For the last year, my colleagues and I at Institute for the Future have been researching the future of science to identify big areas of science we think will have a transformative impact over the next decade. We read a lot of papers, conducted interviews, hosted an Open Science unconference, held an expert workshop with researchers from UC Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, UC Davis, SETI, and private industry, and spent many weeks synthesizing what we learned. The result is this map, titled "
A Multiverse of Exploration: The Future of Science 2021." You can click the image to see it larger or download the PDF (front and back)
here. Marina Gorbis, Ariel Waldman, and I wrote it. Ariel, Jean Hagan, and Karin Lubeck made it beautiful.
The map focuses on six big stories of science that will play out over the next decade: Decrypting the Brain, Hacking Space, Massively Multiplayer Data, Sea the Future, Strange Matter, and Engineered Evolution. Those stories are emerging from a new ecology of science shifting toward openness, collaboration, reuse, and increased citizen engagement in scientific research. We are delighted to share the map with you, under a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. From "A Multiverse of Exploration: The Future of Science 2021":
