What will the world be like thirty years from now?

Allow me to dream.

I’ll begin with events in my lifetime that were billed as somewhere between “never going to happen” and “I’ll believe it when I see it.” And this written by someone who witnessed the moon landing live on television.

On my first trip to New York City in 1964 to the World’s Fair (where, ironically, Wycliffe had a major presence, but I was unaware, far as I know!), I was in the automobile pavilion, at the ripe age of 6. I remember looking at the cars of the future, one of which turned out to be the AMC Pacer. Someone beside me said, “That will never be on America’s highways.” AMC was the American Motor Company, now long defunct. The Pacer came to America’s highways and went away about a decade later.

Satellite dishes appeared on the landscape and must have been about 10 feet in diameter. They were massive things. In a random conversation one day, Roxanne Gebauer said she heard they would one day be so small, they could fit on your window sill. Uh, huh! Not going to happen! Did happen.

One more. In 2006, one of our tech leaders in SIL, Gary Simons said that one day (soon? How soon?) the laptop computer we know, loved and slaved over every day would be replaced by working directly off the Internet: your applications would be on the web, your documents would be stored on the web. What are you talking about?!…Not long after, Google docs appeared, along with Google Drive and Google Sheets, and Google Whatever, and you get the picture. (And Gary’s point was, we have to build our technology to fit the future. The present reality is slipping away as the de facto standard. Right again.)

I think of those as I write on my blank canvas, knowing that impossibilities today are not necessarily future impossibilities. I’ll dream a little with a random list for 2054:

Malaria will be a distant memory, just as polio became a distant memory for people of my generation.

Predictions about the demise of brick and mortar institutions of higher education came true: hundreds and hundreds went out of business, either due to the move to online enrollment, or a surge in students moving to vocational trades and away from classical university studies. Their football teams remained, but for some like Harvard and Brown, their football teams played NCAA video football games against each other. At last! We will finally find out who’s the smartest!

The death of the American penny is duly noted. Long gone. (Why would you keep currency that costs more to make than it’s worth? Please, Einstein, step forward and tell us.)

A step further: American currency in every paper and coin form died 10 years ago. Why spend money on it when e-payments took over the world with no retreat and less cost?

All cars will be electric; the gasoline resistance eventually died. Electric cars became cheaper, more dependable, of course better for the environment, and even faster. What’s not to love? Never mind why it took so long to love them. (A funny cultural side note: the 8th most popular baby name in 2045 was Tesla.) The ever-present Corolla in places like Kabul quietly run on electric, and the memories of smokey, loud, little Toyotas running all over the city were in the distant past. (At least with the noise from the engines. The same loud stereos have remained in vogue.)

Cancer will be over! All the money raised through walk-a-thons, marathons, triathlons, and I don’t know, spell-a-thons, finally paid off: a genetic marker got identified that was going crazy in the human body. A drug was administered to “flip that marker” which changed the world.

AI became a thing of the past. That’s weird; I thought it changed the world in the 2020s?? It did, but got abused so badly, and those who abused it just couldn’t stop abusing, so world governments stepped in and said, “Stop it! Anyone caught using is breaking national and international law, big time! They are going to be put so far under the jail, they will be fed via slingshot!” (My reader is going to think I’ve lost my mind; go ahead and ask Chat GPT if this might happen, and give me some feedback. I thought I would go totally rogue on this one.) The death of AI stock gave Wall Street a shock, but they found a new darling.

We celebrated the death of communism 10 years ago. Finally. Communist China, Cuba, Vietnam (do they have no shame; why do they have a Burger King in the Hanoi airport?), North Korea, and the hangers on in Russia all met their political, economic and societal demise. (Note as I write this in 2024: the majority of North Koreans make less than $1000 a year. Yes, they were ready for a change, just didn’t know how to get there.) It took a while after a Russian leader heard the words, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”, but the ideological walls fell everywhere again and again. The philosophical mortar holding them up gave way to a new world. Took a while, but it was inevitable. A dumb, evil system collapsed. Can’t erase the tens of millions killed, imprisoned, and erased from society, but at least subsequent generations won’t be subject to the same.

As a result, North Korea and South Korea actually did have an armistice, but much more: they were reunited in 2042, and while I would like to report that Pyongyang became a center of tourism, which it did, at least the dear people of North Korea finally got enough food to eat. And they reported that they loved Internet surfing. They even built a national airline, North Korea Air, dubbed NKA. The motto is: “Get away, on NKA.” American cuisine on international direct flights to LAX is optional. Korean bibimbop is preferred.

The Taliban fell in a mighty collapse. How? The area and village chiefs finally had enough of them and systematically eliminated them, the old-fashioned way. I’ll let my reader imagine what that means. It happened, and the country became free. New leadership erected multiple markers and statues throughout the country in honor of the US Military who stayed with them for years and who helped ensure free elections decades ago. They adopted US Veterans Day as a national holiday; they knew that the US stepped in to keep them free and they were going to make sure that the generations coming behind would not forget. The common Afghan had wanted to show honor but was prevented by the bad guys from even saying the word, “America.” The chiefs changed that. For good.

There’s been a major turning to Jesus, thoughout the world, led by youth under the age of 25. Those who had become ‘nones’ became fervent believers by the millions. They found out that the things of the world left them empty; they looked for meaning, and purpose and found their lives changed. They started following Jesus and didn’t let up. Jesus became irresistible, and they followed him without shame.

I write this from a meeting called Lausanne 4: The Fourth Congress on World Evangelization. The first was held in Lausanne, Switzerland in 1974, convened by Billy Graham and John Scott. Even though it was the only one of the meetings held in that town, the subsequent meetings were still called Lausanne, followed by a number. At Lausanne 2 in Manila in 1989, there was a famous picture taken and shared of empty chairs: pastors from Communist China were supposed to attend and fill those chairs, but were denied travel by their government, as they were at Lausanne 1. At Lausanne 3 in Capetown in 2010, which I attended, that picture was shared, and more empty chairs were highlighted: 200 Chinese were denied travel, some even denied at their airports as they were checking in for their flights. At Lausanne 4, 100 Chinese nationals attended; a great breakthrough! But at Lausanne 5, in 2050, the world was shocked: the meeting was held in post-communist Beijing. It was hard to get through the program as attendees wept uncontrollably, overcome with what God had done. It felt like the feeding of the 5,000. Unexplainable.  

Let’s dream big.