What will the future be like? Will the world be greener and more beautiful? Will people live more happily and more conveniently? Probably people will lead a better life.

The Spring Festival, the most important Chinese holiday when everyone returns home has caused headaches for millions of Chinese. More than 2 billion people travel at the same time, making getting travel tickets and the journey arduous. But in several decades, the Spring Festival travel may not be a problem at all. China plans to build more than 120,000 kilometers of railway and a fast transportation network that will serve 90% of the population.

And because most of China will be cities, people will not have to go to other places to find jobs, so it will no longer be a problem. In the future, new information about timely events will be sent by humans or even robots to personal web tools through the Internet. That means only digital (数字化的) newspapers can be seen. Readers can discuss topics with journalists and editors. Information will move faster.

Oil is running out faster than expected. But scientists have found something else for oil as fuel. Coal, natural gas, solar power, nuclear power and even water can take the place of oil as sources (来源) of energy.

Schools will go electronic. Everything will be in the computer and students will not need to bring books to school. They will find information on the Internet. A computer will be the students’ library, schoolbag and connection to the outside world. There will be robot teachers, who will check homework on computers and communicate with the students’ parents through emails. And school buses will be like spaceships, comfortable and safe.

However, what can the future actually become? It remains to be seen.

Growing salad in space is a step closer to becoming a reality, thanks to hundreds of thousands of young people who helped conduct an out-of-this-world experiment.

The project started in 2015, when British astronaut Tim Peake took a million rocket seeds with him on his journey to the International Space Station (ISS). The seeds spent six months there before they were sent back to Earth in 2016. In a message sent from the ISS, Peake said the science experiment was to find out if the conditions in space, such as lack of gravity, affected the seeds’ ability to grow.

Around 600,000 pupils at 8,600 schools in the UK were then asked to grow the rocket seeds that had been to space, along with regular seeds that had never left the planet. Peake described the experiment as “one of the largest and most inspirational experiments of its kind”.

The results of the study, which have just been published, found that the space seeds grew more slowly than the ones that had stayed on Earth, because they had aged quicker. Researchers on the experiment said this was due to the stresses of space travel, such as the zero-gravity atmosphere and high levels of cosmic rays, which slowed the growth of the plants. Cosmic rays are high-energy, fast-moving particles(微粒) made up of tiny bits of atoms. Most of them come from outside the solar system, although some come from the Sun.

Now researchers are hopeful that if the seeds are properly protected, it might be possible to grow plants during future space missions to other planets. Dr Jake Chandler, from Royal Holloway, University of London, who led the study, said, “the prospect of eating home-grown salad on Mars may be one small step closer”.

Our future selves used to be a riddle. Now, thanks to social media filters (滤镜), we can stare them right in the face. People fell in love with TikTok this month to share themselves “aging” in real time using a filter “time travel”. Set to a sad song, the effect shows the user’s face slowly getting older, complete with wrinkles (皱纹) and sunspots.

Camera filters that age you have been around for years. But advancements in AI are making the results more real. Doctor Aleksandra Brown said the TikTok time travel filter does well in guessing how a given face would age.

As we get older, our facial skin thins, fat dissolves (溶解) and gravity pulls everything downward. Not everyone is pleased about this. One of Brown’s friends didn’t like watching time fly past. She couldn’t stand watching herself age 50 years in 15 seconds-could life really go by that fast? Brown cried herself after using the aging effect on her own young daughter. She won’t live to see her daughter get that old, she pointed out.

For other people, the time travel filter brought up unexpected positive feelings. Actor Jonathan Bennett shared a video saying his own filtered face recalled happy memories of his late father. Nicole Loehle, a 24-year-old in New Jersey, tested the effect with her boyfriend. It gave her a new viewpoint, she said, she could imagine the relationship lasting into their old age.

There’s no correct way to age. But it’s important to remember that no one can stop time or undo its effects. “I keep trying to view aging as a gift.” Brown said, “Some people don’t get to age, unfortunately?”