In the Future….

So here is part 2 of looking at The Futurist’s list of top ten forecasts.

Forecast #3: The car’s days as king of the road will soon be over. More powerful wireless communication that reduces demand for travel, flying delivery drones to replace trucks, and policies to restrict the number of vehicles owned in each household are among the developments that could thwart the automobile’s historic dominance on the environment and culture. If current trends were to continue, the world would have to make way for a total of 3 billion vehicles on the road by 2025. — Thomas J. Frey, “Disrupting the Automobile’s Future,” THE FUTURIST, Sep-Oct 2008.

I think this forecast overlooks the development and integration of advanced technology for the transportation sector that will fundamentally change how we view cars.  With the blanket WiFi and proliferation of GPS units in cars we will see cars become more autonomous and therefore more efficient.  With better systems and auto pilots cars will become more convenient than they already while reducing fuel consumption and traffic congestion.  I don’t see a paradigm shift coming until we get a better form of personal transportation.

Forecast #4: Careers, and the college majors for preparing for them, are becoming more specialized. An increase in unusual college majors may foretell the growth of unique new career specialties. Instead of simply majoring in business, more students are beginning to explore niche majors such as sustainable business, strategic intelligence, and entrepreneurship. Other unusual majors that are capturing students’ imaginations: neuroscience and nanotechnology, computer and digital forensics, and comic book art. Scoff not: The market for comic books and graphic novels in the United States has grown 12% since 2006. —THE FUTURIST, World Trends & Forecasts, Sep-Oct 2008.

As a system grows it allows for more diversification.  With the majority of American high school graduates attending some form of college there is a greater pool of resources, and so to gain an edge it is easier to become a specialist.

Forecast #5: There may not be world law in the foreseeable future, but the world’s legal systems will be networked. The Global Legal Information Network (GLIN), a database of local and national laws for more than 50 participating countries, will grow to include more than 100 counties by 2010. The database will lay the groundwork for a more universal understanding of the diversity of laws between nations and will create new opportunities for peace and international partnership.— Joseph N. Pelton, “Toward a Global Rule of Law: A Practical Step Toward World Peace,” THE FUTURIST Nov-Dec 2007.

I wonder if this will cause problems with international treaties and/or induce a form of reform for extraditional offenses.

More next time.

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The magazine The Futurist puts out predictions around this time every year.  You can read about it here.

I figured instead of giving my own take, because that is way to complex of a task to stitch together my theories into one cohesive narrative, I would discuss each of top theories here and hopefully encourage some open discussion and really tease out the theories a bit.

So without further ado, theory one

Forecast # 1: Everything you say and do will be recorded by 2030. By the late 2010s, ubiquitous unseen nanodevices will provide seamless communication and surveillance among all people everywhere. Humans will have nanoimplants, facilitating interaction in an omnipresent network. Everyone will have a unique Internet Protocol (IP) address. Since nano storage capacity is almost limitless, all conversation and activity will be recorded and recoverable. — Gene Stephens, “Cybercrime in the Year 2025,” THE FUTURIST July-Aug 2008.

To me this theory seems more 1984 than 2030.  Sure all that ability will be there, but there has to be motivation to record everyone everywhere.  Sure most people think there lives are really interesting but most are not, and the general population is mostly too dumb to be subversive. 

Storage capacity advancement may very well mean we can store everything, but will we want to?  Not to mention that’s a lot of data to manage, and there will have to be people, systems and operations to maintain and pay.  Even with unlimited storage there will always be a cost to storing something, will it be worth any amount of money to store me sleeping for 8 hours?

Then there are also the people that just wont do it. Not everyone is happy about the future coming and there is still a huge part of our society that fears technology.  Within 22 years I don’t see a possibly of 100% adoption, that I would think, would take at least a generation.

This is also a matter of privacy, and there are some interesting questions that are going to start coming up in the coming years.  I wonder if we will head in the direction of a constitutional amendment dealing with privacy in some form? Or maybe the whole social meme of what privacy is will change.

Forecast #2: Bioviolence will become a greater threat as the technology becomes more accessible. Emerging scientific disciplines (notably genomics, nanotechnology, and other microsciences) could pave the way for a bioattack. Bacteria and viruses could be altered to increase their lethality or to evade antibiotic treatment.— Barry Kellman, “Bioviolence: A Growing Threat,” THE FUTURIST May-June 2008.

And such is human nature that when we develop a tool we turn it into a weapon.  One can only hope that the same things that create the problem can also solve them. 

There is not much else to say about this prediction, we have been hearing for years about the use of bio-weapons.  Of Course if there are more of them out there that obviously means more risk.

That’s all for now, More to come!

Subscribe, and leave a comment to tell me what you think.

Solar Power!

In the future we will see the total abandonment of fossil fuels in favor or Solar Energy. Granted this may not happen in the immediate future but there are certain things about Solar Power that put in on the inevitable path in our energy future.  And certainly it will be an economic decision over everything else that truly takes Solar Power mainstream.  It costs nothing to mine; it shows up every day for free, all we have to do is learn how to harvest it.  Now I understand that at present day there are still large problems with solar power, and I do not express the naïveté that we will abandon fossil fuels completely any time in the next 50 years.  However there are great challenges being overcome every day and when these hurdles have been sufficiently knocked down we will have the ultimate energy sources we need.

So just what will it look like?

They say that enough sunlight hits the earth every hour of all of our energy needs for a year.  And so everything that is hit with light will become a potential source of energy.  This will start first in a smaller and more practical fashion in the personal arena.  Increases in efficiency and design will allow companies to build in solar cells to roofing tiles.  This company has already started doing it.  As we really refine the technology we will begin to see invisible solar power, where the integration of the solar cell has be masked by the traditional manufacturing process of the product. 

This will start to decentralize our power generation and massively ease the grid.  Another thing that will greatly decrease the strain on the grid is when our devices start powering themselves.  I know not charging my iPhone at night won’t really affect my eclectic bill that much, but if 10 million devices were no longer tied to our power grid we would see a massive load lifted it.

The electrical grid is still safe in its function throughout time I feel though.  Even with decentralized power you will still always have more power drain in areas than others and there will always be people that consume more than they produce, as is human nature.

This week a major development came out from researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute that may be a massive leap forward to the vision I have laid out earlier in the article.  The team has created a new anti-reflecting coating for solar panels that changes the way light interacts with Silicon, the main base of solar cells.  You can read the full article here.

The first thing that this new coating does is it allows the Silicon to absorb 96 percent of light as opposed to 67 percent that of untreated silicon.  An important distinction about this is that light absorbing is not the same thing as conversion efficiency.  This new material is basically just harvesting more sun to be converted, which will increase the net output.

The second unique property of this new coating is that it changes the angle at which silicon absorbs sun.  Traditional Solar panels work best when pointed direction at the sun, every degree off angle the sun becomes the solar cells lose efficiency.  With this new development Silicon is absorbing light at all angles which will increase the net output in much the same way as the absorption.  But a major factor of this property is that now motors can be removed that currently tracks the sun along the sky, while still achieving maximum efficiency for a fraction of the cost.

So what’s next?

Well solar still has quite a way to go, but the biggest hurdle it seems is that the sun does not shine at night.  And the answer I feel to that is better forms of energy storage.  The energy is going to be abundant but how will we keep it?  That’s a discussion for another time, but the guy over at ultracapacotrs.org seems to have a few interesting ideas you should check out.

So there is this company called BlackLight Power that I have been following for several months and let me tell you it is definitely an interesting company.

The founder Dr. Mills has been at this since about the 90s. And he claims that the accepted theory of quantum physics is for all intents and purposes wrong.  For you non physics and chemistry types he is claiming to be able to get massive amounts of energy out of hydrogen atom by dropping the energy levels below its accepted lowest level, the ground state.  In essence squeezing blood from a stone.

Without evidence or proof I would just want to throw this guy out on his ear.  But this week folks from Rowan University independently verified some very interesting results that BLP has been claiming in there studies. They found energy that has no current explanation in the current model of physics.

Mills claims to have built a prototype using this technique that generates 50kw of continuous energy only using water as fuel.  Now its important to point out that the Rowan team only observed spikes, not continuous output, but that the part Mills does not want to give away, because that is the BlackLight Process, which I’m sure he is convinced will make him lots of money.

BlackLight has been around for a long time as I have said, and has taken lots of hits as “quackery”  but it still stands because of and in spite of the persistence of Dr. Mills.  Mainstream science’s problem with Dr. Mills theory is that he claims to create “hydrinos” which are hydrogen atoms with this extra energy sucked out of them, which should be impossible with what we know about the world.  However it can clearly be seen by this research that something is going on (assuming this is not another Bigfoot debacle). So his persistence may just pay off.

One point of interest is Dr. Mills has a theory that hydrinos could account for dark matter because they do not react the same way with light.  And if you think about it that kind of makes a little more sense than dark matter as some exotic material taking up lots of space.  But who knows, lots of people call him a crackpot, only time will tell.

Make your own decisions, here is all the press, make up your own mind.

Black Light Process

Rowan University Paper

Black Light Press Release

The Future of Medicine, The Human Genome

I saw this really great article the other day.

So in the early spring of 2009 a company called Complete Genomics is claiming that it will offer, for 5000 dollars, the complete sequencing of an individuals DNA.  The current cost for that is closer to 100K, even up to a million, so we are looking at a major drop in the cost.  At 5000 dollars it becomes economically feasible, unless that is the economy stays the way it is.

Now how they do it and what the advances are is all very technical, but this article does a good job of describing it.  In 2009 they will only sequence 1,000 genomes, that number will raise to 20,000 in 2010 and further from there.

The potential benefits of this are huge.  If for nothing else than it will increase the amount of information scientists have to study.  With every person that opts to get their Genome sequenced we will achieve a broader cross-section of the human populations genetic make-up.  And therefore we will have a better understanding of how all this stuff works.

But beyond that we will now have advanced screenings for diseases that we have never had before, and cures for crazy ones that still mess us up like Alzheimer’s.

This company is one of many that will rise soon that will shift the focus of world health care from a reactive stance to a proactive one.  And really that makes sense, why would you wait to get sick?  What was that my mother always said? “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”

This is the Future.
This is the Future of Medicine.
Enjoy. 

-Chris

The Future of Space Travel

The future will definitely have to do with Space, and people are starting to figure that out.

This article above talks about the potential of space based resources, just the imagination of harvesting asteroids for all there minerals and hidden treasures is really fascinating.

We are going back to space, and maybe not with NASA.  Damn Russians.

Private industry could go to Mars by 2030…. according to a Science Channel Commercial with Buzz Aldrin.  

Hell, look at Elon Musk.

Sleep well and dream of the future

-xc

Google is at it again, trying to save the world.

Google.org the company’s philanthropic arm announced that, basically, they want to get the US off of coal and oil generated Electricity by 2030.  A pretty big goal, but with Google you tend to think anything is possible.

The three step plan calls for conservation, alternative fuel and a new power grid.

Google is working with GE to develop a “Smart Grid” which will allow for real time monitoring and two way transmission, so you can sell back to the grid.

Oh by the way, Google thinks we are going to be all driving in Electric cars in 2030, that’s why we need the smart grid.  And also Google has a vested interest in Tesla.

So ultimintly, Google is probably going to take over the World.

“It’s Google, It’s Google, It Knows What to Do!” - MattRock

-xc

In the future….

Moving parts will be a thing of the past.  Well not exactly, but if we look at current systems and trends we see moving parts becoming scarcer and scarcer every day.  With the invention of the electronic transistor all those years ago we have only cracked the surface.  Until now solid state products were immature, but more and more we are seeing solid state devices outshine traditional mechanical architecture.

The engine of the Tesla Roaster, one for the nicest 100% Electrical vehicles, has only one moving part. Now if you were to compare that to a traditional Chevy block they untrained eye would undoubtedly think that the more powerful of the two motors, and oh how they would be wrong.  Tesla’s engine, hitting the streets this fall, is one power house, and it’s only a few years old.  The internal combustion engine however is much older and is exceedingly more powerful than its predecessors.  So within twenty years I think we will see the beginning of the death of the internal combustion engine (as we know it).

This is all stuff that is happening today, on normal everyday roads.  Now let’s think a little deeper.  We are seeing the increased decrease of moving parts.  And ultimately when things move they expend energy, which is lost, so we must stop them from moving.  So how far will we go?  Maybe all the way.  Maybe one day we will be driving around in cars with electromagnetical “wheels”.  Who knows?

Regardless of how it works out there is a lot of cool stuff now to look at.

Until next time

xc

There will be a blog here detailing one man’s misgiven thoughts on the fututre