#Tapping into the Waterways in the Sky Futurist Thomas Frey: With all of the water we have in the world,
only 2%of it is fresh water. To make matters worse, only one-forth of all fresh water is accessible to humans.
Until now, the entire human race has survived on 0. 5%of the available water on earth. But that s about to change.
We are seeing a fast growing trend towards harvesting water from the atmosphere, something our ancestors first began working on centuries ago.
People in the middle East and Europe devised the original air-well systems over 2, 000 years ago.
water is heavy and difficult to transport. Plastic bottle made water far more transportable, but it created a whole new set of problems.
Every day, millions of plastic water bottles, cups and containers are transported around the world by exhaust-spewing steamships, trains,
and trucks, only to be discarded, thrown into landfills, and onto our streets. And most of our current bottles don t degrade.
#Top 10 cutting-edge technologies in development Tube transportation is the future of transportation. You shouldn t give up on flying cars or hoverboards just yet.
As technology continues to march on, everything will go into development sooner or later#s demonstrated by the existence of these things,
Meter-long tubes packed with electronics and mirrors, these cameras are to be mounted to the outside of the International Space station.
But their purpose isn t to capture images of space#hey ll be pointed toward the Earth.
While currently focusing on people and cars, they d like to add animals and weather conditions soon. 3. Wireless Electricity The notion of wireless electric power has been around far longer than one might think:
it could bring about an end to batteries as we know them. 2. Ultra-High Speed Tube Trains Magnetic levitation,
or Maglev, trains have been in development for quite some time. In Japan, a recent successful test run means that plans are underway to connect the whole country by 2045 with trains capable of reaching over 480 kph (300 mph.
They accomplish this by removing the wheels#nd thereby, contact and friction#rom the equation.
Maglev trains levitate above the track, suspended by an electromagnetic field. And while the Japanese model is impressive,
called the Evacuated Tube Transport, is the future of transportation, and it very well may be. Its track is contained within a sealed,
pressurized vacuum tube, making the capsules conceivably capable of speeds up 6, 500 kph (4, 000 mph),
all while subjecting the passenger to G-forces comparable to that of a leisurely ride on the highway
as of this writing, is searching for an appropriate stretch to build the first tube. 1. Sustainable Fusion reactor Nuclear fission (the process by
and it is the second-largest cooperative international scientific endeavor (ranking behind only the Space station).
ET3 will be global space travel On earth Daryl Oster, CEO for Evacuated Tube Transport Technologies. Elon musk is a brilliant, big-thinking, subtly accented,
self-made billionaire who has led the design of revolutionary cars and rockets and he needs no introduction.
Musk unveiled his idea for a next-generation transportation system on August 12th, and it got the attention of about every news organization between Earth and Mars,
where Musk hopes to aim his rockets one day. Musk s Spacex and Tesla Motors,
which he launched after cashing out of first billion-dollar idea, Paypal. Then Musk let slip the term#oehyperloop,
So he realized the vision of ultrahigh-speed land travel could well depend on someone marshaling a tiny fraction of Musk s net worth and name recognition,
Oster, 51, runs a consortium called ET3, for Evacuated Tube Transport Technologies, and his vision has the rare distinction of being even bolder than one emerging from the mind of Elon musk. Like Hyperloop,
he thinks the economics favor a supersonic plane), Oster promotes a planetary network capable of speeding a passenger from New york to Beijing in two hours.#
#oeit s global space travel On earth,#Oster said, which happens to be ET3 s trademarked catchphrase.
A Victorian pneumatic tube system zipped the note across the road to the office and brought back an invoice.#
But he attributes his real interest in evacuated tube transport to a math error in the early 1980s.
so he worked for smaller firms#here an autonomous military land vehicle, there a mower for golf course greens.
In the late 1980s, there was a spontaneous move to Lincoln, Nebr. to work on filament-wound structures#mix shafts for the food industry and rocket-motor casings.
He met and married Brenda. They moved to Florida. At first telemarketers, Oster got a job designing boats for Proline.
He considered different tube diameters, propulsion systems, routes, markets. He worked 40 hours on boats and 60 hours on ET3,
#oei just decided I wanted to ride motorcycles with my dad for a few years while he still could,
at the cost of a 6%royalty on revenue whenever their capsules start flying through tubes.
#Evacuated tube transport isn t a new idea. By the time Oster had his wind-tunnel epiphany up in Walla Walla,
a Rand Corporation study on Very High Speed Transport had been gathering dust for more than a decade.
no rolling resistance-that could hit 14,000 mph taking passengers from New york to Los angeles in 21 minutes.
and difficult#problems associated with evacuated tube technology. There are three keys to ET3: a narrow tube diameter, minimal capsule weight and high-temperature maglev technology.
Narrower tubes (ET3 specifies a diameter of five feet) mean less vacuum pumping and lighter pylons and bridges for support (like Musk,
Oster proposes an elevated system, which among other issues obviates the need for a 100-foot-wide right of way bisecting properties from here to Beijing).
4 3#high and 16 2#long, not far off the dimensions of a midsize car.
life-support and sanity-preserving systems (such as big video screens to distract its passengers from the fact that they re hurtling through the choking darkness),
and lower costs throughout the system#one-tenth that of high speed rail or a quarter of the cost of a freeway,
Linear motors launch the capsules to jet-aircraft speeds and beyond; occasional linear motors en route maintain gaps between cars
and subtly adjust speed, and linear motors at the destination do the braking, winning back much of the acceleration energy through an analog of a hybrid car s regenerative braking system.
Most of the trip, you re floating in the man-made great beyond, with a four-inch gap between the capsule s exterior and the nanoengineered concrete walls of the tube.
Of course, none of this exists, any more than Musk s Hyperloop does. Hyperloop, while similar in the broad sense, is a different animal.
The cars are bigger roughly six feet high by 4. 5-feet wide, and long enough for 28 passengers.
Musk also elevates his tubes, which have an internal diameter of 7 4, #on pillars (note that Musk proposes a second, larger system,
one that could carry three cars). The tubes would host the vacuum-pressure equivalent of an altitude of 150,000 feet.
This is rarefied air, but still 1, 000 times more dense than ET3 s proposed vacuum,
and therefore easier to maintain leakage and entry and exit of capsules through airlocks. But even that scant amount of air is enough to increase demands on the capsules,
which include a compressor powered by a 436-hoursepower onboard motor and juiced with 3, 400 pounds of batteries.
The compressor s job is to blow onrushing air behind the capsule-otherwise, what amounts to an airbag would slow the vehicle from its 760-mph tear.
Some of that air is channeled to 28 air bearings each a sort of ski 15 square feet in size.
Rather than using maglev technology, Hyperloop cars float on a cushion of air. As with ET3, Hyperloop s minimizing air resistance
Oster says ET3 is 50 times more efficient than the best electric cars or trains; a 57-megawatt solar array atop the Hyperloop route would produce more than twice the average power needed to run the system, Musk estimates.
Of course, asking a transportation expert about ET3 vs. Hyperloop is like asking an NFL scout to rank Quidditch prospects.
Experts in traditional transportation tend to be flummoxed by these systems, with their strange technologies and disregard for the traditional boundaries of road, rail and air, transit and cargo.
With respect to ET3, Texas A&m Transportation Institute spokesman Rick Davenport said in an email, #oethis is the first
While providing all but resistance-free travel, vacuums kill. As pressure drops, so does the boiling point,
A 1973 NASA document summarizing the biological effects of vacuums on mammals gives you 10 seconds of consciousness
They have answers for sudden depressurization or tube breaks, generally involving controlled ventilation to use outside air to slow capsules
Jean Ratner, a therapist who directs the Center for Travel Anxiety in Maryland, says that simulating windows with high-def screens would#oehelp a lot,
#but claustrophobia will be a real problem for some passengers. Even in the closed tube of an airplane, they can get up and go to the bathroom,
at least-neither Hyperloop nor ET3 appear to have included built-in bathrooms.##oeno bathroom#that would be a disaster,
adding that even the notion of bathrooms assuages passengers who need a sense of possible escape.
and said the devil will ultimately be in the details of evacuated tube transport. Those details range from minimizing g-forces around curves (Hyperloop anticipates 0. 5gs of lateral force;
the limit for conventional trains is 0. 1g, and a maglev study found passengers get sick at 0. 2gs#not good,
especially without a bathroom) to keeping terrorists and saboteurs from soft targets that, when breached, create onrushing air tantamount to an onrushing train.
In the case of Hyperloop, the proposed gap between the capsule s air bearings and the steel wall is as little as 0. 5 millimeters.
particularly considering near perfection must carry across maybe 25,000 pillars and as many tube segments, through the expansion and contraction of temperature swings and seismic jostling.
Both believe evacuated-tube transport is a battle worth fighting. They told each other as much in a meeting three weeks before the Hyperloop announcement.
Calif. headquarters, the man from Mead walked among rockets in assembly, guys in Air Jordans working on cargo pods
and 3d printers cranking out spacecraft parts. Then he went toe-to-toe with Musk in a discussion of evacuated-tube transport.
Oster s command was typically encyclopedic. They came to understand that their ideas, both unique, amounted to a sort of convergent evolution.
Musk went back to work on his spacecraft and electric cars; Oster is forging ahead on ET3. In his Rand report of 41 years ago,
U s. airline passenger miles have leapt by a factor of 20; we drive, collectively, 250%more miles in more than twice as many vehicles;
and our atmosphere is laden with 21%more carbon dioxide. These sorts of ambitious transportation projects may be just what the country
and the environment needs, said Powell, the maglev pioneer.##oewe had the Apollo project and people got really excited about that.
The interstate highway system. The Internet. But right now we don t have any of that excitement going on,
and large amounts of beetle-killed trees have created#oeperfect storm#conditions for multiple wildfires to rage across the State.
the heat plume coming out of the back of the rocket produces a distinct heat signature instantly detectable by satellites tens of thousands of miles away with infrared sensors.
I can only assume today s technology is hundreds of times more precise than anything we were working with back then. 2007 NASA image of forest fires in California The above photo was infrared taken with thermal imaging sensors on NASA s Ikhana unmanned research
aircraft in 2007 over the Harris Fire in San diego County in Southern California. That same technology could be adjusted to detect forest fires at a very early stage.
This image was taken with a thermal camera mounted to a helicopter. Bluesky is a UK company specializing in aerial imaging.
high altitude aircraft, low attitude drones, or some combination of these, monitoring hotspots and instantly determining the danger level is well within our grasp.
Every kind of tree will likely require a different navigation strategy, and some densely covered grounds may be entirely unreachable until it s too late.
But so does a full-frontal attack on a fire by smokejumpers, bucket-bearing helicopters,
and slow lumbering slurry bombers that each dumped more than 2, 000 gallons of red chemical fire retardant on a formerly pristine mountainside.
Many of those trips were made so I could understand from the ground up the new forces at work in rural Africa and in farming and agribusiness in the region.
these#oeperi-urban#farmers PDF typically bring their goods to market by taxi or motorcycle, striking deals in advance by text message.
and transport costs are low, leaving her enough profit to consider leasing more land in the future.
when he traveled in the Congo, attempting to foment rebellion: Almost every African family he met owned a plot of farmland#radically different situation than in Latin america,
and send it to Nairobi s airport in a single day. And because farmers still control
Transport links are terrible; where proper roads do exist, you ll often see police roadblocks capriciously set up to extract bribes from drivers.
Rather than support their own producers, many African governments ease the importation of foreign-grown food.
In Ghana, for instance, canned tomato paste from Italy, frozen chickens from Brazil, and rice from Thailand can be sold below cost, killing local production.
#oewe were promised rocket jet packs##futuristic, ultra-nutritious crops that would bring exotic produce to the supermarket
#That s good news for those that have turned already to cloning to create a small pack ofsuper sniffing inspector dogs at airports,
At a scientific conference, she struck up a friendship with Jennifer Doudna, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at UC Berkeley.
And the road from lab experiment to treatment is a long one. Sangamo Biosciences has been working to commercialize the earlier zinc finger nuclease technology as a form of medicine for more than a decade.
the Wright Brother s first flight only lasted 12 seconds. Perhaps the most controversial comment made by Brand during his talk was#
a relatively straightforward technological innovation#GPS-equipped free-range cows that can be nudged back within virtual bounds by ear-mounted stimulus-delivery devices#has implications that could profoundly reshape our relationships with domesticated animals,
#because we are still going to need conventional fencing along airport runways, interstates, railroad right-of-ways, and so on.#
For example, if you fly into Albuquerque or El paso airports, you will come in quite low over rangeland.
you could be driving your property in your air-conditioned truck and you notice a spot that received rain in the recent past and that has a flush of highly nutritious plants that would
Currently we have a very active program here on the Jornada Experimental Rangein landscape ecology using unmanned aerial vehicle reconnaissance.
because I don t want to be associated with the train wreck #I mean a major train wreck#that could happen through using this technology.
If you can be sitting in your office in Washington D c . and you program cows to move on your ranch in Montana,
What our team did initially was cannibalize a kids remote control car to send a signal to the device worn by the animal.
if that was next to a road, even if it cost $163, 000 for those two-and-a half miles of fence,
I want a barbed wire fence between Ted Turner s ranch and our experimental ranch up the road here.
while they are waiting in public spaces (at bus stations and buses), the library has managed to stretch its resources even
Bookbike##oeusing a specially-designed three-wheeled bicycle, library staff, Pima County Bike Ambassadors and volunteers ride throughout our community to visit people
and ride in the motorcycle sidecar with Hagrid. Attendance now nears 3, 000 people.##Library Nurse Program Mangamania!!#
and publishing center (Sacramento Public library, Sacramento, CA) Wine tasting fundraiser Wine & Words (Huntington Beach Public library, Huntington Beach, CA) Food trucks and international food
##Dodge City Public library Kentucky Campbell County Public library: Lego club Teens writing a manga book online Class on making medieval weapons from office supplies Sit down aerobics for seniors#oecrafters Who Care##Needlework lovers meet to knit
photographing dioramas, antique dollhouse furniture displays, historic doll history/display, miniature war machines, trains, etc.
Jackson George Regional Library System) Car seat Rental-partnership with Citizens Against Needless Death in Youth CANDY.
Super bowl 101#Partnership with school coaches to bring football education and sports appreciation and to local community just in time for the Super bowl.
10,000 tiny flying swarmbots perform flawlessly together? 7. Cure for Aging Life expectancy is getting longer,
8. Driverless cars How long will it be before we see the first highway in the U s. to be designated as adriverless-cars only highway?
Space Based Power stations The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) recently announced its 25-year plan to build the world s first 1-gigawatt power plant in space.
Ultra High Speed Transportation system Today s high speed trains max out around 300 mph. However, vacuum tube transportation systems,
like the one being proposed by ET3, have the potential to exceed 4, 000 mph. Once implemented, how will a technology like this affect the airline industry?
27. Genetically Engineered Athletes will engineered genetically designer babies, often referred to as super-babies, grow up to become superhumans?
How long before this same technology can be used to 3d print much larger items such as ships, stadiums, aircraft,
Who are some of todays best-known celebrities that would likely show up as downloadable personalities for your computer, car, or robot?
Invisible fences, invisible screens, invisible cars and windmills will all be possible. What kind of market will there be for invisible netting like this?
including year-round crop production, protection from weather, support urban food autonomy and reduced transport costs. Scientifically viable in 2023;
Jessica Duggan grew up in this starchy historic city in the 1990#s. She remembers field trips with her mother to the historic Battery neighborhood,
A booming tech start-up economy and a thriving arts and restaurant scene have helped this old Civil war tourist magnet do something that places across the USA have been trying to do for decades:
At the gas station on the way home, you can fill your growler with craft-brewed beer. This is a new kind of city
and Alexandria, Va.,places designed before automobiles arrived. Several of the most popular cities have become an important part of New Urbanism,
which models development around mixed-use development and pedestrian-friendly spaces. These places seem to be built for people
not for automobiles, says University of Nevada-Las vegas demographer Robert Lang. And the 20-somethings love the people, not the automobile.
Using recent U s. Census data, USA TODAY has identified 289 cities that have more 20-somethings than teens in the case of Charleston and about a dozen other cities, it s 2-to-1 or higher.
859 164 Costa Mesa, Calif. 110,322 160 Denton, Texas 115,098 160 Killeen, Texas 127,995 160 Lincoln, Neb. 259,218 156 Lubbock
Boeing is expanding rapidly. The aerospace giant now assembles 787 Dreamliners at a rate of three a month at a massive facility adjacent to the Charleston airport,
and over the next three years it plans to hire about 600 more information technology employees, bringing its total number of workers in the region to about 8, 000.
land use and transit to create a city that allows residents tolive, work and play in the same space,
Now he gets so much business most nights he s got to lease 85 parking spaces from The (Charleston) Post and Courier across the street.
a young developer who is working with the city to build acreative corridor on Meeting Street, an industrial thoroughfare once dominated by car dealerships.
One floor of their campus has been remodeled as asocial work space that resembles an open-floor loft or a high-end hotel lobby.
in the middle of one workspace, a gleaming red Ducati 1199 Panigale motorcycle. Speaking of design, Charleston may bethe single most important city of inspiration to the New Urbanists who have pushed to redesign cities around more densely populated,
the electric car company, is slowly reshaping how people think about driving. Following the same pattern can help any social entrepreneur get people excited about world-changing products.
ELECTRIC CARS AND THE DIFFUSION OF INNOVATIONS THEORY Elon musk is the man behind Paypal Spacex, and Tesla Motors.
to build a market for electric cars, beginning with luxury cars, and then expanding over time to reach a broader consumer base.
that is, it wasn t simply about building an amazing electric car, it was also about creating an environment in
and he understood what it would take to get that group behind the wheel of an electric car.
He would need to design a car that could be compelling enough to act as a status symbol for young professionals in the insular community of Silicon valley.
He knew his audience would be highly technologically literate and very social in both how they bought the car
He needed a luxury car that would be theit car in Silicon valley. But perhaps as importantly, he would need to find a solution for the incredibly expensive battery technology needed for the car to work.
Just the battery for an electric car costs more than double the price of an entry-level car in the market.
For this reason alone, Tesla would have to focus on the luxury end of the market.
Tesla s cars are designed and built for the Google or Apple executive. The Apple headquarters boast more Teslas than a Tesla showroom.
Five years after the introduction of its Model S car Tesla was reporting a profit,
and the Model S had become the third best-selling luxury car, behind only the Mercedes E Class and BMW 5 Series.
ensuring the car is safe before it gets on the road, and in turn bringing along the more risk-averse parts of the population.
Tesla is building a network of car superchargers so that owners can drive coast-to-coast without range anxiety.
The next segment it needs to reach is the early majoritywho can move the company from a niche car manufacturer into a global powerhouse.
And though they look to the previous group for guidance they often have practical considerations that make it hard to adopt a change.
he needs to invest in the electric car market, and not just his cars. Tesla won t succeed just by selling electric cars.
They need to grow the overall electric vehicle market. They need to remove barriers for their competitors so they can join them in moving away from gas-fueled cars.
To this end, Tesla now sells their patented powertrain components to competitors. They are concerned less about the competition taking up market share than building the market
and creating scale that will bring the prices down enough to be viable options for the average car buyer.
By selling luxury electric cars first Musk and his team at Tesla have accelerated actually the development of technology for the market.
Tesla s success has created further hope for electric cars and spurred investment in research and development. Musk s initial customers were largely in Silicon valley
and connected to venture funding, a proximity that ultimately increased investment in batteries and renewable energy.
But while the initial scale of his operations allowed Musk to create additional demand and begin to bring down prices,
and ultimately it will need to be easier than owning a gas fueled car. In order for the laggardsthe most risk-averse group of allto come along,
or simply no more gas stations left to fuel their antique cars. But if Musk sluxury cars for the tech-elite strategy works, it will ultimately allow Musk to sell electric-powered sedans and minivans to families in Ohio.
It sounds intuitive, maybe even obvious, but most entrepreneurs (particularly those working on social issues) don t follow this model.
why Elon musk first entered the electric car market by focusing on luxury cars, and other social changes like sustainability, same-sex marriage, andin my casepro bono services.
and safety concerns that have dogged the use of these aerial high-fliers in more heavily populated areas.
The Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, the trade group that represents producers and users of drones and other robotic equipment, predicts that 80%of the commercial market for drones will eventually be for agricultural uses.
Once the Federal Aviation Administration establishes guidelines for commercial use, the drone industry said it expects more than 100,000 jobs to be created
Today, satellites, manned planes and walking the field are the main ways farmers monitor their crops.
000 for a plane the farmer puts together up to around $160, 000 for a military-style device are equipped with infrared cameras,
sensors and other technology controlled by a pilot on the ground. The sticker shock may be steep
He s used the aircraft, which covers about 80 acres an hour, to study how yields on his property are affected by changes in topography.
A major reason to hire someone instead of buying is the extensive training needed to operate the costly piece of machinery and the complexity of flying it.
has positioned itself to sell drones in much the same way as General motors works with its dealers to peddle cars.
there is some uncertainty over how much flexibility the federal government has given really agriculture to use the aircraft.
Even farm operators and drone companies are divided over how much authority they have been given to fly the aircraft.
Until then, the agency said some operators will continue to incorrectly assume they can operate drones under the guise of existing model aircraft rules
which would cover planes flown for personal use below 400 feet, within eyesight and a safe distance from airports and populated areas.
We are concerned about any (Unmanned Aircraft Systems) operation that poses a hazard to other aircraft or to people and property on the ground,
If we receive a complaint about such UAS flights, we investigate to determine if the operator violated FAA safety regulations.
The Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International has been pressing the FAA to allow limited drone use for some operations like farmers
which is to regulate the entire airspace to prevent anyone from flying, said Ben Gielow, general counsel of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.
As federal regulators struggle to define how drones can be used for commercial purposes, many countries around the world have loose guidelines for how these devices can be used.
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