It plans to fill the skies with at least 10,000 low-flying satellites, or around four times as many as are currently active and in orbit. “Starlink”, as the service is known, was due to come out of its beta-testing phase in October.

Until now SpaceX has financed itself by providing rocket launches for NASA, on whose behalf it ferries both cargo and astronauts to the International Space Station, and by launching satellites for private companies such as broadcasters and telecoms firms.

Mr Musk would like to change that by establishing a permanent base on Mars

The perceived threat from China will also push India to use its space programme for military messaging and other “purposes of foreign policy”, predicts Ajey Lele, an expert at MP-IDSA, a think-tank in Delhi funded by the defence ministry.

the success of a big expansion of Russia’s Vostochny Cosmodrome in 2022 has become, he says, “a question of credibility”.

Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic (founded by Jeff Bezos and Sir Richard Branson respectively) both made their maiden suborbital flights in 2021

Countries planning to launch lunar craft in 2022 include India, Japan, Russia and South Korea. NASA, America’s space agency, is sponsoring an astonishing 18 missions in 2022, as it paves the way for a return to the Moon by astronauts as part of a lunar programme called Artemis. Thales Alenia Space, a Franco-Italian firm, is expected to deliver the shell of Gateway, a space station to be put in lunar orbit, to America in late 2022.

a European Space Agency (ESA) probe due to blast off, in mid-2022, for Jupiter’s icy moons.

mRNA drugs could be used for individualised cancer therapies, regenerative medicine, and for a wide variety of diseases such as allergies, autoimmune conditions and inflammatory diseases.

The pandemic has forced people to work better together. Recently initiated projects have seen a high degree of co-operation between institutions such as the World Health Organisation, international regulatory authorities and funding organisations, supported by experts who have been researching the pathogens of interest for more than 30 years. The first mRNA-vaccine candidates for these diseases are expected to enter clinical trials in 2022 and 2023.

The greatest risk to this more optimistic outlook is the emergence of a new variant capable of evading the protection provided by existing vaccines. The coronavirus remains a formidable foe.

The “last mile” problem of vaccine delivery will become painfully apparent as health workers carry vaccines into the planet’s poorest and most remote places.

one of the world’s largest charities, predicts that average incomes will return to their pre-pandemic levels in 90% of advanced economies, compared with only a third of low- and middle-income economies.

Only the Bahamas, a Caribbean nation, and a few of its southern neighbours (St Kitts and Nevis, Antigua and Barbuda, St Lucia and Grenada) have issued a “live” CBDC.

Instead of proprietary systems built by a handful of incumbents, OpenRAN offers new suppliers, both large and small, the opportunity to get into the mobile-infrastructure market.

do not work in cities

OpenRAN provides a way to depoliticise the roll-out of 5G.

The open architecture makes it easy to respond to any problems by switching out software or hardware. Our network has no black boxes.

No single vendor controls the system. Our supply chain is transparent

OpenRAN networks are safer and more secure than proprietary technology

OpenRAN networks cost less to run because many of the proprietary infrastructure components are replaced by software,

The first is lower costs: in our experience, a reduction of 30-40% in capital expenditure and operating costs for 4G networks, and as much as 50% for 5G networks.

OpenRAN networks are completely different: they are software-driven, based on open standards and run in the cloud on commercial, off-the-shelf servers.

one reminiscent of the way personal computers replaced mainframes in the 1980s, and cloud-based apps are replacing traditional software today.

As governments attempt to use stimulus money to reshape the chip supply chain, they will be trying to grab a beast in the midst of transformation.

the blueprints underlying chip designs are published under open-source licences, available for anyone to use.

One important tactic will be the development of more advanced ways of combining and connecting already-made chips, rather than simply pushing to etch individual chips with ever smaller (and thus faster) features.

for this expansion on their soil.

Car manufacturers lost out, having cancelled their chip orders early on in the pandemic only to find themselves at the back of the queue when demand for cars rebounded. As a result, in 2022 chipmakers will still be working overtime to expand supply.

So the contest to be the best regulator in tech is as yet undecided, and highly competitive. It is good to see competition regulators practising what they preach.

Its researchers have published some of the best studies of the market for digital advertising. The CMA also boasts a Data, Technology and Analytics team, which consistently recruits data scientists in order to close the wide knowledge gap between tech titans and their regulators.

The government is working on new regulation, to be passed in 2022, that would empower the DMU, like Germany’s FCO, to give tech firms “strategic market status” and require them to follow stricter rules.

is Germany. Andreas Mundt, who heads the country’s Federal Cartel Office (FCO), has turned his agency into a pioneer of tech regulation, in particular by going after Facebook’s data-harvesting practices.

As in other policy fields, authorities in Beijing have taken more than one page from the EU’s book. Yet enforcement comes with Chinese characteristics.

The main criticism is that the DMA applies the same rules to all tech titans despite the fact that their businesses, and their competition problems, differ.

Its executive branch, the European Commission, had just introduced the Digital Markets Act (DMA), the first law aimed at regulating big tech “ex ante”—that is, constraining firms’ behaviour upfront, rather than punishing them after the fact with antitrust cases.

While lawsuits drag on (and often end with not much to show for all the effort), 2022 will be the year when the world’s parliaments and regulators start to pass substantial rules to govern the tech industry.

educating employees to be wary of suspicious emails; keeping software up to date; and backing up data. That sort of prosaic cultural change is not as sexy as cyber-retaliation or as satisfying as a ransom ban, but it is the only solution in the long term.

A more useful approach would be demanding that companies report both breaches and ransom payments, forcing the issue into the open.

some cyber-ransoms are even tax deductible.

banning digital ransoms entirely, in the same way that many countries criminalise the payment of terrorist ransoms for kidnapping

More than a third of senior executives surveyed in March 2021 by Munich Re, a reinsurer, are considering taking out a cyber-insurance policy, which pays out for ransomware-related losses.

If governments cannot hunt down the attackers, then recovering the ransoms is the next best thing.

Tired of the economic disruption caused by ransomware, governments will strike back. Many countries have developed offensive cyber-forces run by military and intelligence agencies.

In March 2021 eight Western countries, co-ordinated by the European Union’s police agency, attacked and disrupted the Emotet botnet, a network of hijacked servers used by cyber-criminals.

A DIGITAL PANDEMIC swept the world in 2021.

Long before the pandemic a gap was emerging between well-paid, intellectually stimulated workers on the one hand, and poorly paid service workers on the other. The rise of working from home deepens the split between these two types of people—with consequences that no one can predict.

find that employee “engagement” in America, a rough measure of how committed people are to their jobs, is near an all-time high.

companies may place more emphasis on managers who are good at using digital tools to specify exactly what they want doing, and when, to distributed teams.

Some recognise its importance in the fight to retain talent.

It enables a more efficient division of labour between “deep work” (the sort requiring lots of concentration, which may be best done at home) and collaborative work (best done with colleagues, in person, in the office).

firms expect that around a quarter of all work hours will be done from home in a post-covid world—about half what workers want.

Respondents to surveys suggest that they would like to work from home nearly 50% of the time, up from 5% before the pandemic, with the remainder in the office.

on average workers report higher levels of satisfaction and happiness.

many of these novel working practices will endure. And for the better.

Democracy—the combination of demos (people) and kratos (rule)—means “rule by the people”. The “Taiwan model” demonstrates how the use of digital platforms can strengthen democracy, by giving everyone a voice and enabling a government that works not just for the people but with the people.

called Join, hosts debates and helps create consensus in other policy areas. Since its launch in 2015, Join has been accessed by almost half of Taiwan’s population.

An open platform called vTaiwan, created by volunteers, brings together representatives from the public, private and social sectors to devise and debate policy solutions to problems related to the digital economy, from online alcohol sales to ride-hailing.

Through design and usability studies, they create prototypes that showcase suggested improvements.

system of grants to reward community proposals that can potentially benefit the public interest.

one of the largest open-source civic-tech communities in the world.

contact-tracers can retrieve data from the system for quick and effective tracing.

By scanning a QR code using a smartphone camera and sending a text message to the toll-free number 1922, check-in records are created and stored—with no need for an app.

The pandemic has strengthened our model of collaboration between people, government and the private sector, deepening what I call “people-public-private” partnerships.

it would take $100bn to make sure everyone on Earth had more than $1.90 a day. Aid and private philanthropy could cover that sum twice over, with money to spare.

Governments across the globe introduced more than 3,300 social-protection measures between March 2020 and May 2021, according to the World Bank, including cash-transfer programmes targeting the poor

There will be 121 women in poverty for every 100 men by 2030, according to UN Women, up from 118 in 2021.

Women, who are more likely to have precarious jobs, were hit hard by covid-19 lockdowns. The pandemic cost women around the world at least $800bn in lost income in 2020, according to Oxfam, a charity.

But in others, like Ethiopia and Uganda, less than 1% of the population was fully jabbed. That discrepancy will persist into 2022 and beyond.

One in ten people who are poor in 2022 will be in urban areas.

By 2030, over 60% of those living on less than $1.90 per day will be in fragile states. Stable countries, meanwhile, are inching towards ending extreme poverty.

At the end of 2020, the number of people living on less than $1.90 a day had increased to almost 750m, according to the World Data Lab’s World Poverty Clock, a predictive tool which includes World Bank and IMF data. By the end of 2022 they expect that number to edge back down towards where it was before the pandemic, around 685m.

A meeting of a key decision-making body on August 30th noted that the initial crackdown had shown signs of success.

Neither Chinese nor American regulators want Chinese companies to go public in New York. Even initial public offerings in Hong Kong have taken on a new level of risk.

Tencent’s price-to-earnings ratio is expected to fall from a multiple of about 32 in 2020 to 24 in 2022, according to Bernstein, a brokerage.

are being forced to confront many of the monopolistic practices that bolstered their earnings in the past.

The short-video industry, dominated by companies such as ByteDance, Kuaishou and Bilibili, may receive similar treatment.

they should stop focusing on profits and instead concentrate on reducing adolescents’ addiction to playing.

some providers of online after-school tutoring have been forced to convert into non-profit organisations.

a decline in the profitability of China’s tech sector.

But on August 8th the Communist Party issued a five-year blueprint aimed at reshaping China’s tech industry—confirming to even the most optimistic industry watchers that the abrasive changes would continue well into 2022.

More than $1trn was wiped off the collective market capitalisation of some of the world’s largest internet groups,

Entire business models—online tutoring, for example—were laid waste.

What it can hope for is to sustain, with like-minded countries, a world order friendly to democratic values. Whether it can do this will depend on recovering a sense of national identity and purpose at home.

how it affects the partisan struggle.

A far greater test for American foreign policy than Afghanistan will be Taiwan, if it comes under direct Chinese attack.

But the covid-19 crisis served rather to deepen America’s divisions, with social distancing, mask-wearing and vaccinations being seen not as public-health measures but as political markers

American society is deeply polarised, and has found it difficult to find consensus on virtually anything.

The degree of unipolarity in this period has been rare in history, and the world has been reverting to a more normal state of multipolarity

America overestimated the effectiveness of military power to bring about deep political change, even as it underestimated the impact of its free-market economic model on global finance.

The peak period of American hegemony lasted less than 20 years, from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to the financial crisis of 2007-09.

The long-term sources of American weakness and decline are more domestic than international

The Kremlin will increase pressure on Google to fall into line: it may slow down its search engine and impose fines. And it will continue to develop its own video-hosting platform, RuTube, to which it can move popular content, then switch off YouTube if necessary. Restoring a monopoly over information is central to Mr Putin’s power. The war over the internet will define Russia’s near future.

Blocking YouTube is problematic. The service is used by millions of Russians who have little interest in politics but would be outraged if it were unavailable.

It has installed equipment and compelled providers to hamper access to Twitter so that pictures and videos do not upload. It has threatened the Russian staff of Apple and Google with criminal proceedings in order to remove Mr Navalny’s app from their stores. Media organisations and journalists have been declared “foreign agents”, making it almost impossible to operate in Russia.

The share of the internet and social media among all sources of information has grown from 18% in 2013-15 to 45% in 2021.

The biggest challenge to the Kremlin comes from the internet

The EU gains its power from its economic clout.

wide gaps in growth rates have emerged between northern and southern Europe in the past two decades,

Resetting the rules, which dictate how much governments can spend, will be the main fiscal battle of 2022.

Under Mr Macron, France has increased its influence on the European stage, but “peak France” still seems some way away.

a more limited coalition of the willing, with some countries agreeing to meld their armed forces further, but without going anywhere near forming the oft-forecast, never-delivered EU army.

Allowing deeper European integration on defence, but in a way that avoids giving the Americans an excuse to opt out, is one possible compromise.

A French-led summit on defence in the first half of 2022, with the European Commission as a cheerleader, will put the topic front and centre.

defence and security

As long as the policy is not revealed to be a ploy to shovel cash at stodgy European enterprises, the liberal countries will play along.

Boosting EU self-sufficiency on things like microchips

economic endeavour

strategic autonomy.

“When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

Gary Gensler, the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, America’s main financial watchdog, once taught a class on blockchain technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

As the boundary between financial firms and tech companies blurs further, and the value of amassing customer data increases, protecting privacy and security will be paramount.

Transferring money across borders, such as through remittances from rich countries to poor ones, is still too expensive.

Financial inclusion is a problem even in the rich world: one in five Americans were either unbanked or underbanked in 2018. Small firms regularly struggle to access finance.

More than a hundred DeFi applications are in the works.

to introducing digital currencies of their own.

Novel assets of all kinds associated with the DeFi world, such as non-fungible tokens (nfts) and other crypto-tokens, will continue to proliferate

Facebook’s new digital wallet could make inroads.

to offer an ever-widening range of financial products on a single platform

“decentralised-finance” (DeFi) applications

the need to address inequities that widened during the pandemic is often overlooked.

One-third of surveyed women working in tech said they were interrupted or ignored more often in virtual meetings than in person.

Now that many jobs can be done flexibly, or fully remotely, employers can recruit from a wider pool.

Decisions about pay and promotion must be made in clear and measurable ways.

have access to the same resources as everyone else.

Many employers promise that workers can work flexibly, but leave them to decipher unwritten rules.

at least its rules were clear.

bosses will need to define whether they want procedural fairness (same rules for everyone) or fairness in outcomes (no group suffers as a result of a policy).

Fairness will happen only by design.

women, minorities and parents with young children will spend less time in the office.

hybrid

Fairness—essentially, lack of favouritism—is easier to track when everyone is working in similar circumstances.

the “great leveller”

increased workplace fairness.

Greater productivity, happier and healthier workers and lower emissions are just some of the benefits of the great work-from-home experiment.

To pep up growth, keep people healthy and avert unrest, the smartest thing any government can do in 2022 is to roll out vaccines. Anti-vaxxers will resist, but France and others have shown that insisting on vaccine passports to eat in restaurants can swiftly change minds. Magic bullets in politics are not supposed to exist, but the coronavirus vaccines come awfully close.

Kenya’s election in August will be fraught, too. The pandemic has wiped out tourism jobs. Police have killed curfew-breakers

By contrast, citizens of middle-income countries expect decent public services and are frustrated. They know that the well-off were vaccinated first, including the local elite who flew abroad for their jabs. They are understandably impatient that the vaccine is tantalisingly out of reach for millions.

A study of 133 countries between 2001 and 2018 finds that political unrest tends to peak two years after a typical epidemic starts.

The good news is that a military confrontation seems unlikely in 2022.

this all seems highly unlikely.

And in theory the two sides could make progress in plenty of areas, such as devising a sensible deal on trade and technology to replace the tariffs of the Trump era; agreeing on a common approach to cyber-security, nuclear non-proliferation or the militarisation of space; or finding ways to accelerate the clean-energy transition in the wake of the COP26 climate meeting in Glasgow.

Divergent political and economic performance will dominate the headlines in the coming year.

With covid-19 behind it, its fiscal tightening mostly complete and (assuming some version of Mr Biden’s bill is passed) with a long-overdue effort to improve infrastructure under way, America’s economy could grow smartly, even as its politics frays. GDP growth of 4%, not far off China’s, is plausible.

from a shrinking workforce to a rapidly growing number of old-age dependents, and the economic pressures are considerable. Annual GDP growth could fall to 5%.

The crisis at Evergrande, a huge developer, suggests that this tricky transition is at last under way.

will discourage entrepreneurship and hinder innovation

China’s draconian approach will eventually cause economic damage.

with a zero-covid policy throughout 2022

a living-with-covid mindset.

will lead to little more than Congressional hearings.

erasing as much as $1.5trn in shareholder value

which system delivers the most competent economic management.

if he succeeds in getting a version of his “Build Back Better” package of infrastructure and social spending passed, Mr Biden begins 2022 with his popularity still dimmed by rising inflation and supply shortages.

In Europe a winter of energy shortages, with high prices and even rolling blackouts, will infuriate voters and frighten politicians. France’s presidential election will be an ugly spectacle of populist demagoguery, the tone set by Eric Zemmour, a hard-right, anti-immigrant television personality who is positioning himself as the French Trump. In the end Emmanuel Macron will probably be re-elected, as the populist right-wing vote splits, but a campaign dominated by resentment and culture wars will not feel like an advertisement for democracy.

any whiff of disquiet within the party at Mr Xi’s rejection of any term limit for his rule will be met with brutal purges.

Starting with the Winter Olympics in February and culminating with the 20th Communist Party congress later in the year

“The East is rising and the West is declining,” as Chinese officials have become fond of saying.

by an adversarial rivalry that is not just about each side’s relative power, but has become an existential competition as each side strives to demonstrate the superiority of its system of government.

from hubristic faith that it could be integrated into the existing American-led world order to something closer to paranoid containment, marked by suspicion of China’s intentions and a fearful bipartisan consensus that America’s global pre-eminence is at risk.

in 2015, Graham Allison of Harvard University examined whether the same dynamic would apply to America and China. He identified 16 historical episodes where an established power’s position was disrupted by a challenger. In 12 of those cases the shift ended in war.

“The Thucydides Trap”,

the consequence of growing Athenian power instilling fear in Sparta

based on the idea of a probabilistic universe, in which a particle is neither here nor there until measured, described by the wave function itself.

These experiments have, nonetheless, spawned entirely new disciplines – of quantum information and quantum computing – demonstrating that exploration of seemingly pointless philosophical issues can have profound practical consequences.

‘According to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics,’ he wrote, ‘whenever a [wave function] attains a [certain form pertaining to measurement] it immediately collapses.’

Foundational questions were judged to belong in a philosophy class, and there was no place for philosophy in physics.

Research advisers, many already inclined towards empiricism or plain indifference, sought to steer their students towards projects more likely to attract funding, and so more likely to provide a firm basis on which to build careers as ‘professional calculating physicists’.

It would be the bolder, brasher, more empirical ‘hands-on’ style of US theoretical physics that would come to dominate the postwar world.

that Bohr was ‘annoyingly vague, and, indeed, [Bell] felt that, for Bohr, lack of precision seemed to be a virtue’.

‘Shut up and calculate’

the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics

beyond its relevance to the calculation of probabilities.

What we observe is quantum behaviour as projected into our classical world of direct experience.

For Einstein, the lack of any kind of physical explanation for how this is supposed to happen meant that something is missing; that quantum mechanics is in some way incomplete.

All we can do is use the wave function to calculate the probability that the next electron will be detected here, or there, or way over there.

Repeating this with more and more electrons will give us a diffraction pattern – a pattern possible only with waves – made up of a myriad of individual spots, each of which is possible only with particles.

quantum mechanics judges to be merely improbable, lending a fungible quality to reality, and challenging the truth of a universe defined by the physics that came before.

It has obvious wave-like properties, but also obvious particle-like properties, such as mass.

At the heart of the debate was the interpretation of the theory’s central concept – a mathematical object called the wave function.

Mechanics is that part of physics concerned with stuff that moves, and quantum mechanics is the theory of the motion of matter and light at the smallest scales: the realm of molecules, atoms, subatomic particles (such as electrons), and photons, the quanta (or ‘atoms’) of light.

quantum mechanics and Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity.

underpin almost every aspect of our technologically advanced society.

When Nixon was informed that Chinese premier Zhou Enlai had declared a new era in relations, the president marveled that such an announcement had been made “to a ping-pong team!”

It was a crucial break in the bitter, sometimes bloody, rivalry between the two countries and led to President Richard M. Nixon’s visit to China the following year.

The WHO should continue to apply this approach and work closely with the World Organisation for Animal Health, the Food and Agriculture Organization and countries,

the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) One Health approach recognises that health is connected in humans, animals and its shared environment,

It has also addressed other health challenges, for example in the formulation of International Health Regulations, the Framework Convention of Tobacco Control and Universal Health Coverage. The evolution of the Global Health Security Agenda, the United Nations Political Declaration on the Prevention and Control of NCDs, and the WHO Global Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of NCDs are some excellent examples of successful health diplomacy in recent years.

Global health diplomacy is what links health and international relations to address health security. It was this diplomacy that delivered political commitments from many corners of the world to push for COVID-19 medicines and essentials, the development of new partnerships and initiatives, and the creation of COVAX the global scheme to vaccinate people in lower-income countries and ACT-Accelerator, dubbed the fastest, most coordinated and successful global effort in history to develop tools to fight a disease .

Both India and Indonesia (with a low GDP) had ten flags, while the United States, China and Japan (with the highest GDP) only had one flag.

They then looked for signs of key factors in international politics: reliability, trustworthiness, material capabilities and continuity.

Additional doors had to be installed so that Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill could enter the fateful meeting room, where decisions about Germany's future would be made, at the same time.

A new study from Lund University in Sweden analyzed over 50 photos from the first virtual G20 meeting in 2020.