagomar Degroot

"Existential risks threaten to drive humanity to extinction, or at least permanently prohibit its future flourishing. We seem to live in an era defined, in part, by the proliferation of such risks."

Dagomar Degroot is an environmental historian at Georgetown University. He combines the methods and evidence of the sciences and humanities to write histories that guide responses to today’s urgent challenges. From climate change to artificial intelligence, cosmic impacts to lab-grown pandemics, many of these challenges involve risks that seem to threaten our entire species.

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by such risks. But Professor Degroot’s work has shown that communities in both the recent and distant pasts could find ways to overcome even the most daunting challenges.

Our ancient ancestors survived wild swings in global temperature, involving the retreat and advance of continent-straddling ice sheets and the rise and fall of sea levels by hundreds of feet. Our parents lived through brushes with nuclear Armageddon, not to mention the emergence of a truly existential threat – the ozone hole – that politicians and corporate leaders solved through sensible regulation.

One thing is certain: acting and creating are antidotes to despair.

The history students in Professor Degroot’s “Existential Risk” course brainstormed how they could meaningfully address one of today’s most important threats. First, they had to decide which threat to tackle. They wrote proposals for addressing different challenges: the risks of artificial intelligence to the economy, for example, the possibility of a runaway accumulation of orbital debris – even the detection of a hostile alien civilization.

Next, they joined Professor Degroot in reviewing the proposals. Then they voted. Ultimately, they chose to focus on a risk that was different from all others in that it seemed all but inevitable: the risk that global warming would continue, at least until a truly damaging event clarified the stakes for humanity and the rest of Earth’s web of life.

Now, they settled on how they would aid efforts to address global warming. They opted to design this interactive website to clarify the risks associated with global warming for undergraduate students like themselves. They decided that some of those risks would be associated with geoengineering: the deliberate, large-scale effort to alter Earth’s climate to slow, stop, or reverse global warming. Like Professor Degroot, they believed that a geoengineering effort would be likely in the wake of a severe climate catastrophe.

The students had about six weeks to plan out this website. Like the MIT students of 1967, they worked in small teams.

Five teams wrote first drafts for five of the timelines on the site. A sixth team with two students helped keep the project on track, created a mockup of the website, and used open-source data provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to create drafts of the website’s maps and graphs.

Classes were devoted to updates on the project, group consultations with Professor Degroot, and virtual interviews with leading scientists. During class discussions, the students decided to write from the perspective of future history students living in different cities, scattered around the world, all profoundly affected by climate change. Professor Degroot maintained resources that aided the work of each group, including links to online climate simulation tools and lists of important publications.

Eventually, students submitted rough drafts of their timelines, viewed each other’s drafts, then revised their drafts with Professor Degroot’s guidance.

Professor Degroot used the drafts as a foundation for the timelines on this website. Building on the students’ original work, he expanded and repeatedly rewrote each draft, giving the timelines a consistent voice. He strengthened their storytelling; deepened their treatment of scientific, political, and economic change; added and checked citations; and revised the visualizations.

We hope that the site can provide a template for other courses in a time of serious – but, we believe, still manageable – risks to humanity. And we believe it illuminates the world-altering significance of the moment in which today’s university students are coming of age.

The Limits of Prediction

After2C provides different timelines that imagine how climate might change, and how populations might respond, over the rest of the twenty-first century.

But it’s hard to predict how global warming could shape our future.

Part of the problem is, ironically, that we know roughly how climate will respond to greenhouse gas emissions, even if we don’t know exactly how that response will affect regional weather, or local environments. It’s much harder for us to predict how other aspects of the human and natural world will change, even if we suspect those aspects will be very important in shaping the future.

We can be sure that, given reasonable scenarios for greenhouse gas emissions, warming will fall somewhere between 2 °C and 4 °C by the end of this century, relative to Earth’s average temperature in the late nineteenth century (when emissions were just starting to warm the planet). But we can’t be sure how economies, technologies, or cultures will look like a decade from now – especially in an era shaped by global geopolitical upheaval, economic transformation, and disruptive innovation (headlined by artificial intelligence).

There is, therefore, an almost unavoidable tendency to “reduce the future to climate,” as the geographer Mike Hulme puts it: to concoct scenarios in which climate’s predictable changes don’t coincide with equally profound changes that we can be sure will happen, but which are much harder to predict.

There’s another, related problem. It’s much easier to forecast how warming will impact human and natural systems if we don’t account for how those systems may respond to limit damage, or perhaps even to exploit the changing climate. If the history of climate change – including the deep history, long before human-caused warming – is any guide, we can be sure those responses will be surprising. Some might exacerbate the destructive impacts of warming. Others could mitigate them in ways we can’t imagine.

Of course, responses to warming will provoke still other responses, in more systems. Change will cascade in ways that are fundamentally impossible to predict. If we try to predict them, our scenarios of the future can easily seem outlandish. And there can be an infinite number of them, radiating from one seemingly implausible inflection point after another.

The timelines in After2C account for interacting changes between Earth’s climate, the rest of Earth’s environment, and many aspects of human life. But they still rely on several basic assumptions that might have little bearing in how the future actually plays out. They assume that:

• Climate will change more quickly and profoundly than other aspects of Earth’s environment or human civilization.

  • Technological changes won’t lead to an artificial superintelligence, or a biological revolution that dramatically improves human health and lifespans. A natural or engineered pathogen will not kill so many people that it dramatically alters global emissions or threatens existing societies.
  • Economies of the future will broadly resemble those of today. Space exploration, exploitation, and perhaps settlement won’t fundamentally transform affairs on Earth. Geopolitical changes won’t give rise to a new hegemon, or a catastrophic world war.
  • Cultural shifts will be gradual, rather than abrupt. Demographic trends will unfold as currently forecast. Human behaviors of the future will resemble those of the present, even if people are changed by cybernetic implants.
  • Overall, there will be no unanticipated, “black swan” event that abruptly alters the course of history.

• There is no technological “fix” to climate change.

  • Climate mitigation (cutting greenhouse gas emissions), climate adaptation (building resilience to global warming), and geoengineering (deliberately altering the climate to cool it) will all depend on technologies that seem viable today. They will be difficult, imperfect, gradual, and precarious.
  • Path dependency – where past decisions limit future choices – will determine the pace of efforts to address global warming. The world’s energy system can’t be altered overnight, because there’s a limit to the speed at which the vast infrastructure that sustains it can be replaced.

• Climate change will not accelerate rapidly, owing to feedback loops embedded in, for example, the behavior of clouds or methane deposits on the ocean floor.

  • In this century, the rate of warming will be set by greenhouse gas emissions, rather than nonlinear responses, by the climate system, to those emissions.

We make these assumptions not because we believe they’re true, but because they make it easier to imagine a future that currently seems plausible. Our goal in After2C is above all to provide histories of the future that feel realistic, partly because they’re grounded in cutting-edge natural and social science.

This is “hard” science fiction, relying on current trends and current knowledge. But hard science fiction has a mixed record in predicting the future.

Humanity could well be extinct in 2100. Human life might be so dependent on artificial intelligence or synthetic biology that it would be unrecognizable to us today. People might have spread across the solar system, in ways that transform Earth.

Perhaps these futures are more likely than the ones we imagine on this website. We can’t be sure. But we can be certain that the climate of the coming century will look different than the climate of our present. Our timelines provide some perspectives on what that could look like.