Earth 2100

E.O. Wilson:
[Biologist & Entomologist, Harvard University] A few hundred years down the line, they'll look back and say, the dark ages began with the twenty-first century.

Van Jones:
[Founder, Green for All] People are complaining about the economic crisis we have right now? You ain't seen nothing yet. You know, if we continue down this suicidal pathway that we're on, where we basically turn living stuff into dead stuff and call that economic growth, this will look like the good old days.

James Howard Kunstler:
[Author, The Long Emergency] One of our political leaders said, not too long ago, that the American way of life is non-negotiable. And we're gonna discover the hard way that, when you don't negotiate the circumstances that are sent to you by the universe, you automatically get assigned a new negotiating partner. Named reality. And then it will negotiate for you. You don't even have to be in the room.

E.O. Wilson:
[Biologist & Entomologist, Harvard University] Humanity could very well be in hell, where hell is defined as truth realized too late.

Host:
Beyond the familiar technologies, amazing new ones are already in the works. Fields of solar balloons that could power thousands of homes a day... a nuclear fusion facility that could produce the energy of a tiny man-made star... Getting enough of these projects up and running will take people. That means jobs.

Host:
By 2100, our world could be transformed.

HEIDI CULLEN:
[Climatologist, Climate Central] Just, imagine a city that's not polluted, that has a great transportation infrastructure...

MITCHELL JOACHIM:
[Architect And Urban Designer] Stackable cars, and they would charge, and be a shared ownership model, and you would just pull out the one that's available that's fully charged. Everything happens inside the city itself. That means our food production, our waste and recycling, our energy.

PETER GLEICK:
[President, Pacific Institute ] We're going to have joint management of water resources, of energy resources, uh, of disaster management. We're going to be living on a planet where we don't see things at a national level, but we see things at a global level.

VAN JONES:
[Founder, Green for All] By the time we get to 2100, the challenge of building a global, green economy where we're sharing technologies and where we're not fighting wars over water and oil... That's going to bring out the best in the human family.

E.O. WILSON:
[Biologist & Entomologist, Harvard University] Humanity will be relatively, disease-free. Children will be treated as rare treasures.

PETER DeMENOCAL:
[Professor of Environmental Sciences, Columbia University] What most people don't realize is that not only can we change, we must change. And I think that's how you own the future. That's how you take control of your destiny

STUART PIMM:
[Professor of Conservation Ecology, Duke University] I have huge faith in humanity.

THOMAS FRIEDMAN:
[Foreign Affairs Columnist, The New York Times] And we will be able to create a world that will be a livable planet for our kids and their kids. That is our opportunity. That is our obligation.

ALEX STEFFEN:
[Author, Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the Twenty-First Century] Kids born today will see us navigate past the first greatest test of humanity, which is: can we actually be smart enough to live on a planet without destroying it?

Host:
The idea that within this century, perhaps in your lifetime, our civilization could lie in ruins seems unbelievable. But according to some of the world's leading minds, that's not just a worst-case scenario, it's a real possibility. Good evening, I'm Bob Woodruff. Over the next two hours, we'll take you on a journey into a world that could await us and our children. 370,00 babies will be born today. And we've taken the liberty of creating one more, a fictional character we're calling Lucy, who will be our guide through this century. Her life story is not a prediction about what will happen, but what might happen.

Jared Diamond:
A hundred years from now, if New York is abandoned, I can imagine some advanced creatures, maybe humans, maybe extraterrestrials, looking at New York and saying, "Those ignorant people. How on Earth could they have ever expected to survive?"

Lucy:
I was born June 2, 2009. Civilization was at a crossroads. We were in a race for our future.

Peter Gleick:
We've acted as though we were independent of the environment. We burned fossil fuels, we've overused our renewable resources; in the belief that we could do that forever.

Lucy:
Although the world I was born into was running out of so much, water, oil, land, I remember a loving family, a big house, green lawn, more water than we knew what to do with. My parents must have known what was happening. We had a compact car and recycled. And it wasn't just us. Smart, imaginative people everywhere were working furiously on solutions. Our government was pouring money into alternative energy. It seemed like everyone was growing their own vegetable garden. Windmills we're sprouting up all over. People we're beginning to understand. But the clock was running out, and nature was always one step ahead.

Host:
It's 2015, six short years from now, and the best-laid plans are getting underway. A wave farm off Scotland is harnessing the ocean's energy. Vatican City has gone totally solar. And here in America, cars are running cleaner and more efficiently. Still, we cling to that old habit, oil, and it's getting harder and more expensive to find.