The Top 20 (Plus 5) Technologies for the World Ahead

By James H. Irvine and Sandra Schwarzbach

Breakthroughs now emerging in biotechnology, robotics, and other key areas bear the potential to reshape life on Earth. Two military analysts describe the 20 innovations that will have the biggest impacts in the near future, plus five prospective technologies that could have major repercussions in the longer term.

About 10 years ago, we at the Naval Air Warfare Center in Southern California set out to determine how emerging technologies might change armed conflict over the next 25 to 50 years. We selected 200 new technological applications, projecting out their growth and how they might influence future military strategy and warfare.

Our conclusion: These technologies would be major drivers of not only future military affairs, but of virtually all of human life. From these 200, we examine here what we consider the top 20 innovations that will have the greatest effect in the near term; in addition, we’ve selected five other feasible technological developments that could significantly change our world in the more distant future.

1. Computer Technology

Computing power has increased by a factor of 106 since 1959. Based on present-day central processing technology, we can expect a 108 further improvement in the next 30 to 40 years. Advances of up to 1018 (100 quintillion) could result, if any of the following innovations (which already exist at the laboratory level) undergo further development:

• Parallel processing.
• Advanced computer architecture.
• Special function processing chips.
• Special function analysis chips.

Such a level of enhanced computer performance would require much more advanced production technologies, including new chip production technologies; new types of computer chips, circuit elements, and computer architectures and software; and a projected 105 improvement in telecommunications-transmission rates over the next 25 years.

2. Ubiquitous Computing

Household appliances and many other items in our everyday lives will be embedded with cheap and barely detectable microchips, sensors, microcontrollers, and microprocessors that sense our presence, anticipate our wishes, and read our emotions. Imbued with these tiny yet powerful computing components, appliances and consumer products will become “intelligent.” They will interconnect and communicate with each other via network grids.

The ubiquitous-computing phenomenon will be further enabled by three new technologies:

• MEMS. Micro-electro-mechanical systems integrate items such as sensors, computers, data storage, and transmission systems onto a single computer chip. MEMS are small, low mass, lightweight, low power, and easy to mass produce. They also measure a wide range of physical phenomena, such as acceleration, inertia, and vibration. They can be analytical instruments to measure biological or physical states and can also be active response systems.

• Bots. Formally known as semi-intelligent specialized agent software programs, bots can automatically sort data based on set preferences, keep track of specific dynamic data sets (such as checkbook balances or inventories), maintain schedules and calendars, and track movement of things and people while integrating them with outside events. Bots are also capable of interacting with other computer software and other bots on their own initiative to accomplish tasks independently of a human user.

The general deployment of bots is projected to occur in the next seven to 10 years, pending the rollout of more advanced processor hardware. Masses of bots and bots-inhabited equipment will work together without human initiative—or even human knowledge—to automate large portions of society’s routine activities. Bots will also manage computer networks. By 2025, the Internet will have evolved into a bot-coordinated, bot-directed “information grid” that connects billions of devices, nodes, and sensors to each other. Under bot management, the Internet will be much more dynamic than it is today.

• Swarm technology. Network command-and-control system architecture will be very unlike that of networks today. The ability to understand and manage the collective movements, reactions, and interactions of masses of interconnected items will be critical. Swarm technology—i.e., decentralized arrays of agents or programs interacting locally with one another and with their surroundings, thus carrying out “intelligent” large-scale behavior (much like an ant colony, bacterial culture, or school of fish)—will be important in the near future for controlling and managing this new system.

3. Human Language Interface for Computers

Another great technological advance of the next 20 years will be the development of computers with human-language interfaces that fully comprehend human words—both spoken and written—and their meanings and that will talk, listen, and read aloud in humanlike voices. Some applications will permit information retrieval using natural language and automated foreign language translation for print and voice. Also, semi-intelligent personal search agents will use human-language interfaces to search the Internet’s databases and archives to compile information in specialized fields of knowledge and areas of interest based on the human user’s specific interests and wishes.

The human language computer interface could potentially transform society from a written culture to one relying more on verbal interactions. This interface will also automate a large number of voice-based activities, such as placing orders, asking directions, and executing verbal instructions to perform complex tasking. The education system and service area will both become more automated.

4. Machine Vision

Machine vision that will become available in five to 15 years will grow more sophisticated over time. Developed machine vision will have capability far beyond the range of the human eye (infrared, ultraviolet, multispectral). Robotic systems equipped with machine vision will recognize, classify, sort, and manipulate objects and respond to changes in their environments in unique ways. They will be put to a wide variety of industrial, laboratory, and surveillance uses, such as automatic guidance systems for vehicles and accident avoidance systems for machinery.

5. Robot Technology

We are now in the process of developing human-directed, virtual presence machines capable of remote-controlled movement and manipulation of objects. These devices are often called robots, which they are not. The technology to build real robots is on the way, however.

In the near-term future, our world will be driven by two emerging technologies that are advancing simultaneously: robotics and biotechnology. These technologies will overtake information technology and give us a new Socio-Technological Age around the year 2025. This new age will continue for 50-plus years.

The technologies needed to build robots that can perceive their surroundings, move themselves, and perform tasks without human oversight should reach fruition between 2015 and 2025. By 2040, robotlike machinery will inhabit the world alongside people, doing much of the work.

As robots enter the mainstream, they will probably exert major economic and societal impacts. On the positive side, labor productivity will vastly increase, which could be life-saving as populations of retirees will swell in the developed world. Replacing the retiring labor force with high-tech robotic equipment will ensure that economies remain productive enough to support their retirees. Additionally, hundreds of thousands of new jobs could become available for human professionals who possess the skills to program robot-to-human interface systems, movement control, harm-avoidance systems, vision packages, tasking systems, and speech-recognition programs.

At the same time, major disruptions of the world’s workforces could result. Studies estimate that robots could replace as much as one-third to one-half of human labor in some industrial and service sectors. Additionally, robot technology could almost completely take over agriculture and displace most, if not all, of the world’s farm workers. Even worse, this precipitous fall in human labor will probably occur at a rapid pace: in about a five- to seven-year period.

6. Telecommunications Revolution

Mass interconnection of computerized data systems has enabled people and machines to talk to each other at high data rates. These data rates will get progressively higher over the next half century. Optical fiber network transmission systems will continuously increase their capacities and reach transmission capabilities as high as 100 terabytes per second once new photonics switches, photonics circuit elements, optical routers, and plasmon switches—all now under development—go into widespread use. This will ultimately produce a seamless, all-optical network for data communications four to five times more powerful than the current one.

The next telecommunications revolution will offer mass sharing and transfer of databases, unrestricted worldwide communications and an ability to locate and communicate with anyone, a much higher diffusion of work via telecommuting, rapid and widespread dissemination of knowledge (unlimited access for everyone to the sum total of knowledge of the human race), and a much wider variety and availability of education and entertainment.

7. Fullerene Chemistry

In September 1985, Nobel Prize–winning chemist Rick Smalley discovered the original C60 molecule, buckminsterfullerene (“buckyballs”), which comprised 60 pure carbon atoms. In 1990, a means to mass produce buckyballs was discovered, making them available for large-scale study and establishing the new field of fullerene chemistry. Since then, chemists have learned not only how to form fullerene molecules, but also how to attach other kinds of molecules to them and build new structures and materials, such as nanotubes and graphene.

Nanotubes are hollow, tubelike structures composed of carbon atoms. They are very strong under linear tensile loads, conduct electricity with little resistance, can store items in their hollow interiors, can filter substances that pass through them, and conduct heat better than any other known material. Researchers are exploring carbon nanotubes’ potential commercial uses as fiber in composite structures, as superconductive wire, and as a storage medium for hydrogen fuel. Other uses may include transport mechanisms for fluids in and out of the body, as molecular sieves and filters, superconducting interconnections on circuit chips, computer memory storage devices, thermal regulators, and small electric plasma guns.

Graphene, first produced in a lab in 2004, is a flat, two-dimensional carbon fullerene consisting of a carbon sheet just a few atoms thick that can be extended indefinitely along its edges. It is an amazingly good conductor of electricity and has many potential uses in the electronics and semiconductor industries. Graphene ribbons made on an industrial scale, for example, could be used as connectors on computer chips. An experimental nanoscale graphene transistor was first demonstrated in a laboratory in April 2008.

Large-scale production of graphene wafers could produce a new class of semi-superconducting substrate with which to build computer chips. This would make possible several revolutionary advances in chip technology: development of a superconducting substrate layer to connect components, processing elements, and multiple core dies and development of graphene-based superconducting transistors.

Graphene wafers might also make Johnson junctions, induction switches, and “Y” switches work at room temperature. These three devices are three times faster than transistors, but at present they only work at cryogenic temperatures. If, by using graphene wafers, engineers successfully made them work at room temperature, they could create extremely efficient electrical networks that would not require active switching—i.e., fewer moving parts and fewer resources required.

8. Multi-Level Coding System in DNA

Scientists now recognize that DNA has at least six levels of coding. Some birth defects, cancers, and other genetic disorders may not actually be the result of genes themselves, but of coding errors in these outer layers of the DNA system. Some of the “non-gene” control layers may be easier to manipulate than the classic, first-line gene layer. Recent discoveries have opened several new lines of genetic research, making this the dawn of a new era in molecular genetics.

9. Biotech Analysis Instrumentation

Development of new instruments to examine biological phenomena is revolutionizing the fields of biological research and medicine. One of the most important new instruments is the DNA microarrays, which are compact robotic systems that detect DNA and other biochemical matter. Modern microarrays’ detector systems are made with postage-stamp-sized coated glass wafers. Each wafer includes a grid of strands of DNA that only bind to their complementary DNA matches (or alternatively, dots of some biochemical reagent).

The grid elements can measure the presence and level of a given gene or gene product (mutants, abnormal variants, dysfunctional genes) in a sample. These wafers can also find and analyze chemical and biological compounds within the body. Current machines are only capable of statistical samples. Scientists would like a machine capable of analyzing the entire human genome and its biochemical environment with all its variants in a single pass. It will probably be the late 2020s before a full human body biochemical scan can be performed.

At present, however, our greater challenge is not how to detect the chemicals, but how to interpret the results. Too few tests have been conducted to establish the normal level of most of these chemicals in the human body. By the mid-twenty-first century, we will have enough data analyzed to tell what chemicals, proteins, and enzymes are normal in the human body; whether their physical form is a mutation or merely a normal statistical variation; and whether certain measurements are metabolic disorders or just normal variations of human metabolism. This information will have a significant impact on health.

10. Human Biogenetic–Chemical Computer Model

New biotechnology and computer science breakthroughs are revealing the body’s biochemical secrets and spurring creation of new methods for attacking metabolic and genetic disorders. We have begun to examine the body’s biochemical nature to determine whether it is functioning correctly and is in balance and to determine what effect this balance or imbalance has on health.

Biochemists’ ultimate goal—of a full-scale biochemical computer model of human genetics, biochemistry, and all their interactions—will be available within 10 to 20 years. The amount of data and calculations involved will require a larger computer than available today, but this deficiency will be overcome within that time.

By the mid-twenty-first century, we will have a working computer model of human genetics, biochemistry, and major portions of their interactions. This will permit the modeling of an individual’s genetics and biochemistry, which can be used to diagnose and isolate individual biochemical deficiencies, including a number of conditions that today may be considered psychological but are actually statistical variations in metabolism. This will also be used to determine the effect of drugs and nutrients.

11. Treatment of Hereditary Diseases

The human race is now afflicted by some 4,000 hereditary diseases caused by genetic abnormalities. These diseases have until now largely been untreatable. However, the new knowledge of gene structure and function could possibly lead to new treatments. Eventually, genetic intervention could prevent or treat a large number of diseases. More successful treatments might be possible via selected artificial protein therapy and/or micronutrients.

It is also possible that this new biotech knowledge will uncover a variety of “minor” genetic diseases that people haven’t recognized or have assumed to be normal variations. Since these minor diseases affect a larger portion of the working population than the major hereditary disorders do, mitigating or curing them could lead to bigger increases in workforce productivity and performance.

12. Control of Bio-Metabolic Disorders

New means will arise to measure how the body is working at a biochemical level and to assess the body’s biochemicals (types and amounts) and whether the body metabolism displays proper balance. Biochemical “retuning” will treat a number of chronic, long-term conditions—including Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s, and possibly even the aging process itself—by supplying chemical compounds that the patient’s body does not have in order to realign the biochemical functions.

13. Blood and Tissue Matching of Drugs

At present, only about 40% of the population reacts favorably to a new drug. The rest have either minimal reaction or adverse reactions. As knowledge of human bio-metabolism advances, however, clinicians will learn to group patients into bio-metabolism classes and tissue-type groups to determine who will benefit from a specific drug and who will have adverse reactions. Use of bio-metabolism classes and tissue-type groups will be widespread by 2050 and result in increased drug effectiveness, fewer negative drug reactions, and lower drug-treatment costs.

14. Tissue Engineering

The creation of self-replicating biomaterials for healing wounds and bone fractures, including the combining of synthetic materials and structures with living cells, is another area of scientific exploration. Tissue engineering will revolutionize body and wound repair, organ transplantation, and surgery in general.

New polymers that satisfy safety and effectiveness requirements are being researched and developed for many surgical uses, including tissue scaffolding, bone grafts, cartilage repair, tissue regeneration, wound repair, and tissue joining. Soon, artificial organs and body parts will be available for replacement surgery. Research programs are now under way to develop artificial ears, hearts, pancreases, lungs, kidneys, livers, and legs.

15. Neurotechnology

Neuroscientists have developed a set of scanners capable of determining how and where the brain performs specific functions. The new brain-scanning and brain-mapping tools are opening up a whole new understanding of how humans think and act. Using them, researchers can observe brain activity, measure its intensity, chart the general pattern of brain operation, and identify the type of chemical reactions occurring in the brain.

Brain-scanning technology will soon be upgraded by the use of atomic magnetometer sensors—a new magnetic sensor technology that uses cesium vapor as a sensing element. These devices are 100 times more sensitive and 1,000 times faster than present sensor elements. They will, with time, better discern how people think, how the brain performs tasks, how thought processes differ among individuals, and what those differences mean in relation to task performance and personality.

The new knowledge of brain operation and its effects will be one of the major, socially transforming events of the twenty-first century. Understanding how the brain operates on an individual basis will permit society to match the individual to task performance, to individualize educational programs, and to identify and mitigate mental illness.

16. Neuropharmacology

We can now see the operation of the brain. We can also systematically study and measure the effects of nutrients, micronutrients, and drug treatments on the brain and on various mental conditions. This has led to the new science of neuropharmacology—the study of how we change the brain’s operation through the use of drugs, food, and other nutrients, micronutrients, and proteins. Over time, this field will apply knowledge of the brain’s biochemical operations to systematically treat mental disorders and mental conditions pharmaceutically, as well as enhance people’s natural mental abilities.

17. Cellulose-to-Glucose Process

One of the major goals of the biotech and chemical industry is the production of glucose, the principal food of many microorganisms, from cellulose. If cheap, plentiful glucose were available, microbes could be genetically engineered to make almost anything. An economical cellulose-to-glucose process would revolutionize the world’s chemical industries and allow the conversion of much agricultural cellulose-based waste into useful raw materials.

18. Nanotechnology

Instrumentation has begun to permit us to see and manipulate matter at a nano level—10-6 to 10-9 meter—the level of atoms and molecules. This has created the new field of nanotechnology. The ability to create smaller structures using modern chip-manufacturing technology will permit us to change and modify materials one atom or molecule at a time and to develop super-fine powders, quantum dots, and nanotubes. These capabilities have now started to shrink things into the “upper nano” range—a range that advancements in production technology will push us into over the next 10 to 15 years. The scale of objects will continue to shrink, and some useful upper-nanoscale devices and phenomena will be developed and deployed.

19. Chaos Theory and Complexity Models

Our world is much more complex, interconnected, and dynamic than we once thought. New mathematical concepts are challenging the rationalized, deterministic, scientific models of the Industrial Age. The Industrial Age paradigm held that there is one best way to organize a given thing and that, in all cases, a given “rational” outcome is predetermined by nature. The new scientific paradigm will ultimately replace this older mentality.

The new Information Age is being driven by applied technology and by two major advances in theoretical science that are altering our view of how the world works: an ecological/ecosystem model, which supports ecological and environmental diversity, and modern chaos and complexity theories, which emphasize unpredictability, self-organizing systems, and the coexistence of the linear and the random. In the near term, this paradigm shift will significantly change people’s views of society, of themselves in relation to society, and of how the world and the greater universe work.

20. Fuel Cells to Allow Deep-Sea Habitation

A major effort is under way to develop advanced fuel cells for cars. The greatest social effect of fuel cells will not be in automobiles, however, but in the opening of the undersea world to exploration and habitation. Fuel cells that produce electricity directly, without producing toxic fumes as a byproduct, will bring down the costs of submarines and keep them running for days as opposed to hours. This will permit human exploration and—eventually—colonization of the continental shelves and the shallow oceans.

Fuel cells will lead to the development of extensive deep-sea business sectors and myriad human habitations out in the ocean. Mining operations to exploit the shallow ocean floor’s mineral wealth, as well as commercial aquaculture enterprises to exploit the ocean’s biological resources, will follow. Earth’s available resource base will expand significantly, and Earth’s population—which could reach more than 9 billion people by mid-century (or even 11 billion if medical advances extend average life spans)—will have much more room to grow.

Five Future Technologies and The Problems They Could Solve

Several technologies yet to come could significantly affect the nature of our world. Our top five are as follows:

1. Superconductivity at room temperature. When certain metals and ceramics are cooled to ultra-low temperatures, they become superconductive—i.e., they can carry huge amounts of electrical current for long durations of time without losing any of the current’s energy as heat. Diverse work is going on in making materials superconductive at room temperature. If it succeeds, we could substantially increase the efficiency of electrical machines and power grids and also develop new types of computer chips, improved medical-imaging devices, and high-efficiency ion drives for space vehicles.

2. Low-cost space lift. Lifting objects into orbit is expensive—a problem that slows human improvement in space capabilities. The advent of a cheap space lift would allow exponential growth, and perhaps a new technological age. It would be attainable either by politicians agreeing to the massive funding needed for such a development or by some unforeseen, dramatic technological breakthrough. Neither, however, can be guaranteed to happen within the next 25 years.

3. Artificial intelligence of human-level capability in computers. The development and widespread use of AI of human-level capability in computer systems stands to be one of the major advances in computer technology over the next 75 years. AI claims have been made for 40 years, but to date, they have not delivered. Furthermore, there appears to be no current, fundamental breakthrough that will alter this in the near future. However, research grants bolster those who think that the big breakthrough is right around the corner.

4. Cellulose-to-liquid-hydrocarbon path. A number of new, synthetic fuel processes can produce diesel fuels from agricultural products. The means now exist for converting vegetable oils into biodiesel fuel, protein matter into diesel oil, various agricultural substances into synthetic oil, and sugars and starches into fuel-grade ethyl alcohol. Unfortunately, all these biosynthetic fuel processes are much more expensive than fossil-fuel generation, largely due to the costs of harvesting and processing.

One lower-cost option may exist, however: converting low-end agricultural waste (largely cellulose) into synthetic oil. A number of experimental processes to derive fuel from cellulose waste are now in R&D. A successful low-grade, agricultural-product-to-fuel path would enrich agricultural economies throughout much of the world, and in addition make energy independence more attainable for communities everywhere.

5. Improved medicine and life span. The question is not whether we are going to get some life-span extension, but how much: Will the extension be a moderate increase in life expectancy of 100 to 120 years, a significantly increased life expectancy of 150 to 170 years, or a very significant life extension of 250 to 300 years? Conversely, radical life extension could lead to life spans of 1,000-plus years.

Life extension has both positive and negative social implications. It will alleviate suffering caused by age deterioration and will result in a longer-lived, more productive workforce. On the other hand, it may cause issues with pension plans, Social Security, life insurance, and other retirement programs. It could result in overpopulation, food shortages, pollution, wars for resources, and extinction of species. Another important consideration is that of control: Who would determine how this precious technology would be shared?

The Effects of Emerging Technologies on Society

As the technology areas covered in this article advance along their individual development curves, their combined effect will remake society as we know it. Ultimately, they will give humankind two new socio-technological ages in the first half of the twenty-first century: the Information Age and the Robotic-Biotech Age. The current Information Age, which should continue for the next 20 to 40 years, is being driven by advances in computers, telecommunications, and electronic instrumentation, plus major advances in materials, space, energy, and manufacturing.

The Robotic-Biotech Age will follow at around 2025, driven by the simultaneous advances of robotics and biotechnology, and reinforced by advances in nanotechnology, materials, and manufacturing technology. The Robotic-Biotech Age will continue for 50-plus years, until another great technology emerges as a new force in the world.

The Information Age came on very quickly and will be relatively short-lived (about 50 years). Society and social structure will not have had the time to fully adjust before the next wave of technological innovation comes along. This speed of change is going to continue for the next 50 to 75 years as the current wave of emerging technologies matures.

In the twentieth century, many people viewed the philosophical movements to which they belonged (communism, fascism, various radical nationalisms, socialism, social democracy, liberalism, etc.) as belief systems that would and should govern how the world runs. In the name of these systems, 500 million people died by war, genocide, war-related famine and disease, politically motivated terror, and régime-based terror.

Members of the emerging generation, operating under the new paradigm, are much more likely to see themselves as cellular automata—trying to optimize themselves in their environment—rather than as governors of the universe. Whether this is good for society as a whole is not yet known, but it will represent a new social viewpoint.

New socio-technological ages tend to produce new social structures and new social mores. Historical precedent suggests that this new age will also produce a new and different societal basis for war and the use of military force, along with a new social perception of the legitimate application of war.

It is possible to project with some certainty the social structure of both the new Information Age and the Robotic-Biotech Age. With each transition to a more advanced stage of civilization, certain things transpire:

• The social structure acquires an increasingly large number of small, specialized niches.
• There is a significant increase in the number of players in the political power structure.
• There is an increasing spread of knowledge out to the masses.
• The average person’s standard of living goes up.
• Human control over nature increases.

As society has advanced, class structure has become more complex. In the later Information Age and Robotic-Biotech Age, there will be simply too many classes for a dominant one to emerge. The complexity of the new social structure, coupled with the rise in general knowledge level, will require recognition that specialized knowledge is necessary and that all classes serve useful functions and are needed for society to operate properly.

It is usually hard to change the direction of society, absent great social perturbations, such as war or economic disaster, which can force rapid social change. In an age of peace and prosperity, it takes a long time to modify social norms, regardless of the level of new technological progress that occurs. Technological progress alone is relatively slow at driving social change. However, the near future will see society change markedly as a result of new emerging technology and demography.

This need not be any cause for alarm. With some exceptions, most of the changes described portend to be highly positive. Barring bad luck and bad management, the world will—when all the technologies are deployed—be a better place to live in.

About the Authors

James Irvine is director of the Revolution in Military Affairs Program at the Naval Air Warfare Center, Weapons Division (NAWCWD) in China Lake, California. He has worked as a systems engineer for the U.S. Navy for the last four decades, and has authored numerous studies on future military geopolitics and technology. E-mail james.irvine@navy.mil.

Sandra Schwarzbach is senior strategic analyst for the Naval Air Warfare Center at China Lake, California. She advises the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Chief of Naval Operations on security issues and contributes regularly to Department of Defense planning initiatives. She has also taught courses on military strategy development and participated in the design of multiple weapons and weapon systems. E-mail Sandra.schwarzbach@navy.mil.

Global MegaCrisis: Four Scenarios, Two Perspectives

By William E. Halal and Michael Marien

Two futurists map out the convergence of multiple global challenges, offering divergent viewpoints—one optimistic and one pessimistic—on the likelihood of successfully meeting these challenges and turning them into global progress.

Killer pandemics, financial meltdowns, runaway global warming, environmental decay, nuclear war, cyberdisasters: These catastrophes are becoming increasingly routine headlines. But as the mainstream press focuses only on individual extreme events, attention is drawn away from an issue far more complex: the convergence of multiple problems into a Global MegaCrisis. This article offers an explanation of this complex issue, as well as four plausible scenarios based on how we and our institutions approach it.

The Global MegaCrisis cuts across all sectors in an era of multiple transformations. The Iraq War demonstrated the limits of U.S. military power, and the 2008 global financial crisis highlighted the limits of deregulated markets. With these foundations of the old global order shaken badly, the growing threat of climate change, looming energy shortages, huge government deficits, terrorism, and a host of wild cards now form a complex interplay of destructive forces that are straining established systems to the breaking point. These multiple threats converge like a multi-vehicle freeway pileup in slow motion. If it had not been bad mortgages and arcane derivatives, other driving forces in these complex systems might have caused roughly the same type of global failure. And more failures seem all too likely.

The Global MegaCrisis: What Is It And What Does It Look Like?

The MegaCrisis, simply defined, is a global environmental and economic collapse or near collapse, along with attendant problems of rising prices, mass protests, widespread psychic stress, and lawlessness. We present the following tentative outline to better paint a picture of what MegaCrisis might look like.

Some Trends Driving the MegaCrisis

• Climate Change, No Matter What. The year 2010 marked the hottest year (and decade) on record. The world has already seen a 1°F temperature rise, and an additional 4°–6° rise is likely even if all proposed actions are taken. Expect possibly 10°F in the next few decades if greenhouse gases keep growing. In addition, the projected sea-level rise in the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report was 16 inches by 2100; now it is about three to six feet by 2100.

Complicating this first point is the fact that reducing CO2 is costly. The science indicates that greenhouse gases must be reduced by 60% from 1980 levels to avoid severe climate change. This would cost roughly $20 trillion, or about 1% to 3% of global GDP, if done soon, but would be far more costly if done later. The problem is even more daunting because most developing nations are likely to industrialize, and most industrialized nations are likely to grow, increasing all these threats over the long term.

• Political Will to Reduce CO₂ Is Lacking. There are as yet no global agreements that would decrease carbon emissions significantly. Meanwhile, China, India, and the United States are planning to build a total of 850 coal-fired plants, adding five times as much CO₂ to the atmosphere as present treaties intend to reduce.

• Methane May Be Worse Than CO₂. Keep your eye on methane, a potent greenhouse gas that is 23 times worse than CO₂, although it doesn’t stay in the atmosphere as long. Large quantities of methane are being released from thawing tundra in the Arctic region, and still larger quantities may be released from icelike methane clathrates on the ocean floor in coastal areas.

• Freshwater Is Becoming More Scarce. Nearly a billion people lack clean water, and 2.6 billion lack good sanitation. Water tables are falling on all continents, and the World Bank estimates that, by 2025, half of the world population could face water scarcity due to climate change, population growth, and increasing demand for water. Unless major changes occur, global water shortages are likely to cause mass migrations, higher food prices, malnutrition, and major conflicts.

• Recession Likely to Last for Years. The Great Recession that began in 2008 is often compared to the Great Depression of 1930, which lasted until 1940. The International Monetary Fund forecasts growth for the next two years at slightly above 2% in developed nations, although it should remain at 8% in the developing world. Some economists think unemployment rates between 8% and 9% are quite likely for several years, much like Japan’s “lost decade” in the 1990s.

• Severe Institutional Failures. The near collapse of the world’s financial system in 2008 highlighted structural failures in the financial industry, government, and other institutions. A study of 1,500 CEOs noted: “The world’s leaders think their enterprises are not equipped to cope with complexity in the global environment.” Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote, “The financial collapse may be to markets what the Berlin Wall was to Communism.”

• Cyberwarfare/Cyberterrorism. Computer hacking is growing, commensurate with the boom in global e-commerce. U.S. military networks, nuclear facilities, banks, air-traffic-control systems, and electrical grids are under constant attack. The U.S. Naval War College was shut down by hackers for more than two weeks in 2006. The threat is so great that one expert suggested installing “cyberwar hotlines” similar to the special phones that the United States and Soviet Union used to avoid nuclear Armageddon.

• Weapons of Mass Destruction. The old status quo of MAD (mutually assured destruction) may have kept two superpowers locked in a stalemate, but it is no longer viable with nine contending nuclear powers (and more likely to emerge, including terrorist groups). Between 1993 and the end of 2009, the Illicit Trafficking Database recorded 1,784 nuclear trafficking incidents.

Suddenly, many of the concerns we were forewarned of over recent decades are at hand. The future is arriving—and with a vengeance. There is a palpable and widespread fear that the present world is unsustainable and that events could easily spin out of control. Scientists are convinced that a 60% reduction in carbon-dioxide emissions is needed to stave off ruinous climate change, but achieving that goal looks so unrealistic that many are girding to withstand a significant rise in sea levels, scorching heat, withering droughts, and more extreme weather patterns. Policy makers in major world capitals, including Washington, are seriously considering geoengineering the planet as a last-ditch effort to stave off disaster. The MegaCrisis represents what could occur if the human species fails to transform its economies, technologies, politics, and lifestyles into something more sustainable within the next two decades.

Debating the Global MegaCrisis And Its Outcomes

With these political, financial, and ecological crises threatening the world, the two of us engaged in a spirited e-mail discussion, later published in World Future Review (“Letter to the Editor: A Dialogue Between William E. Halal and Michael Marien,” June-July 2009). We then published a survey on TechCast.org to encourage discussion and to learn what others think. The survey summarizes our differing views and asks TechCast experts and visitors to evaluate the severity of the Global MegaCrisis and the probability of four alternative scenarios.

The four scenarios run along a single axis from pessimistic to optimistic. This enables us to focus on alternative outcomes for the entire world or entire societies moving through a period of crisis.

Scenario 1: Decline to Disaster

The world fails to react to the Global MegaCrisis in time. Indecision reigns due to too many choices, too many entrenched interest groups, and too few resources to make necessary changes. Huge government deficits persist, leading to failures of public services and an inability to make crucial transition investments in energy, education, and infrastructure. Governments are unable to reform financial systems, curb global warming, reduce military spending, or conquer deficits. Most corporations remain focused on short-term profit. Technological advances are shelved, delayed, controversial, or fail to help. Climate change accelerates, thanks in part to large amounts of methane complementing the carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere, resulting in more extreme weather events, massive migrations, and crop losses.

The bottom line: a global economic depression, crippling energy shortages, ecological collapse, local and regional wars, rampant terrorism, crime, corruption, and more.

Scenario 2: Muddling Down

Halfhearted, inadequate actions result in the apparent paradox of a high-tech dark age. Political stalemates, general ignorance about the complexity of the problems, and lack of resources stymie all but the most modest changes in financial systems, governance, energy, and education. The promise of new technologies is only partly met, and pollution and population pressures continue as the world population passes 7 billion in late 2011. The effects of climate change become even more extreme. Meanwhile, recovery from the Great Recession is slow and uneven, and the number of failed states rises. Local wars and terrorist attacks increase.

Despite claims of progress by political and corporate leaders, high unemployment persists and the quality of life declines for most people.

Scenario 3: Muddling Up

Governments and corporations act slowly, but with increasing knowledge. Mounting threats spur generally successful efforts. Far more sophisticated information technology (IT) and artificial intelligence (AI) provide powerful technical capabilities to help counter the challenges. The sense of urgency builds as problems increase, so public attitudes shift enough to favor needed changes, and reasonably good leadership is able to provide guidance. There are relatively minor disasters along the way but little that is catastrophic for an entire region or the planet. A rudimentary but functioning global order emerges to manage this advanced society in time to avert widespread disaster. Many new problems arise nonetheless, but most are adequately addressed.

Scenario 4: Rise to Maturity

The transition to a new global order is made quickly and easily. Governments and corporations act wisely and with determination, and are supported by the majority of people. The world surpasses the United Nations Millennium Development Goals of halving poverty by 2015, and many countries approach ecological sustainability (at least as it is currently defined). A conversion to clean, renewable energy happens quickly and provides a solid boost to many national and regional economies.

Early Survey Results

As of January 2011, our exploratory survey has been completed by 60 responders, and more replies are coming in. It’s not a random sample; these are smart and thoughtful people. Here is the breakdown of responses to the initial question, “How severe is the potential threat posed by the Global MegaCrisis?”

We also asked respondents to estimate the probability for each of the four scenarios along the pessimism–optimism axis. This question frames the issue differently, but produces roughly the same general results: a 60% probability for the two most pessimistic scenarios, compared with a 40% probability for the two most optimistic.

The rough timetable for these four scenarios is estimated as follows. Note that the Muddling Down scenario is thought to occur earlier than the others; indeed, some think it has already begun. Here are the dates that respondents suggested:

Many respondents identified the key problems as chronic failures in governance, leadership, and cultural attitudes. They also believe that, despite such failures, humanity has a proven capacity to survive, usually by muddling up.

Halal’s Analysis: The World Is Entering an Advanced Stage of Evolution

Despite the enormity of the challenges, there is reason for hope. Advanced IT, along with the rise of green technologies and other new industries, will help spur an economic upcycle starting about 2015, and it is likely that the Global MegaCrisis will be largely resolved by 2020. That is why I rate the four scenarios as follows: Decline to Disaster, 10%; Muddling Down, 25%; Muddling Up, 60%; Rise to Maturity, 5%.

The forces involved are so historic and powerful that a long-term evolutionary perspective is necessary to understand what is taking place. Our work at the TechCast Project shows that the Global MegaCrisis is the inevitable result of high-tech globalization that is causing what we call a “global crisis of maturity.” This is a critical growth phase in the life cycle of the planet, marked by unprecedented transition points in climate change, energy consumption, economic systems, and all other facets of an emerging global order. We also believe that the relentless advance of information technology is driving a transition to an advanced stage of civilization powered by new technologies, interrelated global systems, adaptive social institutions, mounting knowledge and intelligence, and global consciousness.

By combining our 70 forecasts of technology breakthroughs, we are able to produce “macroforecasts” that suggest that the Muddling Up scenario could occur in about 10 years, give or take three years. Worldwide e-commerce is likely to take off in about five years to form a rudimentary version of the “global brain” that futurists have long anticipated. Around 2020 or so, we are likely to see second-generation computing (optical, nano, bio, and quantum) and artificial intelligence that can automate routine knowledge.

These developments will enable people to concentrate on values, beliefs, ideologies, and other higher levels of thought and to focus most of their attention on solving crucial global challenges. This constitutes the next logical phase in the progression of society from agriculture to manufacturing, services, knowledge, and even consciousness itself.

The central role of IT/AI is a game changer because it shifts the relationship between humans and machines in profound ways. Contrary to the assertion that AI will surpass human abilities, AI liberates us from mental drudgery and releases the unique human capability for higher consciousness at the very time that the world faces unprecedented challenges. This is hardly a coincidence, but rather the playing out of historic forces in the evolutionary cycle. Sure, there will be lots of information overload and confusion, because the world is struggling to take responsibility for its future or suffer enormous consequences. However, pollster John Zogby’s research shows a “fundamental reorientation of the American character: away from wanton consumption and toward a new global citizenry in an age of limited resources.”

Events are likely to culminate around 2020, when we expect IT/AI to mature and the threats to reach intolerable levels as the global GDP almost doubles. Yes, the situation looks bleak, but it’s always darkest just before the dawn. The rise of consciousness can be seen even now in the way the economic crisis has provoked a widespread awareness of the need to transform business and government institutions, stabilize the world’s financial system, promote renewable energy, and halt climate change.

It is not possible to know much more about this coming “Age of Global Awareness,” just as we never could have guessed that the Information Age would entail us being virtually inseparable from our PCs, laptops, and smart phones for practically every waking hour. I suspect we will use what I call “Technologies of Consciousness” to see us through the crisis of maturity.

Technologies of Consciousness (ToC) are methods that shape awareness, emotions, values, beliefs, ideologies, choices, and states of mind. The ToCs in this survey range from so-called “hard” ToCs, such as artificial intelligence, biofeedback, virtual reality, and even cybernetic brain enhancements, to “soft” or “social” ToCs, such as collaborative enterprise, conflict resolution, and even meditation and prayer.

The key tool in the ToC arsenal is the little-used power of collaborative problem solving. In a knowledge society, collaboration creates new solutions that can benefit all parties, but this is not yet well recognized. Maybe this collaborative article can serve as a small example.

When we (Michael Marien and myself) started working together on this project, I thought many times that we could not go on because our views were so strikingly at odds. We were dealing with a tough issue, of course, but the problem was exacerbated because both of us have thought about futures for many decades, but from different perspectives. One of us is guardedly optimistic, while the other is decidedly pessimistic (albeit hoping to be proven wrong). By examining our differences in the light of compromise, we made important breakthroughs. Collaboration is a powerful approach to problem solving—and possibly the single best way to resolve the Global MegaCrisis. Technologies of Consciousness such as those mentioned above could greatly encourage collaboration.

Marien’s Analysis: Infoglut, Ignorance, Indecision, and Inadequacy

The two of us agree that both a Global MegaCrisis and an IT/AI explosion are under way, and that there are other technology revolutions ahead, as nicely summarized by the TechCast Project. The question is: Will the IT/AI explosion make things better? It is indeed “a game changer,” and it will change many games—for good and ill. It could bring convergence of thinking about important global issues and move attention to “higher levels of consciousness.” It is also just as likely to cause further information glut, fragmentation, degraded consciousness, indecision, and, ultimately, half-baked inadequate action. Based on the first decade or so of the Internet and vastly expanded information abundance of all sorts, I see no reason for unfettered optimism, which is simply wishful thinking in the end.

In my essay “Futures Thinking and Macro-Systems: Our Era of Mal-Adaptive, Non-Adaptive, and Semi-Adaptive Systems” (World Future Review, April-May 2009), I argue that our increasingly complex social systems are adapting in the wrong direction, not adapting at all, or only partly adapting, which could well result in the paradox of “improvement and growing inadequacy.” As a consequence, I rate the four scenarios as follows: Decline to Disaster, 20%; Muddling Down, 60%; Muddling Up, 20%; and Rise to Maturity, 0%.

Certainly there is more consciousness about global issues nowadays, and some actions are being taken to improve global governance. There is growing awareness of climate change. The “greening” of communities, businesses, and governments is under way in many places, and there is a veritable gold rush to develop a wide variety of clean energy technologies (for example, ExxonMobil’s recent claimed investment of $600 million to produce liquid fuels from algae). And yet the latest assessments of climate experts are increasingly dire—thus, “improvement and growing inadequacy” seems likely.

The biggest blind spot in the IT/AI vision has to do with governance. In the “Rise to Maturity” scenario, governments and corporations do the right thing—and are supported by the public. This happens even in the more likely “Muddling Up” scenario. It may be desirable, but it is not likely in our chaotic new information environment of tweets, twitters, trivia, sound bites, floods of emails, superficiality, commercialism, and ever more fragmentation. Huge deficits, run up by many governments, are leading to draconian cuts in essential services and inattention to decaying or inadequate infrastructure, while fueling overreactionary fears that we are headed toward fiscal ruin, “evil” socialism, and/or unwelcome centralized global government.

Also, despite the hyperabundance of information, there is no evidence that people are better informed about current affairs today than they were in the past. Newspapers and magazines are closing down or shrinking their coverage of national and global issues. In the United States, financially stressed schools and colleges are still deficient in civic education, let alone serious futures education, and socioeconomic inequalities continue to grow. We may still see some shift to enlightened views, but, more likely than not, too little too late. And it may well be offset or rolled back by simplistic reactionary movements.

Granted, Facebook and Twitter have sparked a spectacular and welcome string of regime changes in the Middle East. However, once the post-dictator euphoria passes, the harsh realities of rising prices and a bulging youth population in need of employment may lead to further discontent.

This is not “doom and gloom,” but mainstream social-science thinking, based on my synthesis of hundreds of recent books on environmental issues, governance, IT impacts, and education. Perhaps we can return to an undisputed path of evolutionary progress, but it will require a major restructuring of industrial-era knowledge and education/learning, especially adult/voter learning, and serious consideration of ethics and the quality of public discourse. What Halal refers to as “Technologies of Consciousness” are not a solution in and of themselves.

Your Turn

You have now encountered four scenarios and two differing arguments about which direction the world is heading in. Now it’s your turn to think and respond—and to encourage others to do the same. We invite readers to take the MegaCrisis Survey at www.TechCast.org.

About the Authors

William E. Halal is professor emeritus at George Washington University and president of TechCast LLC (www.TechCast.org). Portions of this article are adapted from his forthcoming book, Through the MegaCrisis: The Technology Revolution to a World of Knowledge, Intelligence, and Global Consciousness.

Michael Marien is the founder and former editor of Future Survey, published by WFS for 30 years, and is now the director of GlobalForesightBooks.org. Despite their differences, Halal and Marien share the common bond of having studied for advanced degrees at the University of California, Berkeley.

The authors gratefully acknowledge contributions to this analysis by Jerome C. Glenn, director of the Millennium Project, and Mike MacCracken, chief scientist at the Climate Institute. Readers are invited to take the MegaCrisis Survey at www.TechCast.org. E-mail comments to halal@gwu .edu and mmarien@twcny.rr.com.

Recently Published Books Other perspectives on the Global MegaCrisis

To provide a broader sense of the MegaCrisis, we offer a summary of the problem as seen by a variety of prominent futurists and other writers.

It is important to realize that there is no shared language on the general global condition. Nor is there any shared approach. Some writers use a balanced perspective that looks at both pessimistic and optimistic indicators, but most decidedly take one side or the other. Here is a sampling of both general overviews and one-sided views.

Perhaps the best starting point is the “State of the Future Index” in the Millennium Project’s annual State of the Future report, assembled by Jerome C. Glenn, Theodore J. Gordon, and Elizabeth Florescu (The Millennium Project, 2010). The Index reviews 30 trends to provide a “report card for humanity,” divided into four categories: where we are winning (improved literacy rate, more Internet users, improved life expectancy, etc.), where we are losing (fossil fuel emissions, unemployment, terrorist attack casualties, etc.), where there is little change (HIV prevalence, for example), and where there is uncertainty (infectious diseases, for example). How the trends are weighted is problematic, however, and there is doubt as to whether the 30 indicators cover all essential developments.

A recent report prepared by the Rockefeller Foundation, along with Peter Schwartz and the Global Business Network, parallels somewhat the four single-axis scenarios presented in our article. Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development (2010) provides four scenarios for the next decade or so in a 2x2 matrix along two axes: strong versus weak political/economic alignment, and low versus high adaptive capacity. The scenarios are “Hack Attack” (an unstable and shock-prone world, with weak governments, thriving criminality, and dangerous technologies), “Lock Step” (tighter top-down government control after a 2012 pandemic, with limited innovation and growing citizen pushback), “Smart Scramble” (an economically depressed world, with local makeshift solutions and “good enough” technology addressing a growing set of problems), and “Clever Together” (a world of highly coordinated and successful strategies addressing global issues). A free PDF is available at www.RockFound.org; Global Foresight Books selected this as its Book of the Month for November 2010.

Essential reading, as always, is provided by Lester R. Brown, founder of the Earth Policy Institute, in World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse (W.W. Norton, 2011). He warns that “ecological and economic deficits are now shaping not only our future, but our present. … [T]he ‘perfect storm’ or the ‘ultimate recession’ could come at any time.”

In The Great Disruption: How the Climate Crisis Will Change Everything (for the Better) (Bloomsbury USA, 2011), Paul Gilding, a faculty member of the Cambridge University Program for Sustainability Leadership, sees loss, suffering, and conflict in the coming decades, as our “planetary overdraft is paid,” but believes that compassion, innovation, resilience, and adaptability will win out.

John L. Petersen, founder of The Arlington Institute, focuses on a wide range of converging global trends, breakdowns, and breakthroughs in A Vision for 2012: Planning for Extraordinary Change (Fulcrum, 2008), concluding with an exploration of various possibilities after a massive catastrophe, ranging from a failed global system to a new world of global cooperation and harmony with nature. His brief version, “A New End, A New Beginning,” appears in the World Future Society’s 2009 conference volume, Innovation and Creativity in a Complex World.

Another and still broader view of world-scale systems crises and civic collapse by the 2020s, to be followed by “our maturity as a species,” is provided by Duane Elgin in The Living Universe (Berrett-Koehler, 2009).

Acceleration: The Forces Driving Human Progress by Ronald G. Havelock (Prometheus Books, 2011) makes a strong and thoughtful case for long-term progress of humanity, and a somewhat successful attempt to address various “fears for the future.” However, the 15-page annotated bibliography is a bit spotty, with favorable comments on Julian Simon and John Naisbitt, negative reviews of Paul Ehrlich and the 1972 Limits to Growth report, and no consideration of Lester R. Brown and current thinking of the vast majority of climate scientists.

An upbeat view looking beyond the Great Recession is provided by urbanist Richard Florida in The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity (Harper, 2010). This is countered with the grim view of Dystopia: What Is to Be Done? by Canadian sociologist Gary Potter (CreateSpace, 2010), who sees capitalist-driven disaster already afflicting at least one billion people and coming soon for the rest of us. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by UCLA geography professor Jared Diamond (Penguin, 2005) was a best-seller for more than six months and is still relevant. Our Final Century: The 50/50 Threat to Humanity’s Survival by UK Royal Astronomer and Cambridge professor Martin Rees (Basic Books, 2003) covers a broad range of science and technology risks and is also still very relevant.

Severe climate change scenarios in particular deserve our attention. Climatic Cataclysm: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Climate Change, edited by Kurt M. Campbell of the Center for a New American Security (Brookings Institution Press, 2008), offers three plausible scenarios: Expected Climate Change by 2040, Severe Climate Change by 2040, and Catastrophic Climate Change in the 2040-2100 period, as average global temperatures rise to 5.6°C above 1990 levels.

In a more popular style, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Energy Joseph J. Romm provides three scenarios in Hell and High Water (Morrow, 2007) on developments in three periods: 2000-2025, 2025-2050, and 2050-2100 (when a sea level rise of 20–80 feet will be “all but unstoppable” if current trends continue). A longer-term view of our world in 2050, 2100, and 2300 is enabled by University of Washington geologist Peter D. Ward in The Flooded Earth: Our Future in a World without Ice Caps (Basic Books, 2010), who argues that sea-level rise will happen no matter what we do.

Our own previous contributions to thinking about the MegaCrisis include Democracy in the 21st Century by Michael Marien (Future Survey Mini-Guide #3, 2008), on problems of democracy and today’s ill-informed citizens, and Technology’s Promise by William E. Halal (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), which covers TechCast forecasts of the technology revolution.

—William E. Halal and Michael Marien

Note: Longer reviews of many of these books are available online at GlobalForesightBooks.org.

Defining and Anticipating the Global MegaCrisis

How to Define the Global MegaCrisis

At the personal level, it is a MegaCrisis to lose one’s home, job, and/or spouse. At the community level, a city or state (like Haiti) reeling from high unemployment and/or a natural disaster is in a MegaCrisis. In a broader sense, a MegaCrisis is more than a “catastrophe,” and it can bring about a natural turning point in social evolution. It is thus not only a threat but may also be an opportunity.

The Global MegaCrisis is a constellation of major issues such as climate change, ecological collapse, economic depression, nuclear threats, and/or high-impact wild cards that threaten civilization. Worth noting is that, in the most hopeful scenario, the Global MegaCrisis could initiate the creation of an advanced stage of development based on knowledge, high technology, and global community.

How to Understand the Global MegaCrisis

Trends such as those listed in this article suggest that we are moving toward a MegaCrisis, and there are many other indicators to consider as well. If Iran demonstrates a nuclear bomb, for example, this would heighten the chances of war, which could destabilize the Middle East and deepen a global MegaCrisis. Many would argue that failed or failing states, such as Somalia and Haiti, are already in a condition of MegaCrisis. There will always be contending perspectives when it comes to anticipating crises and gauging their severity. However, avoiding the issue, forestalling painful but necessary changes, or simply thinking, “it can’t happen here” will increase the probability of catastrophe.

What Might Happen When the Global MegaCrisis Arrives?

Could it be the beginning of “The End” (complete extinction or major decline in civilization)? Or could such a breakdown ultimately lead to a breakthrough—a shift in global consciousness, for example—as Ervin Laszlo and others have postulated? Such a transition could be rapid or slow. It could be a clear upturn or downturn, or mixed paths, as in our “Muddling Down” and “Muddling Up” scenarios. The uncertainty is huge. What is certain is that sharply differing visions of what is likely to happen will be hotly contested, as illustrated in this article.

—William E. Halal and Michael Marien

Solar Power from the Moon

By Patrick Tucker

A Japanese company is pitching an alternative energy plan that’s out of this world—and potentially the largest public infrastructure project in human history.

The year is 2050 and it’s morning on the Moon. The Sun is rising over a landscape that is bleak and featureless with one exception: a wide belt of photovoltaic panels that cuts across the ash-gray lunar surface like a straight river. Not a single astronaut is in sight, but a troop of robots is busily making repairs to the installation where tune-ups are needed. Beneath the panels, superconducting cables are ferrying the Sun’s power to transmission centers. The power will be beamed to a receiving station near the Earth’s equator, and from there, it will be distributed to energy-hungry cities and towns across the globe where it will keep the lights on in offices, hospitals, and schools.

Meet the LUNA RING, the brainchild of Tetsuji Yoshida and his colleagues at CSP, the research arm of Shimizu, one of the largest construction firms in Japan. The LUNA RING is an idea that could only come from the land of the rising sun, a country boasting many of the world’s best-known technology companies, like Sony, Hitachi, and Panasonic, but also saddled with a shortage of natural resources.

The LUNA RING speaks to a future global need that’s keenly felt in the present in Japan, a nation now also coping with the impacts of the devastating March 2011 earthquake on its nuclear power capacity.

It’s also an example of planning in the long term.

“My very optimistic forecast is 25 years,” Yoshida told me when I visited the company headquarters in Tokyo last November. He explained that this is the time required before they could even begin the lunar-surface activity, assuming that Japan, the United States, or some other investor was actually willing to fund the project. “The scale is so huge; I don’t know how long it would take to construct. We may have to adjust the plan and the scale,” he says.

If the most exciting part of Yoshida’s job is coming up with bold engineering concepts, the most difficult part, except for the math, is keeping people’s expectations realistic. Shimizu’s company president, Yoichi Miyamoto, was hoping to pitch the project to potential investors with a start date on the Moon of around 2035. Yoshida sees this as ambitious, to say the least. The technical, practical, and monetary obstacles to building a solar laser power station on the Moon are unprecedented.

But the LUNA RING is buildable. Photovoltaic panels, remotely guided robots, and microwave transmission and lasers are already proven technologies. The project is simply raising the proverbial bar on the current state of innovation—raising the bar to the Moon.

“It’s very challenging, a good project for a company like Shimizu. So this is a type of campaign for us,” says Yoshida.

A Feat of Futurism

To the jaded technology watcher, the LUNA RING may read not so much bold as old-fashioned. In the project’s size and scope, the faith it expresses in large-scale and long-term government-funded initiatives, it harkens back to the 1970s, a decade synonymous with many things, not least of which was U.S. space program euphoria. It was during the 1970s that the U.S. Department of Energy and NASA first conducted a series of studies on the feasibility of sending energy to Earth from satellites.

These studies, called the Satellite Power System Concept Development and Evaluation Program, were nothing less than an exercise in super-futurism, with a group of scientists from around the world writing back and forth in reports, letters, and journal articles, trying to design something in the distant future using tools and technologies that did not exist in the present.

The proceedings of the program note more than a few major obstacles to collecting and transmitting power in space. “The space infrastructure requirements were projected to be significant,” John C. Mankins, the manager of the Advanced Concepts Studies Office of Space Flight, told Congress in 1979, in what might be considered something of an understatement.

The program explored a variety of concepts, design plans, and scenarios. One proposal emerged as a leader: a network of dozens of satellites working together to catch solar energy and beam it to Earth, rather than a single satellite. But even with a network, the objects and their solar arrays would need to be enormous to do the job: large enough to collect and transmit 5 gigawatts of power each, according to Mankins’s testimony. (They would be transmitting power for use in the United States exclusively.) Sending objects into orbit becomes more costly and complicated as the size of the satellite increases. These wouldn’t be simple Sputniks, either, but rather floating power stations a kilometer or so in diameter—far larger and more complex than any communications satellites in space today.

The ongoing maintenance costs of the network would thus be enormous. Mankins testified that the cost to build the system would be more than $250 billion in present-day dollars. The program concluded in 1979, leaving many questions unanswered. Then, between 1980 and 1981, the U.S. energy crisis ended, and interest in space-based solar power hit a wall.

Fifteen years later, NASA initiated a three-year Fresh Look Study. A brief Exploratory Research and Technology Program followed. The agency found that many of the technical obstacles it first faced decades ago no longer seemed so insurmountable. Photovoltaic arrays in the 1970s could convert into power roughly 10% of the solar energy that struck them. By 1995, they were far more efficient and much lighter. New ideas were on the table, such as satellites that used inflatable trusses rather than metal to decrease object weight.

Mankins himself ditched the dispersed satellite network scheme and came up with a new idea for designing, building, and launching satellites. In his 1995 plan, many thousands of smaller, identical solar-gathering modules come together to form a much larger whole, the same way that thousands of similar ants come together to form colonies and millions of quite similar Web sites and Web servers form the Internet—a “super-organism,” Mankins calls it. The logistics of building and launching a type A mini-satellite 9,000 times (then type B, then type C) is less daunting than figuring out how to launch a few extremely complex, independently functioning machines. Mankins calls this realization his eureka moment. “It led me for the first time to believe that space-based solar power was technically possible,” he says.

Despite this encouraging progress, the question remained: How do you conduct tens of thousands of satellite launches, keep the devices working together collecting and transmitting energy safely, and keep the maintenance costs under control?

According to Yoshida, this is the wrong series of questions.

The Moon-Based Power Station

A solar collection satellite launched from Earth, even using the most advanced materials available in 2011, would weigh close to 10,000 tons, says Yoshida. This number, he later explained in an e-mail, is his estimation of the weight of a 1-million-kilowatt power plant in geosynchronous orbit.

“So heavy and hard to control, you will need so many rocket launch pads. Too much money.… So we chose the Moon as a power station,” he says. “We already have a natural satellite, one with minerals and resources. And it already receives sunlight across its surface area.”

The Moon’s face receives 13,000 trillion watts (terawatts) of solar power continuously. This is 650 times the amount of power the entire human population would need to continue to grow economically, according to space power expert David Criswell. Solar collection on the lunar surface would be 10 times more efficient than it is on Earth, where our ozone and rich atmosphere make solar collection less efficient.

Here’s how the LUNA RING would work.

• Robotic staff. The lunar base would require some human personnel, but the bulk of the work on the Moon would be performed by robots that were remotely controlled. Japan has been conducting experiments with robotic giant arms in space since the 1997 launch of the ETS (Experimental Test Satellite) No. 7. “I don’t think [it will be] a big problem to control the robots on the Moon,” Yoshida says.

• Panels. Sending enough photovoltaic arrays to encircle the lunar equator would require a lot of costly launches and burn up a lot of rocket fuel. The LUNA RING plan calls for the robotic construction of those panels on the Moon directly from lunar soil. This increases the overall efficiency and energy savings of the program compared with others. It also bumps up the complexity level of the proposal considerably.

Photovoltaic panels are constructed from silicon, which makes up 23% of the lunar surface. The Moon also hosts aluminum and aluminum oxide, which factor into many solar cell designs. “Theoretically, we have enough materials on the lunar surface” to build solar panels, Yoshida says. But finding significant deposits of these minerals is a lot harder on the Moon than on Earth, where the formation and movement of oceans, rivers, lakes, and streams created accessible mineral stores. “There’s no concentration of these minerals,” says Yoshida, “so all these resources are spread over the lunar surface.”

Shimizu scientists are working on ways to derive sufficient quantities of the minerals they need using hydrogen deduction. But building solar panels from moon dirt (and doing so via remote-controlled robot) remains the most ambitious aspect of the plan.

Once constructed, those panels would produce a lot of power. A 4 × 400 km portion of the lunar solar belt would produce power equal to the energy consumption of Japan, says Yoshida. A 30 × 400 km portion would equal the energy consumption of India. Sixty by 400 km would power the United States, and a 400 × 400 km square would collect enough energy to satisfy the power needs of the entire human population, by Yoshida’s calculations.

• Laser transmission. Like those solar-based power plans from the 1970s, the LUNA RING would beam energy to Earth in one of two ways, using either a microwave or a laser.

Microwave transmission experiments have been ongoing since the 1960s and space laser studies since the 1980s. In that time, science agencies have demonstrated power transmission in space, between orbiting objects and the Earth and between planes and the ground. These, however, were low-level power exchanges. The most famous of these took place in Goldstone, California, on June 5, 1975; the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory successfully transmitted 34 kilowatts of power over a distance of 1.5 kilometers. A space-based power station would have to transfer a lot more power a lot farther. More tests will be conducted around the world between now and 2015, including in the Tokai region of Japan where researchers are working with a 2 kilowatt infrared laser. This isn’t a lot of power, either—not enough to run a car, but sufficient to boil water in a matter of seconds.

The ultimate test of spatial power-beaming could occur on the Moon itself. If NASA sets up a lunar base at either of the Moon’s poles—one of many projects under perennial consideration at the agency—a satellite flying around the Moon could conceivably power that base via microwave or laser transmission, thus proving the feasibility of using the Moon as a power station.

“Because there is no population on the Moon, it’s a good test spot for laser tests,” Yoshida says. “On Earth, it’s too dangerous. We have to spread out the energy concentration.”

The LUNA RING station would beam 220 trillion watts (terawatts) to Earth on a yearly basis (the beaming would be continual). Of that, only about 8.8 terawatts would be usable on the ground. The rest would be lost in space.

Over the Moon

Reaction to the LUNA RING among space experts whom THE FUTURIST contacted was optimism tempered by skepticism.

“It’s good that a major corporation is considering the Moon as a platform for gathering solar power and providing it to Earth,” said David Criswell, the director of the Institute for Space Systems Operation at the University of Houston, in an e-mail. “I’ve argued for years that the Moon [is] the only means to provide adequate commercial power to Earth to enable sustainable prosperity.”

Criswell is a long-time advocate for using the Moon as a power station. Although he’s a cheerleader, he acknowledges that much more research needs to be done before a Moon-based power plan can attract serious consideration. Much of that research would have to take place aboard the International Space Station, which, according to Criswell, presents something of a problem. “The fully staffed International Space Station will be hard pressed to do its few authorized experiments in low-Earth orbit and keep the station operating. It doesn’t have the capability to support the logistics for a major lunar infrastructure project or the staff to monitor lunar surface operations,” he said. “However, the station does provide the operational experience for building other specialized facilities in orbit about the Earth and Moon and on the Moon for power production.”

Power from the Moon would have to travel 10 times farther to get to Earth than would the same juice collected from a satellite. Mankins believes that a giant wireless transmitter floating in space would need to play a part in sending microwave or laser power from point A to point B. Robots building solar arrays out of lunar dirt? Maybe one day, Mankins says, but he insists that, when space-based solar power comes to light, it will have to use hardware built on Earth, at least initially.

“I believe that the first [space-based power] pilot plant could (with funding) be on orbit within 10–15 years; waiting for a lunar base to be established first would delay the availability of space solar power by decades,” he wrote in an e-mail. “From time to time, Shimizu develops a very visionary future large-scale engineering concept that they then articulate to a broad audience. Their LUNA RING concept is only the latest of these.”

John Hickman, a member of the board of advisors of the MarsDrive project and author of Reopening the Space Frontier (Common Ground Publishing, 2010), is known as a space-policy realist. He’s argued that the problem with most super-large space projects is that they require too much from potential investors: too much up-front capital, too much patience, and too much faith.

“If attracting capital for projects using proven technologies like communications satellites remains difficult, imagine the difficulty of attracting sufficient capital to construct a mining facility on the Moon or terraforming Mars or Venus,” he wrote in his 1999 essay, “The Political Economy of Very Large Space Projects,” a critical analysis of why mega-scale space schemes almost never get off the ground.

Hickman says that the LUNA RING boasts a few advantages over other similar projects. It could provide returns within a reasonable time frame, but would probably make for a better investment if ownership of lunar real estate were part of the deal. He suggests that Shimizu obtain legal title to the land on which it plans to build. “Unfortunately, the 1967 Outer Space Treaty made the Moon an international commons. That means that Shimizu would be constructing the LUNA RING on land ‘owned’ by all of the states on Earth,” he wrote in an email. But Japan could withdraw from the treaty and “claim the lunar equator as its sovereign national territory.”

Hickman is curious about what funding streams the company may draw upon but thinks the LUNA RING would probably need a large public investment to be economically viable.

The project is well suited to Japan, he says, in that it makes use of the country’s expertise in public works construction and robotics. But that doesn’t mean Japan is a good funding source. Japan carries more debt than almost any other highly industrialized country: almost 200% of the country’s GDP. Financially, Japan is in a terrible position to sponsor a project of this size.

“For Japanese decision makers to commit the capital necessary to launch construction of the LUNA RING would be a demonstration of unusual political will,” says Hickman.

The United States is another potential investor, if not for the LUNA RING, then for some competing space-based solar power program, perhaps of the sort that Mankins has suggested. The Obama administration has made repeated statements in favor of alternative-energy research initiatives and big public works. But the administration is also facing record deficits, a Congress fighting to repeal its signature health-care program, a retirement wave of historic proportions, and reelection in two years. Pitching a speculative and fantastically expensive lunar energy project to the American people under such conditions would be a loser.

“National political and economic decision makers in every advanced industrial democracy are especially risk averse at present about government expenditures for new projects,” Hickman points out.

Ask Yoshida about cost and he’ll shake his head and cross his arms tightly across his chest. “It’s always cost,” he grumbles. “Cost is a problem.… But price is a human tool for exchanging goods. Maybe this type of project could be out of range of cost considerations. We would have to find a new word for it?”

An energy plan beyond the realm of cost considerations? It’s an optimistic idea, even more so than sending robots to the Moon to build solar panels. In broaching it, Yoshida is also acknowledging that the greatest impediment to space-based power isn’t rockets or robots or physics; it’s a dearth of public resources. A project of such size and scope would require the willingness of hundreds of millions of souls to reembrace government-funded space programs. It would require sacrifice in the form of higher taxes, cuts in other areas, or both. At present, this seems beyond the capacity of the developed world.

But then, not long ago, we said the same thing about reaching the Moon.

About the Author

Patrick Tucker is the senior editor of THE FUTURIST magazine and the director of communications for the World Future Society.

Finding Eden on the Moon

By Joseph N. Pelton

At a time when world leaders see few compelling objectives for space exploration, here is one: a colony on the Moon. The economic and scientific benefits would more than compensate for the up-front costs and time investment, argues a former dean of the International Space University.

In recent months, there has been a great deal of debate about the future of space activities. Those of the United States, in particular, have been highly uncertain since spring 2010, when President Obama called for the end of Project Constellation. He thought that this program, which would send several human missions to the Moon and would only develop a new launcher much like the 40-year-old Saturn V—i.e., Apollo on steroids—was too expensive. In short, this program seemed unlikely to achieve major new technical or scientific breakthroughs.

A number of questions continue to be debated about the future of space programs around the world. What should we do with the International Space Station (ISS)? How soon can there realistically be commercial human space flight to low-Earth orbit, the ISS, and even private space habitats? What should the world’s priorities in space be: improving global communications, enhancing national and international security, monitoring climate change, promoting scientific understanding, or exploring other worlds?

It is clearly appropriate to question the objectives of space enterprise and debate the many options. Should we return to the Moon? Or should we build a space colony to beam power back to Earth? Maybe we should go to Europa, or to an asteroid—perhaps one filled with platinum. And we always have Mars!

Why We Should Go to the Moon

I believe strongly that we would generate major scientific and economic gains if we were to embark on creating an economically viable colony on the Moon. This would be achievable largely through lower-cost robotic missions that could, within a decade, create a livable environment on a lunar outpost, allowing humans to carry out a wide range of economically viable tasks. Let us call this future lunar colony Eden 1.

There are many reasons we should focus on the Moon, including the following:

• Communications. We have the technology today to establish an affordable, broadband system to communicate with astronauts on the Moon with only a few seconds’ delay in transmission. It is much easier than attempting broadband communications with astronauts at a deep-space destination, such as Mars, where transmissions would be hugely expensive and suffer delays as long as 20 minutes (which could prove critical in emergency situations).
• Transportation costs. Landing a few human crews on the Moon to build a habitable colony would indeed be expensive. An earlier study, the Project Constellation, projected the costs to be near $100 billion. Sending robots to build a lunar colony, however, is a much more affordable proposition. Teams of robots could dig the lunar surface and build a permanent human habitat there for a fraction of the cost of a human construction crew.

“Smart” robots might first land on the Moon and build a radiation-hardened living environment. Robotic missions to create a permanent human habitat would push back a human return to the Moon by four years or more, but such a modest delay would help ensure that the inhabitants of a lunar colony would be able to stay longer and accomplish much more. Once the robots have completed the initial groundwork, people can move into this new living area and activate commercial projects that will ultimately make the investment of capital resources in lunar enterprise profitable.

This would be doubly cost-effective if developers from the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan, and perhaps China collaborated on the effort. There also have been out-of-the-box suggestions that propose adding shielding and some nuclear thrusters to the International Space Station and then sending the station to the Moon as a staging habitat (i.e., a cosmic construction trailer) while a lunar colony is being constructed.

• Viable, cost-effective and radiation-hardened habitat. The discovery of billions of gallons of water and other resources on the Moon suggests that such a habitat could be created largely from resources available on the lunar surface, and that a permanent colony could be established on the Moon at much lower cost than required to create another off-Earth habitat. The Moon may have as much as 80% of the materials needed to create the colony, and digging down to build the colony would provide significant radiation protection.

Creating a space colony at a Lagrange point (one of five gravitationally stable positions in an orbital configuration with Earth) would require lifting hundreds of tons of materials to this location at huge cost. Our proposed Eden 1 colony, in contrast, could include a material processing area from which communications, solar power, and remote-sensing satellites could be fabricated and lowered to desired Earth orbits with substantial launch cost savings. Lunar manufacturing sites could also produce components for use on space stations, or even for buildings and homes back on Earth. With the Moon’s material capacity, human centers there could make any number of things more affordable: Lowering material from space to Earth is much less costly than is building them on Earth and rocketing them up into space.

• It could turn a profit relatively soon. A colony such as Eden 1 is the only human off-world activity that might reasonably be expected to realize an economic return within 20 to 30 years and could offer huge long-term economic returns. For example, the Moon could be the site for manufacturing satellites used in remote sensing, climate monitoring, and telecommunications. Compared with building satellites on Earth and launching them into space, the cost and power savings would be substantial. In time, such a station could provide substantial returns, based on a 20- to 30-year business plan that included consideration of reduced launch costs, power cost savings, and other such factors.

Other imaginative possibilities could make Earth–Moon commercial activity even more economical. These include construction of a space elevator with pods that lift materials and people from Earth’s surface into orbit. Once you are in Earth orbit, the pull of gravity is 560 times less. You could exit the elevator and fly to the Moon, Mars, or other destinations by very low-thrust, high-efficiency rocket propulsion systems.

Lunar Colonization as a Business Enterprise

Commercial involvement in building Eden 1 would be important because this could help provide a viable business case. For instance, the business plan would have to demonstrate that there are sufficient material-processing capabilities on site to build and deploy applications satellites. The creative and entrepreneurial power of international business enterprise can make going the Moon not only possible, but even profitable in a couple of decades or so.

Space enterprise is a fast-growing area of R&D. For instance, the entrepreneurs Paul Allen and Burt Rutan recently demonstrated how, for a few tens of millions of dollars, they could create a space plane capable of flying to the edge of Earth’s atmosphere and returning safely.

Also, a number of innovative companies build robotic lunar explorers each year and enter them into the Google Lunar X Prize, a competition of robots designed to land on the Moon, travel around its surface, and relay images and data back to Earth. A total of $30 million in prizes will be awarded ($20 million to the first team to succeed). The designs and ideas generated through this competition might not traditionally be funded by a governmental space agency because they are too unconventional and daring.

Robert Bigelow has launched two Earth-orbiting inflatable habitats with private money, and he plans to deploy a private space station larger than the ISS. Most significantly, he has adapted NASA-developed technology to meet his entrepreneurial goals.

There was sound logic in the Aldridge Commission report that advised, among other things, that NASA expand opportunities for international cooperation and limit its role to the development of cutting-edge technologies, space sciences, and governmental functions that are not easily or appropriately carried out by private industry. This is because private industry is more driven to achieve end results at lowest costs, can carry out international cooperative projects with fewer formal constraints and greater flexibility in partnerships and contractual relationships, and is more entrepreneurial and better able to take innovative approaches, with risk-taking bounded by insurance or reassurance agreements.

Practical Space Development

This is not to suggest that private industry should do everything. The space agencies around the world, including NASA, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, the European Space Agency, and many others, need to develop the advanced technology that lies beyond the means of corporate R&D. There are projects that are properly the role of governments and that do not involve a profit motive, such as space telescopes, satellites to monitor climate change and space weather, and nuclear-propulsion systems.

But publicly funded projects must meet public needs, including budgetary ones. In the United States, for example, the public would likely expect international cooperation to reduce the costs of space enterprise and focus on activities that are vital to sustaining the human race or improving life on Earth. Going forward, space agencies should not only set new priorities, but also communicate them more effectively to citizens through major television networks, the Internet, and other media channels.

Today, U.S. space activities still dominate world spending on the space frontier. Perhaps in time this will change, but for now creative leadership in developing space vision and goals—for better or worse—remains with the United States. For example, new ways to find cooperative relationships with “smart machines” will become critical as we look forward to what Ray Kurzweil calls the “Singularity,” or what I have called in other writings the “Age of Super Automation.”

If we are to develop Eden 1—a habitable colony capable of independently sustaining life—the best hope to do so cost-effectively and within a reasonable time span entails an approach that is both entrepreneurial and cooperative, primarily capitalized by a team of international corporations who are bonded together in a unique way.

Here it would be wise to consider models such as Arianespace, which developed the successful Ariane launch vehicles, or Intelsat, which pioneered global satellite communications. The key for Eden 1 to succeed would be to assemble the world’s best technical skills and the best possible entrepreneurial and business management team, and to start with a business plan based on viable economic return. Elements of this plan might include:

• Processing materials on the Moon to create new products.

• Building satellites that could be “lowered” to Earth orbit at a fraction of today’s launch costs.

• Creating solar-energy systems or thermocouple power units that could beam clean energy to the Earth’s higher latitudes during their “long nights” and “solar winters.”

• Monitoring environmental, meteorological, and climatic trends and events on Earth.

• Conducting astronomical or other cosmic research that cannot be carried out on Earth.

An Evolutionary Move Forward

The human species is now potentially in danger of becoming a dead branch on the evolutionary tree. We simply must address climate change in much more aggressive ways. We also must limit population expansion. We must restore the ozone layer that protects us from space radiation. In short: We need to move forward to survive.

We must also make space enterprise both economically viable and a sustainable pathway to the future. In time we may indeed find that we need an ultimate doomsday escape plan for the human race, but unless we start now in a systematic way, it could be too late to save human life as we now know it.

It is technically possible to create an “off-world” presence that is actually profitable within a few years based largely on energy production and material processing. Eden 1 could be a commercially viable pathway forward to new knowledge, new jobs, and new wealth.

About the Author

Joseph N. Pelton is the founder and vice chairman of the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation, as well as the founding president of the Society of Satellite Professionals. He has directed strategic policy for Intelsat, served the International Space University as dean and board chairman, and been elected a full member of the International Academy of Astronautics. He also serves as THE FUTURIST magazine’s contributing editor for telecommunications. E-mail joepelton@verizon.net.

This article draws from his paper, “Eden 1-2-3: A Sustainable, Post-Doomsday Strategy,” to be published in the World Future Society’s 2011 conference volume, Moving from Vision to Action.

Why Farmers Need a Pay Raise

By Julian Cribb

Global commercial trends threaten farmers’ livelihoods—and the global food supply along with them, argues an agricultural policy watcher. The consequences for human beings everywhere could be dire.

The world’s farmers need a pay raise, or else, come mid-century, the other 8 billion of us may not have enough to eat.

As the Earth Policy Institute notes, the world produced more grain than it consumed throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Today, those surpluses are gone. While the world harvested 20.4 million tons of grain between 2001 and 2010, it consumed 20.5 million tons. This gap may sound small, but it will surely widen later this century as the world population and food demands continue to rise.

At its “How to Feed the World” meeting in October 2009, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization stated that world food production would have to increase 70% by 2050 to adequately feed the growing world population. This would require an investment of $83 billion a year in the developing world alone. However, it also noted, “Farmers and prospective farmers will invest in agriculture only if their investments are profitable.”

Unfortunately, farming in the last few decades has not been particularly profitable. The real prices of rice, wheat, soybeans, and maize fell by an average of 2%–3% per year between 1975 and 2008, according to University of Minnesota economists Julian Alston, Jason Beddow, and Philip Pardey.

Cheap food is a boon for consumers, but not for farmers and not for the planet. Among the effects are disincentives for farmers to grow more food, leading to reduced agricultural productivity gains, a disincentive to young people to work in agriculture, huge wastage, and spreading ill-health in society. Cheap food prices also reduce national and international investment in agriculture, as investors consider farming less profitable than other opportunities. Because of the disincentives to investment, farmers cannot adopt more sustainable and productive farming techniques so readily.

The dramatic increases in world crop prices in 2008 and 2010 have not made farming more profitable. The reason is a growing imbalance in market power between farmers and the businesses that dominate the food supply and input chains.

Two decades ago, most consumers bought their farm produce from local farmers in local markets. In the twenty-first century, market power is increasingly concentrated in a very small number of food corporations and supermarkets sourcing food worldwide. The food corporations minimize their input costs by paying farmers less for farm commodities. The power of the farmer to resist downward price pressure has weakened, as farmers in rich and poor countries alike now compete intensely with each other to sell at the lowest possible prices.

At the same time, the manufacturers of fuel, machinery, fertilizer, chemicals, seeds, and other farmers’ necessities have grown much larger, more globalized, and more powerful. This makes it easier for them to raise the cost of their products. When farm commodity prices rise, the industrial firms increase the prices of their wares, often by far more. In 2008, when grain prices rose 80%, fertilizer prices went up 160% in some cases, while oil reached to $160 a barrel with proportionate increases in farm fuel costs. Many farmers have noted the irony: They earn lower profits when commodity prices are higher.

Farmers are thus trapped between muscular globalized food firms that drive down the prices of their produce and muscular industrial firms that drive up the cost of their inputs. The economic message now reaching most of the world’s farmers from the market is “Don’t grow more food.” As a result, world food output is increasing too slowly to meet rising demand, overall farm productivity gains are sliding, and yield gains for major crops are stagnating.

Global Resource Degradation and Productivity Decline

In a recent satellite survey, FAO researchers reported that 24% of the Earth’s land surface was seriously degraded, compared with 15% estimated by an on-ground survey in 1990. The FAO team noted that degradation was proceeding at a rate of around 1% a year. This degradation is caused primarily by the low profitability of agriculture, which drives many farmers (especially in poorer regions) to overuse their land. If we continue to sacrifice 1% of the world’s productive land every year, there is going to be precious little left on which to double food production by 2060.

Much the same applies to irrigation: “In order to double food production we need to double the water volume we use in agriculture, and there are serious doubts about whether there is enough water available to do this,” Colin Chartres, director general of the International Water Management Institute, told the 2010 World Congress of Soil Science in Brisbane, Australia.

Solutions to land and water degradation are fairly well known and have been shown to work. Unfortunately, most farmers cannot afford to implement them, even though many would like to do so.

As a result, world agriculture is today primarily a mining activity. We all know what happens to mines when the ore runs out.

University of Minnesota economists Alston, Beddow, and Pardey attribute much of the productivity decline to falling investment worldwide in agricultural science, technology, and extension of new knowledge to farmers. In the United States, public expenditures on agricultural R&D grew 3.6% a year from 1950 to 1970, but only 1.7% a year from 1970 to 2007.

“A continuation of the recent trends in funding, policy, and markets is likely to have significant effects on the long-term productivity path for food staples in developed and developing countries alike,” they write.

The role of low returns in discouraging farmers, in both developed and developing countries, from adopting more productive and sustainable farming systems cannot be ignored. While a few highly efficient and profitable producers continue to make advances, the bulk of the world’s farmers are being left behind. Since small farmers feed more than half the world, this is a matter of some concern.

Cuts in support for farm research have been inflicted in most developed countries and even in places such as China, where the level of agricultural R&D support is falling as a proportion of the total science investment. With agricultural R&D comprising a mere 1.8 cents of the developed world’s science dollar in 2000, you can get a very clear idea how unimportant most governments now consider food production to be.

Solving the Food Challenge

Although most experts agree that we should be seeking ways to double food output sustainably over the coming half century, the ruling economic signal is: “Don’t do it.” We could obey the economic signal and allow agricultural output to gradually fall behind—but that will expose 8 billion consumers to massive unprecedented price spikes, imperil the poor, and maybe start wars and topple governments. It will not benefit farmers nearly as much as would stable, steady increases in their incomes, which would provide incentives for investment and innovation.

Policy makers need to move much faster and farther toward totally free trade in agricultural products, thus encouraging efficient producers around the world. But we also need to be aware of the universal dangers of undervaluing agriculture as we approach the greatest demand for food in all of history. Here are a few ways to address the issue:

• Consumers, supermarkets, and food processors could agree to pay more for food so as to protect the resource base and enable farmers to invest in new technologies.
• Governments could pay farmers a social wage for exercising proper stewardship of soil, water, atmosphere, and biodiversity, separate from their commercial food production.
• Regulations could limit the practices or technologies that degrade the food resource base and reward those that improve it.
• A resource tax could be imposed on all food to reflect its true cost to the environment to produce; proceeds could be reinvested into researching and implementing more sustainable farming systems.
• Markets could be established for key farm resources that offer farmers higher returns for wise and sustainable farming practices.
• Public education programs could be launched to demonstrate how to eat more sustainably, and industry education programs could showcase sustainability standards and techniques.

If we all want to eat securely in the future, it is imperative that a more serious debate take place about how to deliver fairer incomes to farmers worldwide, countering the unintended effects of overwhelming market forces against farmers.

About the Author

Julian Cribb is an author, journalist, editor, and science communicator, and principal of Julian Cribb & Associates consultancy in Nicholls, ACT, Australia. His latest book is The Coming Famine. E-mail Julian.Cribb@work.netspeed.com.au.

Building a Better Future for Haiti

The former Haitian ambassador to the United States visited the offices of the World Future Society in January, seeking help for rebuilding his country. This remarkable meeting offered the Society the opportunity to outline the futuring process and to clarify what it can—and cannot—do.

At its small office in downtown Bethesda, Maryland, the World Future Society recently welcomed Raymond Joseph, the former Haitian ambassador to the United States. He was accompanied by his son, Paul Joseph—a futurist and activist—and Emmanuel Henry—a retired Panasonic executive. The goal of the meeting was to explore ways that futuring tools can help rebuild a nation.

Joseph is an ambitious man. Not only does he want to save his own country, but he also wants Haiti to become a role model for other countries written off as “failed states” with no futures.

As one of many would-be candidates in Haiti’s 2010 presidential election whose eligibility was revoked (allegedly because he had abandoned his duties as ambassador in order to make a bid for the presidency), Joseph conceded that his ambitions are political. The first thing his country needs, he said, is leadership based on trust.

The Josephs and their compatriot Henry, who helped manage the “Friends of Raymond Joseph for President” campaign in 2010, spoke with Society President Timothy Mack and FUTURIST magazine editor Cynthia G. Wagner on January 13, one day after the first anniversary of Haiti’s devastating earthquake.

The following is an edited transcript of the discussion that took place in our office.

Raymond Joseph: I was in Washington at the time [when the earthquake struck Haiti on January 12, 2010]. The [Haitian] leadership was absent, they were not to be seen anywhere, so all of a sudden I became the face of Haiti for the world. And I had to make the first decisions in the first 48 hours, to get help to the country.

Based on that, quite a few of my friends, both Haitian and foreign, came to me and said, “You know what? We need new leadership in Haiti. You should consider the president’s candidacy,” which I did. And for no reason at all, they disqualified me.

Mack: Let me speak frankly to you. I believe they felt they had lots of reasons, because you posed a threat. You were too well known and too popular.

Raymond Joseph: Yes, because of that I was a threat. Yesterday I wrote a piece in The Wall Street Journal, and in there I say what needs to be done if we’re going to get Haiti back on track. And what I said should be done is for the president who’s there now, whose term ends February 7th, to exit on February 7th with his team and not try to hang on as he wants to until May 14th. Because in three more months, he will not be able to accomplish what he could not do in five years.

I was quite forceful in that and quite forceful last night again, repeating it. Now, what I seek in [terms of] government for Haiti is a large coalition, and that’s what I’m working for, that’s why I stayed in the country after they disqualified me. They thought I was going to go back abroad. I did not do that.

I feel that we need to look at ways of changing Haiti. And to do that, we have to change the leadership. That’s what I’m working on.

But besides changing the leadership of Haiti, people know that I have some ideas for the future. One of the ideas I have is about energy, … and another major idea for us is reforestation.

To get moving on these things, I feel that we have to entice a percentage of Haitian intellectuals and professionals living abroad. … According to the Inter-American Development Bank, that’s 83% of our intellectuals and professionals. I feel we have to entice a percentage of them to come back.

Wagner: To reverse the brain drain.

Raymond Joseph: To reverse the brain drain. So, knowing that you work with the future, I felt I may come and tell you what I think I need.

Mack: Well, let us be honest in the sense of full disclosure. We [the World Future Society] are a convening and a publishing house. We do articles on a range of issues, but certainly one of the most powerful stories that we are able to tell is the story of organizations, countries, and even individuals who have taken their own future under advisement and are working to make it better, in order to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past and improve the quality of life for those that cannot speak for themselves.

Wagner: I would welcome an article that would tell the rest of the world what it is you need, step-by-step. How do you build a future?

Mack: Another thing we should be clear about: The Society is in fact a neutral clearinghouse, and that gives us our authenticity and the trust that we have with our readers. But also it makes us very interested in finding the truth and making it clear to an international audience. And that international audience is spread across citizens and academics, policy makers, corporate leaders—a wide range of people who would be very interested in the future of Haiti.

Wagner: We also tell stories when other media outlets aren’t interested in them. And that is a very big problem with the attention span in the United States. We had this horrific crisis in Haiti with the earthquake, and people reached out to their fellow man, because that’s what we humans do.

Mack: But we don’t do it for very long.

Wagner: We don’t do it for very long, and that’s the media problem that we have. And that’s where I think THE FUTURIST is very different. We had a story on alternative technologies that are very low cost—energy, water filtration, a bicycle built for cargo. That’s the kind of story that doesn’t really make headlines, so that’s what we try to do: focus attention on problems and how they can be solved. The story of Haiti’s potential catastrophes was very well known to people who were watching the trends.

You mentioned reforestation—that was the first thing that came to my mind. If you’re starting to rebuild the country, you need to build the natural resources back up and get your entire population involved, one person at a time: “Plant one tree and you will help your country.” That’s very motivating and it’s very doable.

Mack: Right. And we’ve seen reforestation models in other parts of the world (Mongolia, for example, which is very arid) work very well.

Wagner: Getting into the politics of international aid: People become very frustrated when their donations sit on the docks and don’t go into the country. Then you come into the problem where people want to help you and then stop helping you. And you can’t have that stop. You still need people to contribute, but for your own people [to contribute as well]; they’re the ones who live there. They also can contribute—more than they think they can.

Mack: And as well, self-reliance is a strong position to negotiate from. When the country is rejuvenating itself, you don’t have to rely on what I would call unreliable assistance.

Wagner: You also don’t need the experts to do the futures for you. We have found that community groups—in Michigan, for example—have been very useful in dealing with the auto industry crisis in their own communities. They get town hall groups together to start discussing “Where do we want our community to be? What do we want?” You start with that vision, and then you work back and build the steps to get there. The term for that is “backcasting.” You can call it “envisioning the future,” whatever you want to, but it is a process, and communities can do that.

Mack: It is a trusted process, and it’s worked well elsewhere. That point is very important, because it seems to me one of the great crises that Haiti faces—and perhaps one you respond to—is the trust in the present government. That must be addressed, and that trust must be rebuilt, regardless.

Wagner: So part of the enticement, of bringing the intellectuals back into Haiti, has to be from Haiti itself.

Raymond Joseph: Right.

Mack: The chance is for them to have a real hand in building Haiti’s glorious future. It’s much more possible for change to occur in smaller countries. The United States is so large and it has so many people wrestling for the future of the country, while Haiti has one national culture instead of 40 national cultures, as we see in the United States. And a vision that can be built with a country that has a scale that is workable and a sense of the national culture is extraordinary and could be done very quickly. So I’m saying that there are real opportunities here.

Raymond Joseph: So if I understand, you work in the realm of ideas.

Mack: And the possible, too; we work not just in the realm of ideas, but in the realm of making those ideas practical and implementable.

Paul Joseph: If I may, I would like to have the theme of this meeting go from the possible, which is the art of politics, to the implementable. I talked with some friends of mine at the church I go to; we have our goals set out for our congregation for the year, and I said one of the things we have to approach every one of our goals with is, How do we get it done?

Part of the reason that I set this meeting up was because I understood the synergies between the two entities. Wheaton College anthropology [indicating Raymond Joseph, who holds a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Wheaton College in Illinois], political destabilizer, and very successful at it. You’re the futurist, that’s anthropology and projections, the modeling of case histories.

Mack: Right.

Paul Joseph: Then, here you have here the editor [indicating Wagner], he’s an editor [indicating Raymond Joseph]—that’s how the destabilization of the Duvalier regime came about, through the newspaper my father and my uncle founded. I looked at all the synergies, and I thought you’re speaking the same languages, just not in the exact same animal, for lack of a better term, with which Haiti now is identified. In shaping the future of what the country can be, that [becomes a] blueprint that you can use as a model. If another Katrina hits someplace else, or a tsunami, here’s what happened in Haiti, and here’s how we rebuilt, here’s what we’re doing in Mongolia, here is what’s going on there.

Mack: Right. And one [goal] is to bring implementable, on-the-ground, transportable, and affordable technologies that can be put in place quickly. We certainly heard a lot about the use of communication technologies in Haiti, where when the networks were cut off, the people were able to keep communications, information, flowing about need, about damage, about fatalities, about the immediate triage that was required. Those were very helpful.…

As we all know, Haiti will always be in the path of harm. And I don’t mean politically, I mean from the environment, from the growing problems that we see with climate change, from the instability of the land. We really focus on how new technology affects people’s lives—is it practical? One of the things that happens in a country which has seen crisis is that entrepreneurial forces come from around the world—largely from the United States—and say, “I have such a wonderful deal: I’d be glad to share this technology with you, only five million dollars.”

Wagner: That was the other point I think we can make about starting small and at the grassroots. We talk about new technologies, but there are also social technologies. And one thing that I think would be very implementable would be the microlending programs that have been very widely …

Raymond Joseph: Microfinance.

Mack: Yes, microfinance.

Wagner: Yes, absolutely, lending to your neighbors, community lending: “What do I have that can help you?” But what you face is a collection of problems, and the decision has to be made, what do you tackle first?

Mack: And of course the biggest problem you face is leadership.

Raymond Joseph: That’s it, that’s it.

Mack: And how do you get the strong leadership that is necessary to make this change even be considered.

Paul Joseph: This is where I feel the first step had to be made. I thought that all day and last night as well, and how specifically the World Future Society can help, because it has such an extensive reach. These two men [indicating Emmanuel Henry and Raymond Joseph], with their collective experience, have a vast wealth of knowledge and an extensive network in Haiti. If you want the facts, if you want the figures, if you want the information that very few people know and you show that you can use it to the best advantage of the country, I’m sure they would be willing to make some of it available. …

Now, where that information can best be utilized and with the right parties, … that’s the way that the story of what’s gone wrong with Haiti can gain a much larger international audience and institute the changes instead of the OAS [Organization of American States] and the UN and whoever else saying, “Let’s have a runoff of the candidates” in a fraudulent election already. Change that story to, let’s say, “If you have a runoff of this kind of election, then you deny, historically speaking, the legitimacy of the United States’ birth, because it was a country that rebelled against unjust rule.” You have to support the rebellion against unjust rule today, or the hypocrisy is too outlandish.

…

Wagner: [But] if you can outline the vision of your future, that’s the story that we can tell.

Mack: We can certainly help you with shaping that story. And we can help you with telling that story. But the telling may be on a little longer timeframe than the immediate March crisis … or, you know, the 7th of February.

Wagner: Think of this as post-crisis thinking.

…

Raymond Joseph: Mr. Mack here, he says: Work on the blueprint, the future you want to see. And then come and visit and see …

Wagner: And instruct us.

Mack: Right.… It seems to me the first step would be for us to put together a list of people you should be talking to.

So let me ask you, What are your next steps? What are you hoping to accomplish in the next few weeks?

Raymond Joseph: My next steps. That’s what I’ve been working on. Since I was bumped off the ballot, I have stayed in Haiti and worked with various candidates—some who were running, and some who were not running—and looking towards having a large coalition for future change. That’s my goal. I’m not even considering myself as a candidate for the president of Haiti.

Mack: Well you know who comes to mind, I mean, you look at South Africa and the history of South Africa, you know, there were years and years of struggle. No, I’m not suggesting you should spend any time in prison like Nelson Mandela, but another name in that group is Desmond Tutu: you know, people who had not a formal role in the government, but enormous influence.

Raymond Joseph: That’s the way I’ve been through the years, you know? I fought the dictatorship of Duvalier, I fought against Aristide and … his kind. And I was condemned for death in absentia.

Mack: Yes, I know that. And, as you know, some people who are condemned to death in absentia had it come and visit them.…

Raymond Joseph: What I have tried to do in the past, building a coalition of ethical leaderships, has been successful. Since they have bumped me off the ballot as for the presidency, I’ve come back. Now we have quite a few candidates for presidency. I want to tell them you cannot all be president of Haiti, but you can all work for change.

Mack: Yes. You can all be friends of Haiti.

Raymond Joseph: Exactly. So, let’s work together to do this. And immediately, the next thing I’m doing is to help annul the election that took place, which was not an election. That’s what I’m working on right now.

Mack: Are you also working on observers for the coming elections, too, or is that something that will happen no matter what?

Raymond Joseph: We haven’t gotten there yet. However, the first democratic elections in Haiti, in 1990—December 16th—I was the one that signed the agreement with the OAS back then. I was the representative of the country to the OAS; the UN took that agreement and expanded on it, and we had 3,000 observers in Haiti the week of the elections. So I’m used to doing that. And I will want to—in the elections coming up, after we get through this harrowing year—to have the best observer teams. I brought President Carter to Haiti in 1990, and others. I want to get to that point in the next elections coming up, which will probably be in a year, because this thing here that they’re trying to patch up, they cannot patch it up. They’re trying to patch it up at the level of the presidential elections. However, the fraud was widespread. It was at the legislative [level] also.

Mack: And that may be very self-defeating in the sense that a weak government does not last, especially if that government is clearly founded on fraud.

Raymond Joseph: Exactly.

Mack: We know many people, but mobilizing them within days or weeks—I would be honest with you and say it’s unrealistic based on our capabilities, our staff, and our resources.

However, mobilizing the kind of organization for change that you’re talking about, and helping you not only put together a plan, but also [figuring out] who should be part of that and give you some nonprofits from a range of areas, or at least people that are not seen as political to say, “Yes, this is the direction, this is how Haiti should think about its own future,” we can be helpful with that.

Paul Joseph: … and because they don’t have any political allegiance as well. They’re more credible because they’re not interested for the profit motives.

Raymond Joseph: And to be frank with you, since the earthquake, Haiti has had too many NGOs, so much so that now they’re calling Haiti “The Republic of NGOs.” They’re saying ten thousand. There’s no coordination.

Mack: They all have their own agendas, and therefore they step on each other.

Raymond Joseph: And you don’t see what they accomplish.

Wagner: There’s duplication and gaps.

Mack: Also, they are there to accomplish what they are built for, which is their own, their own …

Paul Joseph: … agendas.

Mack: Not just agendas; their own pride. You’ve seen that. You know, NGOs are very proud. And they are very moral, but not always in a good way: “Maybe you should change the way you live your life because I say so.” Too much of that in NGOs.

Let me just say one last thing, which is, I think that what we bring is tools for the people of Haiti to use, as opposed to rules for the people of Haiti to follow.

Henry: That’s well said.

Raymond Joseph: Good. That’s well said. I will take that. I want to take that sentence.

Henry: And when you have ten thousand NGOs, everybody wants to pull you in different directions. “My direction is better; yours is better,” and nothing is accomplished, nothing is achieved.

Mack: But we’re very, very pleased that you would come here and talk to us about this, and we want to be as helpful as we can.

Raymond Joseph: And I’m going to tell you, also, Paul has tried to get me to talk to various people, and you know …

Mack: Some you say, “Yes,” some you say, “No.”

Raymond Joseph: When he talked about you, I said I want to come. Not because I know you’re going to help me solve the problem right away, but that you can help me think about the future.

Mack: And one of the things we can do is bring together a group that could meet with you at some time in the future, when you have a better sense of what the next year, for example, is going to look like. That we’d be very interested in. And certainly we know a lot of groups that were active in Haiti in a positive way, more in the way that I described, bringing tools to the people.

Henry: More the tools than the rules!

Paul Joseph: Yeah!

Mack: Yes.

Raymond Joseph: Yes.

Editor’s note: Three days after our meeting, on January 16, exiled dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier returned to Haiti, accompanied by heavy security. Ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide also returned from exile, arriving in Port-au-Prince just two days before a runoff between the two top vote getters in the disputed 2010 election. The results were not known at the time of publication.

Changing Agriculture From the Ground Up

By Rick Docksai

Africa’s farmers innovate to meet formidable challenges, offering lessons for the rest of the world, says the Worldwatch Institute.

State of the World 2011: Innovations That Nourish the Planet by the Worldwatch Institute. W.W. Norton & Company. 2011. 237 pages. Paperback. $19.95.

Hunger, water shortages, and environmental devastation are looming global problems, but farming communities in Africa have workable solutions, according to the Worldwatch Institute’s State of the World 2011. The report documents improvements that growers throughout the continent are implementing, sometimes with outside help and sometimes on their own, to increase yields while reducing their ecological footprints.

The report follows the completion of the Institute’s Nourishing the Planet project, which traveled through 25 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. The project researchers met with individual farmers and community-based organizations working to solve the intersecting problems of hunger, poverty, and environmental degradation. The researchers witnessed reforms that they believe could be exported to other continents and bring about a massive—and much-needed—transformation in global food production and distribution.

“These approaches can feed a large portion of the world—while at the same time addressing a host of present and looming problems of environmental degradation, livelihood insecurity, and poverty,” the authors write.

Chapters written by Worldwatch Institute researchers and contributing authors detail these innovations. Among them are:

• The nonprofit Heifer International Rwanda imported a South African dairy cow breed known for high milk production and gave cows to Rwandan farmers. Recipient farmer Helen Bahikwe spent a government subsidy on construction of a biogas collection tank that would take methane from cattle manure and convert it to electricity. The fuel tank emits minuscule pollution compared with a wood-burning furnace, and it frees Bahikwe from the time-consuming chore of collecting firewood.
• Corn farmers in Malawi planted nitrogen-fixing trees alongside their corn plants to enrich the soil. This technique quadrupled their corn yields without using artificial fertilizer.
• The Solar Electric Light Fund, a U.S. nonprofit, introduced a solar-powered drip irrigation system to farmers in Benin. Villages that installed the system could for the first time grow fruits and vegetables year-round. Residents’ diets improved and their incomes increased.
• Poor storage methods lead to much produce rotting or being infested by insects before it ever reaches markets. But a Village Community Granaries microcredit scheme enabled 27,000 small farmers in Madagascar to build new storage facilities for their rice. They cut crop contamination by 50%.

Aid organizations serve farmers best when they equip farmers to implement their own solutions, the researchers argue. Scientists can provide critical assistance, also, by partnering with farmers to help them conduct their own experiments. What is key is that the aid organizations and scientists listen to the farmers. The farmers know their crops and their ecosystems, and they have the best perspectives on what will work for their unique locales.

Farmers themselves can be great resources for other farmers, as well. The project researchers reported some farmers forming research committees, farmer-to-farmer educational programs, and radio broadcasts for spreading innovations throughout whole regions.

The authors make clear that it is not just Africa that needs farming innovation, however. Food supplies everywhere stand at a critical juncture: Production increased substantially in the last century, but the increase exacted huge ecological tolls that set the stage for a looming agricultural disaster this century. Agriculture is a major producer of greenhouse gases. In addition, overgrazing and excess cultivation have depleted soils and compromised their ability to nurture bountiful crop yields in the future.

Meanwhile, flaws in the distribution chain keep food from reaching all the consumers who need it. At least a billion people on Earth continue to suffer from severe malnutrition. In Africa, child malnourishment has increased 30% in the last 30 years.

As the world population continues to climb, and climate change strains communities everywhere, keeping food supplies stable will be more important than ever. Present-day adoption of sustainable farming practices stands to benefit not only the farmers, but all of humanity, in the long term.

“Healthy rural economies are also fundamental to global sustainability,” the authors write.

State of the World 2011 tells of the ground-level successes taking place on a continent not often associated with success. The authors objectively state the problems facing Africa and the rest of the world, but illuminate a multitude of encouraging answers to them that are already saving lives and livelihoods. It is an eloquent, painstakingly researched sound of warning and expression of hope.

About the Reviewer

Rick Docksai is a staff editor for THE FUTURIST and World Future Review. Email rdocksai @wfs.org.

Introduction to Personal Futuring

By Rick Docksai

You can’t predict your future, but you can direct it, says a professional futures workshop leader.

It’s Your Future … Make It a Good One! by Verne Wheelwright. Personal Futures Network. 2010. 253 pages. Paperback. $17.50. An accompanying workbook is available as a free download from www.personalfutures.net.

You may find yourself living in a shotgun shack.
You may find yourself in another part of the world.
You may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile.
(“Once in a Lifetime,” song lyrics by David Byrne et al.)

Anyone who has heard the Talking Heads’ hit song “Once in a Lifetime” will agree with the lead singer that a person’s future holds many alternative possibilities. But unlike the song’s protagonist, you don’t need to look around one day and tell yourself, “Well, how did I get here?”

Verne Wheelwright, a professional futurist, emphasizes in his new book It’s Your Future … Make It a Good One! that the years of life ahead of you are much less mysterious than you might believe. With proper thinking and evaluating, you can obtain a clear sense now of the direction your life is heading in and what you can do to guide it toward the outcome that you want.

“You will be surprised to find out how much you can know about your future. And, you will be surprised at how much influence you can have over your future,” he writes.

Government agencies and businesses throughout the world rely on formal foresight exercises to help them identify plausible futures and plan ahead how they will navigate them. Wheelwright adapts these exercises to the personal level to show how you can thoroughly map out where you might go—and where you might want to go—in the next 10, 20, 30, or more years of your own life.

“If you have a plan for your life, then as you make daily decisions, small as they may be, you will keep moving toward your plan and toward the future that you want for yourself,” he writes.

Wheelwright’s methods begin with you observing your present situation and your past. Next, you develop several scenarios for what your future might entail: best case, worst case, most likely, and a few unexpected “wild card” scenarios.

Alternatively, you could backcast—i.e., start in the future and work backward. This entails having a preferred destination in mind and then working through the steps that you would have to take to reach it.

Wheelwright demonstrates how you can use Excel sheets to list the “stakeholders” in your life—family members, co-workers, supervisors, elected officials, and other individuals who can impact your future for good or ill. Then you can similarly chart the “forces” that motivate you: finances, social relationships, housing, health, etc. Don’t forget to employ “environmental scanning” methods, which Wheelwright explains are how you look around to identify events and people likely to impact your future: marriage, job change, illness, divorce, and so on.

Self-awareness is integral to Wheelwright’s methods, also. He advises you to determine your values, as well as your strengths and weaknesses. You must know what you want and what would be the best approach you could use for attaining it.

The future can be a bewildering and intimidating concept. Wheelwright helps readers to not be daunted, however. The exercises and strategies he lays out in It’s Your Future can help any reader apply the long-term perspective necessary to find a desirable future and proceed confidently toward it.—Rick Docksai

Breakthroughs Gone Wild

The Very Next New Thing: Commentaries on the Latest Developments That Will Be Changing Your Life

Wooly mammoths could once again roam the frozen tundras. People recently killed by freezing or drowning could be brought back to life. And chimpanzees might take up day jobs in professional movie studios as cinematographers and camera operators.

These are just a few of the seemingly impossible developments that Gini Scott, founder of Changemakers Publishing and Writing, argues could be possible within our lifetimes once cutting-edge scientific research taking place today attains further fruition.

Many of these developments are bound to be controversial. For instance, Scott tells readers that medical researchers recently inserted human DNA into newborn pigs. The pigs grew to adulthood and were able to receive donated human blood, which would normally be incompatible to pigs. Scott speculates how scientists might one day build upon this experiment: Could actual human-ape, human-dog, or human-cat hybrids live among humans? Human–hybrid marriages and questions over whether to bestow citizenship on hybrids would loom large.

The Very Next New Thing is a walking tour of our future world radically made anew by technologies and discoveries that the scientific community has just recently grasped. General audiences who are curious about what today’s science could bring to tomorrow’s world will find it an exciting and engaging read.

Bringing the Planet Back from the Brink

World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse

Many great civilizations collapsed due to exhaustion of their resource bases, and our civilization is on the brink of repeating history, warns Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, in World on the Edge. He traces a plethora of present crises brought on by unchecked human activity: rising food prices, shortages of freshwater, instability in dozens of failing states, pervasive malnutrition, and tangible effects of climate change, among others. The global community must change course before it is too late, he warns.

Brown presents an ambitious plan to stabilize energy supplies, conserve resources, diminish poverty, halt pollution, and cut carbon-dioxide emissions by 80%—all by 2020. The technologies that would make each goal possible are with us today. Burgeoning solar industries are taking off in the Middle East, Germany is on course to get 30% of its energy from renewable sources by 2030, and growing numbers of Northern Hemisphere communities are producing their fruits and vegetables locally in greenhouses powered in winter months by geothermal turbines.

Brown has much promising news on the poverty front, also. Liberia is a successful test case in rescuing a failing state, and Iran showcases how a government can use education and incentives to lower its population’s birthrate. And the percentages of children attending regular schooling is rising worldwide.

In a brief 210 pages, Brown compellingly describes a wide array of looming problems and then spells out how the world can fix them. All readers who are concerned for human health and the planet’s health may take great interest in what he has to say.

Editor’s note: An excerpt from World on the Edge is scheduled for the July-August 2011 issue of THE FUTURIST.

It Pays to Share

The Mesh: Why the Future of Business Is Sharing

A new business model is emerging based on sharing rather than selling and owning. Entrepreneur Lisa Gansky calls the new model the Mesh and reports that a variety of new businesses are using it to become far more responsive to their customers’ wants and needs.

Mesh businesses rely heavily on social media, online marketing, and word-of-mouth recommendations to gain new customers, interact with them, and deliver to them extra-personalized services at far lower economic and environmental costs.

Gansky profiles dozens of Mesh businesses and describes the strategies that most often help them succeed. Some Mesh businesses rent products: Netflix lends movies, for example, and Zipcar offers cars that customers borrow and drive on an as-needed basis. Others sell wares that they produce in close collaboration with their customers: Chocolate merchant TCHO rolls out new flavors in as little as 36 hours by continuously testing “beta versions” of recipes on customers.

Aspiring entrepreneurs should take great interest in The Mesh. As Gansky notes, all those who have products that their communities would enjoy sharing could launch successful Mesh businesses.

Public-Service Futures

Jobs That Matter: Find a Stable, Fulfilling Career in Public Service

Even in slow job markets, those who use the best job-search strategies will find many opportunities for rewarding careers in public service, says career advisor Heather Krasna in Jobs That Matter.

“Public service” jobs are ones whose main objective is solving societal problems, rather than earning profits or promoting an association’s members’ interests. Public-service opportunities abound in government, the nonprofit sector, and the growing field of social entrepreneurship. Krasna gives readers a detailed breakdown of dozens of job categories, projections of their future hiring rates, and resources for finding jobs in each field.

Krasna projects rapid increases in hiring for many types of public-service jobs, such as social work, public relations, human resources, and epidemiology. Career opportunities in public works—including urban and regional planning, civil engineering, and water treatment—are also set to increase at rapid rates. And although print journalism jobs are disappearing, the future looks promising for digital media strategists who know how to utilize social media to launch effective viral marketing campaigns.

Jobs That Matter thoroughly assesses the job market and what it will offer in the years ahead for job seekers who want to use their skills to serve others. With the book’s consumer-oriented focus, job seekers will find it very approachable and useful.

Reality Check for Virtual Living

Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality

The Internet has a propensity for bringing out reckless, cruel, and sometimes psychopathological behaviors in people who are normally rational and stable, says psychiatrist Elias Aboujaoude in Virtually You. Citing clinical surveys and a series of patients that he personally treated for Internet-related behavioral disorders, he describes how the seeming unreality of cyberspace can lead Internet users to say or do regrettable things online and wreak real damage to their careers, relationships, and health.

We do not think, talk, or behave online as we would in everyday life, he explains. On the Internet, our personalities become “e-personalities”: more impulsive, more ambitious, and less restrained by common sense and personal responsibility.

Web users who are disciplined, rational, and polite in everyday life are known to fire off brusque e-mails that offend colleagues or co-workers, shop or gamble compulsively in online retail outlets and casinos, or create online profiles that brim with uncharacteristic bravado and overconfidence. And many young people are unable to pay attention to anything in everyday life for more than a few minutes at a time because Web surfing has atrophied their attention spans.

Virtually You is a reality check on the Internet’s power to enrich life and, conversely, impoverish it. Readers will find a thorough, firsthand account of the destructive side of Internet use and a challenge to reevaluate who they are on and off the Web.

Sustainability’s Dividends

Climate Capitalism: Capitalism in the Age of Climate Change

A business that lowers its fossil-fuel use is not only benefiting the planet’s health; it is also increasing its own profitability, argue L. Hunter Lovins and Boyd Cohen. In Climate Capitalism, they demonstrate how businesses in a variety of industries are adapting to the recession by adopting policies of environmental sustainability.

It’s no fluke that Toyota and Volkswagen became the world’s largest car companies in recent years by marketing fuel-efficient cars, according to the authors. Nor is it too surprising that General Motors regained solvency after its 2008 bankruptcy by selling hybrid cars. Companies are increasingly recognizing that wasting energy and materials is a high-risk strategy, while implementing environmental sustainability in their business models creates jobs. They also increasingly view corporate environmental responsibility as the most promising path toward improving performance, government relations, brand reputation, and management of their supply chains.

Lovins and Cohen profile major companies, such as Google and Walmart, that are embracing environmentally friendly innovations. They also profile the fast growth of new alternative-energy markets, green venture capital, and energy-efficient building design.

Climate Capitalism portrays a hopeful, sustainable future for global commerce: Even if some business leaders used to think that their profit margins and the environment’s health were mutually exclusive, they will very likely think otherwise in the years ahead. Market watchers, environmental advocates, and general readers of all kinds will find in Climate Capitalism a compelling counterweight to business as usual.

Tapping the Fountain of Entrepreneurial Youth

Young World Rising: How Youth Technology and Entrepreneurship are Changing the World from the Bottom Up (Microsoft Executive Leadership Series)

Geography and income may separate the young people of developing and industrialized countries, but digital technology is a powerful common ground, according to tech entrepreneur Rob Salkowitz. In Young World Rising, he describes the spread of digital communications technology among developing nations and the new opportunities that it creates for disadvantaged young people to patent new products and launch new businesses.

With Internet access, business-minded youths anywhere can more easily study markets, acquire training, and connect to people and resources. Civic-minded young professionals employ digital systems to make government agencies more effective and root out corruption. Youths create new software programs at low cost by “open-sourcing” their development. And young entrepreneurs start tech companies that are hugely profitable while embodying sustainability and investing back into their communities.

Since many developing nations’ populations are composed disproportionately of people less than 30 years old, young “consumer entrepreneurs” have vast potential to raise developing-world standards of living. It is not certain that they will succeed. Troubled economies, unstable governments, and blowback from established business interests threaten their successes. But if this young entrepreneurial wave navigates the challenges, it could make profound and lasting impacts on the global marketplace.

Young World Rising tells of the vast changes that young people could bring to economies everywhere. It is well suited for public policy analysts, global development advocates, and for all who are interested in how developing nations might attain greater prosperity and greater influence in the twenty-first century.

When the Oil Wells Run Dry

Life Without Oil: Why We Must Shift to a New Energy Future

Petroleum enabled the world population to reach its present-day total of 7 billion, argue environmental scientist Steve Hallett and journalist John Wright. They both doubt that this population will sustain itself once oil supplies run low this century.

Credible evidence suggests that we have already entered the era of peak oil—when the world has discovered all the oil there is to discover and supplies will steadily shrink ever after. Oil yields have been declining in the United States, Venezuela, and every other major producing nation, and most large oil companies have been reducing their investments in exploring for new reserves.

The oil companies are planning for a future beyond oil, and the rest of us would be wise to do so, as well, Hallett and Wright warn. The authors expect the point of noticeably depleted oil supplies to be as soon as 2015. Vast disruptions in modern life will follow.

Nations will rush for coal, the easiest substitute for oil, and greenhouse gas emissions will accelerate. Astronomical spikes in energy prices will set in. Russia, which possesses some of the largest remaining oil reserves on earth, will flourish, but the United States, India, and most other countries will be at risk of dramatic economic contractions. The Middle East will descend deeper into violence as national governments clash for remaining reserves.

Global hardship is inevitable, Hallett and Wright conclude. Alternative energy and ecosystem conservation will not save us from it, even though they are both necessary. The world will essentially have to rebuild itself into a new civilization that exists within nature’s limits.

Life Without Oil is a grim forecast that is sure to encourage deep thinking and debate about human society’s future. It may resonate with conscientious economists, environmentalists, and public policy analysts.

Tomorrow in Brief

Daniel Bell and the Post-Industrial Society

By Edward Cornish

The late sociologist was best known for defining and describing the new era and social realities that information technologies were helping to create in the twentieth century.

Daniel Bell, who died January 26, 2011, at the age of 91, left a lasting legacy of imposing books analyzing the economic and social trends that have shaped and now are reshaping American society.

Bell was born on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 1919. His parents were Polish Jewish garment workers and, until the age of six, Bell spoke only Yiddish. By the time he was 13, however, he had no difficulty reading and speaking English.

Intensely interested in socialist ideals, Bell joined the Young People’s Socialist League, but soon became critical of the ideological dogmas he found among them.

At the age of 19, he graduated from the City College of New York and began writing regularly for the liberal weekly The New Leader. Later, he became the labor editor of Fortune magazine after writing a memorandum on labor-management relations that impressed the editors. He went on to write a monthly column for Fortune but maintained his association with the academic community as a lecturer in sociology at Columbia University and, later, at the University of Chicago.

Bell’s reputation as a social thinker grew with the publication, in 1960, of his book The End of Ideology, which argued that U.S. society had passed through its ideological phase, having outgrown the need for simple rubrics to describe and justify public conduct. Ideologies, Bell decided, offer attractive but often unworkable solutions for human problems.

The End of Ideology won high praise from reviewers like political scientist Andrew Hacker, who said Bell “clearly ranks among the outstanding essayists of our generation.” Hacker added:

There is a sense of relief in being able to discuss Medicare or civil rights or the anti-trust laws without having to cope with the specter of Socialism, Wall Street, or Mongrelization. Not only have intellectuals and politicians thrown aside the prisms that once clouded their eyes, but the general public too is increasingly suspicious of catchalls and catchphrases.

In 1965, Bell became chairman of the Commission on the Year 2000, organized by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston. The Commission brought together a stellar group of thinkers, including Daniel P. Moynihan, Karl Deutsch, James Q. Wilson, Erik Erikson, and Samuel P. Huntington, to think about the future of America and the world.

The work of the Commission was summarized in a volume edited by Bell, Toward the Year 2000: Work in Progress (Houghton-Mifflin, 1968).

Bell’s masterwork The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (Basic Books, 1973) noted that, in the nineteenth century, America shifted from an agricultural economy to an industrial economy as workers abandoned farming for better-paying jobs in manufacturing. Then in the twentieth century, increasing efficiency in manufacturing led to such a sharp decline in industrial jobs that the United States could no longer be classed as an industrial society.

But if America is not an industrial society, what is it?

Various thinkers have suggested that today’s U.S. economy might be described a “service society,” an “information society,” or a “cybersociety,” but Bell felt that the basic character of today’s society is uncertain. Preferring to be cautious, Bell insisted on calling it simply a “post-industrial society,” and he went on to cogently describe some of its problems.

First, he said, social problems are now national in scope due to the revolution in communications and transportation, such as the rise of newsweeklies, jet transportation, and, more recently, the World Wide Web.

Second, America’s present administrative structure is inadequate. The United States is still composed of quasi-sovereign states, each with tax powers resting on varied and often inadequate tax bases.

“What is the rationale for the present crazy-quilt pattern of townships, municipalities, counties, and cities, plus the multifarious health, park, sewage, and water districts?” he wrote. The functioning of the U.S. government “is largely out of step with the needs of the times.”

Third, the rise of plebiscitary politics poses a serious challenge. The ease with which tens and even hundreds of thousands of people can pour into Washington, D.C., within a 48-hour period “makes the national capital a cockpit for mobilization pressures in a way this society has never before experienced.”

Fourth, capitalism is threatened by its “cultural contradictions.” Bell worried that capitalism may destroy itself if the polarities between its affective (emotional) and rational elements are not reconciled.

Capitalism as an economic system requires ever greater applications of rationality to solve problems of organization and deficiency, and to find the right balance between cost and benefit. On the other hand, capitalist culture places an ever-greater emphasis on such values as self-fulfillment and personal gratification. As these two tendencies grow stronger, the rift between them widens. In other words, capitalism demands a strong work ethic for efficient production—that is, hard work and an emphasis on saving for the future—plus a fun ethic to ensure robust consumption.

In short, Bell argued, modern society can best be thought of as “an uneasy amalgam of three distinct realms: (1) the social structure (principally the techno-economic order), (2) the polity or political system, and (3) the culture.” The three realms are ruled by contrary principles: efficiency, equality, and self-gratification.

About the Author

Edward Cornish is the founding editor of THE FUTURIST.

Future Scope

Future Active

The New "Peace Building"

If the Washington, D.C., skyline seems a little more peaceful these days, there is a reason.

In March 2011, the United States Institute of Peace began moving into a new, $186-million headquarters located on the National Mall. The five-story building faces the Lincoln Memorial and is located near both the Korean War and Vietnam War memorials. Constructed on top of an old parking lot, it incorporates sustainable building methods and is conceptual in design: The translucent white glass rooftop is intended to evoke the undulating white wing of a dove of peace.

Visiting members of the public will be able to view office work taking place through floor-to-ceiling glass windows that open onto the Great Hall inside.

“The design of the new building embodies the open, transparent, and inclusionary nature of peacebuilding,” says USIP President Richard H. Solomon.

Boasting a state-of-the-art workspace, the building will also be home to the Global Peacebuilding Center, an interactive public education center geared especially toward students and young people. A rotating series of exhibitions will raise awareness of international issues and introduce viewers to various methods of preventing, analyzing, managing, and resolving conflicts. Exhibits and activities will include “an immersion theater [that] will put visitors ‘on the ground,’ transporting them from the Global Peacebuilding Center to, for example, the Cambodian killing fields,” according to the USIP’s Web site.

The building was designed by Moshe Safdie, a Boston-based Israeli architect whose many groundbreaking designs include the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem and the Khalsa Heritage Memorial Complex in Punjab, India (a museum dedicated to preserving the history and culture of the Sikh people).

Established by Congress in 1984, the USIP takes a multidisciplinary approach to conflict prevention, conflict resolution, and peacebuilding. THE FUTURIST covered its birth from idea to Act in the early 1980s; then-Senator Spark Matsunaga, who played a key role in founding the USIP, described it in the magazine’s February 1985 cover story, “An Academy of Peace: Training for a Peaceful Future.” He noted that the idea for an academy to train Americans in peaceful resolution of conflict had been around since the aftermath of the Revolutionary War:

In first introducing legislation more than two decades ago to establish a U.S. Academy of Peace, it was my intention that the academy should train the best and brightest of America’s youth to undertake the waging of peace. … Peacemaking represents a growing body of knowledge drawn from diverse disciplines and honed to professional skills in conflict resolution techniques. It is a dynamic function, not a passive or static condition, utilizing the same human energy we observe under conditions of war, but applied to more humane ends.

The new “peace building” will open to the public in September 2011.

Sources: United States Institute of Peace, www.usip.org. Safdie Architects, www.msafdie.com.

Asia's Next 50 Years

portrait of attendees of Global Transitions and Asia 2060

Vahid Motlagh listening to speaker K. V. Kesavan

A select group of academics, politicians, and NGO representatives from across Asia and beyond gathered together in November 2010 to project what the next 50 years may hold in store for Asia as economic and political power shifts eastward.

The invitation-only conference, entitled “Global Transitions and Asia 2060: Climate, Political-Economy, and Identity,” examined possible long-term futures of the continent. Hosted by Tamkang University’s Graduate Institute of Future Studies in Taipei, Taiwan, and co-sponsored by Korea’s Kyung Hee University and the United States–based Foundation For the Future, the three-day workshop took an interdisciplinary approach to problem solving.

Much of the conversation was geared toward developing a long-term policy perspective across many sectors, with particular focus on three core issues: climate change and a shift to renewable energy, the transformation of national and regional identities across Asia, and the possible creation of a politically and economically unified Asia—in other words, an Asian Union similar to the European Union.

WFS member Vahid Motlagh, the founder and editor of Vahid Think Tank and co-author of several award-winning futures studies books in Farsi, was among the speakers who addressed the topic of changing identities. His presentation, entitled “Multiple Longer-Term Futures of Asia,” in part examined the possible impacts of breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, genetics, and biotechnology. He argued that Eastern cultures are more likely than Western cultures to accept the “benefits” of these breakthroughs (such as gene therapy, designer babies, and human cloning).

A number of speakers stressed the need for long-term economic planning with an emphasis on protecting the environment. They delved into such issues as environmental education in Korea, a switch to renewables in Oman, and freshwater scarcity and desertification in China. Economic growth and environmental sustainability go hand-in-hand, noted Kyung Hee University chemistry professor Young Sik Lee.

The likelihood that an Asian Union will emerge, with shared values as well as shared currency, seems slim, but nevertheless the scenario offers an intriguing “what-if” possibility and an avenue toward increased regional cooperation and security.

Toward the end of the conference, participants engaged in breakout sessions, dubbed “fishbowl conversations.” In small groups, they built 50-year scenarios, ranging from best case to worst case, and brainstormed ways to successfully bring about the most desirable future for Asia.

Sources: Foundation for the Future, www.futurefoundation.org. Vahid Think Tank, www.vahidthinktank.com.

Computers Making the Quantum Leap

One branch of physics holds huge implications for information technologies.

Quantum computational devices with calculating power greater than any of today’s conventional computers could be just a decade away, says Bristol University physicist and electrical engineer Mark Thompson. He anticipates accelerated research and development breakthroughs in many fields of science, thanks to quantum computing.

At a January 2011 Cambridge University forum, Thompson presented two Bristol-developed quantum photonic computer chips, which process photons (particles of light). One chip used a quantum algorithm to find the prime factors of 15. Thompson says that factoring numbers is hard for conventional computers but would be relatively easy for quantum computers.

With further development, quantum processing could create powerful simulation tools for modeling many natural processes, such as superconductivity and photosynthesis. Quantum computers might also model molecular and subatomic systems with greater precision than today’s computers can.

“We plan to perform calculations that are exponentially more complex, and will pave the way to quantum computers that will help us understand the most complex scientific problems,” says Thompson.

A conventional computer stores information in bits, each bit either a 0 or 1. A quantum computer would store information in “qubits,” and each qubit could be both 1 and 0 at the same time. David Lee Hayes, a researcher at the University of Maryland’s Joint Quantum Institute, explains that a particle in a quantum state is in “superposition”: It can be in more than one place at the same time. It assumes one location, however, once someone observes it.

“You can think of the observer as getting entangled with the quantum bit in a weird way,” says Hayes.

Entanglement, another property of quantum particles, means that one quantum particle links telepathically to another particle far away. The second particle then exactly imitates all its partner’s properties.

Since qubits can hold more than one location at once, a quantum computer could compute many more problems at once, according to Carl Williams, chief of the Atomic Physics Division at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Such a computer would be a powerful tool for pharmaceutical developers, says Williams. Drug researchers now use conventional computers to model the human body’s chemical systems and project how certain chemical compounds might interact with it. The models guide the researchers’ synthesis of experimental new drugs.

The modeling processes involve millions of calculations. A quantum computer might complete the same calculations much more quickly and speed up drug development.

“Our time scale for developing new drugs would become cheaper and faster,” says Williams. “Researchers would only have to synthesize those things that are going to work.”

The quest to build a quantum computer is becoming a race, according to Martin Rotteler, head of the quantum computing research group at NEC Laboratories. He says that NEC has built a quantum computing device that has two qubits of memory, but other labs have built devices with three qubits of memory, and someone may build a four- or five-qubit device in another three to five years.

Rotteler says that quantum computers would be optimum for working on problems in which there is a lot of structure, such as a graph. They could also map magnetic fields, protein folding, and other natural systems down to magnitudes of detail that are impossible today.

Building a quantum computer will require more efficient ways of controlling quantum phenomena, according to Williams. Quantum particles can easily entangle with particles they are not supposed to entangle with, or interact with each other in ways that the researchers do not intend.

Also, creating qubits and photons requires massive system components. But just as the first conventional computers filled entire rooms and were later replaced by progressively more-compact successors, quantum computing could evolve into smaller and cheaper systems.

“Build the first one,” says Williams, “and in 25 years, they will be 25% of the size. I bet that, after the first quantum computer, the cost of one 10 years later will be significantly reduced.”—Rick Docksai

Sources: David Lee Hayes, University of Maryland Joint Quantum Institute, http://jqi.umd.edu.

Martin Rotteler, NEC Labs, www.nec-labs.com.

Mark Thompson, Bristol University, www.bris.ac.uk.

Carl Williams, NIST, www.nist.gov.

Holographic Videoconferencing

The next breakthrough in digital communications may be 3-D and 360.

Imagine having a long-distance conversation with a colleague who, to your eyes and ears, appears to be right in front you. Now, 3-D telepresence has moved closer to reality, thanks to research by the University of Arizona and supported by the National Science Foundation.

The system they are working on features a holographic video display that refreshes every two seconds. That two-second refresh rate represents a huge step up from where the technology was a couple of years ago, when the display refreshed once every four minutes.

A three-dimensional image of a moving person or object, with 360-degree viewing capability, projected from afar in something approximating real time, could represent a major breakthrough in communications technology. Unlike depictions of holograms in popular science-fiction movies, however, the images are not projected into empty space but onto a transparent sheet of plastic—a key part of the process.

“The heart of the system is a new plastic material that we have come up with which we call … a photorefractive polymer,” says Nasser Peyghambarian, project leader and chair of photonics and lasers at the University of Arizona. Peyghambarian is also the director of the National Science Foundation’s Engineering Research Center for Integrated Access Networks.

As new images are “written” on the polymer screens, old ones are erased. The material is also able to store the projected images, and, unlike face-to-face conversations, there is a pause button. Viewers can circle the projection and view it practically in its entirety, which results in a more realistic simulation.

The process begins with 16 computer-controlled cameras arranged in a semicircle around the person or object, taking two-dimensional pictures from different angles simultaneously. “The 16 views are processed into hogel data by the host computer and sent to the holographic recording controller through an Ethernet link,” Peyghambarian explains. Hogel is a nickname for holographic pixel; hogels are the 3-D version of pixels.

When the recording has been sent, a pulsed laser inscribes the images into the polymer screen. “Once a hologram has been written, the system uses the next available hogels to update the information. The hologram is displayed using a color LED that gets scattered off the image to the viewer’s eyes,” Peyghambarian adds. This optical effect renders the 3-D image perceptible to the naked eye, no special glasses required.

The designers’ main goal is to achieve full-motion video rate—30 frames per second. They point out that other improvements need to be made as well before commercializing the technology. For instance, the color palette is very limited right now (although it is worth noting that adding color into the process doesn’t slow down the refresh rate at all). Size also presents a challenge—the maximum projection size is currently 17 inches, but the design goal is to increase that to encompass at least the average size of a person. The resolution of the projection and sensitivity of the materials need improvement as well, and the research team is working on ensuring that the optics can competently handle indoor low-light settings.

Many other important uses for the technology exist besides holding long-distance business meetings, say the researchers. These uses include digital design and engineering, and telemedicine for complex surgical procedures. Such a telepresence system would also improve 3-D printing capabilities, better enable 3-D mapping, and enhance entertainment experiences.

Affordable large-scale holographic projections may still be a long way off; however, they are moving closer to becoming a reality.—Aaron M. Cohen

Sources: The National Science Foundation, www.nsf.gov.

Nasser Peyghambarian, University of Arizona (email interview).

Reversing the Mexican “Brain Drain”

By Concepción Olavarrieta

Investing in more tech opportunities may lure the best and brightest back home.

After investing more than a billion dollars (or 25% of the Ministry for Education’s budget) in postgraduate studies for young students abroad, Mexico is looking for a return on that investment—literally. Many of those students never come back to Mexico once their studies are completed. Their reasons for remaining abroad include superior wages and salaries; the ability to work in research centers, offices, and labs equipped with the latest technologies; and the opportunity to be involved in cutting-edge research projects.

Of these former students, 66% reside in the United States, 26% in Europe, and the rest in Canada and elsewhere. Half of the 5,000 scientists who did not return to Mexico obtained PhDs, and some went on to obtain postdoctoral positions. An estimated 575,000 Mexican professionals and academics now live and work in the United States and Europe, and this number is growing. Every year, 20,000 highly educated Mexicans search for better working conditions outside Mexico. Most of them ultimately get hired.

This brain drain has policy repercussions as far as investment in higher education is concerned, but, more importantly, it signifies an irreplaceable drain of human resources, the retention of which is vital for the country’s development. For every five Mexicans with master’s degrees and every three with PhDs working in Mexico, there is one with an equivalent degree working in the United States.

Both public and private investment in science and technology research and development is needed in order to attract and retain these “brains.” However, that investment is currently precipitously low.

In 2010, the amount set aside in the Mexican government’s budget for research and development represented 0.4% of the GDP, while the contribution from the private sector was 0.1%. Together, this amounted to a mere 0.5% of Mexico’s GDP, placing the country last among members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which recommends that developed countries devote 4% of the GDP to R&D.

Not surprisingly, The OECD Reviews of Innovation Policy: Mexico (2009) recommends that the government increase public spending on science and technology. It adds that, given the current global crisis and economic recovery, there are two fundamental issues to which the Mexican government should give priority.

First, the government should mitigate the negative impact of the world’s financial crisis on the actors involved in innovation. Continuous support by the National Council on Science and Technology (CONACYT) and the Ministry of Economy is critical for maintaining research and development as well as preserving long-term projects in the public sector and in partnerships between the public and private sectors.

Second, it should view the innovation process as a key component of a green recovery program. Green technologies, green jobs, and innovation and investment in renewable energy will drive future growth.

Moreover, the OECD has proposed that the Mexican government create a Ministry of Science.

Currently, Mexico’s National Researchers Program is intended to abate the brain drain. It offers researchers and academics the ability to earn an annual tax-free bonus calculated on the basis of individual performance. The OECD recommends that the bonuses be incorporated into the regular salaries of all 15,000 participants in this program. Within the criteria used for assessing the performance of researchers, the organization advocates that more credit be given to collective work and research carried out by international teams and networks as well as in university research institutes. The OECD argues that these steps will enable the National Researchers Program—which consumes a third of CONACYT’s budget—to fulfill its aims.

The Mexican government has taken steps toward implementing these recommendations, including the creation of an Innovation Stimulus Program and a Sector Funds program for monitoring and evaluating scientific, technological, and innovation activities. There are also plans to invest more in graduate education programs in Mexico.

These funds enable financial speculation in certain sectors of the economy, such as alternative energy, information technologies, poverty alleviation, and others, fostering greater investment in science and technology. By the end of 2009, there were 20 such funds with federal support, and contributions exceeded $2 billion.

Mexico has also become the leading promoter of the Latin America and Caribbean Innovation Network. This network purports to further the exchange of ideas concerning the ways in which innovation policies can be evaluated, and to identify the common challenges and effective policy responses that will benefit the strategic analytical frame that the OECD will soon launch.

Further enhancing science and technology opportunities at home are programs such as the Institute of Mexicans Abroad, the Mexican USA Foundation for Science, and CONACYT, which have all been promoting the Mexican Talent Network. This network encourages liaisons, synergies, business development, and education for global innovation; fosters Mexico’s prestige abroad; supports Mexican communities in other countries; and facilitates a better understanding of Mexicans’ contributions to their adopted countries. These efforts also aim to introduce Mexican technology companies to the world market. There are associations of the Mexican Talent Network in tech hotspots such as Silicon Valley, Houston, Austin, Boston, Los Angeles, and Redmond.

Former NASA astronaut José Hernández, an American of Mexican descent, has predicted that, if Mexico were to invest seriously in space, in five years the Mexican Space Agency could be reaping its first fruits, and within 10 years it could count itself as one of the eight major space agencies in the world. Studies have shown that, for every dollar spent by NASA, it gains six from the technology it develops and commercializes. According to Hernández, Mexico has to use its reservoir of talent at home and abroad in developing such technologies.

With these proposals, the brain drain could be transformed from a net loss into an opportunity for globalization.

Concepción Olavarrieta is the president of the Mexican Node of the Millennium Project.

Dimming the Sun

Humans could reduce Earth’s sunlight intake, but are they playing with fire?

When a volcano erupts and dims the sun with ash-laden clouds, one noteworthy effect is immediate cooling. Can this effect be replicated worldwide—without the ash?

The British government is sponsoring prospective studies of “solar radiation management” procedures to halt global warming by blocking some of the sun’s radiation from reaching Earth. But some of the studies’ researchers are not sure that solar radiation management’s benefits will outweigh its harms.

Solar radiation management would deploy clouds of gas, sulfate aerosols, or water vapor into Earth’s upper atmosphere to reflect some of the sun’s rays back into space. The Southwest Pacific Ocean Circulation and Climate Experiment (SPICE) is assessing candidate gases, how to deploy them, and the likely impacts. SPICE is one of several solar radiation management projects receiving grants from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the main UK government agency for funding science and engineering research and training.

Peter Braesicke, a SPICE researcher and Cambridge University atmospheric science professor, suspects that solar radiation management might cause major disruptions in world weather patterns. In a study published January 2011, he argued that interfering with sunlight could change the “teleconnections” that link Earth’s wind, water, and temperature currents. As he told THE FUTURIST, the consequences could include increased droughts in some parts of the world.

“Circulation regimes like monsoons and associated precipitation patterns are likely to change—and that might mean that some areas will be drier than now,” he says, adding that some countries will suffer more than others. “Regional changes will almost certainly always produce winners and losers.”

Ben Kravitz, a doctoral student in Rutgers University’s Atmospheric Sciences Department, wrote a companion paper to Braesicke’s study. Kravitz evaluated the consequences of using sulfate aerosols to manage solar radiation and concluded that they might reduce summer rainfall in Africa and Asia, thus threatening billions of people’s food supplies.

There are other technical issues, too, as Kravitz explained to THE FUTURIST. First, the sun’s radiation rises and falls over time, so any clouds created for radiation management would have to be adjusted continually.

“This involves changing the amount of aerosols you make, which—assuming everything works as it’s supposed to—would not be particularly hard to do. The most effective climate modification ideas will be adjustable and reversible in a certain time frame,” he says.

A more serious problem, according to Kravitz, is knowing when and how to stop these sun-dimming measures. If engineers cease it too quickly, the rebounding sunlight would shock Earth’s whole climate system.

“If you stop solar radiation management abruptly, the climate will rebound according to greenhouse gas concentration. Since adaptation to climate change depends upon how long you have to adapt, this rapid change would be disastrous,” he says.

Adapting to climate change includes reducing the emissions of climate-changing pollutants, Kravitz adds. But achieving this could actually be more difficult in a solar radiation-managed world: As Kravitz notes, less sunlight tends to mean less solar energy.

“If we decide to switch to a greener economy and vastly increase the portion of our energy that comes from solar power, solar radiation management could have a huge impact,” says Kravitz, adding that, if solar generators no longer produce as much electricity, people might try to fill the energy void by burning more coal, oil, and natural gas. “If we’re generating less energy from one source, we have to compensate for it from a different source, and that’s likely fossil fuels.”

According to Kravitz, that could defeat solar radiation management’s whole purpose. To cool Earth’s climate and keep it cool, the world needs to let atmospheric greenhouse gases dissipate and not replace them by continuing to emit them in large quantities. Otherwise, solar radiation management’s benefits, if any, will not last.

“The only permanent solution is to stop putting CO₂ into the atmosphere,” says Kravitz.—Rick Docksai

Sources: Peter Braesicke, National Centre for Atmospheric Science, Cambridge University, www.atm.ch .cam.ac.uk/.

Ben Kravitz, Rutgers University, http://envsci.rutgers.edu/~benkravitz/.

Predicting Our Own Happiness

Why we’re usually wrong about how we’ll feel in the future.

Will acing an exam truly make you happy? Will the snub of a cute co-worker send you into throes of despair? Maybe not. New research shows that people routinely discount their own personality biases when they envision how happy or sad they will be as a result of changing external circumstances.

Individuals who are naturally pessimistic imagine that they will be far more euphoric as a result of big life events than usually turns out to be the case. Folks who are usually in a great mood underestimate how much happier particular events will make them (which must make for a pleasant surprise later on).

The new study comes from psychological researchers Jordi Quoidbach of the University of Liege, Belgium, and Elizabeth Dunn of the University of British Columbia. To test their hypothesis that both pessimists and optimists tend to incorrectly predict their future happiness, they surveyed a group of college students to determine their base-level personality (from “optimistic” to “neurotic”). The subjects were then asked to imagine how they would feel, on a scale from one to five, if they received a certain grade in a class.

Six weeks later, when grades actually came out, the researchers surveyed the subjects again. They found a wide gap between how the students expected to feel and how they actually felt. But Quoidbach and Dunn did find a close correlation between how the subjects felt earlier and how they felt when they received their grades.

“Results supported our hypothesis that dispositions would shape participants’ actual feelings but would be largely neglected when people made affective forecasts,” they write.

In a second test, participants (Belgian adults) were asked to describe how happy they would be in the event that Barack Obama won the 2008 U.S. presidential election. After the election was called, the researchers again found that the participants’ actual level of happiness reflected how happy they were when they were asked the question, not how happy they expected to be later.

Why are people so bad at predicting their future happiness levels? The problem may be in the brain. Previous studies have shown that the part of the brain responsible for envisioning future states is the same part tasked with remembering situations we’ve already experienced, the episodic memory center. Neurologically, the act of imaging a scenario is a lot like the act of remembering. But we process thoughts and ideas about our own personalities in a different part of the brain, the semantic memory center, which is tasked with learning and analyzing abstract concepts but not remembering specific events.

“For example, an amnesic patient was able to rate his personality in a highly reliable and consistent manner even though he was unable to recollect a single thing he had ever done,” write the researchers. When we envision the future, we use the part of the brain we use to remember the past, not the part that knows our personality the best. This is why our personal-happiness forecasts are so often off the mark.

Quoidbach and Dunn’s research provides further support for Hedonic Adaptation, a 40-year-old theory that says that most people have a baseline level of happiness, whether or not they’re aware of it. So while we may experience blips of joy when we rush out to make a big consumer purchase, or bouts of melancholy when we suffer a setback, eventually we return to a default emotional setting.

Quoidbach and Dunn hope their research will help people take their personality into account when making big decisions or forming expectations. “For example, individuals high in dispositional happiness who are planning their next vacation might not need to waste money and effort finding the perfect location (because they will be happy in the end anyway). By contrast, people with less happy dispositions might be more prone to regret the slightest annoyance, so carefully planning every detail of the trip might be the best strategy for their future well-being,” they write.

In other words, if you want to know how a big event will make you feel in the future, consider how you feel right now and you’ll have your answer.—Patrick Tucker

Source: “Personality Neglect: The Unforeseen Impact of Personal Dispositions on Emotional Life” by Jordi Quoidbach and Elizabeth W. Dunn, Psychological Science (December 2010), www.psychologicalscience.org.

Envisioning a Global Economic Dashboard

Economic futurist Hazel Henderson offers alternative measures.

A growing number of economists and policy makers argue that statistics such as gross domestic product (GDP) and gross national product (GNP) may be useful as snapshots of a nation’s total economic activity, but they are limited in scope. Critics advocate for a new metric that calculates the overall standard of living in a country by factoring in environmental and public health, social welfare, infrastructure, and other quality-of-life factors.

While there has been much talk around the issue, little reform has actually occurred at the national level, says economist and futurist Hazel Henderson. The United Nations’ Human Development Index, which includes education, health, and income, is perhaps the best-known and most widely cited alternative.

Henderson, author of Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy (Chelsea Green, 2006) and president of Ethical Markets Media, tells THE FUTURIST that a revamping of GDP hasn’t happened for a number of reasons. Chief among them is the potential drawback that factoring in social and environmental costs “would lower the apparent performance, both of companies and of a country,” she says.

Nonetheless, a majority of people around the world agree that a new model is needed, according to Ethical Markets’ research.

“Health, social, and environmental statistics are as important as economic data, and the governments should also use those to measure national progress,” according to more than two-thirds of the approximately 12,000 individuals in a dozen countries surveyed in 2010 by Ethical Markets Media and the international polling firm GlobeScan. Less than a quarter of respondents identified most strongly with the second statement—that national progress is best gauged by “money-based economic statistics” such as GDP and GNP.

These findings update the initial GlobeScan–Ethical Markets public opinion survey, which was undertaken at the behest of the European Commission as part of the 2007 Beyond GDP conference. (The follow-up survey was conducted independently, Henderson says.)

However, in some countries, support for the traditional GDP/GNP methodology has risen slightly during the three-year interim. These include the United States and several European countries. Furthermore, people in emerging economies such as Kenya were less likely overall to side with GDP reform than those in developed countries. Henderson believes that this may be due to financial concerns brought about by the recession—and overall financial well-being in general. The executive summary of the report notes: “The stronger support in developed countries for this expanded measure suggests that, once a level of material well-being has been attained, many people feel that it is critical to take other measures of life quality and sustainability into account, and that these are a valid way of expressing national progress.”

Henderson emphasizes that significant numbers in all 12 countries included in the survey expressed interest in reforming traditional economic metrics to incorporate long-term quality-of-life indicators. She hopes that the survey contributes to a growing awareness of GDP’s limitations in terms of depicting a country’s overall quality of life. Purely economic statistics neglect countries’ genuine wealth, she says: “Well-educated workforces, efficient infrastructure, and productive ecosystems and resources … all [are] ignored and missing from GDP.

“The good news is that we no longer need to have macroeconomists control the GDP model,” she continues. “We can now use the Internet and Web sites to unbundle these indicators (as we do at Calvert-Henderson.com) and display these 12 indicators of quality of life on a ‘dashboard.’ This is the new approach and it simply bypasses the current formulations of GDP and makes them politically transparent and available to all who are interested.”

Another Ethical Markets project is the Green Transition Scoreboard, which tracks private investment in green businesses around the world. The latest Scoreboard reveals a growing economic emphasis on environmental sustainability. It also shows that interest and speculation continue to rise. By mid-2010, total private investment in the so-called “green economy” had surpassed $1.6 trillion, which represents an increase of approximately $400 million since the end of 2009. Henderson projects that there could soon be a cumulative $1 trillion annual investment in green businesses.—Aaron M. Cohen

Sources: Hazel Henderson (interview), Ethical Markets Media, www.EthicalMarkets.com.

Beyond GDP International Initiative, www.beyond-gdp.eu.

As Blogged: Futuring the Revolution

Watching Egypt’s 30-year-old dictatorship come to an abrupt end inspired futurists to reflect on wild cards, tipping points, and the power of information-empowered people.

For 18 days in January and February, the virtual voices of protest were united to bring about a new reality for Egypt.

Called the People’s Revolution, it was truly one of the world’s first socially networked revolutions, embracing not only the activists organizing flash-mob protests and the demonstrators filling Cairo’s Tahrir Square, but also a worldwide community of keenly interested witnesses.

In our own community of futurists, our Web site hosted the observations of several expert trend watchers, including More Than Human author Ramez Naam, an Egypt-born U.S. citizen. Futurists’ role in analyzing the Egyptian crisis was to provide a context for the present outcome of identifiable trends, as well as lend ideas for what may happen next.

Here are a few excerpts from our bloggers’ comments during these extraordinary events. To read the postings in their entirety, please visit www.wfs.org/blog.

Egypt: Lessons for U.S. Foreign Policy

Posted by Ramez Naam, Sunday, January 30, 2011

… Egypt was the first Arab country to recognize and make peace with Israel. For that, Egypt is rewarded with aid. In addition, Egypt is a key military partner. U.S. and Egyptian forces conduct joint exercises in the area every year. … For those reasons and more, the U.S. has continued to prop up the government of Hosni Mubarak for decades.

There are good reasons for the United States to want a stable and pro-U.S. government in place in Egypt. Yet the protests on the street today show how supporting convenient dictators can have negative consequences. …

In the long run, democracies make the best friends and allies. In the long run, encouraging democracy—through free and fair elections, through personal freedom of expression, through the establishment of a free and uncensored press—is the best foreign policy investment any free nation can make.

“Malecontentment” in Egypt

Posted by Erica Orange, Thursday, February 3, 2011

… In Egypt, the unemployment among young males (aged 15 to 29 years) was 32% in 2009. In other words, one in three young men were out of a job, and, because of increased education, many more were affected by underemployment. Clearly, growing unemployment has led to insecurity over their future, which to many, seems bleak. But when you take a generation of young males who have no future, and have no outlet for their aggression (and testosterone), a range of potentially dangerous problems could occur. …

So the question then becomes this: What do we do with the young males? As we’re seeing now, testosterone-fueled aggressiveness can disrupt or even tear apart societies that don’t find ways to channel those drives into activities that aren’t destructive to the communities. In a worst-case scenario, it may be that countries afflicted by the imbalance could to go to war as a means of sending young men’s aggressiveness to where it can do no harm internally.

Egypt and Changing Units of Analysis

Posted by Eric Garland, Thursday, February 3, 2011

… One of the biggest implications of the past few weeks of major unrest in the Arab/Middle Eastern world is that the units of analysis are being scrambled. Remember: foreign policy experts use the nation-state as the key unit of analysis. …

September 11th screwed things up by suggesting that non-state actors would no longer play bit parts, but could influence the whole geopolitical game. …

A nation-state is truly the result of a social contract, and when the millions of people who form that contract decide it’s no longer for them—it’s not the same thing anymore. It can’t be used as a unit of analysis in the same way. Let’s say the people of Egypt follow through on their popular revolt and elect a parliament of all taxi drivers. Can a foreign policy analyst in Paris seriously expect the same type of future behavior that it got from foreign-educated elites who understood what was expected of Cold War nation-states?

Nope, it’s a whole new world.

Egypt, Twitter, and the Collapse Of Top-Heavy Societies

Posted by Ramez Naam, Saturday, February 5, 2011

… The weight that eventually caused the collapse of both the Maya and the Roman Empire wasn’t just any sort of complexity, it was an upper layer of society that was largely parasitic, consuming more and more of the resources of society without producing much value.

I’m struck by this in the case of Egypt. The protests in Egypt are fueled by the frustration of lack of opportunity and the anger of lack of ability to change the system or even speak out against it. …

Neither state control of the economy nor rampant corruption that lines the pockets of ministers and high officials is truly a form of additional “complexity.” It’s parasitism.

By contrast, services like Twitter and Facebook or more basic telecommunication via cell phones, SMS, and email do increase the societal complexity of a country. They increase the number of voices being heard. They add density to the social graph.

Yet that complexity does not belong to the old world of Hosni Mubarak’s government or its elite friends. It belongs to the younger generation on the street. Facebook, Twitter, cell phones, email, and SMS add complexity, but it’s a peer-to-peer complexity that empowers those who use those tools. That peer-to-peer complexity may cause a collapse, but not of the side that uses it. …

I’m optimistic about the future of both Egypt and of modern society as a whole. … We should expect the collapse of parasitic and top-down societies and institutions, and the emergence of more and more network-centric institutions and societies.

North African Dominoes

Posted by Stephen Aguilar-Millan, Monday, February 7, 2011

First Tunisia, then Egypt, and on to Jordan and Yemen. Ought we to have been surprised by recent events in North Africa and the Middle East? No! Despite the timing of the revolutions now under way, I don’t think that we ought to be surprised at all.

… At a seminar at the World Future Society conference in Chicago in 2009, as a demonstration of the International Futures computer simulation model, Professor Jay Gary and Dr. Tom Ferleman showed us that a combination of economic and demographic trends, in conjunction with a number of social and political trends, were leading to the possibility of a significant event in North Africa and the Middle East in this decade. For a reasonably sustained period, the warning bells have been ringing and those investors and businesses that have been tuned into this potential hotspot are now able to deploy their contingency plans.

… The important factor now is to consider what might happen next—to look to the future rather than to the past. To my mind, the most significant future factor is that the “youth bulge” in North Africa and the Middle East has yet to peak. Over the course of this decade, even more unemployed, impoverished, and bored young men will reach the age when they might be predisposed to action in changing their world. If this cohort can be fulfilled, then the prospect of the future (growth, employment, and prosperity) is very bright. If, on the other hand, nothing changes, then the prospect is quite dim.

Mom and Mubarak

Posted by Cynthia G. Wagner, Friday, February 11, 2011

My mother, who died two and a half years ago, probably would have had some sympathy for Hosni Mubarak this week, for no other reason than that she once shook his hand.…

From her diary [1994]:

We were resting near King Tut’s tomb when a motorcade suddenly appeared—out jumped security guards—young, lean, in dark suits with white shirts and ties. In moments they were positioned all round—and President Maburak [sic] appeared. I asked the guard in front of me if I could take pictures—at first he said “no”—but then the President gave different orders. Before I quite realized what was happening, I was shaking his hand and chatting with him about the opera and my appreciation of all that had been done for that event—and my enjoyment of Egypt. When we got back to the hotel, I discovered that I was an instant (though temporary) celebrity. I was on the 6 o’clock TV news and people started recognizing me everywhere.

…

Mom was far more interested in the history of Egypt—its ancient beauties and mysteries—than in the turmoil of contemporary geopolitics. Shaking the man’s hand was enough to charm her. Politics isn’t just local; it’s personal.

I think about Mom and Mubarak when I look back on how differently I feel about people after I have met them. I was as charmed by Newt Gingrich as by Al Gore when I met them at World Future Society conferences.

But of course I would not want either gentleman running my country for 30 years.

About the Authors

Ramez Naam is a computer scientist and author.

Erica Orange is vice president of Weiner, Edrich, Brown, Inc.

Eric Garland is the founder and managing partner of Competitive Futures Inc.

Stephen Aguilar-Millan is director of research at the European Futures Observatory.

Cynthia G. Wagner is editor of THE FUTURIST.