What Will the Technical Frontier Look Like in 2030? Help Us Forecast It
What will frontier science look like in 2030? Which breakthroughs are on track, and which critical opportunities risk being overlooked? These are exactly the kinds of questions that the Horizon Scanning Tournament is designed to help answer - and we’re looking for more expert voices to weigh in.
Launched in partnership with Metaculus, the tournament is a core part of Renaissance Philanthropy's Horizon Scanning Study Group (HSSG) conducted in partnership with ARIA, the UK's Advanced Research and Invention Agency.
Modelled on the study-group approach used by U.S. ARPAs, the HSSG brings together cross-disciplinary scientific experts across five working groups to scan the scientific horizon for high-potential opportunities, including in the underexplored spaces around and between existing research fields. The resulting reports will help inform how ARIA and other funders direct resources toward the research areas with the greatest potential for societal impact.
The Metaculus tournament translates these expert deliberations into concrete, quantifiable predictions. Questions focus on specific milestones, such as benchmarks we might expect to see by 2028, 2030, and 2035 if progress toward long-term goals stays on course.
Since its launch last month, questions have been added on a rolling basis, with the total set to grow to between 20 and 30 over the coming weeks. Each question is designed to surface genuine uncertainty rather than confirm conventional wisdom.
"We’re looking for tacit knowledge, expert guesses, educated conjectures to help us resolve key questions about what the world looks like in 2035 – hard-won experience could help shape the spending of hundreds of millions of R&D funding," Madeleine Luck, Quadrature Climate Foundation and Co-Lead of the Biomanufacturing Study Group at HSSG.
Take this question: What percentage of carbon embodied in global chemical products will be derived from non-petroleum sources in 2035? If the answer is “very little”, the priority should be accelerating feedstock economics and policy levers that make bio-based inputs cost-competitive. If we knew that non-petroleum carbon will hit 20-30% of the market in 2035, the more urgent investment would be in translating that feedstock shift into altogether new classes of materials. Getting this wrong means misallocating years of R&D funding; getting it right means ARIA and other funders can direct resources to the true bottlenecks hindering technological progress for social betterment.
Forecasters on Metaculus have already begun weighing in, and the early engagement has been encouraging. But to realise the full potential of this exercise, the tournament needs more than skilled generalist forecasters. It needs domain experts — bench scientists, policy specialists, programme managers, and funders — who bring professional insight into how these fields are actually evolving.
You don't need to be a seasoned forecaster to contribute. Metaculus makes it easy to register a prediction, and even a single well-informed estimate adds meaningful signal to the aggregate. You can also leave comments, flag considerations other forecasters may have missed, or simply share the tournament with colleagues who might be interested.
The generated community forecasts will feed directly into the study groups' reports to ARIA, helping programme directors and funders identify the most promising and actionable opportunities in frontier science.
It's a chance to shape how the UK invests in the future of research, and it takes just a few minutes to get involved.
Explore the tournament and register your first forecast: Horizons Tournament on Metaculus