Timeline
From writing to 2126: what humanity discovered, what it lost and recovered, and the four futures that branch out from today.
Antiquity3500 BCE – 500 BCE
c. 3200 BCE
Writing
Sumerian scribes in Uruk, in present-day Iraq, develop cuneiform writing to record transactions.
Sources: Archaeology Magazine, 2016
From the classical world to the Middle Ages500 BCE – 1500
3rd century BCE
Aristarchus puts the Sun at the centre
According to Archimedes, Aristarchus of Samos proposed that the Earth rotates daily and revolves around the Sun. The idea was sidelined for almost two thousand years.
Lost knowledge. Recovered in 1543: Copernicus
late 2nd century BCE
The Antikythera Mechanism
A Greek geared device calculates and displays astronomical cycles, such as the phases of the Moon. Nothing as complex is known for at least a millennium. It is lost in a shipwreck.
Lost knowledge. Recovered in 2006: Antikythera decoded
Sources: Freeth et al., Nature, 2006
79
Vesuvius buries a library
The eruption of Vesuvius buries a library of papyrus scrolls in Herculaneum, carbonised and impossible to open.
Lost knowledge. Recovered in 2024: A Herculaneum scroll is read
Sources: Vesuvius Challenge, 2024
128
Roman concrete
Rome’s Pantheon, with the world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome, is dedicated. How the Romans made concrete that lasts for millennia became a riddle.
Lost knowledge. Recovered in 2023: The secret of Roman concrete
Sources: MIT News, 2023
1229
Archimedes, under a prayer book
A 10th-century manuscript of treatises by Archimedes is scraped and reused for a prayer book, finished in 1229. It contains The Method, of which no other copy exists.
Lost knowledge. Recovered in 1906: Archimedes reappears
Sources: Archimedes Palimpsest Project, 2026
Scientific and industrial revolutions1500 – 1900
1543
Copernicus
Copernicus publishes De revolutionibus, which puts the Sun at the centre: the idea Archimedes attributed to Aristarchus.
Recovered knowledge. Lost in 3rd century BCE: Aristarchus puts the Sun at the centre
1796
The first vaccine
Edward Jenner demonstrates the first vaccine, against smallpox, using material from cowpox.
Sources: World Health Organization, 2026
1843
Ada Lovelace’s notes
Ada Lovelace publishes her notes on Babbage’s Analytical Engine, with the first published description of a sequence of operations for solving a problem with a machine. She imagines it could compose music.
Sources: Computer History Museum, 2026
Twentieth century1900 – 2000
1906
Archimedes reappears
Johan Ludvig Heiberg discovers that the prayer book contains seven treatises by Archimedes. Since 1999 the palimpsest has been studied and imaged at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.
Recovered knowledge. Lost in 1229: Archimedes, under a prayer book
Sources: Archimedes Palimpsest Project, 2026
1928
Penicillin
Alexander Fleming discovers penicillin in London. The first patient receives it in 1941, and by 1943 there is enough for the Allied armed forces.
1945
The first nuclear test
The United States tests the first nuclear weapon in the New Mexico desert.
Sources: Atomic Heritage Foundation, 2026
1950
The imitation game
Alan Turing proposes replacing the question “can machines think?” with a game: whether an interrogator, using only written questions, can tell the machine from the person.
1956
The Dartmouth workshop
A summer workshop studies “artificial intelligence”. Its proposal conjectures that any feature of intelligence can be described so precisely that a machine can simulate it.
1968
The Non-Proliferation Treaty
The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons opens for signature. It enters into force in 1970 and today has 191 States parties.
1969
People on the Moon
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the Moon.
Sources: NASA, 2026
1975
Asilomar
Scientists meeting at Asilomar (California) agree to proceed cautiously with recombinant DNA research. This leads to the NIH Guidelines, adopted even by private companies: a precedent for self-regulation.
Sources: Berg, Baltimore, Brenner, Roblin and Singer, PNAS, 1975; Imperiale and Casadevall, mSphere, 2025
1980
Farewell to smallpox
WHO declares smallpox eradicated.
Sources: World Health Organization, 2026
1987
The Montreal Protocol
The Montreal Protocol is signed to protect the ozone layer. It enters into force in 1989.
Sources: UNEP Ozone Secretariat, 2026
1988
The IPCC is born
UNEP and the World Meteorological Organization create the IPCC to provide regular scientific assessments of climate change.
Sources: IPCC, 2026
1989
The Web
Tim Berners-Lee invents the World Wide Web at CERN. In 1993 CERN puts its software in the public domain.
Sources: CERN, 2026
Digital era2000 – 2026
2003
The human genome
The Human Genome Project, launched in 1990, is completed with the first sequence of the human genome.
2006
Antikythera decoded
Found in 1901 in a Roman shipwreck, the mechanism is studied with new imaging techniques that clarify what it calculated and how.
Recovered knowledge. Lost in late 2nd century BCE: The Antikythera Mechanism
Sources: Freeth et al., Nature, 2006
2012
Deep learning takes off
A deep neural network, AlexNet, classifies ImageNet images with far fewer errors than earlier methods.
2015
The Paris Agreement
The Paris Agreement is adopted: keep warming well below 2 °C and pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5 °C.
Sources: United Nations, 2026
2017
The Transformer
The Transformer is proposed: a neural network based solely on attention mechanisms, without recurrence or convolutions.
Sources: Vaswani et al., 2017
2021
AlphaFold
AlphaFold predicts protein structures with high accuracy, a problem open for more than 50 years. In 2024 Demis Hassabis and John Jumper receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for it, shared with David Baker.
Sources: Jumper et al., Nature, 2021; Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, 2024
2023
The secret of Roman concrete
A study shows that the Romans used hot mixing with quicklime. The lime clasts left in the concrete seal its cracks when water gets in.
Recovered knowledge. Lost in 128: Roman concrete
Sources: Seymour et al., Science Advances, 2023; MIT News, 2023
2024
A Herculaneum scroll is read
With scans, computer vision and machine learning, the Vesuvius Challenge reads more than 2,000 characters from a scroll closed for 2,000 years: Epicurean philosophy on pleasure.
Recovered knowledge. Lost in 79: Vesuvius buries a library
Sources: Vesuvius Challenge, 2024
2024
The European AI Act
The European Union’s AI Act enters into force. Its prohibitions apply from February 2025.
Sources: European Commission, 2026
Today, 2026
This is where the paths split. Where we are today is estimated from public signals on the futures page. Choose for yourself in paths.
Futures2026 – 2126
What the futures model makes happen in each one, on the median of its simulations. Only the first global crisis is shown; the model can repeat them every 15 years. These are scenarios, not predictions.
Pause
We regulate and slow down
- 2031 The planet passes 1.5 °C of warming.
- 2034 Data centers use more electricity than all of Japan does today.
- 2045 Half of all energy is now clean.
- 2066 One billion robots in operation.
- 2069 Nine in ten units of energy are clean.
- 2072 AI can now do half of all human tasks.
- 2086 World population peaks and begins to fall.
- 2109 CO₂ emissions reach practically zero.
- 2120 The cumulative risk of catastrophe passes 10%.
- 2121 Science moves ten times faster than in 2026.
Peaceful frontier
We regulate and move forward
- 2029 Data centers use more electricity than all of Japan does today.
- 2031 The planet passes 1.5 °C of warming.
- 2043 AI can now do half of all human tasks.
- 2044 Half of all energy is now clean.
- 2047 One billion robots in operation.
- 2060 Science moves ten times faster than in 2026.
- 2067 Nine in ten units of energy are clean.
- 2086 World population peaks and begins to fall.
- 2113 CO₂ emissions reach practically zero.
- 2118 The cumulative risk of catastrophe passes 10%.
- 2125 The planet passes 2 °C of warming.
Race
No rules, no brakes
- 2029 Data centers use more electricity than all of Japan does today.
- 2031 The planet passes 1.5 °C of warming.
- 2035 A global crisis breaks out and slows the economy and AI.
- 2042 The cumulative risk of catastrophe passes 10%.
- 2047 AI can now do half of all human tasks.
- 2047 One billion robots in operation.
- 2053 Power is concentrated in very few hands.
- 2057 The planet passes 2 °C of warming.
- 2062 Half of all energy is now clean.
- 2086 World population peaks and begins to fall.
- 2112 Nine in ten units of energy are clean.
Fracture
No rules; a crisis slows us down
- 2031 The planet passes 1.5 °C of warming.
- 2034 Data centers use more electricity than all of Japan does today.
- 2035 A global crisis breaks out and slows the economy and AI.
- 2051 The cumulative risk of catastrophe passes 10%.
- 2061 The planet passes 2 °C of warming.
- 2064 Half of all energy is now clean.
- 2067 One billion robots in operation.
- 2086 World population peaks and begins to fall.
- 2089 AI can now do half of all human tasks.
- 2104 Power is concentrated in very few hands.
- 2115 Nine in ten units of energy are clean.