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From fire-proof forests to famine-stopping ‘bananas on steroids’, scientists are juicing up nature’s bounty to solve the 21st Century’s problems.

You eat them, you wear them, you put them in vases and gawk at them appreciatively  – but are you really using them to their full potential? According to researchers at the Botanical Gardens at Kew in the UK, there are plenty more ways we could be harnessing the power of plants. From being natural fire-fighters to potential famine-thwarters, here are four incredible ways that plants could revolutionise our world.

Cross-breeding super plants

When we eat vegetables on our dinner plates, what we’re looking at were once ordinary crops that were grown on a farm. But those farm-grown crops had relatives out in the wild – that were “to our food plants what wolves are to dogs”, according to the project Crop Wild Relatives (CWR).

But those roguish cousins living in the wild – far away from domesticating farms – have developed resilience to pests, diseases, soil salinity and climate change.

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That’s why plant breeders are working to crossbreed these wild crops with our domestic crops to make them just as hardy as their cousins – while still offering us the benefits that tamed plants offer, such as a high yield.

It’s a truly worldwide plan; the countries that have the highest number of wild plant cousins are Brazil, China, and India, while the countries with the highest concentration of them are Azerbaijan, Portugal and Greece. The benefits that this cross-breeding programme could have in developing countries in particular could be indispensable as world population growth reaches over nine billion.

However, despite this global spread of crop wild relatives, they’re being threatened by a wide array of environmental antagonists. Most of these are down to humanity’s intrusion, be it through land-use change, global warming, pollution, war and the intensification of agriculture. The Millennium Seed Bank of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, is working alongside partners that run breeding programmes around the world and save these hearty wild cousins in the next several years.

Using plants as medicine

This isn’t anything new – the use of plants is medicine has been known since time immemorial. But are we being too slow to register new uses?

Over 28,000 plant species are currently recorded as being of medicinal use, but fewer than 16% of them are cited in a medicinal regulatory publication. When the World Health Organization last estimated the plant-based medicinal industry’s worth in 2012, it totalled a mind-boggling $83bn (£62bn).

The industry is growing increasingly popular; in Germany, around 90% of the population use herbal medicines that are derived from plants such as foxglove and garlic. But one major problem, of course, is that health regulators are keen to stop the proliferation of unsafe or phony products entering the market; a lazy approach to authentication has already meant that herb names have been confused with those with similar sounding names and patients have ended up ingesting a wildly inappropriate (and potentially lethal) drug.

China is one country trying to stop this. In December 2016, Chinese government officials announced their aim to integrate more traditional Chinese medicine into their healthcare system by 2020, as well as presenting detailed illustrations and descriptions of the source plants to stop any future confusion happening.

If we’re to utilise plants to their full life-saving potential,the researchers make urgent recommendations: sourcing plants from sustainable resources, cultivating them, introducing reliable traceability procedures and secure more effective quality control.

Bananas on steroids

Well, not quite bananas. The enset is a member of the banana family that has been cultivated in Ethiopia for tens of thousands of years – the Ethiopians in fact have over 200 names for it – and it has several different uses. As well as being a staple crop in Africa it can make rope, medicine, shelter, animal feed and clothes, not to mention also providing an ideal microclimate for coffee plants to flourish in. It withstands drought, heavy rain and flooding. Basically – is there anything that this ‘false banana’ can’t do?

Scientists have been investigating where else this climate-smart plant could be grown elsewhere, particularly in other African regions and in countries that face famines. It feeds more people per square metre of crop than most cereals and is made into three foods – a sour-tasting dough, soups and porridges, and a boiled root similar to a potato.

Technology is fast changing the world we live in, so it is essential for schools to introduce young students to the skills and concepts they will need to succeed in the years ahead.

“Research shows that many of today’s youngsters will be doing jobs no one has yet imagined,” says Dr Robin Lister, founding headmaster of Malvern College Hong Kong, which is set to open for students in primary Year 1 up to secondary Year 9 in late August 2018. “It is safe to assume, though, that technology will play a big part, so we have to prepare them for that through a combination of factual knowledge, problem-solving, and independence of thought.”

With this in mind, the school invited BSD Code & Design Academy to conduct an introductory coding workshop on November 18, with one session for five- to seven-year-olds, and another for those aged eight to 12. It met with an enthusiastic response and gave children the chance to learn some of the basics, apply those skills to a practical task, and have some fun.

“Looking ahead, we intend to make coding part of the school’s co-curricular programme, besides incorporating the key elements in subjects like physics and maths,” Lister says. “It’s like learning another language. But it will be vital for anyone in IT, robotics, and much else, and fortunately young kids seem to have an in-built ability to do it.”

Along with sports and drama, the range of co-curricular activities on offer will also include music – with plans for a jazz band and orchestra – interest-based clubs, mandatory debating, and chess, which is great for developing analytical skills.

“If you enable a child to shine in one area, that gives a new level of confidence which then comes out in everything else they do,” Lister says. “Therefore, our philosophy is to be traditional in some respects, for example with wearing school uniforms and ties, but at the same time forward-looking. Children must learn to be global citizens, and Hong Kong is archetypical of that.”

Construction work at the school’s waterfront site next to Science Park is ahead of schedule and other preparations are also well in hand. Around 350 to 400 students are expected to start in the first intake, with the application and admissions process already well under way. As the initial group of Year 9 students moves up to Year 12, there will be an extra class added each year. When at full capacity, that will mean a total of around 1,000 pupils.

The main medium of instruction is English and the intention is to use the IB (International Baccalaureate) curriculum all the way through, but with a few tweaks and additions to take account of the expectations of students and parents in Hong Kong.

For example, each class will have daily Putonghua lessons, taught in line with a newer methodology which use more interaction and less rote learning. All teachers will be native speakers, and groups will generally be based on ability. In due course, other languages such as Spanish and German will also be introduced.

“Coming to a good school, you should be able to take the academic side and things like STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] for granted,” Lister says. “Our expectation is that students will perform well in exams. That’s important, but it cannot be seen on its own. To prepare children for the future, we also have to spend time on developing character, personality and resilience.”

The on-site facilities will include an extensive library cum “maker space”, where children will have access to everything from Lego to basic electrical components – and the freedom to use their creativity.

A certain number of bursaries and scholarships will be available, with the latter awarded not just for academic performance, but also for sports, drama and – potentially – for other activities and accomplishments, too.

“Malvern College Hong Kong is a day school, but we will look to instil something of the ‘boarding’ ethos,” Lister says. “Therefore, every student will be allocated to a ‘house’ with a tutor to ensure everyone is up to speed academically and taking a full part in other activities. Help will be given where needed, and that applies equally in the case of exceptional students because we want to make sure talent is brought out. In addition, we will have policies in place for the use of devices and social media, which otherwise can become all-consuming.”

Humanity is entering a period of hyper adoption of new technology

Main image: The 22nd century will be about much more than flying cars. Credit: Airbus

If predicting the future is dumb, then predicting advances in technology is even dumber. Challenges will appear that we’ve never contemplated, and knowledge we now hold dear will in many cases be proven false. The prediction game can soon become more a reflection of ‘us’ in the 21st century rather than ‘them’ in the 22nd century.

And yet, as we enter a period of hyper-adoption of new technology, we have more data than ever before to give us an idea of what the world could look like in 100 years. And we know one thing, it’s that the future is going to be home to some amazing technologies.

Floating cities

By the year 2100 the average temperature is projected to increase by at least 1C. Cue rising sea levels, which will threaten hundreds of cities worldwide. One solution could be floating cities, which the Seasteading Institute has been trying to encourage for years. It’s already happening in French Polynesia, where Blue Frontiers is planning the Floating Island Project.

“I foresee huge floating cities that can move, join together, pull apart – that’s the sort of future I see in a hundred years, not only because we will need to because environmental issues will become more severe, but because technology will make the ocean a lot more hospitable,” says Paul Amstrong, founder of future technology consultancy Here/Forth.

He name-checks 4D printing and graphene as two of the technologies that will enable us to construct those cities, and adds that plastic-digesting nano-bots could be used to clean up the oceans, even gobbling up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Humans will be healthier for longer

Life expectancy for the United Nations-projected 11.2 billion people living by 2100 may not increase drastically, but older people will be healthier.

“With ageing populations, medicine will get a lot better, because otherwise you will have a lot of sick people, which would be a massive burden,” says Armstrong. “Expect personalised medicine, from high-end genetic re-sequencing to bio-hacking and ‘wetware’, which is still in its infancy.”

Brain-computer connections are already possible, although developing the software and interfaces is going to take time. Another massive trend will be personalised medicine; expect medi-pods in our homes that can diagnose problems, and implants that do the same on the move.

Airspace will open up

Beyond both driverless cars and Amazon wanting to use drones to deliver parcels, the far-flung future could have a completely new kind of airspace.

At present, global airspace is managed in a rigid ‘airspace corridor’ way, purely for the benefit of commercial and military aircraft, but that could change. “Global airspace could be managed in a continuously flexible and dynamic way for the benefit of all,” says Robert Garbett, founder and CEO of Drone Major Group.

Garbett forsees “an airspace populated with vertical columns used by aircraft making sub-space jumps, shifting geo-routes allowing passenger drones to pass safely at any altitude, and shifting geo-fences protecting manned routes and high-value assets”.

That kind of dynamic use of airspace could lead to an explosion in unmanned transport systems – drones. It could mean “driverless flying taxis in our smart cities, and reduced accident response times through the use of driverless ambulances”, according to Garbett, while also making traveling to work a breeze by opening up rooftop drop-offs in built-up areas.

“The sky above us is an untapped sea of air that will have incredible value as the drone industry expands,” Garbett adds.

Drinking water wIll be plentiful

We live on a ‘blue planet’, but we’re short of ‘blue gold’. Droughts are on the increase, and where there’s drought, there are dams, and inevitable political conflict. However, the potential water wars of the future could be avoided if humans were able to so something that sounds like it should be simple: drink the sea.

Desalination plants remove salt and minerals from water to make it drinkable, but getting seawater into a plant is incredibly energy-intensive. Cue a fossil fuel-free idea from New Mexico-based wave energy company Atmocean, which involves wave-harnessing pumps to get seawater ashore more cost-effectively. Trialled off Peru a few years ago, the system also produces excess electricity.

From drinking water to irrigation, aquaculture and greening the deserts, advances like this in desalination technology could make a massive difference. The creation of micro-filtration using graphene sieves should also allow so-called ‘toilet to tap’ technology to extract water from urine in homes. Gulp.

Food will become functional

“We know that how we produce food now is unsustainable, so in a hundred years we’ll start to see a radically different way of feeding and farming,” says Armstrong.

“Soon we’ll be able to have a meal that is nutritionally sufficient – it’s just about figuring out what the body needs, and listening to it,” he says, adding that nano-materials and nano-technology that can live inside the body will become important.

It’s already happening; in the US, the Food and Drug Administration just approved a digital pill embedded with a sensor that send data to doctors detailing whether patients have taken their medication. The same could happen with food in humans and animals to introduce precision consumption.

“Are we going to start eating grasshoppers and drinking protein shakes?” says Armstrong. “They may be the only options, but I definitely think that people will want to live without food preparation, so they can spend their lives doing other things.”

AI will help achieve nuclear fusion

Artificial intelligence is so over-hyped right now that it’s obviously a reflection of people’s pathetic fears about ‘robot takeovers’. But AI and computing power are destined to become the enablers for something 22nd society will need a lot of: energy.

Per capita energy consumption is already rising so fast that we’ll need a miracle to prevent humanity from entering a period of energy-starved stasis. Is that miracle nuclear fusion?

“Fusion will certainly be an essential part of the energy mix by 2100, providing between 15% and 35% of global energy,” says Jonathan Carling, CEO of Tokamak Energy, which is now testing its third fusion reactor.

“Our technology aims at small modular fusion power – but one module would produce sufficient power for a small city,” Carling adds. “Fusion electricity into the grid can be achieved in less than 15 years’ time by using new materials like high-temperature superconductors, new technologies like AI, and the agile development environment enabled by private investment.”

AI is currently being used to develop the all-important models of plasma physics, so that scientists can predict how reactions will work. Once we’ve cracked it, humanity will have low-carbon energy forever.

The people factor

Can technology solve all of humanity’s problems? It can, absolutely – but whether it will or not depends hugely on whether humans allow it to live up to its potential. What happens in the future also largely depends on discovering that what we know now is probably wrong.

“Futurology is a risky game,” says Dmitry Bagrov, MD of DataArt UK, who thinks that what would be really be fascinating is to be able to travel to the future, so that we could travel back to see the present.

“A backwards time machine would depict our world now, as it actually is rather than the imagined present we live in,” Bagrov adds, explaining that we have yet to understand our context, and what is real and what is not.

“Think of all the deeply held, but wrong, theories, that have existed over the years – the flat Earth, the four humours theory, the alchemists – and imagine if we had a machine to show us all of this now.” Much of what we think we know today will, by the year 2100, be considered archaic pseudoscience.

“Hopefully, the future will give us technology to truly understand the past so that we don’t repeat mistakes in the future … of the future,” says Bagrov.

Time machines may be beyond even 22nd century engineers, but don’t underestimate the importance of a raft of upcoming technology – some seemingly simple, some incredibly complex – will change the world.