Opportunities: yesterday, today, tomorrow.

It is difficult to imagine our world in 20 years, as everything in the world is unpredictable. To begin with, let's compare what it was like 20 years ago and what it is like now—then it will be easier to say what awaits us in 2039.

1999 – push-button phones, huge computers, primitive internet, Tetris, shopping trips, queues at clinics, paper money, and much more. Nowadays, everything has become much simpler. Touchscreen smartphones with many smart functions, computers and laptops as thin as a notebook, super-fast internet, online shopping, and electronic money.

I can say with confidence that every second person has watched movies from the 90s where people predicted that in the future there would be flying cars, laser guns, and much more in the style of Star Wars. Such a movie scenario is already close. We don't have flying cars yet, of course, but a lot of technological progress has already happened. Keeping pace with the times, we didn't even notice how we ended up in this "future."

Today, we are rapidly achieving various scientific breakthroughs through new technologies. For example, let's look at the field of gastronomy. A scene in the movie "Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory," where Violet tried a three-course dinner chewing gum. What could this mean? In an article for Time, Ray Kurzweil from Google says: "The next major food revolution will be vertical farming, where we will grow food in vertical buildings rather than on horizontal land: hydroponic plants for fruits and vegetables and cloned meat in a test tube." These changes are already happening. Green Spirit Farms grows cabbage, spinach, and other greens under LED lights in an old plastics factory near Chicago.

How will technological progress affect the Work and Travel program? In the future, I see this program in a research-oriented direction. Perhaps one of the most important goals of this program will be the exchange of students to acquire knowledge that will contribute to the development and growth of humanity. After all, our country also has many young people with great potential and bright ideas. This program will give them the opportunity to discover themselves and take a step into the future. And then there will be more people in the world who will not be inferior to B. Gates and S. Jobs.

Why is such a student exchange needed? It is a well-known fact that the future lies in nanotechnology and other human discoveries. So, how will they affect our future?

In 2039, I see myself as a successful businesswoman in the field of nanotechnology. Thanks to the Work and Travel program, a large number of students, adopting the experience of the countries they visited, apply it in practice in our large, friendly company.

We can define nanotechnology as a method that deals with the manipulation of substances at the nanoscale, which is a scale moving in the range of 1 to 100 nanometers.

You probably don't quite understand what this means, so let's look deeper. Since one nanometer is one billionth of a meter, we could simplify the definition and say that nanotechnology is a technique that seeks to manipulate matter at extremely small size levels.

Our company, over many years, with the participation of former student participants of the program, has achieved such results as:

1. A cure for all diseases. Manipulating matter at the nanoscale and extensive knowledge of how the human body works has proven to be a cure for all diseases and has restored the influence of time on the human body, even achieving human immortality. Just like a vehicle engine that can be repaired because we know how it works and the size of its parts, which are easy to manipulate, advanced nanotechnology complements medical knowledge to maneuver the human body very easily. Currently, there are medical studies that use nanobots to fight cancer.

2. Creation of any conceivable object. A device has been created that can create everything our imagination can dream of. You only need to charge it with a certain amount of substances and define the task on a nanoscale. The resulting result creates everything we want, including organic matter.

3. The end of pollution. You probably know what we are talking about. An army of nanobots designed to clean the environment is eliminating pollution, finally achieving this vision of a clean, pollution-free planet.

4. Access to new opportunities and new worlds. Well-developed nanotechnology has allowed people to expand their capabilities beyond imagination. Nanorobots placed in our brain have increased our memory and our intelligence, connected our nervous system directly to the network, giving us immediate access to all kinds of knowledge. They have given us the ability to feel that we are part of virtual worlds indistinguishable from the real world.

Whatever nanotechnology may be, one thing is clear: it has changed the history of humanity forever.