NEW FRONTIERS / 25 EXTRAORDINARY POSSIBILITIES
The next question
changes the picture.
What if a computer calculated with light? A donated organ could wait? A satellite gained five more working years? Explore the real breakthroughs behind these questions—and the bigger possibilities they could unlock.
Every story has five connected ideas, a sourced WOW fact, a complete explanation and a clear account of what has been demonstrated.
01—05 / NEW FRONTIERS
Compute differently. See more.
Light, molecules and atomic sensors open different ways to calculate, store information and observe the world.
What If the Next AI Breakthrough Was a Chip That Calculates With Light?
The extraordinary possibility is a new division of labour: electronics handle some jobs, while light handles calculations that suit its physics.
READ THE COMPLETE STORY ↗What If a Computer Did Most of Its Work Only When Something Changed?
If the approach proves practical, some machines could become better at staying alert without continuously doing unnecessary work.
READ THE COMPLETE STORY ↗What If Tomorrow’s Digital Archive Was Written Into DNA?
The bigger possibility is a different kind of long-term archive, where information rests in molecules instead of continuously operating equipment.
READ THE COMPLETE STORY ↗What If We Could Find What Is Buried Beneath a Street by Measuring Gravity?
The possibility is a new layer of underground knowledge that helps engineers decide where to investigate before they dig.
READ THE COMPLETE STORY ↗What If a Brain Scanner Could Fit Around a Child’s Head Like a Helmet?
The possibility is a more adaptable clinical instrument—not a helmet that reads private thoughts or cures epilepsy.
READ THE COMPLETE STORY ↗06—10 / NEW FRONTIERS
Change the resource. Change the system.
Water recovery, underground heat and electrical chemistry create new choices for cities and industry.
What If Your Next Glass of Water Came From the Air Above a Desert?
The extraordinary possibility is a supplementary water source for difficult locations, if output, durability and cost become practical.
READ THE COMPLETE STORY ↗What If a City’s Most Dependable New Water Source Was Water It Had Already Used?
The extraordinary possibility is a water system designed around repeated use, with safety and public confidence built into its operation.
READ THE COMPLETE STORY ↗What If the Skills That Found Oil Helped Build Power Plants That Do Not Burn It?
The surprising industrial consequence is that some expertise from the fossil-fuel economy could help build another kind of energy infrastructure.
READ THE COMPLETE STORY ↗What If a Factory Stored Cheap Electricity in a Room Full of Hot Bricks?
The extraordinary possibility is to separate the time a factory buys electricity from the time it needs useful heat.
READ THE COMPLETE STORY ↗What If Making New Steel Released Oxygen Instead of Carbon Dioxide?
The extraordinary possibility is to change a foundational manufacturing reaction, while recognizing that electricity and the rest of the supply chain still have environmental impacts.
READ THE COMPLETE STORY ↗11—15 / NEW FRONTIERS
Make it. Unmake it. Grow it.
Cement, plastic, minerals and fungal materials reveal unexpected ways to build and recover useful things.
What If We Could Make Cement Without Cooking Rock in a Giant Furnace?
The extraordinary possibility is to change how the material is made while letting builders keep working with familiar construction methods.
READ THE COMPLETE STORY ↗What If an Enzyme Could Take a Plastic Bottle Back to Its Original Ingredients?
The extraordinary possibility is recycling that rebuilds a suitable plastic from its ingredients, provided the complete process works economically.
READ THE COMPLETE STORY ↗What If the Next Rare-Earth Processing Breakthrough Came From a Bacterium?
The extraordinary possibility is a new biological tool inside a mineral supply chain, rather than a claim that microbes make mining unnecessary.
READ THE COMPLETE STORY ↗What If a Material Factory Harvested Sheets Instead of Pouring Plastic?
The extraordinary possibility is a factory where biology helps build the structure of a product, not merely an ingredient that gets mixed into it.
READ THE COMPLETE STORY ↗What If a Printed Object Came With Its Future Shape Built In?
The extraordinary possibility is to manufacture an object’s response over time, as well as its initial geometry.
READ THE COMPLETE STORY ↗16—20 / NEW FRONTIERS
Give medicine a new possibility.
New delivery methods, living treatments and organ preservation show why the evidence stage matters as much as the ambition.
What If Sound Could Open a Temporary Door for Medicine to Reach the Brain?
The extraordinary possibility is a better delivery route for selected therapies, if safety and meaningful patient benefits are established.
READ THE COMPLETE STORY ↗What If a Medicine Worked by Restoring an Ecosystem Inside Your Body?
The extraordinary possibility is a branch of medicine that manages a biological ecosystem, with evidence required separately for each proposed treatment.
READ THE COMPLETE STORY ↗What If a New Drug Met Living Human Tissue Before It Met a Patient?
The extraordinary possibility is better evidence earlier in development, while recognizing that a model remains a selective representation of a human body.
READ THE COMPLETE STORY ↗What If a Cancer Vaccine Was Designed From the Tumour It Needed to Fight?
The extraordinary possibility is a treatment designed around a particular cancer’s identity, with larger trials needed to determine its clinical value.
READ THE COMPLETE STORY ↗What If a Donated Organ Could Wait for the Right Patient Instead of Racing a Clock?
The extraordinary possibility is organ banking for people, if the method can be made safe and dependable at human scale.
READ THE COMPLETE STORY ↗21—25 / NEW FRONTIERS
Discover what the next connection unlocks.
Food meets electricity. Crops meet microbes. Robots map the seabed. Spacecraft maintain satellites. Software follows cleaner power.
What If a Protein Factory Needed Electricity and Gases Instead of a Field?
The bigger possibility is a new connection between food security and clean electricity—if production becomes affordable and dependable.
READ THE COMPLETE STORY ↗What If Microbes Could Deliver Some of a Crop’s Nitrogen From the Air?
The opportunity is partial replacement of fertilizer, with results that must hold up across actual farms.
READ THE COMPLETE STORY ↗What If Robots Helped Us Map the Vast Part of Earth We Still Have Not Measured in Detail?
The opportunity is better knowledge for science and practical decisions, with a huge surveying task still ahead.
READ THE COMPLETE STORY ↗What If a Satellite Could Gain More Working Years From a Visitor in Orbit?
The larger opportunity is to build space infrastructure that can be maintained, with each additional service still needing its own proof.
READ THE COMPLETE STORY ↗What If a Computing Job Could Choose Its Time and Place to Use Cleaner Electricity?
The opportunity is to make useful flexibility part of computing design, while measuring the actual effect on energy and emissions.
READ THE COMPLETE STORY ↗LOOK FURTHER AHEAD
Today's experiments.
Tomorrow's possibilities.
Our fifteen future scenarios explore what might become possible by 2031 and 2036, and the changes that would have to happen first.
2036 / THE FUTURE BEYOND THE FUTURE ↗