The looming spectre of 2024 is here, and there are, as usual, plenty of reasons to hide under the covers and hope the whole darn year just goes away.
Climate change and its accompanying forest fires and storms, war in Gaza and Ukraine and Myanmar, tensions with China and Russia. Here at home we have a housing crisis and a homelessness crisis and a toxic drugs crisis, and I doubt we’ll fully solve any of them by the end of the coming year.
But there are a few trends in the world that give me optimism for the year ahead.
• Solar power
This coming year, we expect to see the first wide-scale sales of a new kind of “tandem” solar cells that uses both traditional silicon, as well as pervoskite. This makes them a good bit more energy efficient than traditional silicon cells – which have themselves been getting better and cheaper for years now. The goal, of course, is to get as much energy out of as few cells as cheaply as possible.
• Medicine
In 2023, human trials were showing successful results for a host of new drugs and treatments, including a treatment for sickle cell anemia, a vaccine for the most severe kind of melanomas, and two different treatments that targeted auto-immune disorders, including lupus and multiple sclerosis.
Several of these treatments use techniques that didn’t even exist several years ago, including CRISPR gene-editing and mRNA vaccines.
Some of these treatments hit the market in late 2023, others may do so in 2024, but all are hopeful signs.
• Lunar mission
The new Artemis missions to return crewed exploration to the moon for the first time since the early 1970s – before I, or most people alive now, were born – start next year. The first mission won’t be a landing, but will loop around the moon. It will be the first space flight to leave the orbit of Earth in decades. As a longtime nerd, I’m pretty excited!
• Housing
Back here on planet Earth, we’re finally seeing some progress on one of the most intractable problems in Canadian society – getting enough housing for everyone, and bringing down its price.
Between B.C.’s ambitious reforms and the federal government turning the spigot on the fire hose of money for cities boosting density and speeding up approvals, things will start to change in 2024. Reforms won’t make an impact overnight, but hopefully, this will mark the beginning of the end of a 20-year run of ludicrous housing prices.
• New bike lanes
Is this one more about me, personally, being happy that there are some new bike lanes being built in my neighbourhood than a big world-spanning thing?
Yes.
But it’s still true. And often, those little improvements in our lives – a new library, discovering a new hobby, taking up a sport, making a friend – are the things that make life worth living. Small victories and little pleasures are what get us through every year, and 2024 will be no different.