Present & Future
Not history rewritten — the world exactly as it stands today, disrupted by one sudden change starting now.
What If All Commercial Air Travel Was Grounded Worldwide for a Month?
When a single volcanic ash cloud shut down European airspace for about a week in 2010, it stranded millions of travelers and cost the airline industry an estimated $1.7 billion — and that was one region, for a matter of days. This scenario asks what a genuinely global, month-long version of that same kind of shutdown would actually mean.
Read the scenario →What If a Major City Genuinely Ran Out of Water?
Cape Town came close enough in 2018 that the city had an actual date on the calendar — 'Day Zero' — for when the taps would be switched off entirely. A combination of severe drought, rapid population growth, and aggressive last-minute conservation measures meant the date kept moving. It's a real scenario that has already almost happened, not a hypothetical one.
Read the scenario →What If a Major Solar Storm Knocked Out Power Grids Worldwide?
In 1859, a solar storm was strong enough to make telegraph operators' equipment spark and, in some cases, keep working after they'd disconnected the power. The entire technology it disrupted was the telegraph. A comparable storm hitting today's electricity-dependent world would be a fundamentally different kind of event.
Read the scenario →What If a Pandemic Worse Than COVID-19 Emerged Tomorrow?
COVID-19 already demonstrated, within recent living memory, how quickly a novel pathogen can spread through a globally interconnected world and reshape daily life, economies, and public health systems worldwide. Public health experts consistently caution that a future pathogen with a more severe combination of transmissibility and lethality remains a real, ongoing possibility, not a purely speculative one.
Read the scenario →What If Social Media Was Banned Worldwide Today?
Several individual countries have already banned or heavily restricted specific social media platforms for various periods, giving us real, if partial, evidence of what happens when a population loses access. Imagine every major platform disappeared everywhere, simultaneously, starting today.
Read the scenario →What If All Antibiotics Stopped Working Starting Now?
Antibiotic resistance is already a real, documented, and actively worsening global public health problem, tracked closely by health organizations worldwide — this scenario doesn't invent a new threat, it simply accelerates an existing one to its most complete possible endpoint, starting immediately rather than developing gradually.
Read the scenario →What If Cash Was Abolished Worldwide Starting Today?
Several countries, most notably Sweden, have already moved so far toward digital payments that cash use has become genuinely marginal in daily life — but a complete, simultaneous, worldwide abolition, imposed everywhere at once starting today, would hit vastly different societies at completely different starting points.
Read the scenario →What If Bees Went Extinct Worldwide?
Bees currently face real, well-documented population pressures from habitat loss, pesticide exposure, disease, and colony collapse disorder — none of which point toward imminent total global extinction, but which make this thought experiment a useful lens on a genuine, ongoing concern rather than a purely hypothetical one.
Read the scenario →What If a Major Conflict Over Taiwan Began Tomorrow?
A single island, smaller than Switzerland, produces the overwhelming majority of the world's most advanced computer chips — the components inside nearly every smartphone, car, data center, and weapons system built anywhere on earth. Imagine that supply simply stopped, starting tomorrow.
Read the scenario →What If the Global Internet Went Down for a Month?
The internet has no single off switch — it's a decentralized network of independently operated networks, which is precisely why a genuine simultaneous global outage has no real historical precedent and no obvious single cause. Imagine it happened anyway, everywhere, for thirty straight days.
Read the scenario →What If the World Ran Out of Oil Next Year?
Global proven oil reserves are generally estimated to be sufficient for several more decades of production at current rates, and new discoveries and extraction techniques have repeatedly pushed that horizon back rather than closer. Imagine that timeline compressed to almost nothing.
Read the scenario →What If Apple Went Bust Tomorrow?
Apple is currently one of the most valuable companies in history, with hundreds of billions of dollars in cash reserves and no meaningful signs of imminent collapse. Imagine that changed overnight — not through gradual decline, but sudden, total corporate failure.
Read the scenario →What If It Never Rained Again?
Every major civilization in human history has depended on rainfall arriving somewhere, eventually, to refill the rivers, aquifers, and reservoirs everything else is built on. Imagine that stopped everywhere, permanently, starting today.
Read the scenario →What If a Coordinated Cyberattack Disabled Every Major Bank's Digital Systems for a Week?
Modern banking is almost entirely digital, and major banks have already suffered serious, damaging cyberattacks individually — but a genuinely coordinated attack disabling the core digital systems of multiple major banks simultaneously, rather than one institution at a time, has never actually happened.
Read the scenario →What If Global Fertilizer Supply Chains Collapsed Overnight?
Modern industrial agriculture is fundamentally dependent on synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, produced through an energy-intensive process concentrated in a relatively small number of countries and companies. A sudden, severe disruption to that supply chain would hit global food production at a scale few other single points of failure could match.
Read the scenario →What If a Major Earthquake Destroyed the World's Leading Semiconductor Fabrication Hub Overnight?
A remarkably large share of the world's most advanced semiconductor chips — the ones inside every smartphone, car, data center, and weapons system — are manufactured in a small number of fabrication plants concentrated in a single, seismically active region. A major earthquake severe enough to take that capacity offline for an extended period would be felt in every corner of the global economy within weeks.
Read the scenario →What If the Suez and Panama Canals Were Both Blocked Starting Today?
The 2021 Ever Given grounding blocked the Suez Canal for six days and disrupted an estimated $9 billion a day in trade. The Panama Canal separately faced its own serious disruption in 2023-24 when a historic drought forced authorities to sharply restrict the number of ships allowed through. Neither canal has an easy alternative route. What happens if both are blocked or severely restricted at the same time?
Read the scenario →What If a Major Undersea Internet Cable Network Was Sabotaged Tomorrow?
Roughly 95-99% of intercontinental internet traffic — not satellite links, but the vast majority of everything crossing an ocean — travels through a few hundred undersea fiber-optic cables, many of them bundled through a small number of geographic chokepoints. A coordinated attack severing several of the busiest cables at once would be immediately and severely disruptive.
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