Understanding and changing the world beyond 2050. Professor Lord Martin Rees (University of Cambridge, UK). Summary: By 2050, we will all be increasingly empowered by technology that potentially offers huge benefits to the developing and the developed world. But these same advances will pose novel ethical dilemmas, and render our ever-more interconnected world vulnerable to new and disruptive threats. Demands for energy, food and water could irreversibly degrade the Earth's biosphere unless new technologies can be adopted by then. Scientific understanding will have greatly expanded. In particular, we can expect progress towards settling questions that would have fascinated Darwin: How and where did life begin? And has life emerged and evolved elsewhere in the cosmos?