What if San Diego runs out of land for new homes? Could people live on man-made islands off La Jolla and use hover boards to reach the beach?

Sounds sort of crazy. But it’s the kind of idea that might get a look at UC San Diego, where graduate students have been asked to forecast the region’s near-future challenges and to suggest ways of dealing with them.

It’s all part of San Diego 2049, a new campus-wide contest in which competitors learn to think like futurists with help from some of the school’s most famous sci-fi authors, including David Brin and Vernor Vinge.

The contest’s name was drawn from Blade Runner 2049, a sci-fi movie that vividly depicts San Diego as a repository for Los Angeles’ trash roughly 30 years from now.


The contest’s organizers aren’t encouraging students to envision San Diego as a dystopia. But they want them to produce a “memo from the future” that focuses on emerging issues — things like housing shortages and the effects of climate change.

“We want to train students to anticipate the future and become problem solvers,” said John Ahlquist, the UC San Diego political scientist who came up with the idea on a recent sabbatical.

The competition is being run by the university’s School of Global Policy and Strategy, and the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination. They’ll award a prize to the winning team next spring in what could become the first of many contests.

The school hasn’t announced what the prize will be, but says it will have broad appeal.


Students also can earn a certificate in Speculative Design for Policy Making, if they compete effectively.

The university has suggested many possible topics, from the potential impact of low-cost gene editing to redrawing national boundaries, such as the US-Mexico border. But virtually any idea is acceptable, as long as it involves imagining a world that’s different from the one students live in today.

And that includes building offshore housing colonies — something that’s already being done in China.

Predicting the future is difficult; imagine trying to figure out what will follow smartphones. But the “world building” exercise might be a bit easier at UC San Diego, one of the nation’s largest research universities.


“Our grad students kind of live in the future,” said Patrick Coleman, assistant director of the Clarke Center. “They spend a lot of their life trying to anticipate things, which is very challenging. They’re hungry for a more structured way to do that.”

GPS faculty will mentor the students. And competitors will receive advice from noted alumni. Brin — who is well known for his thoughts on what it means to be human — will visit campus in January. Upcoming visitors also include Rose Eveleth, a futurist who hosts “Flash Forward,” an influential podcast.

“Throughout the program, students are taught sophisticated forecasting methods to develop robust scenarios, clarify problems, and develop solutions in a rapidly changing, emergent near-future,” GPS says in a statement about the contest.

“Essentially, they are world building: constructing and contextualizing an imaginary future world.”


Students will be given a lot of options for presenting their visions and solutions.

“It could be an actual physical prototype object, if they’re working in that environment,” Ahlquist said. “It could be a song. Imagine there’s an advertising campaign; maybe there’s a jingle.

“I’m guessing that we’re going to get a lot of written material, so there could actually be a law or policy document.”

Courtney Geigle, one of the competitors, is jazzed by the mere idea of world building.


“We have e-commerce stores and our supply chain runs through China,” said Geigle, a graduate student in GPS. “There’s a trade war going on with China, and lots of scenarios about how it could play out. World building helps us to collectively think about what could happen, and how we would respond.”