ABOVE: ISTOCK.COM, JANIECBROS
Sitting down to write this editorial, I thought I would look back at the one I wrote for our first issue of 2020 to get a sense, at the end of an extremely unpredictable and disconcerting year, of how I was feeling going into it. “In those halcyon days of boyhood, one date stuck in my mind as ‘the future’—2020,” I wrote in The Scientist’s January/February 2020 issue. “That year, difficult to imagine but endlessly entertaining to dream about, was when everything would be different. World peace would be a reality. Technology would solve humanity’s and the planet’s ailments. And yes, cars would fly.”
I knew that my childish fantasies had failed to materialize well in advance of last January, but early in the year I had no idea how wrong I would be about 2020. This year has shown us all that, despite humanity’s decades of ...
