In 2024 I built scenarios for 2050. Some of them are turning up early. And not precisely the way I expected.

07 October 2026

In 2024 I did the sober version of imagining the future. It included two key axes — whether the world holds climate change in check or doesn’t, and whether food technology advances a lot or a little — and the four futures that fall out of crossing them. In the future that I bank on most, the one with hard climate stress and real technological capability, the conclusion was blunt: the highest-value asset is not food itself but the technology to make it — the ownership, the control, the access.

One of the markers I put on that future was contested access to the far latitudes — the Arctic, the Antarctic, the high cold places and clean cold waters — as resource pressure pushed states toward ground nobody had bothered to fight over. I filed it as a 2040-to-2050 signal. Something to watch for, later.

It is 2026, and I am watching for it now. The headlines carry the early shapes of it: a major power talking openly about Greenland; in parallel, renewed pressure on oil supply, and tariffs wide enough to reorder trade. It looks like the far-latitude and resource-coercion future I had sketched for later in the century is, in outline, turning up a little early. And not the way I expected.

I had assumed the pressure would come from a classic “adversary” — an authoritarian power, or a failing state. My model assumed the rules-based, free-trade order, underwritten by its usual guarantor, would not change. And, unexpectedly to me, the order is now being strained not by an enemy of it but by the power that built it, openly, against its own presumed allies. Interesting. When I presented my scenarios at a conference in 2024, I had listed a key limitation on the slide: social and political trends were excluded on purpose, because I had neither time nor resources to include them, and they were out of scope of my work, testing if my expectation on the future potential of aquaculture was misguided.

I don’t think this changes much for the argument for aquaculture that SHRMP.bio is built on. If at all, this sharpens it. An export surplus is a security asset only for as long as the global market stays open. If the country most able to close that market is the one you would have relied on to keep it open, then the hedge is not a trading partner. The hedge is owning something the world needs and cannot easily take — exportable, strategically-relevant technology, held somewhere it can be defended. And this sounds like a startup pitch. At national scale.

Also interesting.

One of a series on how SHRMP.bio reasoned its way to its strategy.