Three worlds in 2035: Imagining scenarios for how the world could be transformed over the next decade

Peter Engelke, Greg Lindsay, and Paul Saffo

Welcome to three possible worlds in the year 2035. As resident and non-resident senior fellows in the Atlantic Council’s foresight practice, we produced these scenarios by assessing how current trends and uncertainties across a variety of categories—including geopolitics, the economy, demography, the environment, technology, and society—might interact with one another in the years to come.

These are not forecasts or predictions of what the future will bring. Instead, these scenarios are intended to inspire imagination and spur readers to consider possible futures, including future worlds that do not align with the readers’ expectations. To paraphrase a sentiment often expressed by the physicist and futurist Herman Kahn, the point of working with future scenarios is to find out what you don’t know and should know but that you didn’t even know you didn’t know.

We invite readers to interpret these scenarios in that spirit. Consider the interplay among the cause-and-effect elements that lead to each of the potential future worlds, as well as the myriad other possible scenarios that could emerge in the years to come.