A narrative of access, science made public, digestible, porous that was engaging and entertaining.
Science in a Changing World: A conversation for the next 200 years is a one night, public panel convened at UCL’s Bloomsbury Theatre as part of UCL200, a bicentenary collaboration with the Royal Society, bringing together experts Chris van Tulleken, Mark Miodownik, Dame Polina Bayvel and Kevin Fong to consider how science might shape the next two centuries, and asks what it means to think across that span from within the present.
The evening opens with institutional self-framing, UCL’s origin as secular, accessible, and allowing women early into higher education. There is a careful positioning of progress as ethos. A short film and introductory remarks establish a narrative of expansion, of doors opened and legacy. The panel discussion turns first to prediction, via Robert Boyle. His speculative list, written some 250 years ago, offers the panel both inspiration and tempering. Some things he foresaw with startling clarity, such as human flight, while others reveal the limits of his context. Pain, for Boyle, remained necessary, medically and morally. It is a reminder that imagination is always bound by what a period can conceive to question.
Mark Miodownik, leading the panel, returns to this, beginning a list, the act of writing predictions down for a future reader. There is something almost childlike in the suggestion to pass a piece of paper forward. Paper is still agreed to be the best material for passing information down, rather than a rock.
The panel moves across topics with ease – space, health, communication, held together by chemistry, mutual respect and a collegiate friction that opens possibilities. Mars enters, inevitably, with discussions around food supply, communication lag, and survivability. Kevin Fong frames it through analogy, recalling Antarctic expeditions once deemed impossible and now somewhat routine. Mars remains high risk, and, as the panel notes, we are living through a risk-averse moment. Fong describes his parents’ understanding of exploration as something resonant as a goal, something they could share. The conversation remains light and entertaining as the panel reflects on the needs for recycled faecal matter for the realities of space travel, astronauts already drink their own wee after all.
Dame Polina Bayvel grounds the future in infrastructure. Optical fibre and communication technology as a site of ongoing invention, without the structures to support it, and oversaturated by AI usage. She recounts optical fibre’s inventor, whose predictions underestimated the technology’s eventual capacity and was way under. Even those closest to innovation cannot fully predict its potential. New fibres are being invented, for example, that run on air rather than glass. Dame Polina early in the discussion casually raises neural implants, chips embedded in the brain rather than devices held externally, drawing a line from current systems to something that still feels like dystopic science fiction. But the technology is already there.
Chris van Tulleken resists certain kinds of futurism. The idea of a complete nutritional pill is gently dismissed; taste, pleasure, ritual, these are not so easily engineered away. Chairs, he notes, will likely continue to have four legs. Food will continue to taste of something, and probably something delicious. He foregrounds what we already know, have discovered, do well. At the same time, he points to the commercial production of wanting, how both food and technology industries hack this known desire.
Across the panel, there is a recurring caution around inequality. Advances in AI and other technologies, risk widening existing gaps, rather than resolving them. Amazing technologies that will improve health in some parts of the world are already accelerating poor health outcomes in other parts. The future is not evenly distributed. The closing reflections turn towards application. Science itself is not in and of itself the object of fear. Complexity emerges as a defining condition of the present, not simply the difficulty of problems, but the difficulty of holding them in full.
What lingers is not any single prediction, but the texture of the conversation and a value of critical thinking. A sense of expertise held lightly, of disagreement that remains generative and of shared laughter, a genuinely human approach. The evening is grounded in a group of people thinking aloud about the future through their specialisms, aware both of the limits, but also the need to discuss this openly, across-disciplines, with levity and hope.
It is, ultimately, a celebration, institutionally framed. A narrative of access, science made public, digestible, porous that was engaging and entertaining. A reminder of what may not need reinventing, how understanding the past helps position us in the future, sitting alongside not only a need for progress but the why. The long view, 200 years forward, 200 back, carefully pitched for the possible.