It seems that architects are designing future cities to fit certain ecological standards. That doesn’t mean their designs are anything short of extraordinary and fantastical. Be sure to click through the slideshow here to see more breathtaking architectural visions from around the world.
I’m attending the annual Future In Review conference in Laguna Beach. Craig Venter delivered the opening keynote this evening. He is of course famous for all his work in genomic science. The
Craig Venter
news in his presentation, for me, included the fact that the room of row after row $350,000 machines required for the original genome project just over a decade ago is now reduced to a size less than the podium behind which he was standing. What cost billions now costs a couple of thousand. The bigger news, for me, was his story that in cooperation with the CDC and others his institute works on decoding flu variations and then developing vaccines for new strains. What formerly took 6-9 months, as was the case with H1N1 or the swine flu, his institute can now accomplish in 10 hours.
I am looking forward to working next week with collaborators Kate McCallum and Ron James as we record interviews for our Visions from the Edge project, still in formation stages. We’ll be at the Future In Review conference all week. With luck we’ll be sharing some great interview material shortly after, with the likes of the in-house futurist at Ford, film makers, entrepreneurs, global thought leaders.
VISIONS FROM THE EDGE is an exciting new, highly entertaining transmedia experience launching in 2012. Set primarily in the VORTEX DOME at Los Angeles Center Studios, VISIONS will feature conversations, explorations and demonstrations of the latest innovative technologies and visions for the future.
Recently when addressing a Chamber of Commerce event I risked raising the issue of what I call “income gap economics” in the U.S. This is a risk because in my experience the business community can tend to assume that you are about to attack success and wealth. But I received a very positive response, as I do among all audiences, when I explained this situation more clearly.
There is no historical or mathematical question that from about the end of World War II until about 1979 all segments of the U.S. economic population saw their incomes grow at about the same rate, more than doubling in real dollars. It was a time of the greatest emergence of a middle class that we’ve ever seen, so far. Recently anew piece of research by the Economic Policy Institute produced a chart that more clearly than anything that I have seen explains a key reason that income went up for everyone in that time period. The chart matches productivity gains and wages. Here it is.
Productivity & Wages 1950-2010
What we see is that from 1950 to about 1970 wage growth perfectly tracked productivity growth. Produce more, get paid more. This relationship began to slip in the early 1970′s and then split dramatically beginning about 1980. Produce more, get paid the same. That became the new reality.
At that point, at first we did not notice the divergence. A shift from one-income to two-income families masked the deteriorating situation for wage earners. Later it was easy credit card debt, then sky rocketing home equity that provided an appearance of affluence when the underlying connection of productivity to wages continued to deteriorate. Then, as I often say, what could not be sustained was not sustained.
Wealth did grow, due to the dramatic increases in productivity. But this increased wealth did not go into increased wages, as had been the case historically.
The challenge I am putting to audiences is simple. In order to have a healthy national economy we have to find ways to reconnect improvements in productivity to increased wages across the board, no matter what the rest of the world is doing. This will not be simple to do. But that is the mission – reconnect wages to productivity growth and get the income of those below the top 10% growing again. Without that, there really can be no long term healthy economy.
Glen Hiemstra is a futurist, author, speaker, consultant, Founder of Futurist.com, and founder and Curator of DoTheFuture.com. To arrange for a speech, workshop or consultation contact Futurist.com.
Source: futurist.com
You will recall the recent announcement of an asteroid mining venture. Now you can come along with me and visit the asteroid Vesta, courtesy of a flyby generated by JPL. Their Dawn spacecraft is currently exploring the very large asteroid Vesta, before heading off to examine a second, Ceres.
Ceres and Vesta reside in the extensive zone between Mars and Jupiter together with many other smaller bodies, called the asteroid belt. Vesta is a very large asteroid resembling a small plant or moon more than we might imagine when we think “asteroid.” Dawn arrived at Vesta back in July 2011, and will continue to orbit Vesta collecting data until August 2012, when the craft will head for Ceres. You can learn much more about the mission at JPL Dawn Mission.
For now, let’s ride aboard NASA’s Dawn spacecraft on a virtual flyover of giant asteroid Vesta. Mission data was used to create the topography you see. Waypoints include: Divialia Fossa; Marcia crater, part of the “snowman” feature; and Aricia Tholus.
Glen Hiemstra is a futurist, author, speaker, consultant, Founder of Futurist.com, and founder and Curator of DoTheFuture.com. To arrange for a speech, workshop or consultation contact Futurist.com.
A colleague at the Association of Professional Futurists just shared his discovery of a most impressive and interesting website, in beta right now, Welcome to the Anthropocene. The site is “designed to improve our understanding of the earth system.
The home page features a really excellent short film, “Welcome to the Anthropocene.” It is a 3-minute journey through the last 250 years of our history, from the start of the Industrial Revolution to the Rio+20 Summit. The film charts the growth of humanity into a global force on an equivalent scale to major geological processes.
The film was commissioned by the Planet Under Pressure conference, London 26-29 March, 2012, a major international conference focusing on solutions.
Really great video – enjoy, learn.
ht to Lloyd Walker, Precurve.com
Among the greatest global population trends is the continued migration of people to cities and their associated metro areas. One estimate has it that by 2050 some 90 percent of global population will live in cities or within an hour of them. Another estimate suggests that today 80 percent of U.S. residents live in cities (bear in mind these numbers often call a town of 20,000 a city) while globally some 51 percent now live in urban areas. TheWorld Health Organization estimates that by 2050 70 percent of the world population or 6.5 billion people will live in urban areas…
We have known for a long time that the national and global population is aging. It is not that people never lived to be 65 or 75 or 85 in the past, but not such a large portion of a growing global population. Here is a 2009 United Nations chart that illustrates what is coming in the next four decades…
People who know me know about my fondness for all things space-related. This began when I was very young, but no doubt was driven mostly by growing up in the first space age. Then falling into the happy circumstance of the college I was attending hiring as its president the Director of Program Planning for the Apollo program at Rockwell, and then that person, Dr. Ed Lindaman, becoming a futurist mentor, all combine to mean that, for me, space is always alluring.
So it was a thrilling 90-minutes yesterday to watch the online video feed of the coming out news conference of Planetary Resources. Few announcements of new ventures in recent memory have attracted such great attention. This is the company, of course, that intends to mine near earth asteroids for critical materials. There are millions of asteroids, and thousands of them come near earth; at current counts 1500 are as easy to reach as the moon. A single asteroid the size of a large conference room could hold enough platinum to be worth 20-50 billion dollars. Many contain water that can be turned into the most precious of space resources, fuel, and then used to create fueling stations in space, dropping the cost of space travel by orders of magnitude.
Asteroid mining has been a staple of science fiction, both print and film, and now some very serious people with very serious money think the time is right to start the venture. As the news conference was concluding I got a call to interview with ECT News Network. The reporter wanted to know if I think the prospects for asteroid mining are real.
My answer: the prospects are not only real, such an enterprise is inevitable. It is simply a matter of when the timing will be right in terms of matching technical ability, need, and capital availability. As company co-founder Peter Diamandis explained, Planetary Resources has concluded that five forces have converged: exponentially improving technologies, availability of commercial space launch, investors with adequate capital and vision, high need for critical resources, and alignment with NASA policy (as they will be a customer).
So, it looks likely that with the Shuttle program over, but private launch ready and projects like Planetary Resources becoming real enterprises, the next space age (is the second or third space age?) is underway.
Good news for the future and the imperative to become a space faring civilization. Good news too for the Seattle area where I live, on the verge of becoming the hub of this new era in aerospace.
Glen Hiemstra is a futurist, author, speaker, consultant, Founder of Futurist.com, and founder and Curator of DoTheFuture.com. To arrange for a speech, workshop or consultation contact Futurist.com.
A few years ago I had the opportunity to work on several television projects, for producers like Steven Bochco, on shows that were to be set in the future. In providing technical advice, one thing I mentioned to prop and set designers was that rapid prototyping and 3D printing had advanced to such a state that it was possible to consider 3D printing companies for assistance in manufacturing props, then still made by hand. I did not get any interest at the time, but it appears that 3D printing has come to Hollywood.
Daniel Terdiman of Cnet describes how 3D printing was used in the movie Iron Man II, to produce props and costume parts like those seen below.
This glove, used in ‘Iron Man 2,’ was made using a 3D printer, and is part of a full-body suit used in some of the film’s live-action scenes. (Credit: Objet on Cnet News)
3D printing is coming of age.
Glen Hiemstra is a futurist, author, speaker, consultant, Founder of Futurist.com, and founder and Curator of DoTheFuture.com. To arrange for a speech, workshop or consultation contact Futurist.com.
