The Futurist

An Inconvenient Truth

As you may have heard by now, in 2007, China is set to surpass the US in the emission of greenhouse gases.  This has many implications for the concept of environmentalism, and for the geopolitical landscape.

China takes 4.3 times as much energy as the US to produce each dollar of GDP.  Thus, China, with an economy less than a fourth the size of the US, already emits more.  It is true that China's per capita emissions are much lower than the US due to China's much greater population.  However, the US is not the highest in per capita emissions either.  Small nations like Canada and Norway top that list. 

Now consider the implications of this for the near future.  By 2012, China's emissions will be a clear 20% higher than the US, which is a delta too large to ignore.  The environmental movement has some people (like Thomas Friedman) who genuinely care about reducing pollution.  However, a large subset are merely anti-US, anti-capitalism radicals who seek to mask their agenda within the altruism of environmental concerns.  A beloved non-Western, undemocratic nation being a bigger polluter than the US is simply too inconvenient of a reality for their agenda.  This will split the environmental group into two opposing factions - those who truly seek to curb emissions worldwide, and those who are merely driven by anti-Americanism and anti-capitalism.  This civil war will be interesting, to say the least, and the purging of the phonies could just be the best thing to happen to the environmental movement, making it palatable enough for greater participation from mainstream people. 

Furthermore, this is an example of point 10) in my essay on Why the US Will Still be the Only Superpower in 2030.  China is not prepared for the burdens of being the primary recipient for blame on a major global issue.  As the heat on the US reduces at China's expense, China will find that the upper rungs on the ladder to superpowerdom bring the attachment of heavy weights that make each subsequent rung increasingly difficult to scale.  Getting to the top is just not as easy as it may seem, as China will continue to discover.

Liquid Mirrors May Boost Future Telescopes

On September 28, 2006, I made the case that telescopic power is indeed an accelerating technology, set to improve at an estimated rate of 26% a year for the next 30 years.  I believe that increasingly more powerful telescopes will ensure that we discover the first genuinely Earth-like planet in another star system by 2011, and that by 2025, we will have discovered thousands of such planets. 

In support of this thesis of accelerating telescope improvement, I had to bring attention to one particular prospective technology that greatly increases the chances of this predicted rate of improvement holding true : Liquid mirrors that could at some point replace glass in the largest telescopes (from MIT Technology Review). 

The mirror is a pool of salt-based liquids that only freeze at very lower temperatures, coated with a silver film.  While practical usage is at least 20 years away, the details reveal a technology that is brilliantly simple, yet tantalizingly capable of addressing almost all of the problems facing the construction of giant telescopes.  Glass mirrors are exceedingly difficult to scale to larger sizes, and even the most minor defect can render a mirror useless.  Reflective liquid, by contrast, can be scaled up almost indefinitely, limited only by the perimeter of the enclosure it is placed in.  External blows that would crack or scratch a glass mirror would have no effect on a liquid that could quickly return to the original shape.

I don't expect updates on this technology in the near future, but the next logical step would be for a smaller telescope to be demonstrated to use this technology.  If that succeeds, the ultimate goal would be, by 2030, a massive telescope more than 200 meters in diameter placed on the Moon, where the sky is free of atmospheric distortions, and the ground is free of tiny seismic shaking.  This would enable us to observe Earth-like planets at a distance of up to 100 light years, as well as observe individual stars near the center of the Milky Way galaxy (30,000 light years away). 

Related :

Are You Acceleration Aware?

Finding Earth-like Planets Will Soon be Possible

"Mr. Gorbachev, Tear Down This Wall."

It was 20 years ago today, on June 12, 1987, that President Ronald Reagan delivered his famous speech at the Berlin Wall.  Audio highlights are available on YouTube over here. 

In studying this speech, the timing and political tactics of it, particularly when viewed in historical context, are extraordinary.  Reagan could have delivered this speech at any time, but chose to do it only after 6.5 years in office.  Perhaps it is just a coincidence, but perhaps Reagan saw signs that by 1987 the USSR's economy was teetering on the precipice of a downfall.  Perhaps Reagan saw in Mikhail Gorbachev the first Soviet leader who truly wanted the USSR to reform. It was thus the ideal time to remind the world, now in an era of cable television, that the USSR was not willing to let East Berliners interact with the Western world.  It was the ideal time to demonstrate that communism could not attract people to it by their own free will.  It was the ideal time to gain a psychological monopoly on the universal concepts of aspiration and hope, in a speech audible on the other side of the wall.  If Gorbachev was truly a reformer, there was only one way to indisputably prove it. 

But did a mere speech really have such an effect on a powerful empire?  Just because the Berlin Wall fell just 2 years later, and the USSR itself peacefully dissolved just 4 years later, does not mean the speech was anything more than well-timed and inspiring.  The trend of nations migrating towards democracy was evident long before Reagan became President.  Yet consider that in just 20 years, the number of genuine democracies in the world has risen from under 60 in 1987 to 90 today.  The number of unfree regimes has thus dropped correspondingly. 

   

In particular, it is the nations of Eastern Europe that transformed the most in the years following Reagan's speech.  Now, almost all the nations of Eastern Europe, including former Soviet states, are full democracies.  This would have been unthinkable just 20 short years ago, ensuring that this speech become a symbol of the watershed moment when cracks in the Soviet Union became just too numerous to cover up. 

Lastly, Reagan's speech contains lessons that modern leaders, particularly George W. Bush, would do well to learn.  The public is fickle, and cannot be expected to put in the effort to become fully informed about the complex geopolitical issues that affect their societies.  A leader's job is to package an ideology into simple, attractive terms that capture the public's basic aspirations.  This use of soft power should never be underestimated.  George W. Bush could do just as much to overcome rogue states than any military expenditure would achieve, by simply going to South Korea, getting as close to the DMZ as he can, and invoking Ronald Reagan :

General Secretary Kim Jong-Il, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for North Korea and Eastern Asia, if you seek assistance from America, come here to this border.  General Secretary Kim Jong-Il, open this border.  General Secretary Kim Jong-Il, tear down this demilitarized zone!

While Kim Jong-Il is an evil psychopath, and certainly should not be compared to Mikhail Gorbachev at any level, this would still bring the spotlight of the world on the oppression and suffering in North Korea, and force Kim Jong-Il to do something to try and save face, which means he either has to make a small concession to the winds of freedom, or react negatively and look even worse.  Either way, the onus squarely is placed on him.

I believe this template has a role to play once again. 

The Semantic Web

The World Wide Web, after just 12 years in mainstream use, has become an infrastructure accessed by hundreds of millions of people every day, and the medium through which trillions of dollars a year are transacted.  In this short period, the Web has already been through a boom, a crippling bust, and a renewal to full grandeur in the modern era of 'Web 2.0'.

But imagine, if you could, a Web in which web sites are not just readable in human languages, but in which information is understandable by software to the extent that computers themselves would be able to perform the task of sharing and combining information.  In other words, a Web in which machines can interpret the Web more readily, in order to make it more useful for humans.  This vision for a future Internet is known as the Semantic Web. 

Why is this useful?  Suppose that scientific research papers were published in a Semantic Web language that enabled their content to be integrated with other research publications across the world, making research collaboration vastly more efficient.  For example, a scientist running an experiment can publish his data in Semantic format, and another scientist not acquainted with the first one could search for the data and build off of it in real time.  Tim Berners-Lee, as far back as 2001, said that this "will likely profoundly change the very nature of how scientific knowledge is produced and shared, in ways that we can now barely imagine." 

Some are already referring to the Semantic Web as 'Web 3.0'.  This type of labeling is a reliable litmus test of a technology falling into the clutches of emotional hype, and thus caution is warranted in assessing the true impact of it.  I believe that the true impact of the Semantic Web will not manifest itself until 2012 or later.  Nonetheless, the Semantic Web could do for scientific research what email did for postal correspondence and what MapQuest did for finding directions - eliminate almost all of the time wasted in the exchange of information.