Houston Conference Examines Challenges and Solutions

The World Future Society’s annual conference, "FutureFocus 2000: Changes, Challenges, and Choices," drew about 1,000 participants from more than 30 countries and featured nearly 200 speakers. Many futurists who came to Houston from July 23 to 25 were especially eager to discuss solutions for a host of problems—from helping troubled teenagers to meeting the world’s energy demands and providing replacement organs for desperate patients.

Many of the challenges we can expect will be global in scope, potentially very disastrous, and not handled effectively by any one government or organization, warned John Petersen, president of the Arlington Institute. He outlined some of the key problems humanity will face, as well as some promising avenues of solution, at the opening plenary session. Among the challenges are runaway population growth, insatiable demands for energy, the threat of AIDS, and the proliferation of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons.

However, humanity also possesses unprecedented resources to combat these problems. If computers continue to increase in power in the future as they have in the past, the world’s best computers will have the computing power of a human brain by 2010, Petersen said. And by 2020, ordinary computers will have achieved the same milestone. Such awesome computing power could be applied to the world’s problems with beneficial effects. In the field of biotechnology and genetics "we’re doing things we could never do before," Petersen said. This technology has tremendous potential to alleviate disease and help feed a growing population.

Kenneth J. Cox, chief technologist at the NASA Johnson Space Center, agreed with Petersen that humanity possesses an enormous potential for creative change. Cox described the possibilities of colonizing space, arguing that futurists should be not only thinkers but doers. "Futurists should be activists," he said. "They should try to influence the future more."

Taking up that challenge, conference speakers presented plans for tapping alternative energy sources, growing organs in labs, and preventing teen violence, among other efforts.

Problem Solvers in Schools
Violence in school is a growing problem in America, said Tom Scullen, superintendent of the Appleton, Wisconsin, school district. Many methods have been proposed to deal with this problem, but Scullen said he believes the program at Appleton’s Alternative School to be especially effective in curbing violence and other antisocial behaviors in problem students.

"Traditional school programs work very well for the majority of our students," he said. "However, one size does not fit all. Some students require an alternative approach that strengthens the cooperation between families, support agencies, the police, and our religious leaders." Highlights of the program include ensuring a class size of 12 or smaller, making computer technology available before and after school, encouraging work experience for pay, and promoting healthy eating among teenagers.

"We can’t say that nutrition changed our kids completely," admitted Dan Tauber, the police liaison officer assigned to the school, "but it was sure a helping hand."

Finding Energy Alternatives
Preserving the environment for future generations will require drastic cuts in the carbon-dioxide emissions that contribute to global warming, said Thomas Valone, president of the Integrity Research Institute, a nonprofit corporation dedicated to supporting alternative energy research.

Valone believes that new, non-carbon-emitting forms of energy are badly needed to replace fossil fuels. "It is up to the private sector to conduct scientific research into new energy systems and enabling technologies of the future in order to replace carbon-emitting fuel systems," he said.

Although acknowledging the promise of fuel cells, which provide electricity with only water as a byproduct, Valone urged interested futurists to explore and support alternative energy possibilities that are less-well-accepted by the scientific mainstream. For example, we might harness the power to operate small electrostatic motors by using long wires tethered to balloons to tap the abundant electric charge in the Earth’s atmosphere. We could also develop biomass energy from organic substances, particularly sewage and farm waste, Valone said. One scientist has figured out how to extract clean-burning "carbo-hydrogen" gas from almost any biomass solution; this gas doesn’t add extra carbon dioxide to the atmosphere as fossil fuels do. Factories and power plants that run on oil could be refitted to use this biomass gas, Valone said.

Growing Organs to Save Lives
Roughly 63,000 patients need organ transplants in the United States, but only 20,000 organs are available each year for transplant. Many patients die before they reach the top of the waiting list. Vladimir Mironov, chief scientific officer with Cardiovascular Tissue Technologies, Inc., wants to grow replacement organs in the lab using patients’ own cells. This solution would eliminate both the organ shortage and the risk of transplant rejection by patients’ immune systems.

The first step to growing an organ is to obtain stem cells from the patient: young cells that haven’t yet specialized their function. These cells are inserted into a three-dimensional, fibrous "scaffold" shaped like the organ to be grown. A scaffold that has been "seeded" with stem cells is then placed into a bioreactor—a device that nourishes the cells, removes their waste, and encourages them to form the desired organ.

Skin and cartilage have already been grown in this way, but more-sophisticated organs and tissues need a more-complicated system of blood vessels. Tissue engineers are constructing a gel-based scaffold that could solve the problem, although the process is still too expensive and time consuming to be practical. When scientists perfect these techniques, however, they will be able to replace even something as complicated as a lost finger, Mironov believes. "That is the future of tissue engineering," he said.

Future Problem Solvers
Human beings will change in several important ways over the next 50 years, said keynote speakers Arnold Brown and Edith Weiner of the Weiner, Edrich, Brown, Inc., consulting group in New York City. Edith Weiner’s remarks focused on the changes, rather than the challenges ahead, but her ideas agreed with the theme of the conference in one important way.

In the agricultural economic era, human strength was prized, Weiner said. In the current postindustrial era, "smarts" are most valued. However, with new computer programs that can do accounting and even perform medical diagnoses, smarts will not be in such demand anymore. Anyone will be able to buy the required knowledge and expertise on disk.

"The nerds are putting themselves out of business," Weiner quipped. But what will be important in the decades ahead is what Weiner called "intelligence, not smarts." We will prize those who can apply information and expertise in novel ways to meet new challenges. In other words, we will become problem solvers.

FutureFocus was an "excellent conference," reports Robert Chernow, a stockbroker and vice president of Dain Rauscher in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and a long-time professional member of the World Future Society.

The meeting, Chernow says, featured "several excellent presentations, such as Joseph F. Coates [‘Where Brain Technology May Take Us’], Ian D. Pearson [‘The Future of Sex, Politics, and Religion’], and Edith Weiner et al. [‘Religion and Science in the 21st Century: Convergence, Divergence, or What?’]. But there were also several gems in smaller sessions—one on the future of maps was superior and exciting [‘The Impending Obsolescence of Maps,’ presented by H. Roice Nelson Jr.], as was the one on the future of human tissue [‘Tissue Engineering as a 21st Century Industry,’ presented by Vladimir Mironov]. And at the closing session, William E. Halal was excellent [‘Top Ten Breakthroughs for the Next Decade’]."

For additional information please contact Susan Echard, Conference Director.