Every New Year brings with it new expectations for better times. The year that ended yesterday was a tumultuous one both at home and abroad. At home, an unprecedented popular upheaval led to a change in the Presidency in July while overseas developments were headlined by the War in Ukraine, which began on February 24.
The world is still reeling from the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and a gradual recovery is expected in the year that begins today, though it might be 2024 when stability returns. These are not easy times by any stretch of the imagination.
But all is not gloom and doom. The year 2023 will no doubt bring in its share of fun and frolic for people of all ages. But there is a caveat – Covid-19 has not been eradicated per se and some countries might experience a resurgence of the disease as most people have now given up Covid health protocols such as wearing masks.
Better position
From a purely medical point of view, we are in a better position to fight Covid-19 than even in 2022, with the availability of bivalent vaccines that can target several viral strains at once, the widespread availability of Covid medicines such as Paxlovid and Evusheld and advanced research into Long Covid, a condition where some people experience one or more Covid symptoms long after they are “cured” of the disease. If all goes well, this could be the year that Covid-19 ceases to be a Global Health Emergency. But we have to be aware of emerging diseases such as Mpox, RSV and StrepA. And as usual, there is one thing that could stand in the way of disease control – global travel.
This is how the virus spread so rapidly around the world, from Patient Zero in China in December 2019 to 660 million patients at end 2022. Covid forced us to stay indoors – and within our borders, virtually grinding international travel to a halt.
But after almost three years of staying in, 2023 will be the year when everyone ventures out, within and beyond their borders. Conducting a conversation over Zoom, itself almost a product of the pandemic, is nothing like meeting your loved ones living on the other side of the world face-to-face. Travel experts predict a boom this year, with flight and cruise bookings going through the roof. Nevertheless, it could still be 2024 before travel returns to pre-pandemic levels.
This year could also be a year where you can explore new ways to travel. Several cities will be trialling Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) Electric Air Taxi Services this year, but do not expect commercial services to launch at least until 2025-2026. For example, Volocopter, based in Germany, plans public flight tests of its VoloCity model this year. It hopes to get the aircraft certified in 2024 and then launch services in Singapore, Paris and Rome.
VTOLs are ideal for ferrying people for trips in the range of 200-300 Km. They are also non-polluting and virtually noise-free. They could even be pilotless by around 2035. Moreover, more trials of electric aircraft will take place this year. It is essential that the world finds an alternative to aviation fuel - Air travel is responsible for 2.4 percent of all CO2 emissions today, and it has an even larger overall contribution to global warming due to other greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
Before pilotless planes and VTOLs take to the skies, we might be able to hitch a ride in a driverless taxi down on terra firma. Several cities will launch robo-taxi services this year on a limited scale. General Motors’ Cruise Division has just launched a fleet of driverless taxis in three US cities – San Francisco, Austin and Phoenix. These are fully autonomous cars with no humans (i.e. a supervisory driver) on board.
Several Chinese cities are also planning to have robo-taxi services this year. As the year rolls by, we can expect more cities around the world to join in. These driverless taxis should be commonplace by 2035 or even 2030. Tesla, Uber, Waymo and nearly all mainstream carmakers are ramping up research on driverless cars in general, not just taxis.
Leaving driverless cars aside, this year promises to be the year in which electric cars finally go mainstream, with all major manufacturers having at least one pure electric car in their line- up. Their goal is to cease the production of ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) cars perhaps by 2030, after nearly 130 years.
Among the hotly anticipated electric cars of 2023 are Lucid Air, Ford Mustang Mach-E, Alfa Romeo Tonale, Maserati Granturismo Folgore (Italian for Lightning), Polestar 3, Mercedes EQE SUV, Hyundai Ioniq 6, Lotus Eletre and Rolls Royce Spectre. Some new electric cars will have an astounding range of around 900 Km per full charge, which even many ICE engines cannot match. This year will also see the proliferation of DC superchargers everywhere, offering quick 30-minute fill-ups for electric car owners. Several new breakthroughs have also been made in terms of electric battery technology which will cascade down to the consumer level this year.
Best features
If you peek into the interior of any of these electric cars, you will see an abundance of screens throughout the cabin. In aviation parlance, this is called a ‘Glass Cockpit’ and the same concept has filtered down to cars.
Vast strides have been made in screen technology over the years – no one even remembers the good old Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) and Plasma screens anymore.
While the screen field is dominated by Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) now, this year will belong to Organic Light Emitting Display (OLED) technology.
These sets offer infinite contrast as each pixel can switch on and off individually, eliminating the need for a backlight as in LCD.
OLED sets will become cheaper, though another technology is being launched this year – MicroLED. It combines the best features of both LCD and OLED to give stunning pictures, though do not expect MicroLED TV sets to be affordable in the year of launch. We are looking at a ballpark figure of around US$ 80,000 for a 55-incher. For that kind of money, you can buy about 45 OLED sets of a similar size.
Straddling these technologies is another take on LCD – Mini LED, which uses a small array of LED lights for the backlighting. Expect to see a lot of Mini LED displays in TVs, tablets (the Apple iPad Pro 12.9 already has one), laptops and in-car screens this year. If you buy an upper end smartphone in 2023, it will also probably have a mini-LED or OLED screen.
Talking of smartphones, 2023 will be the year in which 5G technology will take off in a big way. From faster downloads of movies to better video call quality, 5G will revolutionise our communications landscape, while connecting even more devices to the so-called Internet of Things (IoT).
Your refrigerator will finally be able to “talk” to your microwave, for example.
Nearly all new handsets coming in 2023 will have 5G on board, as 5G chip prices are falling by the day. Satellite technology will also go mainstream this year. Apple’s latest iPhone 14 can already send texts via satellite in case of an emergency in places where cellular signals are not available. A pair of ambitious startups, AST SpaceMobile and Lynk Global, have also started building new Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite networks designed to reach conventional 5G cell phones outside terrestrial cellular coverage.
LEO satellites
AST SpaceMobile said it plans to launch its first five commercial satellites late in 2023 and has agreements or understandings with more than 25 telecom providers around the world. Advances include the declining cost of satellite manufacturing and the shrinking size of satellites themselves, making it affordable to build many more satellites than in the past. Perhaps “No Service” will be a thing of the past starting from 2023.
Meanwhile, more people around the world will be able to access the Internet via satellite this year thanks to services such as Starlink.
Granted, the installation and monthly fees are still too high, but costs should come down in the next few years.
These systems envisage launching thousands of LEO satellites, which has led to fears by astronomers that the night sky could be ‘blacked out’, leaving the James Webb Space Telescope as the only option to gaze at the cosmos.
Alien civilisations
Scientists are expecting great things from James Webb in 2023, including the exploration of possible habitable exoplanets.
Could 2023 be the year in which humankind finally makes ‘Contact’ with intelligent extraterrestrial beings? It has long been believed that humans cannot be alone in the universe as there are billions of planets scattered around it. Some of them could harbour life – intelligent life at that. But the question remains as to why we have not made Contact with any such civilisation so far.
One beguiling, even terrifying, explanation is that most advanced alien civilisations could have wiped themselves out through war or Climate Change millions of years ago.
That indeed, is food for thought as we head into 2023, with increased tensions internationally and the UN Chief warning of catastrophic consequences if Climate Change is not checked.
Protecting the Planet Earth must be our first priority this year, which promises to be exciting on a variety of fronts.