24 Things That Should, Could, Must Happen Or We’re All Doomed
Science and Technology are in hyperdrive. Science Daily News, Scientific American, New Scientist, and MIT Technology Review point the way toward where we could be, should be in the next ten to twenty years.
Still, political bureaucracy, political inertia, and just plain old greed (ka ching) and fear of change have a way of dragging things out so they don’t get done, so things don’t get better for all of us.
I have counted 24 things, mostly technological, with some political changes mixed in that must happen within the next 20 years or, in my opinion, human life on this planet is doomed to extinction, which might not be a bad thing from the perspective of most of the other life forms on this planet.
But these 24 things, when taken together, represent, in my mind, a fundamental change in humanity, a dawning of a new golden age, a renaissance where consciousness, art, music, freedom of expression and growth of the human spirit could emerge and we could begin to take on the role we are probably destined to, which is the caretaker of life on this planet and beyond rather than the annihilator.
So here they are. Some will happen sooner than other and they are not in any particular order. But know this. If these things don’t happen, you might as well pack up your bags and move to a commune somewhere, because you are going to be fighting it out for personal survival with every other individual person on this planet. I believe we have 20 years to make this all happen.
We must be at least 50% of the way towards constructing a smart national electricity grid.
There should be at least half a dozen electrical power plants creating electricity via nuclear fusion created by pulsing hundreds of lasers on hydrogen. Just yesterday the first laser to achieve temps equal to that at the center of the sun were demonstrated.
The vast majority of produce sold in large cities is grown locally on flat rooftops or on bridges between skyscrapers. The food is grown aeroponically, a technique which uses minimum water and sprays a fine mist of water and nutrients constantly on the plant roots, keeping them moist and free from burning. This reduces the weight of the supporting structure for the plants enormously allowing the use of lightweight bridges between skyscrapers to increase the surface area for plants.
All incandescent and fluorescent based lighting is replaced by LEDS.
At least 50% of all the blacktopped surfaces on roofs and on roads and in parking lots are whitewashed or painted to provide a cement off white color, increasing the albedo and the reflected sunlight, radically reducing the amount of heat trapped in the atmosphere by greenhouse gases. Steven Chu, President Obamas Secretary of Energy has calculated this could reduce the average temperature by an amount equivalent to taking all the cars off all the roads on the entire planet for eleven years, when equated to the amount of energy from greenhouse emissions.
All passenger travel of 300 miles or less not covered by driving will be done by high speed rail, either TGA like in France or maglev based.
Completely electric cars should make up at least 85% of all cars sold, and well over 60% of all the cars on the road should be all electric. Batteries will be ten times as energy efficient as current, using porous carbon and oxygen instead of lithium, the oxygen will be obtained from the air and used immediately instead of being stored in the battery. Batteries will not be charged but you will exchange your battery for a charged one at a station and these stations will be as ubiqtious as gas stations are now. It will take less than 2 minutes to exchange the battery.
All over the road trucks will also use these new batteries. The only vehicles continuing to use fuels will be locomotives used on railroads, passenger airplanes, and large maritime vehicles. The fuel used by these vehicles will be exclusively biofuels. In other words, the production of all fossil fuels for vehicles, with the possible exception of natural gas, will be completely phased out.
There will no longer be the need to obtain a zoning waiver or zoning change to put a wind generator in your back yard as long as the wind generator meets certain standards for efficiency, size, and noise levels. These standards can be met now with current designs that are already on the market by firms such as AngelWindEnergy.
Solar and wind power systems will be ubiqtious, taking on many different forms, including centralized systems such as concentrated thermal heat collectors, large wind energy farms, large photovoltaic plants in the desert, as well as decentralized systems in your backyard and on your roof. Roof panels will be installed in a day thanks to the newer flexible ribbon panels that can be rolled out and placed on a rooftop quite rapidly. Weather protection will be required for such panels in some climates and could consist of UV resistant plastics mounted over the ribbon panels.
All objects that are transported into space will be done by one of three methods (a) space plane that takes off like a regular plane and lands like one (b) a carbon fiber/carbon nanotube scaffold and structured ribbon that is used to support an elevator to space. The elevator has lasers as its source of power.(c) a ground based cannon that launches objects into space at a low enough trajectory to reduce g forces enough that the object is not smashed. People and many objects will not be transported this way, but objects that are structurally sound or diffuse in nature to begin with could be launched this wasy.
Smart drugs that make you much smarter will be widely available without a prescription and be inexpensive.
Federal laws are established that create labs for the standardized testing of non-pharmaceutical “nutritional supplements” for the purpose of ensuring that all such supplements contain the advertised dosage/amount and that the advertised dosage/amount has been tested to verify that it achieves the desired clinical, medical, or nutritional effect in the body.
Targeted anti-cancer drugs (using nanotechnology based delivery systems and time released delivery of the drugs to highly specific locations in the body), much more precisely targeted radiation therapy, and nutritional supplements should totally replace the current broad spectrum approach to chemotherapy. Furthermore, the use of these drugs will occur far earlier in the process of getting cancer than now as cancer will be detectable and localized at a scale of at least one tenth the size of the current minimum size that can be seen now.
SPECT brain scans and full blood tests will be required in all cases where OCD, ADHD, clinical depression, bipolar disease, or any schizoaffective disorder is diagnosed via a standard DSM IV approach to diagnosis. Before any medicine can be prescribed by any doctor, these tests will have to be administered first and evaluated by a specialist similar to a radiologist. In addition, it will be common to use SAM-E and St. Johns Wort in place of in lieu of prescription drugs.
All laptop computers will contain GPS technology in them, along with a fingerprint reader for Power On Password, as well as internet based anti-theft technology. Theft insurance will be common and inexpensive, and the fine for stealing a laptop will be $10,000 in todays dollars. In addition, laptops will have enormous battery length because they will not have a hard drive. All laptops will run entirely on RAM, SD chips, thumbdrives, and completely optical disk drives, i.e. like dvds. However, they won’t be DVDs. A typical laptop will be able to hold at least 100 terrabytes on a single disk using holographic memory supplemented by additional phase differential lasers that bring the total dimensions of storage to five or more.
All middle and high school instructors will have to have at least two years of formal training in computer operating systems, networking, internet search engines, and database design in order to teach in a public school.
All middle school and high school students will be required to bring a laptop to school. All of their books will be on the laptop.
Smart internet phones, like the I-Phone, but with additional capabilities such as the ability to project images from the phone to a blank surface, will be the standard phones that are “given away for free” with a new contract from a cell phone carrier.
The revolution in computer memory noted above will also result in media such as optical disks or nanotechnology storage systems that will not degrade, i.e. the data will remain viable and obtainable with no errors in retrieval for at least a million years instead of the current 20 years life on the media.
These radical increases in computer storage and storage life will obviously make the current system of making money on the sale of Blue Ray disks, CDs, on-line music and video sales, netflix, satellite tv, and cable tv totally obsolete in their current form. They will be replaced by a universal system where you can get your information with advertising and/or pay for it with a byte tax that is redistributed to artists, producers, directors, cast, etc. based on the number of times the product is viewed, downloaded, etc. You will get all of your information on-line via streaming media or downloading it. The byte tax will work on downloads because anytime you watch a downloaded product, it will send data back to the internet, or you may be simply able to buy it outright for a higher price.
3D 240 Hz 1080P or higher television will be ubiqitious. The 3D will not require the use of any type of polarized glasses. The images will be alternated so between the left and right eyes that you will simply watch it and it will register directly to your brain. You will be able to wear a small portable EEG type device that will warn you if the 3D video is causing brain wave problems before they occur by analyzing the pattern beforehand. You will be able to switch between 3D and 2D by the menu on the remote control or by a menu or hot key on your computer.
Color Kindles and laptops will replace printed books, and you will be able to print directly from your laptop without a separate printer, provided you carry paper around with you. The kindles will be different however, in that you will have a choice of one that looks like the current kindle or one that looks just like a real book where you actually turn the pages. Each page will be an electronic page with electronic ink just like a current kindle.
Megaplex movie chains like Kerasotes and AMC will be replaced by theatres with 100 or more screens which show combinations of new blockbuster movies, independent movies like those shown at Cannes, etc, and classic movies, i.e. older movies already out and available over the internet. Movie theatres will have multitudes of screens in different sizes depending on what is being shown, with larger screens for blockbuster movies and smaller screens for classic movies. People will still go to the movies because the 3D effect will be more prominent on a larger screen, the sound will be better than at home, and because in large cities where people live in condos and apartments, there will be an inherent limit to the size of the screen and because it is sociable to go to the movies together with friends, and with the advent of classic movies and subscriptions to theatres and internet polling of people to determine what to play, movies will be more popular.
Fast food restaurants will be required to prominently display the calories, fat, and nutritional quality of all their foods at the entrance to the restaurant as well as immediately below each of the menu items on the large wall sized menus and the individual paper menus.
All fast food requirements will have to meet calorie and fat standards which will be administered like the CAFÉ standards for cars are today. If a chain is going to sell a super burger it will have to sell an equal number of more healthy items in order to meet the standard.
Anti social find your soulmate type services, casual pickup dating services like I-Mate, and overnight dating services like Seductive Search are significantly replaced by Artiticial Intelligence based dating services that use a number of personality, psychological, intelligence, emotional intelligence, musical intelligence, visual intelligenc tests to evaluate you and your potential mate. These services also use info. on your body odor, your smell since studies have shown that is important to potential mates. The system will analyze your body language via video and this will be analyzed by a computer using AI to determine your outgoing or inwardness. Galvanic skin response will be measured to evaluate your integrity and honesty and your ability to lie. You will of course decide how much you want to use and your prospective date will decide how much to use as well as how much he/she needs to evaluate of all of this information. This dating character information will be used to create singles parties of compatible complementary people who can find each other in a party setting. In addition, new methods of dating such as virtual reality using avatars to represent you will be used to break the ice on first dates and allow more freedom of expression among people needing this. People with larger social networks will be introduced to compatible groups/networks of people in smaller social networks as the system gains enough information to do so, enhancing the probablility of finding a soulmate. The system will use AI algorithms to find a balance between common interests between two people and personalitys that complement each other.
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