It’s strange to look back at what we were worried about ten years ago. In 2016, to celebrate New Scientist’s 60th birthday, we put together a list of the biggest threats facing humanity. You know the sort of thing: a giant asteroid slamming into the planet, catastrophic global warming, a mysterious new plague, or nanomachines running out of control and turning everything into grey goo. We also mentioned artificial intelligence, almost as an afterthought, a dark possibility from science fiction that might one day become something more. And now, as we get ready to mark our 70th birthday in just under two months, that list feels eerily familiar. The names haven’t changed much, but the edges have sharpened. The worries have become less theoretical and much more personal. Even the asteroid — the one thing that genuinely felt like a movie plot — turned out to be less fanciful than we thought. We dodged that particular bullet, but only just, and it made us realise how fragile our little blue bubble really is. You may also have noticed that New Scientist has had a bit of a glow-up for the occasion. There’s a reason for that: if we’re going to keep talking about the future, we want to look ready for it. But behind the fresh paint and bold new design, the mission hasn’t changed. It’s the same one we started with seven decades ago: to make sense of a confusing, astonishing, sometimes terrifying world, and to do it with curiosity, rigour and a healthy dose of scepticism.
The climate has moved from a warning to a lived experience. In 2016, the Paris Agreement had just entered into force, and there was real hope that we could hold global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. It felt ambitious, but possible. You could still argue about targets and timetables in good faith. Then, in 2024, the planet crossed that line for an entire calendar year for the first time. That wasn’t a blip or a statistical quirk; it was a sign that the future we were so worried about had already arrived. And as if to prove the point, 2026 is now shaping up to be even hotter. A powerful El Niño is loading the dice, pushing up global temperatures on top of a planet that is already running a fever. For many of us, that translates into a terrifying new normal: heatwaves that feel less like weather and more like punishment, wildfires that turn whole regions into ash, landslides that wipe out homes, and storms that batter places that used to be considered safe. These aren’t abstract numbers in a report anymore. They are the background noise of daily life, a constant hum of anxiety that sits underneath everything else. What makes it harder to swallow is knowing that we had warnings, that scientists have been raising the alarm for decades, and that the window for action keeps getting narrower. It is tempting to feel helpless, but despair is a luxury we can’t afford. Even in the middle of this crisis, there are breakthroughs happening every day: better ways to generate clean energy, new materials that can capture carbon, and a growing public understanding that the way we live has to change. The clock is ticking, but it hasn’t stopped.
Politics has a strange way of making all of this worse. Ten years ago, when Donald Trump was elected for the first time, it felt shocking, like a break in the natural order of things. But his second term has been different. The anti-science rhetoric has become louder, more confident and more dangerous. It isn’t just about funding cuts anymore, although those have certainly hurt. It’s about the deliberate spread of misinformation, especially when it comes to health and the environment. Vaccines, climate change, clean air, water quality — all of these have been weaponised as culture war battlegrounds. People are being told that science is just another opinion, no more valid than a badly sourced meme or a confident voice on social media. The result is that we are now navigating a world where the very idea of objective truth is under attack. For scientists and journalists, this is exhausting. You can’t just publish a study and expect people to read it; you have to defend the entire concept of evidence, often against people who have no interest in listening. And yet, in some ways, this makes our work more important than ever. When the ground is unstable, you need something solid to stand on. That’s what good science reporting tries to be: a steady hand in a world full of chaos, a commitment to saying “this is what the evidence shows” even when it’s inconvenient, and a willingness to admit when we don’t know something yet. It isn’t always popular, but it is necessary.
Then there’s artificial intelligence, the threat that used to feel like science fiction and now feels like the shock of cold water. In 2016, we listed AI as one of the big existential risks, though it was easy to dismiss it as a distant concern. Now, the developers who are building these systems are themselves warning that the technology could someday threaten humanity. Whether or not that apocalyptic vision comes true, the effects of AI are already all around us. It is changing how we work, how wars are fought, how we create art, how we communicate, and perhaps most unsettlingly, how we find out what’s happening in the world. Audiences are increasingly turning away from traditional news outlets and getting their information from AI-generated summaries and social media pundits. This is a huge problem for publishers, including us. No news organisation is immune. If your readers are getting a condensed, algorithmic digest of events instead of reading a carefully reported, deeply nuanced article, then you’re not just losing attention; you’re losing the relationship of trust that makes journalism possible. Worse, these AI summaries can miss context, flatten complexity, and occasionally just make things up. They don’t have a reporter who was there, or an editor who understands the story, or the patience to spend weeks chasing a lead. They have patterns and probabilities. And yet, there is something oddly hopeful about this moment. Because when information becomes cheap and unreliable, the value of trustworthy information goes up. People are starting to realise that they can’t just accept whatever an algorithm feeds them. They want sources they can actually believe. That is exactly what New Scientist has been trying to provide for seventy years, and why we think there is still a future for the strange, wonderful craft of science journalism.
For all the dark clouds, there are so many reasons to feel optimistic. We sometimes forget how much the world has changed for the better over the past seven decades. Medicine has been transformed. Diseases that once killed millions are now treated or prevented. Green technology has gone from an idealistic dream to a practical, rapidly expanding industry. And our understanding of the universe, from the smallest particles to the largest galaxies, is deeper and richer than at any point in human history. These aren’t small achievements. They are the result of generations of scientists, researchers and thinkers, many of whom were ignored or ridiculed in their own time, but who never stopped asking questions. We are going to spend the coming weeks celebrating all of this as part of our anniversary coverage. We’ll look back at the discoveries that changed everything, and we’ll also make some bold predictions about the breakthroughs that might define the future. Some of them will probably turn out to be wrong, and that’s okay. The point is to keep stretching our imagination. We’ll also be sharing stories from readers, many of whom have been with us since the very beginning, which is something that feels especially precious in a world that is so obsessed with the new. Those letters and memories remind us that science isn’t just a collection of facts. It’s a human project, shaped by curiosity, doubt, collaboration and hope. It’s about people looking up at the stars and wondering, about kids asking why the sky is blue, about parents trying to give their children a better future. That’s something to celebrate, and we intend to do exactly that.
And let’s not forget that this is, at the end of the day, a birthday. There will be cake, balloons, and probably some slightly questionable party hats. The proper festivities kick off in less than two weeks, when tens of thousands of people gather in London for New Scientist Live, our annual celebration of science and wonder, which happens to be turning ten this year. It feels like the perfect way to mark our 70th: not by looking backwards with nostalgia, but by bringing together scientists, writers, readers, students and dreamers to share in the joy of discovery. The future may be uncertain, and we would be lying if we said we knew exactly what lies ahead. None of us do. But one thing we can promise is that we’ll be here to cover it, with the same commitment and energy that we’ve had since 1956. New Scientist might be turning seventy, but retirement is firmly off the cards. There are too many questions still to answer, too many discoveries still to make, and too many wonderful, weird, inspiring stories still to tell. So here’s to the next seven decades. Here’s to science, with all its messiness and magic. And here’s to you, our readers, for making this long strange journey worth every minute. We’re not going anywhere.