2030

For me the purpose of life is to know other people…is to discover what life is. Who inhabits the world? What is it to be human? What can I give to the world which it doesn’t have…a gift for tolerating my presence in this world..…and unless I know the people, I can’t know what it does not have - Theodore Zeldin

Imagining seeing how everybody else lives, just for one day.  Life In A Day was a historic global experiment to create a user-generated feature film shot in a single day, July 24 2010.

In 2015, the millennium development goals (MDGs) – launched in 2000 to make global progress on poverty, education, health, hunger and the environment – expired. UN member states are finalising the sustainable development goals (SDGs) that will replace them, so the Guardian analysed what the SDGs aim to achieve, how they differ from the MDGs and assessed whether the MDGs made much progress.

Halcyon Highlights is a bi-weekly round-up of some of the most compelling trends that we have spotted over the past fortnight.  + , - or = indicate whether we consider each trend/development to prove mainly positive, negative or neutral/too early to judge...

If we wonder what the television-watching experience will be like 20 years from now, we can begin to sense how our lives are on the verge of shifting into a whole new gear.

Will watching TV still be a communal experience?  Will we be looking at a device, or will the image be projected?  Or will it appear on some sort of digital wallpaper?  Will it be portable?  Will it be 2D, 3D, or perhaps 4D or 5D? Will it be interactive, reactive, immersive, or participative?

A leading futurist addresses these and many more questions in "Eight Great Explosions in Video".

Biotechnology has the power to improve human health, address environmental challenges, and change the way the world does business.  An OECD report, The Bioeconomy to 2030: Designing a Policy Agenda, examines the role of biotechnology in the global economy over the next two decades and outlines policies that could maximise its benefits.

By 2030, climate change will indirectly cause nearly one million deaths a year and inflict US$157 billion in damage, according to estimates presented at U.N. talks in December 2010.