Cover Story: Journeys to the Future
Our Climate Forecasts Will Be More Accurate and Longer Term
By Sergey K. Gulev
What is the most important question to be solved in the future:
by your discipline? Accurate weather and climate predictions which are equally capable of predicting conditions for different time scales from days and weeks to decades and centuries.
by research in general? Medical treatment which is based on the genetic codes of individuals. Equally important would be the development of effective energy sources, like nuclear fusion.
Which ground-breaking invention do you hope will be made within the next ten years? For my science this would be broad access to computer power for resolving long-term geophysical processes. Otherwise, the numerical experiments would last centuries in order to understand and predict the dynamics of the oceans and atmosphere.
Which ground-breaking invention do you fear could be made within the next ten years? The successful, cheap and massive cloning of humans.
Which problem of the future cannot be solved by research? Peace on earth. Science can contribute to both its maintenance and distortion, but it will never become the major factor.
Please complete the sentence: In the future, the world will be different from today because … it will become better just because every next generation is better than the previous one.
What is your favourite piece of Science Fiction? My favourite for many years, going back to my childhood, is “The Mysterious Island” by Jules Verne. I am always more impressed when someone explains to me explicitly how this and that can be done rather than showing me what has been done with no hint of how. This is particularly true of many science fiction pieces today.
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