A Future Look at Today

 
In the last 10,000 years there has been three ages of humanity.  The first age was the Agricultural Age which began around 8,000 B.C. when humanity stopped be nomadic and began to put down roots, literally.  The advent of agriculture allowed humanity to start to build a social fabric that was placed based and that created values around land and the process of growing food. 

Last week I wrote about an incredible energy conference hosted by the Foundation for the Future.  As one of a select few invited to observe and participate in the conference, I had the incredible experience to listen to and meet with 15 of the top thinkers and scientists in the world today on the subject of the future of energy.  The brilliance of both the participants and the level of discussion were so great that I decided that it must be shared with the readership of this blog.  A number of the participants agreed to share their views and research with me.  This then is the first of several columns that will give you insight into our

 
Last week I had the great good fortune to attend a three day energy conference attended by some of the world’s greatest energy experts.  Thanks to the good graces of the Foundation for the Future I was invited to attend the conference as an observer.  The Foundation invited 15 of the foremost physicists and energy experts in the world to come together for three days of presentations and discussions on the future of energy.  An additional 15 or so people were invited to attend as observers. 

 
In the prior post I gave a general definition and overview of peak oil for those that have yet to track this development.  Until recently, the brightest minds unencumbered by vested oil interests have strongly suggested, and with good documentation, that the world could well run out of extractable petroleum sometime around the mid twenty-first century.

 
Peak oil is loosely defined at the point in time when half of all the oil reserves in the earth have been extracted and burned.  This means that we are half way through the oil consumption cycle and move into extracting the remaining 50%.

 
One of the very first posts I made on a  blog over a year ago was “Praise the Lord, not Petroleum”.  It discussed the very public and high profile actions a significant number of Evangelical Christian organizations were taking to fight global warming.  Their underlying argument is simple: if the Earth, and all living things are god’s creation, we should not destroy it and them with global warming.

 
A few years ago I started the process of buying a second home in a warm part of the United States.  Living in Chicago, I wanted to find a place that, through the years would be where I would spend an increasing amount of time during the winter months.  The first step in this process was looking at the various real estate web sites that displayed listings in the Southwest and in Florida, where the weather usually stays above freezing.

[Note to scientific blogging readers:  I posted the following column on my other blog, www.evolutionshift.com in the first week of 2007. Since I write here under Future Thought under the category Culture, I thought it appropriate that I should post these predictions.  When people hear that I am a future thinker or futurist they always ask me for predictions.
I have made absolutely no changes to this column and am posting it exactly as I posted it in early January.  So far these predictions seem to have some accuracy, but the real test is to read this column in December and call it out either way.]
 

It was great to meet with a number of the top executives at GM prior to the Chicago Auto Show to learn about the Chevrolet Volt, the company commitment to developing battery technology and to really find out how committed this company is and will be in the area of cleaner automobiles.  However there is one interview that truly stands out that needs to be shared.

 
[Note to readers: I was one of a select few bloggers to be invited by General Motors to a behind the scenes opportunity at the current Chicago Auto Show to meet and interview top management.  As far as GM knew or I could discern, they were the only major auto company to reach out to the blogosphere and they should be given credit for that.  What follows in this and a subsequent post or two are some highlights, headlines and ruminations from this day long experience.  Of course my focus was and is on what I write about here: alternative energy, and new advanced technology that might change our lives in the years ahead.

Nanotechnology is one of the ‘next big things’ in our future.  People have elevated it to a level of near worship as the way to solve, and in some cases revolutionize a number of areas of human life.  It certainly has that potential, but nanotechnology will take us into uncharted areas and we must be cognizant of both benefits and potential liabilities.  .

 
In January, I spent two weeks attending the world’s largest consumer technology convention and a much smaller but very important annual television convention.  This column is to give you an idea of what will new cutting edge gadgets will soon be available and to also suggest ways they will affect how you consume media and access information.