THE YEAR 2050
If you are a teenager today, you will be as old as your parents are by the year 2050. You will have had several career shifts. You may have teenage children of your own.
All vehicles, from cars to trucks, to trains are electric. Ninety percent of cars will be autonomous. Your family will buy the app but never own a car. More than 75% of all commuter trips are through bike-bus-train connectivity.
There are no garbage cans. The idea of throwing anything “away” is stupid. Everything from synthetic molecules to the component parts of your laptop, to all the materials in your home are cycled. You do not own your carpet, your desk, sofa, TV, or appliances. It is more cost effective to rent them as services from the manufacturers who have designed them for the industrial nutrient cycle.
Clean, renewable energy powers our electric world.
Early Childhood Learning Centers provide high quality learning for free to the neighborhood’s youngest minds. As this service expanded the number of people in prison decreased. It was a simple policy shift from prisons to preschools. Police only solve crimes as needed. Governments redirect funding to community coalitions who manage the health and well being of their members. Restorative justice is the norm. People know each other. Large community gardens are ubiquitous.
Your children do not go to school as you remember it. There are no grades or bell schedules. Your children solve problems that need solving and work with a range of coaches, guides and mentors. You are one of them. The community is the curriculum. Young people often collaborate online across generations, jurisdictions, and sectors in massive scenario teams, solving community challenges that jump scales and bioregions as needed. Good ideas travel rapidly.
GOT ANY IDEAS?
Write the story from the perspective of living in the year 2050. Submit it in any genre.