It is becoming more important to have a good understanding of the status of developments in ultra-high impact super-technology. The ultra-high potential technology is next level artificial intelligence, next level nanotechnology, breakthrough space and super-genetics and radical anti-aging.
Those are global and civilization game-changers.
Mundane technology can get to the trillion-dollar level of impact. Worldwide public cloud computing revenue is projected to grow 17% in 2020 to $266 billion. This would be $500 billion by 2024 and $1 trillion by 2028.
Oil and gas from hydraulic fracking is close to being a $2 trillion industry.
The monetary worth of even a 10% reduction in all-cause mortality is over $20 trillion. Increases in longevity and health improvements had more than $2 trillion each year in value over each of the last 30 years.
The biotechnology trend in whole genome sequencing is to reach about 60 million patients sequenced by 2025. This would be from incremental improvements in CRISPR and related gene sequencing and existing trends.
We will have profound knowledge of our biology and all life in our ecosystem.
We will have next levels of understanding of intervention and next-level capabilities to modify ourselves, biology and synthetic biology.
Those will be commercialized for agriculture and medical transformation.
Biotech modifications will be the inexpensive solution to climate change. Boosting trees, plants etc… There will be new energy but those tend to be $100-1000 per ton of CO2. While Bio solutions can be $0.1-1 per ton of CO2. Genetic boosting bio solutions could be 0.01 to 0.1 per ton of CO2.
The Roswell Technologies molecular electronics will also be a pathway towards more nanotechnology and a way to bootstrap towards molecular nanotechnology.
Antiaging
Modification of two cellular pathways increased the longevity of worms by 5 times. This reinforces the expectation that combination gene therapy will be able to provide massive longevity increases. Rejuvenate Bio is rapidly enabling combination gene therapy.
Super Intelligence
The 2020s will be filled with Narrow Superintelligences. Self-driving cars beyond human capability. Super-Intelligences will specialize in disease, medicine and advancing health and antiaging. These narrow inteligences will be combined with next-level general speaking and communication systems.
Full Self Driving Cars
Having all self-driving cars will make every highway like high-speed rail. Cars and trucks will be able to move safely at 150 to 250 miles per hour. This is the speed of China’s current high-speed rail network. The rollout of tens of millions of self-driving cars and trucks will make over 100,000 miles of highways into the equivalent of high-speed rail networks.
SpaceX Full Reusability, Super Constellation and One Hour Anywhere
SpaceX will roll-out hourly deliveryof packages for years before flying passengers and this will make them tens of billions of dollars each year. SpaceX will have a monopoly on 1-6 hour package delivery for tens of billions of dollars. This will fund the human passenger global infrastructure and provide massive profits while performing millions of test flights to prove human passenger safety.
Ultra-rapid delivery of packages is clearly the precursor to point-to-point human travel. It will support massive volume increases, cost reductions and safety testing.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
By “no closer” you mean “you can go out right now and purchase consumer products that contain graphene”? Then sure.
The really awesome advances, the ones that shake up things so that people living before them have little hope of understanding how much they will change things, have been happening since the discovery and adoption of tools.
Each seems to occur in half the interval that it took for the previous one to follow the one before, and is a necessary precursor for the next, and each also accelerates further progress. But they aren’t like light switches, they don’t occur instantly on a given day.
Most recent ones might be:
Put the Internet at around early to mid 1990s (when it really began hitting its stride) and this was about 60 years after electronics did the same, we are due again for sometime in the middle of this decade.
It’s probably a second industrial revolution (or an extension of the first) based on cognitive automation replacing a lot of brain use with machines, and we are already well into the transition.
Of course, this lines us for another in the early to mid 2030s (AI? Mind-machine augments?) , and then for another in the 2040s (end of involuntary aging?), and no one can even begin to guess what would then be happening in the 2050s (over and over again).
The obstacle for his predictions is not a length of time, but the thickness of head bone. It may never happen, or it can happen in five years – time is a derivative here.
St. Patrick’s Cathedral now saves 30% of its heating/cooling bill from 2,200′ deep geothermal wells: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/14/nyregion/st-patricks-cathedral-geothermal.html
The structural engineers tell us we have go go down at least 200′ anyway, and we would go that deep or more to meet the subway tunnel there too.
The vertical wind turbines are only one of five off-grid energy solutions, but they benefit from being located 1,000′ above the middle of the East River, where it would be quite windy.
Automated building could be used to lay the foundation, and in factories producing modular components for the building.
Not so, from what professional developers are telling me in NYC, though the city has yet to approve it. Also, there was an article about graphene-infused concrete in Global Construction Review in 2018: http://www.globalconstructionreview.com/news/graphene-laced-concrete-twice-strong-normal-mix/
Scott, Your predictions sound awesome, but maybe a bit too futuristic. Perhaps in 200 years?
250 mph… my tesla might make it 40 miles on a charge.
Wear on tires and road surfaces would make use of standard highways problematic. I expect that as we transition we could see an increase in highway speed past the average autobahn speed of 82mph perhaps even into 90s.
Automated pods that are optimized for intracity/short-range travel would likely not be ideal for longer distances. If we are moving towards fleets for travel rather than owner-operated vehicles, efficiency would heavily favor a multi-lane rail system on a raised track to eliminate crossings and side rails for connecting to local transit hubs. This could use dedicated pods to enable freedom of navigation for small groups rather than being tied to specific schedules and routes.
Such a pod-based rail system would also be great for freight. The pods could carry a standard freight container that would be automatically transferred to a local pod for delivery.
Politically I don’t think there would be sufficient support for such a system until we reach a tipping point in the transition to fleet based transit.
And how do we produce industrial quantities of graphene? Been 20 years since I heard about this wonder compound and we’re still no closer.
I used to believe in the jumping Jesus but now not so much. We’re still burning fossil fuels and there is no evidence of major life extension in humans. Fix clean, cheap abundant energy and then we’ll have a chat.
Agree, build ultra large scale buildings on completely cleared sites such as Camden, Baltimore, and countless other exhausted sites. Design for nuclear battery type reactors.
Depends on what you’re looking for out of geothermal. Power production? Deep, most places.
Space heating? Not nearly so deep, especially if you’re just using it to feed a heat pump water that’s warmer than the outside air.
Re: “The monetary worth of even a 10% reduction in all-cause mortality is over $20 trillion.” — not at all! Better phrase would be ” 10% increase in healthspan”
I have to agree with you…in principle. The energy required to move a car 250 mph is substantial. Where the cut off is exactly…certainly gray. 150+ sounds like a somewhat reasonable choice. But you have to consider that a lot of aircraft move at these speeds without an enormous amount of energy or very limited range. If you design the body to be very aerodynamic like the Aptera or even more so (perhaps 2-wheel like Lit Motors’ C-1…and no side mirrors), perhaps the limit will be closer to 200 mph or even that crazy sounding 250 mph. You probably need active surfaces to help you turn (or gyroscopic help). And you need good roads. It is possible to have a rubber-like central line in the roads that 2-wheeled self balancers can use for extra traction and enhanced smoothness.
If they are 2-wheeled self-balancing and self driving, it is possible to have a lane that is only 2 feet wide. Perhaps elevated. Bird hits could cause the occasional accident…so you might need some emergency rockets to get you back on the road or put you somewhere safely.
Thing is, I think it will be more convenient and require less infrastructure change by the government to just use automated air drones. You can’t have one 100 mph car holding back all the 200 mph cars. That speed difference is just too large. Special lanes get expensive…and then barriers to avoid accidents with bozos in their old style cars who can’t manage to stay in their lane.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptera_2_Series
Some of the things you list are limited by physics and economics, perhaps to the point of not being feasible. E.g. wind turbines tend to favor large diameters, and geothermal usually needs very deep drilling. But more energy-efficient buildings and better materials are certainly possible.
The bigger potential revolution in construction is automation of the construction process. Current construction processes are too messy to be automated easily, but they can be incrementally replaced with more automation-friendly methods. For example, using more standardized pre-fabricated components in a more LEGO-like system.
There’s a lot of talk of 3D printing buildings, but 3D printing is slow, cumbersome, limited in product size, and can almost only take care of the concrete structure. There’s a lot more other stuff that goes into a finished building. Still, it can be one of the tools.
However, this too is limited by economics. Human labor is reasonably cheap, and very flexible. Automated construction may initially make more sense for large skyscrapers or whole new neighborhoods, where the ROI on a robotic system may be higher, and there’s more opportunity for mass-production of pre-fabricated building components.
Buildings will be constructed 24/7 in giant factories, in modules which can be barged into place where water access is possible, or else trucked in on special trucks (possibly self-driving), increasing efficiency and saving lots of money. This will make otherwise too expensive large buildings feasible.
Elevators will travel horizontally as well as vertically. Actually, the St. Louis Gateway Arch as had this since the 1960s (and there’s a a 5-car inverted elevator in the Swiss Schwyz-Stoos funicular line too). This will open up the possibility of large buildings that defy the traditional Straight-up design, snaking, arching, and going where previous buildings never went, in order to house millions of people without sacrificing green public space. Some of this elevator technology will be used to span untraversible terrain, like major rivers.
A building which does all of these things, and more, was featured in a recent article in The Broadsheet: http://bit.ly/BroadsheetRA1
and a video fly-through exists here: http://bit.ly/Riverarch
Partners present & sought. Permits sought.
I predict there’ll be a revolution in constructing buildings too. It doesn’t seem like it now because the way buildings are made hasn’t changed significantly in decades or longer.
But material sciences will make possible: graphene laced concrete: 4X stronger than regular concrete & 2X more water resistant, meaning you can use less of it. Also, superior alloys will make superthin and curving skyscrapers possible. This has already happened here in NYC with the thinnest building in the world on Billionaire’s Row (57th street).
Zoning codes will allow for virtual windows like those seen in underground abodes like The Expanse TV show. Eliminating windows means buildings can be any size and in any location. Fail-proof HVAC will take care of air needs provided by primitive windows that mostly let in pollution & noise when opened in urban areas anyway & open windows are impossible in off-Earth abodes too. Solar Windows ™ and Electrochromic windows that darken at the dialing of a knob will double solar-gathering capacity of large buildings and eliminate shades, respectively.
Buildings will increasingly become energy-neutral with solar gathering Perovskite materials coating them, vertical high-efficiency wind turbines, geothermal basements, and if waterbodies are close, water turbines/wave-energy gathering technology. Indoor dams in the largest buildings will generate energy from descending gray water spinning turbines after being collected in indoor tanks.
I mean, an extra 10K to get your 80 mph car to 150+ mph sounds reasonable to me.
You must be very old not to see this stuff coming. I am 72 and I know it is just around the corner.
Brian, cars, self driving or not, do not travel at 150 to 200 mph; never mind efficiency. If you’ve ever driven a car over 120 mph on modern roads you will find out very quickly just how uneven and bouncy they are at high speed. Our infrastructure tolerances aren’t suited to handle those speeds comfortably. I guess you could add another 10k to the price of a car to get the Bose active suspension system. Not practical for many many years.