It was mega-serial entrepreneur Elon Musk’s way of having a year-end blast. Musk lit up the California sky by sending up a giant rocket that left a giant silvery trail in its wake and had watchers as far away as Arizona gasping with surprise. Next month, Musk’s planning to light up the skies once again with an even bigger rocket that will carry his own cherry-coloured Tesla Roadster into space. His space exploration company SpaceX is looking to do 30 launches next year which will be way up on the 20 it did this year. He’s also aiming to re-fly a rocket in 24 hours before the next 12 months are out.

Musk has had a spectacular, trailblazing year but as 2018 approaches, he isn’t the only one looking beyond our planet. Close behind him on the way to the stratosphere and open space is Amazon’s Jeff Bezos who is looking to, in a few months, take space tourists in his Blue Origin rockets to the Karman Line, 62 miles above Earth. From there, they’ll be able to experience weightlessness and gaze at the blackness of space beyond our planet. In the longer run, Bezos is also looking to build a lunar landing craft that will be able to carry large payloads to the moon and make it feasible to build a colony there — yes, that’s triggered jokes about Amazon delivering parcels to the moon. He’s still trying to convince NASA and the government to back his lunar efforts.

Bitcoin effects

Even for those who aren’t headed into outer space, 2018 feels like we’re being blasted into unknown zones far beyond the realms of science fiction and a different world from the one we’ve known. In the coming year will enterprising investors like Amitabh Bachchan multiply their wealth by staying with Bitcoin or lose their shirts? As the year ends, Bitcoin is suddenly losing value at a startling pace but that doesn’t mean in any way it’s over for the crypto-currency.

Look, for instance, at small Florida-based Rich Cigars which, as its name suggests, made cigars and which has now renamed itself Intercontinental Technology Inc and got into bitcoin mining. In the coming year, bitcoin and blockchain technology will be the hot zone where fortunes may be lost and won. Will the boom turn to bust? Or will bitcoin edge out national currencies and deprive governments of their greatest sovereign power? Indeed, it might even be worth asking, if governments themselves might be imperilled if they lose the power to issue money?

Disruptive change

There’s one era of rapid transformational change that was similar to ours in the history of mankind. It began in 1876 when Alexander Graham Bell invented the first telephone. Soon afterwards, in 1880, Thomas Edison discovered a long-lasting light bulb and gave the world the power to light up homes. Then, building on the inventions of others, came Karl Benz’s petrol-powered automobile in 1885. By the 1880s, mankind had already turned his eyes towards the skies but it was the Wright brothers who managed controlled flight in 1903.

The old was rapidly pushed out by the new. Auto industry executives who talk about electric vehicles are fond of pointing to photographs of New York’s Fifth Avenue taken slightly more than 10 years apart. In the first, taken in the early 1900s, the broad boulevard is filled with horse carriages and one solitary automobile. By 1913, the horses have vanished and there are only motorcars. And by 1914 the first magnificent flying machines had taken warfare to new heights.

These inventions brought many positive changes to the way we live. But modern warfare also brought death on a scale that hitherto had been unimagined during World War I. However else they changed our lives, modern inventions did not bring stability with them.

Today’s world, too, is unstable in more ways than one. Politically, the United States has realised that it faces a new rival in the east, that’s aiming to be the global leader. In many ways, the Chinese are moving more rapidly into the digital world of the future than other parts of the globe and that will continue in 2018. On e-commerce transactions and digital payments, they’re far ahead of everyone else including the United States. Even by June 2016, they had 43 per cent of the world’s billion-dollar unicorns. The United States was only slightly ahead at 45 per cent. The remaining parts of the world had a mere 12 per cent.

The EV revolution

These figures mean that China’s giant corporations, such as Tencent, Baidu and Alibaba, have huge cash reserves to go on a world-conquering spree. They’re all eyeing a bigger push into India, and others like Xiaomi and Huawei are already here in a big way. Expect to see much more of China’s top corporations on the Indian scene in 2018. They’re already in gadgets, but we should next watch out for them in areas like automobiles. Volvo, which is in partnership with Chinese automaker Geely, is already here and MG, owned by SAIC Motors will be racing to be on the roads by 2019.

Where does India stand as the world races into a sci-fi future? Sadly, we may still be grappling with problems that are uniquely our own, like the demonetisation hangover and GST which is still being ironed out. Our real estate sector is struggling to get back into fast-growth mode. And crucially, the infotech sector is looking to regain its world-conquering mojo. Meanwhile, our own unicorns like Flipkart, Ola and Oyo Rooms are moving ahead rapidly.

On another positive note, we’re also ready to take on the world when it comes to renewable energy and a company like ReNew Power is getting ready for an up to $700-million IPO, most probably in the first half of 2018. India also looks set to achieve, what once looked like ambitious targets, in its push towards renewable energy. At another level, the Indian auto sector is looking at whether it can cope as the government presses the accelerator on shifting to electric vehicles.

Still ultimately, all that’s really certain is, the future is less predictable than ever before. Will rapidly evolving technology bring high levels of unemployment as old industries become obsolete? Change like never before, is in the air.

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