Anticipating changes for the next few decades... and weeks

“The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ilya Prigogine was fond of saying that the future is not so much determined by what we do in the present as our image of the future determines what we do today.” So begins the latest missive of Noema Magazine.

The Near Future: The Pew Research Center’s annual Big Challenges Report top-features my musings on energy, local production/autonomy, transparency etc., along with other top seers, like the estimable Esther Dyson, Jamais Cascio, Amy Webb and Abigail deKosnick and many others. 

In this report, "Experts say the 'New Normal' in 2025 will be far more tech-driven, presenting more challenges" these pundits argue that changes resulting from disruptions from the pandemic are likely to worsen economic inequality, enhance the power of big tech firms, and multiply the spread of misinformation.

They also argue that changes have the potential to bring about new reforms aimed at ensuring greater social and racial equality and that tech advances have the power to enhance the quality of life for many.

Among the points I raise:

• Advances in cost-effectiveness of sustainable energy supplies will be augmented by better storage systems. This will both reduce reliance on fossil fuels and allow cities and homes to be more autonomous.
• Urban farming methods may move to industrial scale, allowing similar moves toward local autonomy (perhaps requiring a full decade or more to show significant impact). Meat use will decline for several reasons, ensuring some degree of food security, as well.
• Local, small-scale, on-demand manufacturing may start to show effects in 2025. If all of the above take hold, there will be surplus oceanic shipping capacity across the planet. Some of it may be applied to ameliorate (not solve) acute water shortages. Innovative uses of such vessels may range all the way to those depicted in my novel ‘Earth.’
• Full-scale diagnostic evaluations of diet, genes and microbiome will result in micro-biotic therapies and treatments. AI appraisals of other diagnostics will both advance detection of problems and become distributed to handheld devices cheaply available to all, even poor clinics.
• Handheld devices will start to carry detection technologies that can appraise across the spectrum, allowing NGOs and even private parties to detect and report environmental problems.
• Socially, this extension of citizen vision will go beyond the current trend of assigning accountability to police and other authorities. Despotisms will be empowered, as predicted in George Orwell's ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four.’ But democracies will also be empowered, as in my nonfiction book, ‘The Transparent Society.’
• I give odds that tsunamis of revelation will crack the shields protecting many elites from disclosure of past and present torts and turpitudes. The Panama Papers and Epstein cases exhibit how fear propels many elites to combine efforts at repression. But only a few more cracks may cause the dike to collapse, revealing networks of blackmail. This is only partly technologically driven and hence is not guaranteed. If it does happen, there will be dangerous spasms by all sorts of elites, desperate to either retain status or evade consequences. (I wrote that before the panic-frenzy we are seeing by Vladimire Putin, whose best option is to spill the entire KGB file of blackmail he holds over western elites.) But if the fever runs its course, the more transparent world will be cleaner and better run.
• Some of those elites have grown aware of the power of ninety years of Hollywood propaganda for individualism, criticism, diversity, suspicion of authority and appreciation of eccentricity. Counter-propaganda pushing older, more traditional approaches to authority and conformity are already emerging, and they have the advantage of resonating with ancient human fears. Much will depend upon this meme war.

Of course, much will also depend upon short-term resolution of current crises. If our systems remain undermined and sabotaged by incited civil strife and distrust of expertise, then all bets are off. 

== The pertinence (again) of transparency ==

When they hear the "T-word" so many dive into fretting about the spread of ‘surveillance technologies that will empower Big Brother.’ These fears are well-grounded, but also utterly myopic. I recall what Ulysses Grant said to Union generals who were in a froth over Robert E. Lee's next moves. 

Paraphrasing Grant: "Stop worrying over how despots will use light against us, and start talking about how to use light against despotism!"

First, ubiquitous cameras and facial recognition are only the beginning. Nothing will stop them and any such thought of ‘protecting’ citizens from being seen by elites (e.g. billionaires or the police) is stunningly absurd, as the cameras get smaller, better, faster, cheaper, more mobile and vastly more numerous every month. Moore’s Law to the nth degree. 

Yes, despotisms will benefit from this trend. And hence, the only thing that matters is to prevent despotism altogether. And only one thing ever did that!

In contrast, a free society will be able to apply the very same burgeoning technologies toward accountability. We are seeing them applied to end centuries of abuse by ‘bad-apple’ police who are thugs, while empowering the truly professional cops to do their jobs better.  

Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. were saved by crude technologies of light in their days. And history shows that assertive vision by and for the citizenry is the only method that has ever increased freedom and – yes – some degree of privacy.

And finally...

A new type of digital asset - known as a non-fungible token (NFT) - has exploded in popularity during the pandemic as enthusiasts and investors scramble to spend enormous sums of money on items that only exist online. “Blockchain technology allows the items to be publicly authenticated as one-of-a-kind, unlike traditional online objects which can be endlessly reproduced.”… “

 In October 2020, Miami-based art collector Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile spent almost $67,000 on a 10-second video artwork that he could have watched for free online. Last week, he sold it for $6.6 million. The video by digital artist Beeple, whose real name is Mike Winkelmann, was authenticated by blockchain, which serves as a digital signature to certify who owns it and that it is the original work.”

The post-covid luxury spending boom has begun. It’s already reshaping the economy.

A sealed copy of Super Mario 64 sells for $1.56M in record-breaking auction.  That record didn’t last long. In August 2021, a rare copy of Super Mario Bros. sells for $2 million, the most ever paid for a video game. Until the next time...

On the other hand, a once $2 million image of the world's first tweet recently resold for $245.000 That's volatility!  What NFTs fundamentally prove and what we've seen with election interference, Russian oligarch yachts and the stoopid-oligarchs subsidies of Fox 'News'... that the rich simply have too much money. Period.

And when that happens, as Adam Smith himself said, the first thing destroyed is flat-fair-creative-competitive enterprise.

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Addendum on Ukraine:

Real time we are awed by several things. 

By the doughty endurance, courage and ingenuity of the Ukrainian people. 

By yet another example of the topmost lesson from 6000 years of history, that despotism leads to psychotic leader-delusion... in this case endangering all our lives as Ras*-Putin plummets into full panic mode.

That Russians have a long way to go, before they become capable of seeing through the Strongman Hallucination, a version of which also captivates a very large minority of (confederate) Americans. 

And much else. But right now this armchair-general wants to conclude with a couple of amateur military observations, in the wake of Russia's setbacks in the north and at sea:

First: "Ukraine says between 2,500 to 3,000 of its troops have been killed, compared to Russia's 19,000."

Even if the disparity is half as great, it relates to the RF's worst problem. Very soon their troops will be outnumbered in the field. True, most of the new Ukrainian units are recently trained infantry battalions. But they are highly motivated volunteers in truly vast numbers, while the RF has not even dared to call up reservists, yet. Astonishingly, the much larger and more militaristic invader may be outnumbered soon at the front.

The RF retains a huge advantage in mechanized units and artillery. They may yet use them with great effectiveness. But of late a flaw in standard RF Battalion Battle Groups has become clear.... very few mobile infantry patrol flanks to protect the tanks from lurking infantry groups armed with manpads.

Also, large numbers of infantry companies may lurk behind any major blitz-thrust, ready to do partisan tactics. Do not draw hasty conclusions from such thrusts.

Much depends on the weather. If things remain soggy, either the Uks will get time to emplace new units... or RF must rush to use roads and solid ground in narrow channels. There will be a lot of artillery, so dig in, Ukrainians.

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* "Ras" means 'prince" in Amharic/Ethiopian and is a root word for the Jamaican Rastafarianism. In this case it doubles as a comment on Putin's self-image and his similarity to a past figure he has emulated and should, all the way. Dance your way through this educational song!

Tales of optimism - and concern - for planet Earth

First to all of you who participate in Contrary Brin's lively and very smart comment community...one of the oldest and best on the web... see a housekeeping comment below.

Ever since I wrote Earth, way back in 1989, I’ve long held we should emulate some of nature’s own processes and help her to ameliorate the harm we’ve done with our ignorance and adolescent greed -- including now the notion of a worldwide campaign to ‘plant a Trillion Trees.'  Does it count for my predictive tally that a Trillion Trees Campaign was later proposed in 2011? Or that the World Economic Forum in Davos endorsed it in 2020?

But let’s correlate that with something in the news about geoengineering. If it is acceptable to help the planet by planting billions of trees, how is tree planting any different inherently than proposed efforts to stir bottom sediments into fast ocean currents, thus fertilizing them and bringing alive some of the 70% of the oceans that are ‘deserts' almost barren of visible life?

This could exactly emulate how Mother Gaia creates the vast life-fecundity off the Grand Banks or Chile or South Africa, that both feeds hundreds of millions and pulls carbon from the air.

So far, there have been no experiments yet in bottom stirring – well after all, Earth is set in 2038. A cruder but apparently effective method that’s been tried with promising results has been to add iron dust to some currents, always with the result of stimulating bursts of phytoplankton. followed by increased fish populations. Alas, the other result is always howls of “arrogant geoengineering!” and “this distracts us from reducing carbon emissions!” (No, it does not. Nor have we ever seen ‘toxic blooms.')

The idea is at last being taken seriously. “Is ‘hacking’ the ocean a climate change solution? U.S. experts endorse research on carbon removal strategies.”

Now a new twist. Apparently, fresh calculations suggest that whale poop used to serve this function, before humanity darn near drove the great beasts extinct. (Want irony? Whales were saved - in the barest nick of time - by the arrival of fossil fuels, which ended commercial greed for whale oil.) When whale populations plummeted, so did phytoplankton and krill populations across vast regions.

“In 1990, the oceanographer John Martin proposed that the Southern Ocean is starved of iron, and that deliberately seeding its waters with the nutrient would allow phytoplankton to grow. The blooming plankton would soak up carbon dioxide, Martin argued, and cool the planet and slow the pace of global warming. Researchers have since tested this idea in 13 experiments, adding iron to small stretches of the Southern and Pacific Oceans and showing that plankton do indeed flourish in response.

“Such iron-fertilization experiments have typically been billed as acts of geo-engineering—deliberate attempts to alter Earth’s climate. But Savoca and his colleagues think that the same approach could be used for conservation. Adding iron to waters where krill and whales still exist could push the sputtering food cycle into higher gear, making it possible for whales to rebound at numbers closer to their historical highs. “We’d be re-wilding a barren land by plowing in compost, and the whole system would recuperate,” says one oceanographer.

Some of these ideas are explored in Hacking Planet Earth: How Geoengineering can help us reimagine the future, by Thomas M. Kostigen, which delves into the technologies that may help tackle climate change.

Though you could do worse than read Earth… and, of course, my sci fi about … whales.

Oh, speaking of Earth, in that novel, I speculated about different mineral forms of perovskite that make up most of the mantle below the crust and above the core. Perovskites are among the highest temperature superconductors, especially at high pressures. Now comes news of discovery (within the lattice of a diamond) of a new mineral form that’s nicknamed “Dave.” (Named for geophysicist Ho-kwang (Dave) Mao.)

== Climate Change ==

As climate ructions pour ever-more blatant pummelings upon us and Denialist cultists seek refuge in doomer incantations, notable is the detailed, sensible nerdiness of Bill Gates' book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The solutions we have and the breakthroughs we need (the audiobook version is read by Wil Wheaton.) The book is well organized, easy to follow, and lays out all the issues in a very clear way.

It's mostly about economics - for each different type of greenhouse gas emissions (and there are many), what is the cost of reducing those emissions, expressed in terms of the impact on an average consumer or family. Gates talks about the impact on transportation, agriculture, manufacturing, power generation and so on. He also summarizes what technological innovations are needed to bring the cost down.

But of course, almost all of our enlightenment problem solving systems are currently clogged by the great big, worldwide putsch to re-establish varied forms of feudalism.

== A changing climate ==

Micro-plastic fragments swirling in the atmosphere may be influencing the climate - scattering and absorbing sunlight. 

The American bumblebee has vanished from eight U.S. states - and could now qualify for protection under the Endangered Species Act.

UCSD researchers have identified a correlation between extreme heat in low income countries and increased incidence of stillbirths and preterm births. 

And.. rising waters: The volume of the downpour during one hour in Zhengzhou, which flooded subways and killed scores of people, exceeded anything in 5,000 years of recorded Chinese history. Hundreds were killed in Germany by rivers surging to levels not seen in 500 or even 1,000 years. And for the first time, temperatures hit 121 degrees Fahrenheit in the normally cool climes of Canada, while it’s snowing in Brazil. 

The western drought is unprecedented. The fit is hitting the shan. And in the southeastern US, which will experience the nation's guaranteed worst outcomes, from malaria to the worst loss of land to rising waters... denialism is becoming frantic. Open war vs. all fact professions. Plus frenzied "prepper-survivalist" notions of "If then end's a-comin' then bring it!"

Sure, it could lead to Holnism, (from The Postman.) But what's scariest is something I predicted back in the 1980s and 1990s... that all of this will lead to literal millennialism. A mania in the early 2030s around the supposed 2000th Easter. It will happen, so we better sane-up before that.

What can you do? Well some of you might consider: above and beyond mere politics… if you seriously want to help civilization be resilient against shocks the future might bring, consider (in the U.S.) taking training for CERT – your local Community Emergency Response Team. It’s a really interesting and fun 20 hour course given by your local fire department and you get cool green equipment and a badge! And once a decade maybe some light duties to help keep your family and neighbors safe. 

Then there is this detailed interview I gave about half a dozen ways that small investments could make us much more resilient... what we should have done... and can still do... to help our nations, civilization and families be more robust against the batterings of fate. 

== A twin Earth? ==

Earth has been digitized! A new virtual model of our planet - Digital Twin Earth - will use advanced AI algorithms and the latest data and images from earth-observation satellites to help researchers better understand the problems of climate change. This model will simulate the effects of natural, dynamic processes and human activities on the atmosphere, ice sheets, oceans, and ecosystems of earth.

Meanwhile... NASA's newest Landsat satellite has just sent back its first crystal-clear photos of planet Earth, showing our planet's changing landscapes, providing critical data to help us better understand climate change, and monitor threats from wildfires and coastal erosion.

Knowledge is power. One step toward climate accountability: Climate Trace compiles satellite observations to monitor global emissions from agricultural, manufacturing, transportation, and oil and gas extraction sectors. For instance, a snapshot of the CO2 emissions of the United States appears at right.

== A story of resources ==

An optimistic future is possible, ironically more than ever in these dolorous and insipidly pessimistic times, as solutions keep rising…. if only we can gather the collective and individual will to use them. As described in Peter Diamandis’s book Abundance: The Future is Better than you think. Take this very recent example from Peter’s newsletter:

“This past year, the world’s biggest jeweler Pandora announced it will cease to sell all mined diamonds (which are scarce and fraught with environmental and human rights abuses), and switch exclusively to selling lab-made diamonds, which can be abundant and low cost—produced from water, methane, and electricity.”

There are few oligarchic-monopolistic conspiracies more evil than the DeBeers diamond cartel. So this is potentially great news, brought to you by advancing technology.

Though he starts with the story of aluminum.

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Housekeeping note. I'll switch back to allowing anonymous comments for just a few days, to see if any of the regulars in our comment community were locked out, when I switched to requiring a Google sign in. If that requirement locked you out, this is your chance to speak up. But the spam bucket was empty, last I checked. So we're likely to make the change permanent.

New Years Report - fighting gloom in order to thrive

My friend Martin Rees — The British Astronomer Royal — has long offered insightful views upon not only the sciences, but also the dangers we face rushing into an uncertain future. His new book On the Future: Prospects for Humanity gives even-handed criticism of both cynical denialism and hand-wringing despair, leading you toward the one thing that might save us all and help our children thrive… clearheaded pragmatism, laced with the idealism to believe we can be better. Solutions exist, but they depend upon an openminded willingness to question assumptions and learn from one another.

  

== The Abundance Report ==

Indeed, the worst plague in the world is gloom. It infests large portions of the “left” and lobotomizes almost the entire “right,” undermining the confident,  can-do spirit that has propelled nearly all progress. Know this, only a people who are confident that they can change the world stand any chance of actually changing anything. And "can" only arises when you admit "we already have."

To that end, read an interview with Stephen Pinker about how we are surrounded by good news, leading not to complacency, but a spirit of “I think we can!”

“It’s no contradiction to say that we’re extending human life and there are threats: threats of climate change, threats of authoritarian politicians. You can appreciate the threats, worry about the threats, try to fight back against the threats at the same time that you appreciate the progress that we have made.

“I would say that it’s appreciating the progress that gives us the courage and conviction to try to strive for more progress. History tells us that attempts to make the world better tend to succeed. We’ll never achieve a utopia, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make things a little bit better.”

Want some anecdotal evidence?

Inspired in part by the “Tricorder XPrize, a new set of $1 test screens for the presence of a number of diseases like malaria, flu and dengue fever, various types of cancers, and genetic diseases will appreciably contribute to health. And Jimmy Carter's campaign to end the Guinea Worm parasite may reach completion this year..  

The Internet will soon be accessible from all areas of the planet, including rural locations with poor or no network connectivity. The FCC unanimously approved SpaceX’s ambitious plan to launch 7,518 satellites into low-Earth orbit. These satellites, along with 4,425 previously approved satellites, will serve as the backbone for the company’s proposed Starlink broadband network. These new SpaceX satellites will increase the number of active satellites six-fold in less than a decade. And my friends at ViaSat are taking an entirely different approach (massive geosynchronous sats) toward similar ends. Yes, they'll have more latency in voice coms, but most traffic is surfing and you'll never notice the difference. 

And yes, most of these links are brought to you by the Abundance Insider report from Peter Diamandis’s XPrize Foundation (I’m on the Advisory Council.) Get his book Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think! And realize that we have tons of hard work to do, to save the world… but good news is all over the place… suggesting we should be up to the task.

And now something cool. California-based startup Hoversurf is training one of its first customers, the Dubai Police Force, on the 2019 S3 Hoverbike. The vehicle, which can operate with or without a human pilot, weighs 253 lbs, costs $150,000, flies for up to 25 minutes, and can safely fly at an altitude of 16 ft.

== Oh, but the enemies of enlightenment abound ==

“Under the tenure of  Texas Republican Lamar Smith, the House of Representatives Science Committee has held hearing after hearing casting doubt on mainstream climate science, used its subpoena power to harass and intimidate climate scientists, entertained the conspiracy theory that sea level rise is caused by rocks falling into the ocean, and used its Twitter account to blast links to climate change-denying Breitbart articles. Smith, who is not a scientist, has used the veil of authority that chairmanship offers to pen articles imploring the public not to buy into the “hysteria over carbon dioxide” while railing against “climate alarmists” at pro-fossil fuel get-togethers. (He has also accepted hundreds of thousands in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry.)  In short, the House Science Committee has been a dark place for rational discourse on climate change. Sitting on it has been a lonely and frustrating experience for Bill Foster, Congress’s lone scientist (until last night).” - reports Maddie Stone in Gizmodo. These jibbering morons are a cancer on your children's future. Part of a campaign to discredit all fact-using professions. 

Incoming Committee Chair Texas Democrat Eddie Bernice Johnson promises relief  from this monstrous lobotomization of the world’s “greatest deliberative legislature.”   And maybe… after 2020?  A  rebirth for the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) banished by Newt Gingrich for occasionally daring (as faithful-neutral public servants) to say “um, sir, that’s not really true.”

But it’s a long road. The Denialist Cult keeps moving the goal posts. And one way they keep your confed neighbor nodding and hypnotized is by offering dollops of “science” that he learned in Junior High in incantations that let them neutralize any input from actual science. 

Take the fact that plants consume carbon dioxide in order to grow. That means (according to their latest capering incantation) that nature will flourish if we don’t interfere with coal barons, petro-princes and carbon lords raking in billions from their legacy-corrupt extraction rights!  Never mind that paleontology shows high-CO2 eras featured warm arctic zones… (yay? Ask the US Navy viz the Russians what each one thinks of that)… but also vastly bigger swathes of desert, across the globe.  

You think tundra zones with max one growing season will replace lost temperate zones that had two?  Not for the 10,000 years that it will take, to grow topsoil up there.  Fools.

== It gets worse ==

Oh, my, the depths of crazy have yet to be plumbed. Example: “Autohoaxers” are a movement that reflexively declares every significant event a hoax, sometimes just for argument’s sake. Kind of like Vernor Vinge’s fictional “Friends of Privacy,” who auto-generate more ersatz personas and fake items than can ever be refuted, hence making your “that wasn’t me!” denials seem plausible.

Read about this and other pyrotechnically loony modern manias now orbiting a growing *Flat-Earth Movement*. Yes you read that right. And this is just one caked, pimply crust-symptom of the disease being crammed on us by the spreading War Against Smart People. (Including every single fact-centered profession, from science, teaching and journalism to intel and military and FBI officers.)

One of you suggested “Tell the flat earthers to go to Wal Mart and get a goPro and order a weather balloon and GPS tracker. You don't have to build a rocket to see for yourself. If the Earth were flat, then you'd be able to see the Great Lakes, Atlantic and Pacific from 30 miles above Colorado."

Here’s another truly devastating one: “Soundly Proving the Curvature of the Earth at Lake Pontchartrain.”

Of course my own answer is: “How many people do you think can keep secret a conspiracy? At most fifty? Your premise is that ALL the smart people… hundreds of millions of us… are in on this globe-pushing cabal? Woof!"

Liberals are fools, if they think this is rooted in “economic decay of the white middle class.” That’s happened and needs addressing, as does the nastiest pustule on the right — racism. But those are lipstick on a pig.

Scratch the surface. This is all about an inherent American spite toward authorities or “elites.” We all think one elite or another is conniving against us. Liberals (rightfully) point at those who oppressed us across 99% of 6000 years… owner-feudal lords.

Those oligarchs - uniting in a world-mafia putsch - need a distraction to keep populist masses from recognizing them as the ancient enemy. They have a great one, leveraging and weaponizing hatred toward another elite… smart people who know stuff. And make no mistake, we are the ones confederates truly hate, for “looking down on them.”

Think about it. The knowledge elites are our immune system against errors of the past, like feudalism. And errors of the future, like climate change. They are the people who can see — and prevent — the machinations of those seeking a New Feudalism. (I portrayed this in EXISTENCE.) Hence there is a feral agenda behind the War on All Facts — removing the only obstacle standing in oligarchy’s way. 

And gleefully spitting gas on a fire, now Russian space officials talk about ‘investigating’ whether the Apollo landings actually happened. See a link below. Anything to keep us attacking each other. The chief failure mode of our brilliant enlightenment civilization is auto-immune disease.

== And so... back to saving the world ==

See the “Five Phases of  Climate Denialism.” In fact, you can often hear all five uttered during the same hour, at Fox, even though they are mutually contradictory. “Climate Change is a hoax!” and “Glaciers are advancing!” will be chanted – sometimes in the same hour as “It’s changing but no worries and humans didn’t cause it,” all the way to “It’s a calamity and we caused it, but that doesn’t disqualify our credibility; it just means it’s hopeless to try solving the problem! So leave our parasite moguls alone!”

Now “Trump Administration To Polluters: Earth Is Doomed, So Go Hog Wild.” Yes, one branch of the administration issued a 500 page report admitting what every fact-using or “deep state” professional knows, that human-generated greenhouse gases have us on course for a climate precipice of rising acid seas and catastrophically spreading deserts and vast waves of refugees. 

The monsters' conclusion? That nothing can be done to prevent this now, so why try? – is rightly ridiculed by the appalled-educated half of the nation. (Answer – “You who were wrong about every single statement and forecast up to now… why should we heed you any longer?”)

All of this is deliberate. There is no unified conservative position on anything anymore. Not deficits, or trade, or morality… nor old anchor-standards like divorce or gambling or sexual deviancy or “family values.” Certainly not regarding the health of flat-fair-open entrepreneurial market capitalism. What we have now instead are talking points aimed at various constituencies with one purpose, to keep enough of them inside the fraying Big Tent  for one more election.

== Links galore ==

One of you (Anthony T.) offered up a raft of NYT articles… “on topics Brin has written about.”  A bunch of riffs on our interesting times.

American Capitalism isn't working

News Networks Fall Short on Climate Story as Dolphins Die on beach

The race to dam rivers in the Himalayas

NASA's Osiris-Rex Arrives at Asteroid Bennu after a two-year journey

A treatment for Sickle Cell disease in Africa

The Insect Apocalypse is Here: What does it mean for life on earth?