By the 2030s and mainstreamed by the late 2040s, humans will begin to communicate with each other and with animals, control computers and electronics, share memories and dreams, and navigate the web, all by using our minds.

Okay, so pretty much everything you just read sounds like it came out of a sci-fi novel. Well, it all probably did. But just as planes and smartphones were once written off as sci-fi pipedreams, so too will people say the same about the innovations described above… that is, until they hit the marketplace.

Energy. It’s kind of a big deal. And yet, it’s something we rarely pay much thought to. Like the Internet, you only freak out when you lose access to it.

But in reality, whether it comes in the form of food, heat, electricity, or any number of its many forms, energy is the driving force behind the rise of man. Every time humanity mastered a new form of energy (fire, coal, oil, and soon solar), progress accelerates and populations skyrocket.

Don’t believe me? Let’s take a quick jog through history.

When it comes to the plants and animals we eat, our media tends to focus on how it’s made, how much it costs, or how to prepare it using excessive layers of bacon and unnecessary coatings of deep fry batter. Rarely, however, does our media talk about the actual availability of food. For most people, that’s more of a Third World problem.

Sadly, that won’t be the case by the 2040s. By then, food scarcity will become a major global issue, one that will have a massive impact on our diets.

The year is 2033. It’s an unseasonably hot fall afternoon, at least that’s what the plane’s computer announced before including an exact temperature of 32 degrees Celsius. Just a few degrees hotter than New York, but you’re too nervous to care. Your nails begin to bite into your seat handles.

Your Porter plane was starting its descent into Toronto’s Island Airport, but ever since they replaced human pilots with full, point-to-point autopilot, you haven’t felt altogether easy during the landing part of these monthly business flights.

In 2015, China, the world’s most populous country, experienced a shortage of blue-collar workers. Once, employers could recruit hordes of cheap workers from the countryside; now, employers compete over qualified workers, thereby raising the median wage of factory workers.

Smart malls. Monster fitting rooms. And luxury brands still not giving a fuck. In part one of the future of retail series, you saw the beginnings of a new, more integrated system of shopping. Here we’re going to expand on that trend, as well as introduce new micro-trends not previously covered.

The year is 2027. It’s an unseasonably warm winter afternoon, and you walk into the last retail store on your shopping list. You don’t know what you want to buy just yet, but you know it has to be special. It’s an anniversary after all, and you’re still in the doghouse for forgetting to buy tickets to Taylor Swift’s comeback tour yesterday. Maybe the dress from that new Thai brand, Windup Girl, would do the trick.

So there’s a big deal right now called climate change that some people are talking about (if you haven’t heard about it, this is a good primer), and whenever the talking heads on television mention the subject, the topic of a carbon tax often comes up.

(Links to the entire climate change series are listed at the end of this article.)

Climate change. It’s a subject we’ve all heard so much about over the last decade. It’s also a subject most of us haven’t really thought about actively in our day-to-day lives. And, really, why would we? Aside from some warmer winters here, some harsher hurricanes there, it hasn’t really affected our lives all that much. In fact, I live in Toronto, Canada, and this winter (2014-15) has been a whole lot less depressing. I spent two days rocking a t-shirt in December!

2046 - Kenya, Southwestern Mau National Reserve

The silverback stood above the jungle foilage and met my gaze with a cold, threatening glare. He had a family to protect; a newborn was playing not far behind. He was right to fear humans treading too close. My fellow park rangers and I called him Kodhari. We’d been tracking his family of mountain gorillas for four months. We watched them from behind a fallen tree a hundred yards away.