As promised, today I’m going to talk a little bit about what
I’m going to talk about in this blog (yep, still makes sense to me).
What will Realising we’re in the Future be about? Well just
that really. I want to explore the cutting edge of science and technology, to investigate
the very latest in what we can do and what we have found out about the universe.
A few months ago I was talking with a friend about a cutting
edge technology (vertical farming), which she dismissed as sounding “very futuristic.”
But they aren't: There are already vertical farms operating around
the world today.
Those are the technologies I want to look at: those that
seem to be outlandish ideas that are decades away, but are actually being build
and designed in labs and factories around the world today. Things like robots,
spacecraft, amazing medical technologies and computers that are more powerful
than ever.
I also want to look at technologies that are getting dated,
and about what’s going to replace them. The first blog on the Hyperloop was
along these lines. I’ll talks about how the decades old technologies in our
cars, trains and planes (among other things), is beginning to be replaced.
I’m about to start a PhD in astronomy at the University of
Warwick and that’s where my main interests lie. So I’ll also be talking about
the latest ideas in science, some that will tie into the ways in which the
future is going to look, and others that just show more about how interesting
our universe is. Being in a university will mean I’ll hopefully be able to try
and track down people who actually work on what I’m talking about and get their
views on the subject.
So that’s what this blog will be about. Hopefully it will be
interesting, enlightening and amusing, or one of the three at least.
For this week, rather than doing a specific piece of science
or technology, I thought I’d talk about a more overall theme, which is how I
feel about the future.
Yesterday (20th of August) was World
Overshot Day. It wasn’t a day to celebrate. World Overshoot Day is the
estimated point in each year that the human race uses more recourses than the
Earth can restore in a year. From now until the end of the year our uses of resources
becomes unsustainable. We are borrowing, or rather stealing, from future generations.
With this in mind, as well as other facts about the world
such as increasing population, pollution, over farming and climate change, it’s
easy to be pessimistic about the future. We appear to be living in a brief period
of unsustainable prosperity and abundance- those of us, that is, lucky enough
to live in the rich West- and we are sitting on a time-bomb of problems and
challenges that will undo everything we’ve achieved.
This blog will, in part, be about how that might not be the
case.
I am optimistic about the future. At the risk of sounding
like an old election slogan, I think things are going to get better and better.
Before I start though, I am in no way denying the problems
that face us. As Marcus Brigstocke says: “There are people who deny climate
change is happening, and people who can read.” The problems facing us in the
future are huge. By the end of the century, human population growth will have levelled
off at roughly 10 billion
people. Simply feeding everyone, without irrevocably damaging the environment,
is perhaps the biggest challenge, even without the fact of a messed up climate
getting in the way. Non-renewable resources that are essential to our lives, such
as oil, helium and rare-earth metals, are running out or becoming increasingly inaccessible.
And that’s just our problems. The wider ecosphere of the planet may suffer even
more, with the rate of species extinction at around 1000 to
10000 times higher than if humans were not around.
No, I’m not optimistic because I think those challenges don’t
exist. They do. I’m optimistic because I, as well as an increasing number of
people, think that we can overcome them.
All of the challenges we face, those I’ve mentioned above and
more, the ways in which the world appears to be getting worse, have to be
compared with the ways in which the world is getting better.
A couple of plots from Gapminder showing how life expectancy and GDP per capita have increased across the whole world between 1950 and 2012. Note the correlation.
A quick look at Gapminder,
where you can look at various statistics about the world in easy to read plots,
shows that pretty much everything good is going up and everything bad is going
down. We are living longer, better off, and have better access to what we need to
live than ever before. I recommend (all of) the videos on Gapminder if you need
convincing. Not only that, but we’re also more peaceful. In fact we’re living
in the
most peaceful time in history- you are less likely to die a violent death
today than ever.
Yes, there are a billion people who are still living in
horrendous poverty, but it’s important to see poverty for what it is: Not a
step back, but the remnant of what life was like for everyone not two hundred
years ago. This was highlighted by the IF
Campaign this year, which had the objective of ending hunger for everyone. Even
ten years ago that would have seemed impossible, but now it’s reasonable to
expect that everyone might be living above the poverty line by the end of the
century. And some of the things I’m going to talk about in this blog will help
us get there even faster.
(As I was writing this I got an email from Christian Aid. A
line in it read “We want to achieve an end to
poverty in the swiftest and smartest ways we can”. Pretty much sums up what
the next paragraph was going to be, so I’ll leave it there!)
There are many reasons behind these changes for the better,
and for optimism about the future, and I’m not going to try and cover all of
them at all. I’m going to stick to what I know about, the massive increase in
the knowledge and capabilities of science and technology.
I want to explore how our new technological capabilities and
the latest discoveries about the world we live in will help us overcome the
challenges I’ve talked about and lead to a world of abundance for everyone.
So here’s a challenge for anyone who reads this. Name an
issue or challenge that makes you feel pessimistic about the future, and I’ll
try (when I get round to it) to find some developments in science and technology
that might help address it. Hopefully I can convince you to be optimistic about
the future as well!
Next week, Moore’s Law! Unless I find something else
interesting, which is always possible.
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