Museum of the Future: The Daring Optimism of Dubai

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Although my writings often include historical context, I am also somewhat of a futurist. Unlike many who are into history, my interest is not because of a particular affection for the past, nor an interest in their revival. Rather, my interest is in its value to improve understanding of our human nature and of civilisations, which is useful for what I’m really interested in – future anticipation. Hence, I was interested to visit the Museum of the Future in Dubai almost from the moment I learned about it.

I had reasonable expectation that I would, when my brother joined Emirates and moved to Dubai. Surely, eventually I would visit them there. But my first opportunity came from a work trip which required an intercontinental flight. Since it was convenient to transit in the Gulf, I chose to transit in Dubai, and gave myself a slightly longer layover to visit family and look around.

Here was my chance to see the Museum of the Future!

Museum of the Future lobby

The Museum of the Future lobby was very impressive. It was all in white, the walls curved to become ceiling, emblazoned with the same calligraphy that decorated its exterior. Except that inside, it was illuminated with lights that brightened and dimmed, giving it a glimmering appearance.

From the lobby, you could see the visitors already inside the museum move in between its sections, zipping up a futuristic-looking elevator shaft, walking along the gallery paths, crossing the overhead bridge, and exiting down the spiral staircase. A Festo flying robot floated its way above the crowd of people.

The lobby really sold the futurist promise. It had the right vibes.

Near one of the main doors was an illuminated display flanked by the flags of the UAE and the museum. It was in Arabic and English, and explained what the calligraphy etched all over the museum says. They were three quotes from the reigning Ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, about the future.

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The future belongs to those who can imagine it, design it, and execute it. It isn’t something you await, but rather create.

– Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum

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Book tickets in advance for the Museum of the Future

The lobby had a lot more people than I expected. Long queues to where I could only assume was the entrance into the museum exhibits. Long lines at the ticket counters. And more people, milling about the hall. There was a school trip as well, judging from the group of teenage girls clad in black and white uniform.

I discovered ticket kiosks in the hall and discovered that there were no more tickets for the day. Moreover, there were no tickets in the upcoming days either, so I couldn’t even just come back tomorrow. I noticed that entry tickets were sold by time slot, in itself an indication of the museum’s high popularity. I resolved to book tickets online and in advance, for my next try.

I tried see what the future’s about
But the tickets were all booked out. 
Seems you gotta reserve a spot
Plan early
The future apparently 
Is not for those seeking lucky shots. 
For the late to rise
The gift shop sells a consolation prize.

Consolation at the gift shop

Since I was already there, I decided to console myself by getting souvenirs at the gift shop. This was both easy and difficult. Easy, because I found so many cool things that appeal to my offbeat nature. Difficult, because they were not cheap and of course, I couldn’t buy everything, could I?

There was also an alchemical-looking contraption in the main hall. A testament to the historical association of the Arab world with perfumes as well as chemistry and algorithms, it was an AI-guided, customised scent making machine. Basically, you answer a series of questions about the types of scents you prefer, and the machine would create three perfume blends accordingly.

I tried it on my second visit, with mixed results. It was not the machine’s fault. I just didn’t know enough about which smells I actually liked or disliked, and by how much, to end up with fragrances that actually smell ‘like me’.

Second try to visit the Museum of the Future

I had a second chance when I went on my trip to South Africa. Once again, I planned a decent layover in Dubai. After exploring Expo City for a couple of days, I made my second attempt to visit Museum of the Future. Armed with online tickets booked well in advance, I booked a carbon compensated ride on the Careem app to the museum¹.

There was still a crowd of people in the lobby, somehow even more international than last time. But this time, I was assured of entry, and everything went seamlessly. They gave me a scannable wristband, and I went in the queue to go up the futuristic elevator.

Beginning in the future

The Museum of the Future doesn’t mess around. A guide in charge of the section ushered me with a small group of other tourists into a larger lift. As the doors closed behind us, we immediately ‘entered’ into the Falcon space shuttle in Muhammad bin Rashid Spaceport². The year is 2071.

A digital avatar appeared on a wall and introduced itself as Ayah³, the museum’s Intelligence. As the shuttle prepared to launch, she gave us the first briefing for the museum and how she would interact with us throughout the museum visit.

Then, we blasted off to the OSS Hope^a.

The OSS Hope

We emerged into the viewing deck of OSS Hope, a future international orbital space station. In the centre of the ‘deck’ was a hologram of the space station. Ayah greeted us and described the space station project, and its role in research in the future. We then had some free time to explore the deck.

Around the deck were display stations where we could learn more about future technology, and meet the professions we imagine might be typical on a space station one day.

I paused at the display that described a solar power belt on the moon, beaming limitless energy as microwaves to power Earth, eliminating carbon emissions while making electrification universal. The purpose of OSS Hope was to transmit this energy to receiving stations all over Earth.

It was the common optimism of an engineer. But I’m old enough, and enough of a polymath, to be more cynical. I remember thinking sceptically, that even if the technology allowed it, there was no way that certain incumbent rich countries would just leave the receiving stations of others alone, unless they own them in some way. Because energy dependence is sometimes by design, and not simply a matter of who has fuel resources and who does not.

The recruitment centre

We went to the next section, which was the OSS Hope recruitment centre. There, various spacefaring jobs were available, and you could ‘apply’ for them.

I randomly picked a job station without looking at what it was. It took my photo as though I had applied for the job. It was only then that I realised that of all the STEM jobs and pilot jobs on offer, I had picked the one job that was different!

Back to life on earth

The space shuttle lands back in Dubai. Next, in the HEAL Institute, we engage with the future tools of ecologists working to restore nature following the damage of climate change. It was interactive, and you could try modelling different restoration scenarios.

I liked it. I think forest ecologists would love such a comprehensive modelling system. And I liked the emphasis on the role of fungi and soil microbiome in forest restoration. The display felt like the wish list vision of a real ecologist.

I also liked the implicit lesson that although in this optimistic 2071 we would have already reached net zero emissions, it will take more time after that to dial down the historic emissions, and the natural ecosystems would still need to heal. I seldom see this topic framed this correctly for the layman public.

And the DNA library deserves special mention. I don’t know if it would be practical to design a real one to look like this. But I have to admit, it was just such a beautiful section.

That said, the HEAL Institute felt a bit tech-heavy. Whereas ecology is like agriculture in that you can’t really model properly, nor use such a model competently, without also having had sensory in-field experience to do it in real life. It can be valuable to have an outside view of a problem, but you still need a sanity check through collaborating with people who live in the problem.

Healing requires healed people

Following the trend from OSS Hope and into the HEAL Institute, the next section felt decidedly even more feminine. The section guide welcomed us to Al Waha. Within, Ayah appeared as always, explaining another kind of healing we will need in the future. It was the healing of people.

We were still in 2071. Ayah told us that by 2030, depression had passed obesity as the biggest global health risk. It was a world of technological abundance, but also of depression, anxiety, loneliness, and addiction. The vision anticipated the sense of instability pervading human experience of the future, from climate grief and job extinction, and the ubiquitous and constant norm of being digitally plugged in.

In sanctuaries like Al Waha, we find spaces to reconnect with our physical senses, and with our original human experience.

The oasis

Unlike the first two sections, nothing inside Al Waha particularly grabs your attention. Which was, I guess, the point.

But it does a good job of quieting your mind. There were different alcoves where you could focus on one or another of your senses. And they weren’t generic either, but included cultural connection as well. In the alcove for smelling, you could contemplate the fragrance of the UAE national flower, a symbol of togetherness.

I’m not sure whether other visitors realised it too, while stepping into the calm, lovely tranquility of Al Waha. That notwithstanding the beautifully designed refuge, the section was actually describing a dystopia. Because it was a world grown so artificial and dominated by technological noise (or perhaps the climate was no longer as accommodating), that it was not possible for most people to just, go touch grass, to reconnect to natural physical experience. It means, the average person couldn’t just go forest bathing, or to the beach.

It seemed like living in cities in 2071 was not that different from living on a starship. You had to make do with small bits of sensory analogues, because you’re so removed from the nature your body evolved for.

This subtext was how I experienced this section. I thought that it was insightful of the futurists who designed the museum. It showed that they were perceptive enough to understand that, given the anticipated trends, it was not just the planet’s ecosystems that would need to be restored, but the people to do the restoring too.

It tells me that although the vision is overwhelmingly one of optimism, that doesn’t mean being optimistic that only good things will happen. Rather, it tries to anticipate a world of problems, and the optimism is in dealing with it.

The sci-fi technoworld of the future

As we left Al Waha, we also left the future. The next section is Tomorrow Today, an evolving showcase of ideas, technology, and innovations that already exist today, and could be the foundation for the future world.

There were displays and models of self-driving vehicles to electric bikes, ultrafast transit and drone medical deliveries to remote areas, 3D printed living tissue and robotic exoskeletons, innovative construction materials and electric cars, responsive social robots and vertical farms.

I can’t say that it was truly new to someone who already has a broad general interest in the future. However, as a showcase for the general public of what’s already possible, and the range of ongoing innovation, it’s a good way to capture the imagination.

The showcase also had a clear undercurrent of tech optimism. But I hope it’s evident to people that you’re not supposed to just take all of them, that sustainable industry and innovation involves buy-in and choices made by a society. And that the discussion of ethics and what a society wants is not in the domain of technology.

One size does not fit all the world

I did like that the featured technology is generally described in terms of its utility to solve a problem, or the context for its invention. My pet peeve is when people talk about solutions as though only one can be universally ‘the best’, as though everywhere in the world is the same. “Do this rather than that.”

It came to mind when I watched the feature on Dubai Crop One, the largest vertical farm in the world. Some parts of the world say that vertical farming makes no sense, and they have good reasons to say so. But generally that’s because they also have large areas of arable land and convenient rainfall. Even the best designed, most efficient vertical farm would still be less sustainable if you had a continental-scale farmland that just grows food. So it’s a perfectly valid conclusion – for them.

The problem is when they disparage the technology in a general sense, as though nowhere in the world could have a different conclusion. Like Dubai, where you can’t grow greens easily, and almost all of it is imported. Where energy costs are low, but water is precious instead, and labour costs are high. All of a sudden, the comparative business case for a highly efficient climate controlled indoor farm starts to make sense. Not to mention, providing a degree of food sovereignty.

The world is incredibly diverse, more diverse than your best imagination for how diverse it could be. Just because you don’t understand how a solution makes sense for you, does not mean it doesn’t make sense for anyone in the world.

The secret to the renewal of life, the evolution of civilizations, and the development of humanity is simple: innovation.

– Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum

Right about tech, wrong about everything else

Another reason why the showcase was so heavy on technology is probably its partnership with corporations. Indeed, the museum’s strategic partners include the likes of SAP and Audi. This is not surprising, of course. Entrepreneurial Dubai naturally collaborates with businesses.

And you have to bear in mind the time frame of when the museum was designed and built. This was in the short optimistic period after the Paris Climate Agreement, but before national values and international promises faced its first trial by fire in this post-pandemic world.

For the benefit of the Gen Z readers, it was a different world with a very different logic. In fact, the showcase might feel dated to them, because much of this tech has already been deployed at scale, for mass public benefit. Not in the countries of the companies in the showcase though, but in China.

One example of this changed world was the OSS Hope Simulator, an exhibit by SAP, the big name in business enterprise applications. In the exhibit, the support systems of OSS Hope is run by SAP. The display was interactive, with things going wrong on the space station, which you had to solve by making choices. I remember feeling irked that the ‘correct’ answer was never the one that would increase staff autonomy lol.

Except for one question. Bizarrely, the one time when staff probably won’t mind delegating annoying work to AI, the correct answer was basically to just make staff do the annoying thing! Because, on a space station, whose job is to beam limitless clean energy to earth, the AI would consume too much energy, and the ’emissions’ would make the space station uninhabitable!

There is no future without children

The next mezzanine in the Museum of the Future does not hold exhibits. Instead, it was a learning and playing area for child visitors to the museum.

I found this pretty normal in Dubai. There are typically spaces for children in popular attractions in Dubai. In fact, Dubai’s airport is the first one I’ve seen that has a diaper change room near both the female and male restrooms, acknowledging single fathers, and children travelling with just their fathers. The 2020 World Expo in Dubai was also the first one that designed an expo subset experience specifically to include children.

Of course, this is entirely consistent with their family-oriented culture, and gender parity goals. And for a state with such a strong future orientation, a dedicated government foresight initiative⁴, with youth empowered to even lead ministries, this makes sense. The future is far away, beyond the lifetime of people alive today. It is a multi-generational ambition, that depends on the continuity provided by a nation’s children.

We may not live for hundreds of years, but the products of our creativity leave a legacy long after we’re gone.

– Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum

Museum of the Future vision & sustainability

If I think about the Museum of the Future from my personal perspective, the experience subsequent to the space station did not have as many things that were surprising or thought-provoking as I had expected. However, if I re-calibrate to think about it as a regular person who doesn’t have a futurist orientation, the museum delivers a really good tactile experience of scenario planning.

A lot of it felt familiar to a sustainability professional, especially one who had worked in the corporate world. The tone was optimistic, oriented around the Emirates Mars Mission, which was the national project at the time. There was generally an association between the displays and how it relates to other social progress in the UAE.

The museum experiences felt balanced between earth science and space technology, as well as between problems in the external world and its effect on human beings, and that both would require concurrent solutions. World-class sustainability professionals must have been involved, not to mention very different kinds of people.

The casual diversity of Dubai

This comfort with ethnic diversity was something I noticed on my very first visit to Dubai. Although it’s nearly impossible to earn citizenship in the UAE, it is easy to gain permanent residency. Foreigners dominate the UAE, comprising 90% of the people there. This includes my brother’s family, as well as his Sri Lankan housekeeper and her family members also working in the UAE. But native Emiratis seem unfazed by a demographic situation that would have resulted in panic in other countries even at only a fraction of the scale.

In the Museum of the Future, you could see this diversity in the section guides. The guides during my visit were Caucasian, South Asian, Arab, Chinese. In a humorously stereotypical coincidence, the guide in charge of the picture booth was Filipino. And I still remember, on my first visit, catching a glimpse of the expression of the South Asian security guard at the back entrance. He happened to turn his face to look up at the museum building looming above. It seemed to me a look of pride, that working at such an iconic place was a perk in itself.

It made me realise that Dubai has a different kind of self-identity than what would be more intuitive to the rest of us. If I understand it correctly, Dubai is not an Arab country in the traditional sense of a nation. Rather, the vision and national strategy of Dubai (and the UAE) is to make it (1) a country for humankind, which is (2) hosted by the native Arab people.

Now, I don’t know if maybe there’s a good reason why no other country is like this. I don’t even know if the rest of the UAE is like this. But if Dubai wants to do this experiment, the results should be interesting.

Epilogue: The visionary’s dilemma with scale

I wondered if it was on purpose that the museum, in a land of camels, looks like the eye of a needle.

I can’t think of any other country that has such a strong leadership by visionaries. It’s a distinct personality type which is not common. So I think that Dubai’s futurism is usually poorly reported by journalists who don’t understand the visionary way of thinking. So they focus on the frivolous things they do understand, and miss the deeper motivations.

There are no pessimistic visionaries, so it tends to come with playfulness like jetpacks and Tesla police cars and ‘let’s go to Mars!’. Consequently, a visionary’s outputs can look just like plutocrat extravagance. The difference lies in what part of it you’re interested in – is it the showiness, or the engineering? And who gets to come along – is it just you and your buddies, or everyone?

However, the personality does have blind spots. Its default is to think in large scales of time and space. That is how it produces its value, after all. But at those scales, short-term and individual things blur out. It’s like when we’re racing across a field, what might come under our footfalls – like ants or flowers – falls out of focus, unless it could trip us up.

But when the vision is for people, the individuals of today, and along the way, has to matter. The way to a better future has to be bought by doing right by people, or we would only perpetuate the trauma that created the initial problem the vision wanted to solve – or add new ones that create new problems.

Recommended reading

Dr. Yasar Jarrar. The Sheikh CEO. 2020.

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I decided I had to buy a book to understand what they’re thinking here in Dubai, and why they do what they do. It’s different, and often makes it (and the UAE) controversial to observers.
Of the two books in the museum’s gift shop about Dubai’s leadership, I opted for the one that isn’t Sheikh Mohammed’s biography. Coming from a monarchy myself, albeit a constitutional monarchy, I assumed that royal biographies would always include a degree of image management. Not that third party accounts are necessarily more objective, but it should at least contain more useful information.
I was pleasantly surprised by this book. Though it was clearly written by an admirer of the Sheikh, it had many objective facts about Dubai and its origin story. So it did give me what I was looking for: a basic understanding of Dubai’s unusual self-image.

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Footnotes:

1. The Museum of the Future is right on the Metro line. In fact, that was how I got there the first time. However, on my second attempt, I was staying with my brother, who doesn’t live near the Metro. ↩︎
2. I was a tiny bit disappointed that we’d still be using space shuttles in 2071 just to get to an orbital space station. I thought it was a missed opportunity to introduce a space elevator. But I guess it makes sense to have the futuristic vision to still be at least relatable to most visitors, and space elevators haven’t yet entered into the popular imagination. ↩︎
3. Ayah, from the Arabic word meaning ‘sign’ or ‘clue’. Also a word used to mean ‘verse’ when referring to Qur’anic verses, because they are considered to be signs or evidences from God. ↩︎
4. Shaping the future of Dubai. Dubai Future Foundation. (2026, March 18). https://www.dubaifuture.ae/ ↩︎

^a OSS Hope

The OSS Hope takes inspiration from the Emirates Mars Missionⁱ. In 2020, the UAE built and launched a Mars exploration probe called Amal, or Hope.

It was around this time that I learned that the mission lead was a womanⁱⁱ, Sarah Al Amiri. (Also, that the UAE has a ministry for Advanced Sciences, with a female Minister, also Sarah Al Amiri). Moreover, the Mars Mission team itself was roughly gender equal, with women comprising 80% of its science team and 34% of the launch teamⁱⁱⁱ.

• ⁱ Emirates Mars Mission. UAE Space Agency. (2026, March 8). https://space.gov.ae/en/initiatives-and-projects/emirates-mars-mission
• ⁱⁱ El Geressi, Y. (2020, September 8). The Sky’s No Longer the Limit: Meet the Young, Female UAE Minister Leading the Region’s Race to Mars. Al Majalla. https://en.majalla.com/node/101736/the-sky’s-no-longer-the-limit-meet-the-young-female-uae-minister-leading-the-region’s
• ⁱⁱⁱ Bryen, S, (2021, February 13). Women lead way in UAE mission to the red planet. Asia Times. https://asiatimes.com/2021/02/women-lead-way-in-uae-mission-to-the-red-planet/

Carbon offset information to Dubai

A return flight between Kuala Lumpur and Dubai produces carbon emissions of approximately 2,518 lbs CO2e. It costs about $20 to offset this. 

Pin for your Dubai travel inspiration! Have you been to the Museum of the Future? What did you think?