Dr James Martin, a leading thinker in computer science, lectures this morning at the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute on a topic that has become his specialty: the future.The good news for Bermuda is that, as an affluent country, the Island is well-placed to ride out what Dr Martin predicts will be a “make or break” century for mankind. The bad news: “It's difficult to imagine getting to mid-century without large-scale global catastrophes,” he said.In an interview with The Royal Gazette at his home on Agar's Island, Dr Martin described the next few decades as a crucial phase, in a century of converging technological progress and environmental collapse.“We're in the middle of a revolution that started with the Industrial Revolution in mid-eighteenth century Britain, and the most critical part of the transformation is going on right now. I don't think there will be a challenge to the survival of our species. Two thirds of humanity may not survive, but the richer nations will.”By the middle of this century, he said, “the planet will get warmer and, particularly near the equator, we can expect a big drop in food production. I'm not sure that it will affect Bermuda very much, but by the middle of the century we can expect to see famines on a scale that has never been seen before. I use the term ‘giga-famine' because more than a billion people will die from hunger.”He opened his laptop computer and showed a band around the equator that will be worst-hit by a rise of two or three degrees centigrade with Bermuda fairly comfortably north. “I don't think Bermuda stands to have it any worse. Bermuda is very different from the rest of the world. Most of what goes on in the planet is not happening here. Bermuda is not a part of the world in that respect.”Nor do rising sea levels stand to affect the Island as drastically as some suggest, he said.“Sea level change has been grossly exaggerated, particularly by people like Al Gore. Computer models say that it might go up two or three feet in fifty years. Some places will be hurt Bangladesh certainly will be. I look around this island and ask myself what it will do, and the answer I think is not much.”Nevertheless, Dr Martin calls global warming, driven by the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the main force behind dangerous climate change.“Twenty years from now, if we get extreme change, the public will panic and call for something to be done. The problem is that 20 years from now will be too late. Think of climate change as like a spinning top that's starting to wobble. Things like the unusual winter we've just seen in Bermuda are examples of this.“We'll see more and more extreme weather events as the spinning top grows more unstable, and if we go up by three degrees celsius above the baseline average temperature, it's going to become seriously unstable.”He said: “Hurricanes will get stronger and more frequent. We will almost certainly have category six hurricanes. I don't know about category seven hurricanes but six is getting up to wind speeds of 200 mph.”Low-lying areas and parts of the world unaccustomed to hurricanes stand to be worst hit, he said.Asked how more catastrophic weather will affect Bermuda's economy, with the insurance industry particularly vulnerable to natural disasters, Dr Martin said: “I think the insurance industry only looks ahead a small number of years.“Now we need to look ahead decades. The finance industry is also vulnerable to change, as we've seen, but I'm not an expert on Bermuda's economy and what could happen to it.”What, then, should Bermuda be doing now?He said: “The big question is how do you find every Bermudian with a great brain and make sure he or she gets the best education possible, and particularly in the fields of science and technology. “It would be very useful for Bermuda to identify these kids who are likely to be gifted. I think the best thing Bermuda could do would be to improve the educational system and pick out these brightest kids at a young age.”He envisages a future in which “instead of an aristocracy we will have a technocracy, of people fully on top of technology who will probably be about one percent of the public. They'll make a fortune and enjoy doing it very much”.With a need for ever-faster computers to deal with more and more data, he said, “by about 2040 we can expect to see yottascale computing trillions of trillions of operations a second. It will need a huge network, totally different from the internet, which is extremely insecure.”(A Google search for “yotta-scale” revealed few results. Yotta- is the biggest unit prefix currently recognised in the International System of Units: a one followed by 24 zeros.)Another important feature of Bermuda is the Island's method of collecting water.Aside from a collapse in food production, Dr Martin said: “There is a crunch coming in terms of water, and one place that knows about water is Bermuda. We've had to be self-sufficient and our methods could be exported. There are huge amounts of rainwater and sunshine reaching us, and we ought to be using both.”Electric and hybrid cars should be in common use in about ten years, he said, and homes could easily generate much of their electricity from solar power.“I think we'll see a lot of solar power here in 20 years,” he said. “If we really wanted it, it could be done in ten: home solar energy, cheaper than electricity from the grid, that is sold to electric companies.”Nuclear power could soon be viewed differently, he said, even in Bermuda. “Nuclear power is one way to get carbon-free energy, although there is much hysteria surrounding the issue. Of course, modern nuclear power plants would have extreme safety concerns there could never be another Chernobyl again.“We could see standardised and very small nuclear power plants which will be as cheap as possible and safe as possible. Bermuda consumes about 40 million watts a year, which means it's a small place. “There was a type of small nuclear power station called a pebble bed reactor which Bermuda has looked at and we may see in time.”A major factor driving global change will be catastrophes caused by humankind's current mode of existence. “If we go on as we are at the moment, with business as usual, we're going to have the worst famines imaginable.“I think that three catastrophes are likely: extreme war, extreme pandemic, and mass-scale famine. But if we can get through, we will come to a point at the end of the century that would be a new renaissance. There is an optimistic end to it, if we can get it right.”