2030 – 2040s

Events in the 2030s 2

• 1680 – 2035 The Combustion Engine Three centuries of controlled explosions The internal combustion engine began as a thought experiment about gunpowder and became the machine that reorganised the planet. From Huygens' unbuilt piston to Otto's four strokes, from Benz's three-wheeler to the assembly line, it made distance cheap and cities sprawl. It also put a century of carbon into the atmosphere. This timeline follows the engine from curiosity to ubiquity to obsolescence.
• 2030 New Horizons — deepest Kuiper Belt flyby NASA's New Horizons spacecraft — which performed the first close flyby of Pluto in July 2015 — continues its journey through the outer solar system. After its 2019 flyby of Arrokoth (the most distant object ever visited by a spacecraft), New Horizons is expected to fly by one or more additional Kuiper Belt Objects in the early 2030s, if a suitable target is identified. By 2030 it will be approximately 58 AU from the Sun, deeper into the Kuiper Belt than any previous spacecraft.