Global Grand Challenge: The Future

For Cornell's second Global Grand Challenge, the challenge is very literal: it is the future itself.

2024: The world is a challenging place. Planetary crises loom. Rising temperatures, wildfires, floods, droughts, famines, wars, pandemics, crushing inequality, and accelerating dispossession have evolved at dizzying speed into conditions of everyday life for many across the globe.

At the same time, 2024 feels full of possibility. Fundamental advances in communication, artificial intelligence, new materials, space exploration, and scientific understanding of the social and natural world promise unprecedented capacity to transform—for better or worse—the world around us.

Imagining Alternative Futures

Confronting crises and taking advantage of opportunities are luxuries not everyone has. The university should be a space where the power of knowledge can be harnessed ambitiously to make a real difference.

Thinking rigorously about the future is daunting because it is far away and there are so many unknowns. We have long been captivated by science fiction because it provides charismatic ideas for possible futures—with flying cars or new, habitable planets—but the plotlines are often either frustratingly derivative of past worlds or untethered to reality, flights of fantasy that ignore history and material, social, or physical constraints.

"The future’s another country, man. And I still ain’t got a passport." ~ Zadie Smith

Within the university itself, the future serves as an inspiration, but attachment to foundational ideas and paradigms can keep us tightly connected to well-trodden ground, rather than reaching further out into the unknown. Academic critiques of the present are often silent on alternatives for the future.

A Future of Global Importance

The challenge is to begin with the future—and to see it as a means, not an end.

What are the implications of achieving a better future in terms of worldwide distribution of resources and development of new regulations, technologies, and subjectivities? What technologies, infrastructures, systems, relationships, norms, and practices would be necessary to enable that sound, equitable, and sustainable future? How would that future play out across radically divergent conditions around the globe? And how do history and the ways in which diverse peoples make meaning of their world provide different perspectives on and for this new alternative?

"The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them to the impossible." ~ Arthur C. Clark

Our funded projects met the challenge of reaching beyond the immediate—the well-known constraints—to envision the future with imagination, hope, and purpose. We believe that imagining the future will provide conditions and create possibilities for starting dialogues among scientists and humanists, engineers and architects, planners, and artists. This necessitates new pedagogies and relationships centered around "what do we want" rather than "what can I do."

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