For Douglas’s sake, don’t forget your towel on Friday! 5/25/12 is not just the annual Towel Day to honor the genius of Douglas Adams, but Super Towel Day (5 + 25 + 12 = 42!!!!) A day that won’t recur for another … century, when
the cosmic solution to life, the universe, and everything just may be
revealed.
Why a towel? It is, after all …. “the massively useful thing
an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value
– you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold
moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble sanded
beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep
under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of
Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth;
wet it for use in hand-to-hand combat; wrap it round your head to ward
off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast
of Traal (a mindbogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t
see it, it can’t see you – daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can
wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry
yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough. Most
importantly, a towel has immense psychological value…”
So long Douglas,
and thanks for all the fish…
==And on to science...==
Huzzah for Elon and his team at SpaceX for a successful liftoff with their Falcon 9 rocket, followed by the Dragon capsule docking with the International Space Station --the first hook-up with a commercial spacecraft. It's a new era with state and
enterprise, both being intelligent and forward-looking on this venture.
Last month, I was privileged to visit the magnificent SpaceX facility near Los Angeles, where Elon showed me the Dragon capsule.
Next step: reliably delivering vital cargo to the ISS. SpaceX has
long-range plans to use Dragon as the basis for a crewed capsule to take
astronauts to the space station, and eventually to Mars. Onward and
upward...
And now we know something about BlueOrigin,
a private entrepreneurial project by Amazon's Jeff Bezos, which appears
to be a capsule whose lifting body shape will allow a great deal of
cross-range maneuvering while hurtling at hypersonic speeds. Also, ATK Inc
of Utah has a candidate system for lifting capsules to Low Earth Orbit,
and there are others, as well! Privatizing this stuff was way
overdue.
==Trending toward the Future==
I'm currently at the Annual Future in Review... or FiRe
... conference in Laguna Beach, California, a gathering of tech
entrepreneurs and venture folk and such, where I am the regular/resident
futurist scifi-guy. I'll be helping run the "CTO Challenge." This
year's topic - developing a plan to help all consumers use tech to
better know what they are eating -- part of the 'quantified self movement.' Also I will interview famed and sagacious author Kim Stanley Robinson, whose novel, 2312, has just been released.
How to identify the trends and ideas that will endure, leading to radical change, re-defining the world of tomorrow? WIRED
offers valid pointers: look for cross-pollinating ideas that span
disciplines; surf the exponentials; look for virtuous cycles; and plan
on increasing levels of openness and transparency. Okay, I'll steer you
to these tricks, since WIRED blabbed about them. But still, they barely scratched my own, personal top ten Secrets of Master Prognosticators!
Here's one forward-looking concept... developing space-age travel here on Earth. ET3
-- Evacuated Tube Transport Technologies -- plans to go with an idea
many of us discussed in the 1980s... riding maglev capsules in airless,
friction free tubes at high speed (and low energy cost) at very high
speed... say New York to Beijing in 2 hours. Worth a web visit just to
see the cool illustrations. And someday....
A $1 billion ultra high-tech city is about to be built – for a population of zero! CITE, the Center for Innovation, Testing and Evaluation
will be a testing ground for intelligent traffic systems, self driving
vehicles, green energy, resource recycling, smart grid networks, etc – a
laboratory for emerging technologies from both public and private
sectors. (No one to complain when electricity or water is shut off.)
The project will mimic a mid-sized city of 35,000, and will cover about
15 square miles. Location in southeast New Mexico. They’ll need security
to keep the people out…
Honda has revealed plans for a rolling stool it now calls the Uni-Cub which users steer by the seat of their pants. Roll-over Segway!
Was Steve Jobs planning to build an “iCar”? Huh! In TINKERERS I showed a billboard: NEW FOR 2024, THE HONDA/APPLE iCAR!
And
now for something completely different... algae farming! It’s a big
deal (and I portray it in my new novel.) At long last, the glimmers and
tentative hopes are apparently scaling up, led by members of the Mars
family (yes, the candy makers) who have developed processes to take
sewage from farms and cities, combine it from CO2 from factories, mix it
under copious free sunlight, and put out oxygen and “green gold.” I’ll
be meeting Heliae's CEO at this week’s “Future in Review" conference.
==The Technology of Looking downward==
Some call me a "transparency radical" because I push the notion that
increased levels of light are generally likely to benefit us all, rather
than harm us. At least, light nourishes our science, democracy,
markets and individual ability to hold the mighty accountable. But I am
no radical. The Transparent Society discusses legitimate boundaries
and exceptions. Want to see radicals? Have a glimpse at the "Transparency Grenade!"
Toss it into a space and it collects and re-transmits detected network
traffic and audio. Deliberately provocatively made to resemble a Soviet
grenade. As art? cool! As a practical suggestion? Not so much...
I recently participated with many scholars in Phase 2 of the Drones At Home
project -- a 2-day conference organized by the gallery@calit2 and the
Center for Research in Computing and the Arts, under Professor Sheldon
Brown. There were panels, screenings, and art openings, including
presentations by Alex Rivera, the creator of the wonderful little sci fi
film SLEEP DEALER and a brilliant one-hour, one-man performance play, Unmanned, about the rise of drones and cyborgism in modern life, by Jordan Crandall.
And while we're on the subject, see this: How killer drones are changing the way we conduct war.The
Pentagon maintains a fleet of 19,000 drones, for aerial surveillance
and reconnaissance, as well as targeted strikes, killing at least 3000
individuals classified as terrorists -- as well as 800 civilians,
according to human rights groups.
NASA's Dawn mission scientists have released a video
depicting the satellite's fly-over of the distant asteroid, Vesta, a
"proto-planet" in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
==Cool Stuff==
Always
been a big fan of "powers of ten" style zoom-in and zoom-out graphics
and films that bring home the incredible ranges of scale that we must
deal with, in our puny, brittle minds. Now see the latest, a super-cool
slide-able illustration that really brings it home. Dizzyingly fun: An interactive scale of the universe that takes youfrom a hydrogen atom to a cell to a human to a star to our galaxy, local super-clusters and beyond. Explore!
Also, take a look at the terrific Preview-Trailer created by Patrick Farley for Existence.
