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5. OUTLOOK FOR THE FUTURE

The concordance model is now well established, and there seems little room left for any dramatic revision of this paradigm. A measure of the strength of that statement is how difficult it has proven to formulate convincing alternatives.

Should there indeed be no major revision of the current paradigm, we can expect future developments to take one of two directions. Either the existing parameter set will continue to prove sufficient to explain the data, with the parameters subject to ever-tightening constraints, or it will become necessary to deploy new parameters. The latter outcome would be very much the more interesting, offering a route towards understanding new physical processes relevant to the cosmological evolution. There are many possibilities on offer for striking discoveries, for example:

These provide more than enough motivation for continued efforts to test the cosmological model and improve its accuracy.

Over the coming years, there are a wide range of new observations which will bring further precision to cosmological studies. Indeed, there are far too many for us to be able to mention them all here, and so we will just highlight a few areas.

The CMB observations will improve in several directions. A current frontier is the study of polarization, first detected in 2002 by DASI and for which power spectrum measurements have now been made by several experiments. Planck will announce its first polarization results in 2014. Future measurements may be able to separately detect the two modes of polarization and a number of projects are underway with this goal.

An impressive array of dark energy surveys are already operational, under construction, or proposed, including ground-based imaging surveys the Dark Energy Survey and LSST, spectroscopic surveys such as MS-DESI, and space missions Euclid and WFIRST.

An exciting area for the future is radio surveys of the redshifted 21-cm line of hydrogen. Because of the intrinsic narrowness of this line, by tuning the bandpass the emission from narrow redshift slices of the Universe will be measured to extremely high redshift, probing the details of the reionization process at redshifts up to perhaps 20. LOFAR is the first instrument able to do this and is beginning its operations. In the longer term, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will take these studies to a precision level.

The development of the first precision cosmological model is a major achievement. However, it is important not to lose sight of the motivation for developing such a model, which is to understand the underlying physical processes at work governing the Universe's evolution. On that side, progress has been much less dramatic. For instance, there are many proposals for the nature of the dark matter, but no consensus as to which is correct. The nature of the dark energy remains a mystery. Even the baryon density, now measured to an accuracy of a percent, lacks an underlying theory able to predict it within orders of magnitude. Precision cosmology may have arrived, but at present many key questions remain to motivate and challenge the cosmology community.

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