DEAR FORESIGHTED FRIENDS,

With your help, we were able to push three types of frontiers this year: accelerating science, surfacing much-needed ideas, and making progress on global long-term strategy. Our highlights are summarized below, with a more detailed summary of each project in our 2019 Progress Report. 

Why should this matter to you? 

Because you care about the long-term future and agree that making progress on these items is crucial if the want the future to go well.

But also because many of these projects are seeking collaborators like you.

1. ACCELERATING SCIENCE FOR HUMAN AND PLANETARY HEALTH

We only have one planet (at least, thus far). If we want it to remain a home to us and the other incredible life forms we share it with, we have to get orders of magnitude better at removing carbon from the atmosphere. This is a daunting task, but not impossible.

For an overview of the problem, see the brilliant intro presentation on addressing humanity’s carbon debt by Tom Chi, co-founder Google X, who chaired our Climate Destabilization Competition this year. 

We called upon brilliant researchers to compete with proposals to use foundational science to make progress on the precarious state of our biosphere (report). We were surprised by a project from our 2019 Foresight Fellow Patrick Mellor, with the goal to create a new form of carbon sink by slowing the degradation of biomass via “superwood” (video).

This project is no outlier; we have had a tremendously successful year across the board. We are proud to now count two recent Nobel Laureates among our Foresight cohort that focus on Molecular Nanotechnology to solve humanity’s crucial challenges:

Stanley Whittingham of our 2016 workshop cohort received the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry this year for the development of rechargeable lithium-ion batteries. 

Sir Fraser Stoddart, 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, co-chaired his second technical competition for Foresight with the goal to create novel materials that are essential for progress-leaps across the board, from human health to planetary resources.  

Apart from the proposals, this was a highlight for us because it illustrates that our efforts in advancing the very early stage in foundational science bring fruits; Fraser received our Feynman Prize only 9 years prior to the Nobel and co-chaired our competition with Melissa Dumartin, who is a Foresight Fellow.   

This year,  we doubled the application rate to the Foresight Fellowship and look forward to supporting our growing community of brilliant researchers to realize ideas that the coming generations can depend on.

2. ADVOCACY & EDUCATION TO SURFACE MUCH-NEEDED IDEAS

Eric Drexler returned for a much-celebrated Foresight salon with Robin Hanson and Mark Miller (video). The salon is part of our monthly series (all videos) dedicated to introducing the public to novel thinking for crucial technological challenges. In particular, our three longevity salons this year were so explosively popular that we will pursue this area with its own investment-focused track next year. 

We invited our favorite thinkers to Vision Weekend to direct our attention to a high-impact idea that is currently still under the radar. Ideas ranged from a science of normativity for AI, to internet of blockchains, to lunar governance (all videos). We launched a year-long Metaculus Prediction Challenge to test the likelihood of those proposals, and gave out the Incentive Prize on Incentives, together with the Yun Family Foundation. 

We kickstarted interviews for the positive-futures-primer, with the plan to counter current dystopian narratives with an alternative map of ambitious but attainable positive futures that encourages the next generation to take agency in steering toward futures of Existential Hope.