Forecast the Future – New Materials, Graphene – cj4

Forecasting the Future –
start with the past and add in some Black Swans

Forecast for New Materials and Graphene

No forecast could miss out Graphene. There will be other materials though in the meantime Ill look at Graphene. there nearly eight thousand patents based on graphene. Here we can take a quick look at some of the changes we may see, for example:

High Conductivity

– lighter, more powerful,very-fast-to-recharge batteries (for cars, gadgets, medical instruments, drones, aerospace etc.)
– lighter, smaller, faster transistors than silicon-based ones
better telecommunications, better power distribution
– combined with photovoltaic cells to form a flexible panel for creating solar electrical power
– Sensors for drugs, explosives and viruses
– Graphene impregnated plastics and silicon

Stronger, the strongest material ever measured:

– Alloyed with steel could dramatically reduce the weight of steel so new designs and less cost for buildings and bridges
– Twisted or braided could be come immensely strong, both with and without elasticity
– Tennis rackets, tyres, saucepans,

Two dimensional not three being only one atom thick (a pile of a million sheets is less than 3mm high)which means:
– a coating on steel can make it rust-proof
– a coating on copper reduces corrosion by ninety-nine per cent
– flexible for making folding or floppy computer screens
– as a super-skin for ships to eliminate or reduce drag
– protective coatings against ammonia and hydrofluoric acidA

Harder than Diamond:

– Abrasives and polishes
– Saws,
– Steel for safes

AND then there’s Graphene Plasmonics!

AND then there’s AEROGEL and then there will other new materials.

Cliff Jenkins

My original thoughts:

“Power and Peace” (My previous attempts to understand how we got to where we are
“An Englishman’s Life” – Excerpts from my life for you to understand my questing and my journey
“Tomorrows’ Winds” (Book 1 of 3)
“Tomorrows’ Tides” (Book 2 of 3)
“Tomorrows’ Storms” (Book3 written but not finished) .

BUT May be I’m understating the possibilites, take a look at “Abundance”, http://vimeo.com/34984088

Forecast the Future – The Grwoth of Cities, cj3

Forecasting the Future –
start with the past and add in some Black Swans

The Growth of Cities:
– the growth of the cities, architecture, engineering, new materials, ideas, technologies

Current Megacities, the twelve largest:
1 Tokyo Japan 34,500,000
2 Guangzhou China 25,800,000
3 Seoul South Korea 25,600,000
4 Jakarta Indonesia 25,300,000
5 Shanghai China 25,300,000
6 Mexico City Mexico 23,200,000
7 Delhi India 23,000,000
8 New York City USA 21,500,000
9 São Paulo Brazil 21,100,000
10 Karachi Pakistan 21,100,000
11 Mumbai India 20,800,000
12 Manila[21]  Philippines 20,700,000
Wikipedia


WHAT MAKES CITIES HAPPEN

Cities formed at the junction of natural elements im the landscape for example rivers, lakes, estuaries, with bridges and centres of commerce plus later roads and latterly railways and airports. Because they developed wealth there was always a fort or castle nearby to protect them … Oh and to tax them. Because life was so bad the religions were always there to say we’ll help you… and to collect tax from you. These taxes together, of course, guaranteed you stayed in poverty, but you stayed because he alternative was even worse.

Essentially everyone except the ‘privileged few’ lived a subsistence life in the country so those that thought they’d get a better life went to the cities to. It many instances it was go to the city that or starve, for example after the Enclosure Acts in Britain. So the choice was to create a new life in the city. It may be an example of Darwin’s Survival of the Fittest but the outcome was and is a more dynamic environment.

Maybe it’s the concentration of minds; may be it’s the intense competition that develops between people and between their companies; may be it’s because money men and the penniless entrepreneurs find each other; may be it’s because you can create enough money to survive; may be it’s because there are sufficient like-minded people to create a critical mass; may be it’s because the people are there and so they attract other people .

Ffor example they attract hotels, conference centres, enhanced communications of all types, restaurants etc; and because they are tehre they in turn attract yet more people to joim in.

Studies have shown that if tyou double the size of a city the average earnings increase by fifteen per cent; re-double it and again a fifteen per cent increase and so on. No wonder people are drawn to the city.

In the meantime the improvement in productivity of the food companies is continuing to extend the Agricultural Revolution so there fewer and fewer opportunities for rural employment…. so more people move towards the cities.

The real pay-off for the new-comers is that employing someone to do lesser tasks for you, releases you to do more of your own work, whether it’s for example a barber or a hairdresser, a shopper in a supermarket, passenger on a bus, train, tuc tuc or taxi, it all causes a work opportunity for someone less skilled, so there’s some work for the new-comers. You just get in and find your own role.

In the city there’s a better chance of increasing your knowledge and learning new skills and them getting a better job or starting your own business. Obviously people tell their family and friends how well they are doing, which means more people come into the city.


WHAT’s THE FUTURE FOR CITIES

In HONG KONG three million people live above the fourteenth floor. This ability of humans to adapt is crucial because as the work centres get bigger moving the people into work becomes more difficult. [London Underground carry three million passengers each day and is in the process of building another new line “Crossrail”and that’s in addition to the suburban trains again carrying their own three million people.

The future of our cities depends upon our architects and our engineers. We meed them to devise new mixed-use buildings so that people are able to reduce the average commuting time for their journey to and from work. That way the people will get more productive lives and they also save the energy costs of moving about.

The solution possibly will rely upon new steels, other new materials, new social concepts with high-level moving pavements, horizontal lifts, possibly high-level cycle pathways or passenger monorail systems, linking buildings at say the fourteenth floor, as an alternative to descending to ground level or even to the underground.

Personally I also favour having multi-level villages where each level has a village population of about two thousand, say forty storeys high, making a group of eighty thousand people. Each block would have education, medical, retail, entertainment and work facilities to make them some-what independent. Each level would have its own village green, corner café, corner shop, village bobby, crèche, nursery or whatever is necessary.

All the cities will attract and then have the best of services and utilities because everyone is concentrated together. [And therefore more people will flock in to share in the success.]

Cities will become even more the centre of new knowledge with research laboratories and the teaching hospitals for all the future technologies, sciences and treatments. Existing organisations will move or will open new premises for their teams of experts. Cities will in large degree also be the centres for innovation and implementation. Maybe we can use the waste heat from the computer arrays to some new benefit. … So more people will move to the cities.

So as the cities get bigger and bigger the problems will be immense but not insuperable – sewage treatment; telecoms; food supply; recycling resources; electrical supplies.

Naturally the fun, music and entertainment will also all be concentrated in thee cities….. So more people will be attracted to the city. The Shangfila Hotel ccroup has announced it has leased floors 34 to 52 in the Shard in London and will have a Champagne Bar on the 52nd floor. Now that sounds like sophisticated fun to me.

To paraphrase from Mark Ridley’s book “The Rational Optimist” we will have moved from a family unit of laborious, slow and multiple products (that is from subsistence level food, clothing and shelter) to one that is efficient, fast and very specialist and working in co-operation with others and thus enjoying the best style of life.

HOW DO WE OVERCOME THE PROBLEMS in CITIES?

Whenever we look at a city the first critical problem is that everyone seems to need to be somewhere else, with resultant traffic problems for people walking, cycling, driving or using mass transportation. I think its the result of battle between concentrating commerce tightly together leaving no room for people. Fortunately the latest architecture, engineering, materials, and building techniques solve the problem by allowing us to grow into a vertical city.

Other solutions will be found for different elements of the problem for example we could combine the diverless car technology, the radar sensing technology with new rapid transit buses so that they move in tight snakes like long-distance trains. Indeed some studies suggest that these would be a far more effective use of the existing railway tracks. May be we just need a way to run the two systems simultaneously so that we can change rom one to the other in a progressive process.

The biggest improvement in health standards across the world has been in sewerage systems and it is crucial we maintain and install new efficient systems, These are currently underway in Mexico City and in London amongst others. The real problems lie with slum cities in low GDP countries who can’t afford the huge costs. Though our nearest water treatment works is capable of a conversion that recovers all solid matter for use by the farming community and that the water is sparkling clear drinkable quality, so may be all we need is small plants…. one for each large building.

It’s a common phenomenon that cities are a few degrees warmer than the surrounding areas. This heat must be coming from the buildings so if we can eliminate this heat loss we will save ourselves critical amounts of energy. Though we also still need to utilise the sun’s rays more effectively so I’m sure we’ll see paint impregnated with nano-sized photovoltaic cells or enhanced glass or other solar powered technologies to provide electricity to power our lives.

The more cities are capable of a more self-sustaining style, for their populations, the more their growth is unlimited, as fewer and fewer resources are needed to maintain and improve everyone’s lives. Eventually we will recycle everything and more than that we will start mining our old waste dumps and landfill sites. The only resources we actually and totally consume is oil and deisel. I think virtually everything else cam be recovered and re-used.

I’m extremely excited by 3D printing for manufacturing as that has no waste at all from the manufacturing process, you only need to buy exactly the minimum actually needed. [The latest TVs for example] The first meat protein grown from stem cells has already been demonstrated. The first driverless car has been licensed for use in California. The first human brain driving a prosthetic arm has been demonstrated so we will be able to drive any computers and machines directly from our brains – spaceships, deep-sea mining, drones for any purpose fire-fighting .remote medical procedures……. all whilst sitting in our cities.

WHAT ARE THE OPPORTUNITIES FOR THE CITIES?

The cities are the powerhouses for the future, they bring together people in the most effective manner and we shouldn’t shy away from letting those talented people who want to come together in a high density, high pressure environment and forged together and supported by the most concentrated energy and services.

For some reason Britain seems to attract people from all over the world and London seems to be the main attraction. We want the best people to join us, to continue our pursuit of excellence and to share the safety and security we enjoy, though we probably need a further Women’s Revolution to make the next significant break-through.

…………………………………..

See also: Energy, Power, Transport, Brainpower, Agriculture, horticulture, Resources,
Genetics; bionics; robotics; neurology; stem cells; gerontology;

My original thoughts:

Power and Peace (My attempt to understand how we got to where we are.)
An Englishman’s Life – Excerpts from my life for you to understand my questing and my journey.
Tomorrows’ Winds (Book 1 of 3)
Tomorrow’s Tides (Book 2 of 3)
Tomorrows’ Storms (Book 3 written but not finished.)

Tags: cliff jenkins, forecast, future, Futurism, Futurist | Category: Futurist & Futurism, My forecasts

Forecast the Future – Knowledge and Science – cj2

Forecasting the Future –
start with the past and add in some Black Swans

Introduction- It all starts with KNOWLEDGE

In 1793, I think, it was declared this was the last time any one person knew everything there was to know.
There were as many books printed between 1950 and 1970 as there had been in the entire history of the world prior to 1950.
The word ‘science’ is derived from the Latin ‘Scio’ meaning I know or ‘sciere’ to know., so knowledge and science are the same thing.

Everything that follows here comes from what we knew ten thousand years ago; what we knew in 1900 GMT; what we know now (year 2012 GMT) and what we will know tomorrow and further into the future.

‘Knowledge is power’ (1597, Francis Bacon.) Certainly denying people knowledge enabled the ‘scientist’ to have power over them whether Druids Priests, Aztec priests, The Pope (and the Roman Catholic church), Muslim Imams, doctors, bankers and economists. Knowledge was always controlled if the person with the knowledge could profit from it, the ‘privileged few.’

This is still largely true today to a large extent except that UNIX computer operating software was given away free to American Universities;Linux is freely available to anyone, as is other open source software; Wikipedia is free; Google Search and News is free; Google Maps and Google Earth are free; and also the hard ware for robotics.

The ‘oil’ to make it happen is the use of english as the lingua franca for the world. This will change as Simultaneous Translaters become available (from Google) as it won’t matter what language you use or it will also change if the Chinese become the government of the world as they will just implement their existing laws in their language everywhere-else.

For the moment though english is still the main carrier of Knowledge and the main communications media is the Internet, mobile phones, snartphones, telephone calls, corporate information networks and ebooks. Plus television , and filns [Copies of each of six hundred thousand ebooks can be down-loaded free of charge from Kindle.] The demand for and therefore the supply of telecommunications capacity is growing every year and with new technologies the knowledge is continuously becoming more affordable everywhere.

There is a separate problem about the word Knowledge. Knowledge is not much use if it’s only known by one person. Knowledge needs to be known by as many people as possible but knowledge needs time to spread round the world. There are billions of people who are only recently moving up from subsistence level living – those people who in bad years face starvation or at least malnutrition.

Knowledge needs to lead to innovation and implementation and then to enhancement, improvement and then to re-invention.

There is of course is the problem of which language the knowledge is in. Obviously knowledge was held by the Arabs in Arabic, then there were the Greeks, but Latin was used by the Roman Catholic church, and then as each country developed its own language that was the one used. Nowadays everyone is joining together through using english, the lingua franca. It is the first language, official language, or the second language used by an estimated two billion people. Denying the opportunity to learn and use emglish denies people access to the existing knowledge and to the avalanche of new knowledge becoming available

[Chinese may become the lingua franca within a hundred years,. As I understand it the official language is Mandarin, which with Cantonese are the two great languages fo China. All the different Chinese languages use Kanji characters for written work , so you can get different meanings as there are more than two hundred Chinese languages, from any character. There may be more as there were nearly six hundred tribes and the peoples were spread over a vast expanse of land with difficult geophysical characteristics making it probable that they kept separate.]

[India, whose current population is estimated at 1.3billion, identified twenty seven unique languages when they went independent. They then found they had to revert to english in order to talk to each other and work to create the modern state.]

So all, or largely all, the information on the Internet is Free… to all. Well except China, Russia, North Korea, and Syria where the governments control what content their peoples can look at. Other governments are frightened that knowledge (and education) will destroy their control over their people.

WHAT IS OUR CURRENT KMNOWLEDGE?

It’s everything we do in the ”West’ including all Western style countries for example Australia, New Zealand, Scandinavia, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore and many others.

Knowledge is what we need to run, and also to further improve, our lives. It covers everything from food to medicine, electricity to oil, housing to aeroplanes, entertainment to leisure, cooking to singing and dancing, computers to MRI Scanners, agriculture to rare earth elements, engineering to nanotechnology, exploration of both space and the sea depths.

WHAT IS NEW KNOWLEDGE?

New knowledge is what ever we are working on at the moment. Google searches just in Google News respond with 1,590 results for research for neurons and synapses; 16,000 for stem cell; 11,000 for nanotechnology; 30,00 for robotics; 239,000 for new materials; 19,000 for cancer etc.

But Knowledge has to be used, it has to be incorporated into new products, new machines, new treatments, new materials. It has to be incorporated into new processes, new systems, new buildings.

Knowledge, or even a new concept, is then re-used in a slightly different manner and can lead to a break-through in a totally unexpected field of endeavour.

HOW IS KNOWLEDGE GROWING?

What a wonderful world we will have when globally everyone’s knowledge reaches the present average level of ‘Western’ knowledge. This will also mean and involve huge social changes as it demands that everyone has electricity, clean water, and sanitation together with equal knowledge and equal treatment or women as for men.

Acquisition of knowledge starts at our mother;’s knee and uses the brain our mother has generated for us, so we in society need to do everything we can to give that new brain the best start in life that we in ‘society’ can provide. Pre-natal specialist education for the mother-to-be and then the realisation that the next adult’s life has already begun and their education begins immediately.

Generally in the world our women get a rough deal starting with female infanticide; being treated as lesser citizens; being denied education; being treated as slaves, even in marriage; but education and knowledge (and machines) are entitling women to be equal to men and to being treated as equals. This in itself will increase the knowledge growth by. Say. Eighty per cent.

Knowledge itself is the ‘oil’ that increases every single person’s productivity whether it be driving more buses, using more computers, buying foodstuffs at the supermarket, [food lasts longer these days so there’s lees wastage] or just doing everything faster and more easily. This in itself enables them to do more in the same time and it’s this extra time which is used to create even more knowledge.

MOOC, Massive Open Online Courses are now being operated and implemented by Universities round the world. The Open University, in Britain, is launching ‘FutureLearn’, in 2013 available free of charge to users anywhere in the world and there is no charge for learning, though there will be a charge for the optional examination and the degree a the end of the course.

In the Britain since the eighteenth century the number of people that society can afford to be deployed to creating new knowledge has been growing in direct proportion to the increase in surplus capacity in society:-
– We started with agricultural revolution, which including imported foods, brings us from subsistence level for everyone to needing just three percent of labour force today…. 33 times
– Then the invention of steam power….. 1000 times
– Followed by the invention of steel and the rest of the industrial revolution, including railways and ships;
– Invention and widespread use of electric light added four hours to each day….. 50% more
– The advent of motor cars, goods vehicles and roads…..say 2 times
– Computers even just up to 1970…. 14 times [Some people in 2012 say one billion times more powerful]
– Other machines robots etc., say the same, 14 times
– Telecommunications and the Internet etc., say the same, 14 times
– Increased working population (UK) from immigration … 5% annually
– Extended useful people’s life, from age 60 to age 80….say 50% more

Now let’s add tomorrows developments:
– Equality for women …. 80% more
– Effective education for all from the earliest moment….. 2 times
= mplement the knowledge and the machines across the whole world population…. say for a further 6 billion people…5 times
– times the total multiplier from above
More computers and machines…..

HOW IS KNOWLEDGE CREATED?

Knowledge is created whenever someone wants to do something they haven’t done before. Whether it’s to test a theory or to do something in a novel way


THE FORECAST ABOUT KNOWLEDGE

Knowledge will grow faster than we think. The sheer speed is it’s own Black Swan. So everything we think might happen will happen much earlier than we think. Obsolescence will occur much earlier, and even though almost all our buildings are obsolete new materials will enable us to improve the life of those existing buildings or change their use unless they are in the wrong place..

The biggest problem will be that older generations are not used to change and want demonstrable evidence that they will personally benefit.

The people with the biggest difficulty will be those who won’t derive a personal benefit and unfortunately this applies most clearly to retired eldetly people, bureaucrats, civil servants and employees of monopoly organisations as increases in their productivity may mean that fewer personnel will be needed even though the primary benefit will be quicker or more cost-effective results.

Knowledge can only be useful when it can be absorbed and is a small step from people’s existing knowledge and experience, except for some young adults who seem to make leaps of faith, jumping into and grabbing with both hands whatever the future offers them.

Cliff Kenkins, 31 Dec 2012.

Forecasting the Future – cj1.

Forecasting the Future –
start with the past and add in some Black Swans

This is the Index for a series of online papers which I will gradually create and formulates the structure of my work. It may easily be adjusted where I consider a major element needs re-inforcing.

The Starting Points:

– the growth of knowledge, innovation and implementation
– The Significance of Cities – the growth of the cities, The role of architecture and engineering in society, new materials,
– The Brain, neurons, synapses, bionic man, neurology,
– Genetics; ; stem cells; gerontology;
– Finite Resources
– The role of women / the role of religion and culture,
– The increase in power/productivity,
– The global village, media, the internet & communications,

AND recent breakthroughs that are not yet in widespread use, plus.

My original thoughts:
Power and Peace (My previous attempts to understand how we got to where we are
An Englishman’s Life – Exerpts from my life for you to understand my questing and my fourney
Tomorrows’ Winds (Book 1 of 3)
Tomorrow’s Tides (Book 2 of 3)
Book 3 writtem but mot finished.

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