Let's take a s tep back by taking a bigger step forward. Behold the first snippet of coverage of Election 2028. It's a political cycle that could make or break us as a human race, so someoneshould start reporting on it.

Where will we be in 20 years? The Arctic may be ice-free during the summer. The world population will crack 8 billion. It'll be the 25th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq and the 100th birthday of Mickey Mouse.

And we'll be reaching our "global crisis of maturity," the point at which our world system (or lack thereof) must be transformed to wrangle a more populous, industrialized and inte lligent world facing risks with cataclysmic consequences. So says William Halal, creator of the virtual think tank TechCast ( http://www.techcast.org) and professor emeritus of science, technology and innovation at George Washington University.

"These dilemmas of environment and globalization and conflict are going to reach crisis proportions by 2030," Halal says, "but the power to resolve these existential issues is going to appear at roughly that same time. The increase in knowledge, the awareness of the need for a shift in global consciousness, the high technology -- all that stuff will be in place."

In 20 years we will be on the brink of catastrophe and have the means to

prevent it. So as a service to ourselves, our children and our children's children, we scoured the region for six people under presidential age (35) who could conceivably navigate the path to a White House run in 20 years. We asked futurists and academics to forecast what issues they would have to lead us through and then asked the potential candidates to start pondering.

"A lot of issues important to me and my demographic, they just don't enter into the debates," says Patrick Tucker, 31, senior editor of the Futurist magazine for the World Future Society in Bethesda. Young people are "marketed to -- and to a certain extent exploited for our gullibility -- but because we are a small cohort compared to the baby boomers, we get less out of the discussion. Everyone wants to seize the mantle of youth, but no one wants to deal with issues the youth will be facing."

Those issues may include the economic fallout from climate change, the regulation of artificial intelligence and genomic manipulation, the influence of up-to-the-second political polling, a reverse migration of young people to other countries and even the dissolution of the United States.

"This is the great challenge to the system: How do we bring back the long-term thinking?" asks technology forecaster Paul Saffo, who lives in Silicon Valley. "How do you reward people in the present for thinking three generations ahead? How do we learn to become good ancestors?"

Here, we present this challenge to our candidates and get to know them in advance. Think of this experiment as one small step toward a more perfect union.

EUGENE RESNICK, 19, Charlottesville 

Sophomore at the University of Virginia, president of College Democrats of Virginia

It could be a first on many fronts. Eugene Resnick, the first Jewish president. Eugene Resnick, the first openly gay president. Eugene Resnick, the first immigrant president (his family moved to Brooklyn, N.Y., from Moscow when he was 4). These identities were soldered together in the crucible of the 2004 presidential election -- which he followed intently -- to create the man Resnick is today.