Future America: Jetsons or Waltons?

What happened to the future? Weren’t things supposed to be cooler by now, smarter, safer? Raised on a steady diet of science fiction, overzealous politicians and corporate hype, Americans expected to be living in The Jetsons — but instead find themselves stuck in a scarier version of The Waltons.

Read this interesting Special Report on The Future, brought to us by Forbes Magazine.


Another mustread is this first chapter of the book Future Files: A History of the Next 50 Years.

WAKING LIFE: 1st Artificial Life To Be Announced

Reportedly Dr Craig Venter, the DNA researcher involved in the race to decipher the human genetic code, has built a synthetic chromosome out of laboratory chemicals and is poised to announce the creation of the first new artificial life form on Earth.

Also be sure to watch this extremely cool video prediction: scene 6 from "Waking Life".

LIVING WITHOUT OIL: Now Available In The Dutch Edition

Look here.
The English language edition is under way!
The book was officially introduced at the Shell HQ in Amsterdam.

Adjiedj Bakas and Rob Creemers in "Living Without Oil / Leven Zonder Olie" together present the trends in energy production and energy consumption in today’s world. Is there an energy crisis to be expected and when? How long can we use oil and gas and when is it necessary to change the energy consumption? How to reduce CO2 and prevent the changes in climate we might expect in the near future? This book is the ultimate answer to Al Gore’s book An unconvenient truth. It is visionary, yet practical and inspirational: what are the real energy alternatives? What is the state of the art? What are the future scenario’s and future trends in energy consumption? Which new energy inventions are due? With cases and inspiring examples. The book is designed as a "magazine in a book": it is full colour, richly illustrated, with a foamcover and luxuriously designed.

Also vistit the LivingWithoutOil weblog, which BTW isn't ours.

Greenspan on 2030

From Alan Greenspan's new book "The Age of Turbulence":

"Adaptation is in our nature, a fact that leads me to be deeply optimistic about our future. [ . . . ] Progress is not automatic, however; it will demand future adaptations as yet unimaginable."

Monumental Multimedia Documentary

Here.

Totally New Digital Products Ahead

Cramming more data into less space on a memory chip or a hard drive has been the crucial force propelling consumer electronics companies to make ever smaller devices.

If Stuart Parkin proves successful in his current quest at the San Jose IBM Research Center, he will create a “universal” computer memory, one that can potentially replace dynamic random access memory, or DRAM, and flash memory chips, and even make a “disk drive on a chip” possible.

It could begin to replace flash memory in three to five years. Not only would it allow every consumer to carry data equivalent to a college library on small portable devices, but a tenfold or hundredfold increase in memory would undoubtedly unleash the creativity of engineers who would develop totally new entertainment, communication and information products.

The Worldwide Credit Crunch

From the International Herald Tribune on the US homeowner woes that can be felt throughout the world:

Different lives on different continents. But all of them, in this astonishingly interconnected world, are being swept up in a worldwide credit crunch that have raised fears of a financial meltdown.

Bad lending decisions to ordinary folks in places like Minnesota and New Jersey have been tearing through world economies like a tsunami, causing stock markets to plummet, threatening pensions, and affecting the prices of everything from oil to refrigerators.

The Future Of Work

The U.S. and the global economies are coming to a crossroads that no one could have anticipated just a few years ago. Globalization and technology together are creating the potential for startling changes in how we do our jobs and the offices we do them in. Offshoring, for one, means work can be broken into smaller tasks and redistributed around the world. And the rapid growth of broader, richer channels of communication—including virtual worlds—is transforming what it means to be "at work."

Read this article: "Which Way To The Future?"

The whole "The Future of Work" file is here.

Pumping Money As Markets Slide

Central banks worldwide have injected at least $326.3 billion in the past 48 hours to prevent markets from spinning into a global liquidity squeeze.

Want to know more???

Paul Krugman concedes at the moment "Very Scary Things" are happening.

The Last Oil Shock

David Strahan's provocative book "The Last Oil Shock" is meant to be "A Survival Guide to the Imminent Extinction of Petroleum Man". Homo Petrolicus is finished an we have no alternative. Even Shell's Jeroen van der Veer agrees: "the age of easy oil is over".

Internet Doomsday Scenario

Click here.

Charles Stross: Crystals Will Keep Our Memories

UK science fiction writer Charles Stross, author of novels Accelerando and Singularity Sky, posits a future in which all human experience is recorded on devices the size of a grain of sand.

Consider a carbon crystal, created (and edited) one atom at a time by nanomachinery; there are two stable isotopes of carbon, and we can use a Carbon-12 atom to represent a binary 0 and a Carbon-13 atom to represent a binary 1.

One gram of this substance could store 10 to the power 21 bytes (887,808 petabytes) - the equivalent storage of more than 11 billion typical PCs.