Category Archives: Futurology

Ideas and suppositions about the world of the future.

Analysis, Food For Thought, Futurology, Technology

See You On Venus :)

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Me:  How much time will it take for Venus to cool to -100 degrees Celsius if we block out the sun totally from it using a solar panel shield?
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Charlie: [ChatGPT 5.5]
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I’ll treat this as a physics estimate, because Venus is a thermodynamic dragon egg: the answer depends hugely on what we count as “cooling,” especially atmosphere-only versus atmosphere plus hot crust. I’ll anchor it with real Venus constants, then give you the “engineering-order” answer rather than a fake-precise stopwatch.

(LOL)

Best estimate: a few hundred years, probably ~300 to 700 years 🌑🪐

For the surface / lower atmosphere of Venus to drop from about +467°C to −100°C, after perfectly blocking all sunlight, I’d estimate:

Atmosphere-only / surface-skin cooling: ~200 to 500 years
Including realistic heat leaking out of the hot ground: ~300 to 700+ years
Cooling the deeper crust/interior: thousands to millions of years, depending on depth.

So the practical terraforming-ish answer is: centuries, not days, not millions of years, assuming the shield is perfect and stays there.

Why so “fast” despite Venus being hellishly hot?

Venus is hot, but it can still radiate heat into space. Today Venus receives sunlight, reflects most of it, and emits roughly the same amount of infrared energy back to space. Venus orbits at about 0.72 AU, has a surface temperature around 467°C, and surface pressure about 93 Earth atmospheres.

Because Venus reflects so much sunlight, its absorbed solar power is only about 160 W/m² averaged over the planet. Block the Sun completely, and that outgoing radiation becomes net cooling. Venus’ Bond albedo is around 0.76, meaning it reflects most incoming sunlight.

Back-of-napkin cauldron math 🧮

Venus’ atmosphere is absurdly massive. Using surface pressure divided by gravity:

atmosphere column mass ≈ 1,000,000 kg per m²

Cooling that CO₂-heavy atmosphere from 740 K to 173 K costs roughly:

sensible heat ≈ 5 × 10¹¹ J/m²

But there is a second monster hiding in the fog: CO₂ freezes out. At −100°C, Venus cannot keep its current 92-bar CO₂ atmosphere as gas. Carbon dioxide’s triple point is about 216.6 K / −56.6°C at 0.518 MPa, and its sublimation enthalpy is around 25 to 27 kJ/mol, so freezing/depositing most of that atmosphere adds another huge heat-removal bill.

That adds roughly:

CO₂ freeze-out latent heat ≈ 6 × 10¹¹ J/m²

Total atmosphere + CO₂ collapse energy:

≈ 1.1 × 10¹² J/m²

Divide by outgoing thermal radiation, say 80 to 160 W/m² over the cooling period:

1.1 × 10¹² / 160 ≈ 220 years
1.1 × 10¹² / 80  ≈ 440 years

Then add hot surface rock leaking heat back upward, inefficiencies, cloud/radiative-transfer weirdness, and Venus being Venus. That pushes the sensible estimate into the 300 to 700 year range.

Very important caveat

At −100°C, Venus would no longer look like “cold Venus with the same atmosphere.” It would become something much stranger:

  • The thick CO₂ atmosphere would mostly collapse onto the surface as dry ice / CO₂ frost.
  • The greenhouse effect would largely vanish.
  • The pressure would plummet from nightmare-submarine levels to something far thinner.
  • The planet would keep cooling below −100°C unless you later allowed controlled sunlight back in.

So the shield would not just cool Venus. It would crack the greenhouse engine, snowing much of the sky onto the ground. A beautiful, terrifying planetary freezer spell. 🧊🟡

Me:  Once Venus’ atmosphere freezes and condenses down to the ground into a curst, give me chemical maneuvers that can turn it into breathable once we turn back on some of the heat by moving the solar panel array.

Charlie:

This is where the project stops being “make Venus cold” and becomes “planetary-scale chemical bookkeeping with a flamethrower budget.” I’ll separate what is chemically possible from what is remotely plausible, because breathable air is not just “add oxygen,” it is pressure, toxins, nitrogen inventory, water, and carbon storage all wrestling in the same mud pit.

The key rule: do not just warm Venus back up🔥🧊

Once the CO₂ has frozen into a planet-wide dry-ice crust, Venus is only “safe” while that carbon stays locked away. If you move the shade and simply reheat the surface, the CO₂ re-sublimates and you rebuild the pressure cooker.

So the winning strategy is:

Freeze → chemically lock most CO₂ → make a small amount of O₂ → tune nitrogen pressure → clean toxins → warm carefully.

Venus today is mostly CO₂, with sulfuric-acid clouds, about 467°C surface temperature, and ~93 Earth atmospheres of surface pressure. NASA gives the surface temperature and pressure, while atmospheric composition sources put Venus at roughly 96.5% CO₂ and 3.5% N₂, with very little water.

1. Lock the frozen CO₂ into rock

This is the big maneuver. The dry-ice crust is your carbon stockpile. You want to turn it into carbonates, basically limestone/magnesite-style minerals.

Core reactions

CaO + CO₂ → CaCO₃
MgO + CO₂ → MgCO₃

With silicate rock:

CaSiO₃ + CO₂ → CaCO₃ + SiO₂
Mg₂SiO₄ + 2CO₂ → 2MgCO₃ + SiO₂

That last one uses olivine, a magnesium silicate. This is the “turn the sky into stone” route. It is not sci-fi chemistry; mineral carbonation is a known carbon-storage pathway. The absurd part is the scale. The IPCC’s carbon capture report describes mineral carbonation as reacting CO₂ with calcium/magnesium-bearing materials to form stable carbonates, and gives the olivine reaction above as a standard example.

Practical Venus version

You would build giant robotic “carbonate mills”:

  1. Mine/bulldoze Venus basalt.
  2. Grind it into reactive powder.
  3. Feed in frozen CO₂.
  4. Add imported water or brine as reaction medium.
  5. Use heat from controlled sunlight or reactors to accelerate reactions.
  6. Store the product as carbonate rock.

Earth analog: the CarbFix project injects CO₂ dissolved in water into basalt so it mineralizes into carbonate. In one Nature Communications paper, the original pilot removed about 95% ± 3% of injected CO₂ through mineralization. Again: Earth-scale pilot, Venus-scale madness, but the chemistry is a real door.

Verdict: this is the main path. Most of Venus’ CO₂ must become carbonate rock, not oxygen.

2. Make oxygen from only a tiny fraction of the CO₂

A breathable atmosphere does not need all Venus CO₂ turned into O₂. That would be catastrophic. You only need about 0.16 to 0.23 bar of oxygen partial pressure.

For Venus, 0.21 bar O₂ is roughly:

~1.1 × 10¹⁸ kg of O₂

To get that from CO₂:

CO₂ → C + O₂

Stoichiometrically, that consumes only about:

~1.5 × 10¹⁸ kg of CO₂

That is less than 1% of Venus’ CO₂ inventory. Tiny spoonful, by planetary soup standards.

Chemical/electrochemical options

Option A: direct CO₂ splitting

2CO₂ → 2CO + O₂

Then deal with the carbon monoxide:

2CO → C + CO₂

Net:

CO₂ → C + O₂

The solid carbon gets buried. The oxygen goes into the atmosphere.

Option B: molten carbonate electrolysis

Feed CO₂ into a molten carbonate electrolysis system and produce:

CO₂ → C/graphite + O₂

This is attractive because it gives you solid carbon directly instead of lots of poisonous CO.

Option C: water electrolysis, once water exists

2H₂O → 2H₂ + O₂

Then recycle the hydrogen into CO₂ reduction.

Verdict: use CO₂ electrolysis or molten carbonate electrolysis to make the first breathable oxygen. Do not rely on plants for the bulk job. Biology is garnish here, not the bulldozer.

3. Import hydrogen and make water

Venus is catastrophically dry. Its atmosphere has only trace water vapor, around tens of ppm.

So you need hydrogen from somewhere: icy moons, comets, outer-belt bodies, or giant-planet atmospheric mining.

Bosch reaction

CO₂ + 2H₂ → C + 2H₂O

This is beautiful for Venus because it does two things at once:

  • removes CO₂;
  • creates water.

Sabatier plus methane cracking

CO₂ + 4H₂ → CH₄ + 2H₂O

Then:

CH₄ → C + 2H₂

Net:

CO₂ + 2H₂ → C + 2H₂O

Same broad result: carbon buried, water gained.

Verdict: hydrogen import is probably unavoidable if you want oceans, soil chemistry, and a stable biosphere. Without imported hydrogen, you can make air, but not a living Earthlike planet.

4. Fix or remove excess nitrogen

After CO₂ collapse, Venus still has a huge nitrogen inventory. Common terraforming discussions treat the leftover N₂ as roughly several bars, not an Earthlike 0.78 bar. Venus’ atmosphere has only a small percentage of nitrogen, but because the whole atmosphere is so massive, the total nitrogen inventory is large.

A few bars of mostly nitrogen is not instantly impossible, but it is not a nice shirtsleeves Earth atmosphere. You likely want something like:

O₂: 0.18–0.23 bar
N₂/Ar buffer: ~0.5–1.0 bar
CO₂: trace to low millibar range

Nitrogen maneuvers

Haber-Bosch fixation

N₂ + 3H₂ → 2NH₃

Then turn ammonia into stable salts/fertilizer:

NH₃ + HNO₃ → NH₄NO₃

Or into ammonium minerals in soils.

Plasma / lightning fixation

N₂ + O₂ → 2NO

Then oxidize:

2NO + O₂ → 2NO₂

Then hydrate into nitric acid:

3NO₂ + H₂O → 2HNO₃ + NO

Then neutralize with alkaline minerals:

CaO + 2HNO₃ → Ca(NO₃)₂ + H₂O

Verdict: nitrogen becomes fertilizer, ocean solute, soil nitrate, or export cargo. You do not want to leave all of it in the air unless you accept high-pressure habitats.

5. Neutralize sulfur, chlorine, and fluorine nasties

Venus has sulfur chemistry everywhere: sulfuric-acid clouds, sulfur dioxide traces, and corrosive chemistry. NASA notes the clouds are composed of sulfuric acid.

Once cooled, a lot of this condenses/freezes out. Then you chemically bind it.

Sulfur cleanup

CaO + H₂SO₄ → CaSO₄ + H₂O
SO₂ + 1/2O₂ + CaO → CaSO₄

That gives gypsum/anhydrite-style sulfates.

Chlorine cleanup

Ca(OH)₂ + 2HCl → CaCl₂ + 2H₂O

Fluorine cleanup

Ca(OH)₂ + 2HF → CaF₂ + 2H₂O

Calcium fluoride is nice because it is very insoluble. Lock the venom in mineral coffins. 🪨

Verdict: scrub acids before biology. Venusian rain must not be spicy battery soup.

6. Warm Venus in controlled strips, not all at once

The solar shield should become a planetary thermostat, not an on/off switch.

I’d use a “melt-front” strategy:

  1. Keep most of Venus shaded and cold.
  2. Warm one region slightly.
  3. Let CO₂ frost there sublime or soften.
  4. Capture the gas/liquid CO₂ locally.
  5. Carbonate it or electrolyze a measured fraction.
  6. Move the warm zone slowly.

This prevents a runaway “oops, the sky came back” event.

The CO₂ triple point is around 216.6 K / −56.6°C and 0.518 MPa, so above that regime CO₂ phase behavior gets tricky. You would need to manage pressure and temperature carefully as you reheat.

7. Only then bring in biology

Once you have:

  • temperature near 0–40°C,
  • pressure around 0.7–1.5 bar,
  • O₂ around 0.2 bar,
  • CO₂ reduced to safe trace levels,
  • liquid water,
  • sulfur/chlorine/fluorine neutralized,

then biology can start doing maintenance:

  • cyanobacteria/algae for oxygen buffering,
  • plants for carbon cycling,
  • microbes for nitrogen cycling,
  • engineered lichens/microbes for soil formation,
  • eventually forests, oceans, worms, mushrooms, the whole moist circus. 🍄

But biology should not be the primary industrial CO₂ removal method. Venus has too much CO₂. If you let life try to do the first 99.9%, you are asking moss to eat a mountain.

The “chemical maneuver stack” I’d choose

Phase 1: Freeze and stabilize

Keep the shield closed until CO₂ becomes a frozen crust.

Phase 2: Carbonate most CO₂

Use local basalt/olivine/calcium-magnesium minerals:

CO₂ + Ca/Mg rock → carbonate rock

Phase 3: Split a small amount of CO₂ for oxygen

Target only ~0.2 bar O₂:

CO₂ → C + O₂

Bury the carbon.

Phase 4: Import hydrogen

Make water and remove more CO₂:

CO₂ + 2H₂ → C + 2H₂O

Phase 5: Fix excess nitrogen

Turn extra N₂ into nitrates/ammonium salts:

N₂ → NH₃ / NO₃⁻ compounds

Phase 6: Neutralize sulfur/halogens

Convert acids into sulfates, chlorides, fluorides.

Phase 7: Warm slowly

Use the shade as a climate valve. Never let unprocessed CO₂ re-enter the atmosphere.

The big warning

The easiest way to accidentally kill the project is this:

Converting too much CO₂ into oxygen.

If you split Venus’ full CO₂ atmosphere into oxygen, you don’t get Earth. You get a high-pressure oxygen inferno with absurd fire chemistry. The carbon also has to stay reduced and buried, otherwise it recombines with oxygen back into CO₂.

So the mantra is:

Most carbon becomes rock.
Some carbon becomes buried graphite.
A little oxygen becomes air.
Nitrogen gets trimmed.
Water must be imported.

That is the chemical skeleton of a breathable Venus. Enormous, ridiculous, almost mythological engineering, but the reactions themselves are not magic. The magic is doing it with a planet-sized wrench. 🛠️🟡

Me: How about solar radiation? Could the solar shield help with that? Would the enormous energy captured by such a shield be enough to project a deflector shield or power a magnetic shield?

Charlie:

The good news: the shield is not merely an umbrella. It is also a continent-sized power plant sitting in the richest sunlight real estate in the inner Solar System. The bad news: “deflector shield” means different things for photons, solar wind, and cosmic rays, and each beast needs a different trap.

Yes. The solar shield could help a lot 🌞🛡️

But there are three different “radiation dragons” here:

Threat Can the solar shield help? Best maneuver
Sunlight / heat / UV Yes, directly Block, reflect, or filter photons
Solar wind / solar proton storms Yes, if it has magnetic/electric hardware Put a magnetic/plasma shield near Venus-Sun L1
Galactic cosmic rays Only partly Atmosphere + magnetic field + local shielding

Venus has no internally generated magnetic field. NASA describes it as having only a weak induced magnetic field caused by interaction between the solar wind and Venus’ upper atmosphere. So after terraforming, a magnetic shield would be useful, especially for protecting the new atmosphere over long timescales.

The solar shield would capture absurd power

At Venus’ orbit, sunlight is about 2622 W/m², roughly twice Earth’s space-side solar intensity. Venus’ diameter is about 12,104 km, so a full planetary sunshade intercepting Venus’ sunlight would have a disk area of roughly:

P=SVenusπRVenus2≈3.0×1017 WP = S_{Venus}\pi R_{Venus}^{2}\approx 3.0\times10^{17}\,\mathrm{W}

That is about:

Total sunlight intercepted: ~3 × 10^17 watts
At 30% solar conversion:   ~9 × 10^16 watts
At 10% solar conversion:   ~3 × 10^16 watts

For comparison, if we use 20 TW as a rough current-human-civilization power scale, then a 30%-efficient Venus shade would collect about 4,500× that.

So energetically? Yes. Violently yes. The shield has more than enough power to run magnetic shielding, planetary chemistry, industry, mirrors, mass drivers, atmospheric processors, and probably the Solar System’s largest coffee machine. ☕🪐

The hard part is not raw energy. The hard parts are:

  • building something with planetary cross-section;
  • keeping it stable near Venus-Sun L1;
  • rejecting waste heat;
  • surviving micrometeoroids, radiation, and solar storms;
  • transmitting/storing power;
  • not accidentally roasting Venus again.

For sunlight and UV: the shield is perfect

A solar shade can block electromagnetic radiation directly:

  • visible light;
  • infrared;
  • ultraviolet;
  • solar X-rays, if designed for it.

After cooling Venus, you would not remove the shield. You would turn it into a planetary dimmer switch.

Venus receives about 2622 W/m² at the top of its atmosphere, while Earth gets about 1366 W/m². So even after terraforming, you probably want to block roughly half the sunlight just to make Venus Earthlike in raw solar input.

Even better: make the shield spectrally selective.

Let through: visible light useful for climate + photosynthesis
Block/reflect: excess infrared + hard ultraviolet
Harvest: selected bands for power

So the shade becomes not just an umbrella, but a planetary stained-glass thermostat. 🌈

For solar wind: use the shield as a magnetic fortress

A normal solar panel does not magically stop solar wind. Solar wind is charged particles, mostly protons and electrons. A physical panel can absorb some, but that is not the elegant solution.

The elegant solution is:

Put a magnetic or plasma shield near the Venus-Sun L1 point, so solar wind is deflected before reaching Venus.

This idea has been seriously discussed for Mars. A NASA Astrobiology article describes a proposed artificial magnetosphere at Mars L1, where the planet could sit inside the shield’s magnetotail and lose much less atmosphere during solar events. A 2022 Acta Astronautica paper also explored artificial magnetospheres and concluded that one promising low-power approach is an artificial charged-particle ring, somewhat like a synthetic radiation belt.

For Venus, the same concept is attractive because the sunshade is already sitting in the right strategic geometry: between Venus and the Sun.

Best design

I would combine:

  1. Sunshade / solar power collector
  2. Superconducting magnetic loops
  3. Plasma injection system
  4. Electrostatic particle deflectors
  5. Solar storm sensors
  6. Huge radiators
  7. Station-keeping thrusters or solar-sail control surfaces

The magnetic shield does not need to wrap Venus like a giant metal cage. It only needs to create a bow shock / magnetotail that makes solar wind flow around the planet.

Think: not “bubble around Venus,” but cosmic snowplow upstream. 🚜✨

For cosmic rays: harder, but not hopeless

Galactic cosmic rays come from outside the Solar System and arrive from all directions. NASA describes space radiation as including trapped particles, solar particle events, and galactic cosmic rays, with galactic cosmic rays being highly energetic ions from outside the solar system.

A sun-facing shield does not block these well, because they are not only coming from the Sun.

For cosmic rays, your defense stack is:

1. Earthlike atmosphere
2. Ozone layer / UV chemistry
3. Artificial magnetosphere
4. Local shielding for cities, hospitals, data centers, seed vaults
5. Water, soil, regolith, or polyethylene shielding where needed

NASA radiation-shielding material guidance notes that low-atomic-number materials such as liquid hydrogen, water, and polyethylene are especially useful against many space radiation hazards.

So for a terraformed Venus, the atmosphere does most of the daily work. The magnetic shield helps reduce charged-particle bombardment and atmospheric erosion. For very high-energy cosmic rays, even Earth’s magnetic field is not a perfect wall.

Would the captured energy be enough to power a magnetic shield?

Yes, by many orders of magnitude.

A magnetic shield is not usually “powered” like a laser wall constantly consuming all the energy it blocks. A superconducting magnetic system mainly needs:

  • initial energy to charge the field;
  • cryogenic cooling;
  • control systems;
  • plasma injection / maintenance;
  • station keeping;
  • repair/replacement;
  • radiation hardening;
  • power storage for storms.

The shield’s field energy can be enormous, but the continuous operating power can be much smaller than the intercepted solar power.

The full Venus shade intercepts about:

~300,000,000,000,000,000 W

Even using only 0.01% of that gives:

~30,000,000,000,000 W = 30 TW

That alone is already civilization-scale power. So a Venus sunshade can easily spare energy for magnetic shielding while still doing climate control and industrial chemistry.

The beautiful combined architecture

I would build it like this:

1. Outer shade layer

Reflects most sunlight away. Avoid absorbing too much, or the shield becomes a giant frying pan.

2. Power-harvesting layer

Harvests a controlled fraction of sunlight.

3. UV filter layer

Lets through visible light but blocks dangerous UV until Venus has a stable ozone layer.

4. Magnetic/plasma layer

Deflects solar wind and solar particle events.

5. Beaming layer

Sends power to orbital factories, atmospheric processors, and surface receivers.

6. Control layer

Moves shade panels to tune climate by latitude, season, and atmospheric state.

In other words, the solar shield becomes the Venusian crown-machine: half parasol, half power grid, half magnetosphere, half climate god. Yes, that is too many halves. Venus is dramatic. 👑🟡

Final answer

Yes: the solar shield could help with solar radiation directly, and the energy it captures would be more than enough to power an artificial magnetic or plasma shield.

But the cleanest design is not a sci-fi “force field.” It is:

A solar shade + power collector at Venus-Sun L1, equipped with superconducting/plasma magnetic systems that deflect solar wind before it reaches Venus.

It would protect the new atmosphere, reduce solar storm damage, filter UV, control heat, and provide ludicrous industrial power.

The shield is not optional after terraforming. It becomes Venus’ artificial sky-engine. 🌞🛡️

Futurology

Scratching the Surface of Solar Power

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Among all the different ways we currently can produce electricity, harnessing the power of the sun is the cleanest. The efficiency of solar panels^ has increased during the past decade, following solid research investments in renewable energy sources. Even though the installation of solar panels can take up vast amounts of space, this can be done in areas where there is not so much life to disturb, such as deserts.

Did you know that by covering less than 2% of the Great Saharan Desert with solar panels we can meet the energy consumptions needs of the entire planet? Here’s an excellent article^ that presents the calculations behind the mind-blowing fact. Interfering with the ecosystem in that 2% of desert would save countless other ecosystems from the damage done by the extraction, pollution and storage of fossil and nuclear fuels.

But the world’s energy needs will continue to increase. In the same time, we’re witnessing worsening global catastrophes due to global warming, a situation we’ve brought upon ourselves. We need to think big. Thanks to advances in mass manufacturing, we can think big. And that’s exactly what I invite you to do.

The purpose of any post in the Futurology^ category is to launch a wild, boundless speculation regarding what the future holds regarding a certain concept. To get things going, here are some of the things I imagine can happen as we begin on our journey of tapping into the power of the sun. Feel free to submit your own ideas in the comments below. With your approval I may integrate these in the article, giving proper credit.

  • Our species’ solar power capabilities are a product of two main factors: the efficiency of solar panels and the covered surface. While scientists are dutifully tinkering away at increasing efficiency, engineers have to devise new ways to deploy solar energy collectors. And, thanks to transparent solar panels^, we just have earned a significant increase in the potentially covered surface. In a couple of decades, most window panes in the world might be able to collect a little bit of solar energy. The efficiency of transparent panels is, of course, not that great (currently at around 5%, compared to around 20% for opaque panels). However, what they lack for in efficiency, they can more than make up for in surface.
  • It is not only buildings that can benefit from transparent solar panels. Let’s feed two birds with the same seed bag: protect freeways from rain and cities from noise by covering major arteries with a solar-collecting glass roof. The same layer could then feed energy to electrical vehicles traveling on the freeway.
  • One of the most important issues to solve when it comes to the installation of solar panels in as many places as possible is their ergonomics (bulky forms) and the lack of infrastructure needed to accommodate them. Quite a bit of wiring and rebuilding is required. Not only will solar panels have to become lighter and easier to install, but governments will also have to start treating this as a public service offered to citizens willing to turn their property into mini-powerplants. This is already happening, to some extent. In many countries, installing solar panels is heavily subsidized by the government (Sweden, for example, has a 30% subsidy).
  • The adoption of building standards favoring solar energy collection is also greatly needed. Buildings should come with all the wiring required to become solar collectors and to feed electricity into the local grid. Governments should incentivize building environmentally sustainable buildings through tax breaks.
  • With the advent of nanomaterials and robotics, solar panel installations will become even cheaper in the years to come. Of particular interest are certain “super-materials” such as graphene^. There is a lot of enthusiasm^ surrounding graphene and solar panels, but unfortunately not that many tangible results as of yet. In any case, solar installations are bound to become easier and more affordable in the near future.
  • Many houses have already started using their roof surface to lower their electricity bills. But wait until entire cities become covered in light-absorbing surfaces. We could use walls, windows and eventually even streets and sidewalks to gain energy from absorbed sunlight.
  • It’s important to note that the improper use of solar power can increase global warming. That’s because what mass solar power adoption would actually do is to decrease the albedo^ of the Earth. In other words: we’d absorb more heat from the Sun. It is true that the atmosphere would be cleaner and therefore the greenhouse effect^ would be reduced, but that won’t happen overnight. So, what is the right way to use solar power?
  • I’m glad I asked. How about using solar power to tackle one of the most dangerous threats we as a species have brought upon the planetary ecosystem? Solar power can not only slow global warming, but it might actually be able to reverse it. The method is simple and the technology is already in mass production. It’s called a heat inverter or “reverse cycle heat pump”^. What these babies do is to use electricity in order to extract heat from the atmosphere and transport it somewhere else (such as somebody’s home or a factory). But there’s an even better heat source than the atmosphere available: the ocean (water is better than air (0.6 vs 0.02) at conducting heat).
  • One of the main victims of global warming is the planetary ocean^ (and pretty much any other body of water). Turns out the oceans are very good heat reservoirs. Turns out we also might soon be facing coastal destruction due to rising sea levels^. The oceans are warming rapidly^. How can solar power fix this? A geo-engineering project^ could consist of installing millions of heat inverters on those coasts around the world where there are warm water currents. This would contribute to cooling off the ocean while in the same time providing district heating to cities. The energy (motors & pumps) required to relocate the heat from the ocean would come from the sun.
  • Actually, the solar panels for such a system could be installed on the ocean itself. The surface of the planetary ocean is quite a bit larger than that of the Sahara Desert, which I mentioned in the beginning of the article. Another advantage of having a system of solar barges, covered in panels, is that there’s less particle pollution on the ocean, so they would require less cleaning (and there’s plenty of water around to easily clean them). Keep in mind, however, that geoengineering can be an arrogant species’ last steps on a slippery slope^.
  • Solar arctic installations could also help avert global warming. However, panels installed there would require a great degree of adaptability to extreme weather conditions, including an automated snow cleanup system.
  • To think even bigger, how about space solar panels? In the future, these could be constructed directly in orbit, or perhaps on the Moon. Their energy could be beamed to Earth using microwaves. Even better, what if this can be combined with a public and freight transport system such as zeppelins? Huge, solar-capture zeppelins could circle the world while the space solar collector beams the energy at shorter distance, directly onto the zeppelin, which in turn is connected via a cable to a vehicle traveling on a freeway below. With the advent of advanced auto-pilot systems, such logistical tricks could soon become easy to setup and optimize.
  • A space solar collector could also be used to reduce the amount of sunlight reaching certain areas of the planet. Even a 5% drop in sunlight would do miracles for countries suffering from heatwaves. Such geoengineering ideas^ aren’t new, but most of them are outrageously expensive – at least until robotic space manufacturing becomes a thing.
  • A warning about space solar collection: such systems could potentially be turned into weapons. Cyberwarfare is very real^ and very dangerous. We cannot embark onto such an adventure until we, as a species, take some important steps forward when it comes to mutual trust.

The Futurology Disclaimer: I do not claim that my ideas are original. I’m sure these suggestions are just scratching the surface of what can be achieved, but hopefully they’ve scratched enough to get somebody inspired to come up with more. I’m also sure many of these ideas are already being worked on by several organizations. If any of the ideas listed by anybody on this page are original and will benefit any organization, I expect credit to be given where it’s due.

Version history:

2018-06-05 – 1.0 – Written.

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Futurology, Politics

Government 2.0

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Fake news, profiling & converting voters using social media^, rigged elections, media cartels owned by those in power (or that would lie to get the power), demagogy… the list can go on and on. Democracy today means that those that lie best or have plenty of money, get to steer our society. Actually, it has been so since a long, long time ago. But we now have the opportunity to set democracy free, if we make the right use of the technology at our disposal.

The Internet has seen better times. It was and still is a gateway to knowledge. The problem is that the information found on the Internet is often far from accurate; sometimes it’s horrendously false. From a highway to enlightenment, it has become a stormy ocean where one’s mind can be forever lost.

Fortunately, the Internet as a platform is still extremely powerful. We know it has some problems, but people all around the world are working to improve things. Along with newly emerging technologies, the Internet can still be our ladder towards the next stage of social evolution.

The purpose of any post in the Futurology^ category is to launch a wild, boundless speculation regarding what the future holds regarding a certain concept. To get things going, here are some of the things I imagine can be happen in the near future (coming decades) given a possibly unavoidable technological evolution of democracy. Feel free to submit your own ideas in the comments below. With your approval I may integrate these in the article, giving proper credit.

  • The way election campaigns are currently organized is one of the main problems of democracy. Because the people with the most money can reach out to the largest audience and can organize the flashiest campaigns, it all revolves around wealth, which is not always a proof of wisdom and intelligence. Wealth can be obtained through opportunity, or worse, through inheritance, which offers no guarantee that the receiver of the wealth can wield it responsibly. However, fixing the broken election system is totally within our power.
  • One of the good things that emerged during the past decades from the capitalistic competitive environment is the number of ways through which we can measure performance. There are countless tools for determining a person’s skills. Politicians shouldn’t even be allowed to enter an election if they cannot pass an interview that shows they can qualify for a given position.
  • Even more importantly, winning an election cannot be a blank check for getting any position in a government. A candidate vying for a position dealing with mining should have passed the relevant interview. Of course, a candidate can pass several interviews for several different areas, but never should a government hire a lawyer to deal with agriculture.
  • If we, the people, don’t want corporations to decide our society’s future, then we should take responsibility and change the broken election system. Goodbye donors. No party or candidate should be allowed to receive any funding from commercial entities or power brokers during an election campaign (or any other time for that matter).
  • Election campaigns will be redesigned to be much cheaper and paid entirely by a neutral, society-funded technocrat organization. Goodbye massive costs, millions of printed fliers and throw-away promotional material. Hello standardized and equal promotion for all candidates. All election-related financial transactions shall be documented in transparent, public records: open for challenge and debate.
  • A standardized election campaign means that all candidates should be given a precise, limited and equal amount of resources. This will include air-time on public channels, online and offline promotion. Candidates will have to adhere to a standardized way of stating their message: focused on previous accomplishments (proven and verified) and future plans (a public online space will be created where such plans can be fact-checked against budget and reality).
  • Today, with the help of Big Data^, we can assess the performance of politicians in a neutral way. Just look at how this software^ can find the best people to support a given law. Given enough data, software will be able to perform impartial screenings for an increasingly large number of candidates. Think millions. Just imagine that your highly skilled work colleague can one day receive, from a computer, a suggestion to candidate for a governmental position based on his skill, not on how many friends he has in a political party or the power of his dad’s commercial empire.
  • Earlier, I mentioned transparent financial transactions during an election campaign. Actually, everything should be transparent. All transactions that the government does should be easily accessible for any citizen. All contracts between government and companies that work for it should be open for public debate, because, in fact, these companies work for the taxpayers.
  • In case you haven’t been living under a rock, you probably heard of cryptocurrencies^. Enter crypto-voting. Sierra Leone just had an election where blockchain^ technology was used. Using blockchain, election results can be seen and validated in real time. It’s also much harder to steal an election (and can actually be made impossible if implementing relatively simple checks such as random people cross-checking other people’s votes). This system also reduces the costs of organizing an election and, in my view, can be used to facilitate what I call continuous voting.
  • Continuous voting means that anybody can change their vote at any time. Voters would simply log in with their ID and change their votes for any number of positions that are elected by the public. Politicians will be part of a market where every citizen owns one vote token per vote area (one vote for the education ministry, one vote for the local police chief and so on). This means that a politician would lose the safety blanket of a mandate, which is exactly the amount of responsibility that is required from any person in a leadership position. Mandates, after all, belong to an age where elections were expensive to organize. It also means that any citizen could own hundreds of vote tokens that entitles them to vote for a large number of positions. The vote tokens would be given by a system that automatically allocates them based on the citizen’s address (allowing a person to vote for all positions that influence their life).
  • Taking this further, direct democracy could be implemented by having laws as crypto-mandates: the more people buy in, the more power a law will have. This could remove the need for traditional politicians altogether. Rather than politicians, you would get something more akin to project managers that promote a law and try to get buy-in for that law.
  • The system could be expanded to include a public polling option not only for laws, but even for contracts. I’m referring here to the deals between government and companies that perform services critical to society (cleaning, public transport, etc.).
  • Taking this even further, we could imagine how instant direct democracy will look like. When a law reaches the support it requires, it could go into effect much sooner. For example, people could vote about speed limits in their community and see the effects immediately applied on connected traffic displays. A “thermostat”-like behavior would be implemented, to make sure that a law doesn’t “flick” on and off from one day to the next.
  • Depending on law, applying the changes would take a reasonable amount of time. For example, budget laws would apply only as soon as the affected institutions can adapt to a change in budgeting (within reasonable limits). This might mean less job safety, but would drastically increase a society’s ability to answer to its economical environment, which would, in turn, translate into better performance. With proper social protection measures, this can translate into an adventure where all members of society take part, together, in the well-being of their greater family.
  • Using such systems, a city could easily revoke the contract with any company if people realize it provides poor quality. No more deals behind closed doors, no more lying to get a contract with the government only to quickly drop in quality and siphon taxpayer money.

The Futurology Disclaimer: I do not claim that my ideas are original. I’m sure these suggestions are just scratching the surface of what can be achieved, but hopefully they’ve scratched enough to get somebody inspired to come up with more. I’m also sure many of these ideas are already being worked on by several organizations. If any of the ideas listed by anybody on this page are original and will benefit any organization, I expect credit to be given where it’s due.

Version history:

2018-03-31 – 1.0 – Written.

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Economy, Futurology

Anything as a Service – A Cure for Consumerism

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We live in the age of hyper-consumerism^. Companies are desperate to convert as much raw material as possible into anything that can be purchased. The machine has been perfected to the point where even leftover byproducts from any production cycle can be fed back into another production line to manufacture something somebody would buy. Sometimes this includes using unhealthy materials, both for us and for the environment. But it doesn’t matter as long as it turns a profit. The machine has to keep producing something, anything, just please, buy it. This is wrecking our ecosystem and is woefully unsustainable.

Awareness regarding the bleak future we might be creating for ourselves after drowning our planet in toxic trash is increasing. However, most people still buy products built to last a very short time because there are no alternatives. And even when certain products could last longer, companies have gotten very good at fooling their followers^ that fashion doesn’t apply only to clothes, but to everything else as well. Now-a-days, many people willingly throw away perfectly operational devices just to jump on the latest model.

But a new economic model is becoming increasingly popular – the monthly payment for a certain service, sometimes metered based on how much a person has used the service. At the moment, this is particularly successful in the digital space (media streaming, software, data and bandwidth, games). Let’s see what a generalized version of this system could mean to our economy and ecosystem in the coming decades. I call it “anything as a service”. The term is already used for software, but in this case, it is truly anything.

The purpose of any post in the Futurology^ category is to launch a wild, boundless speculation regarding what the future holds regarding a certain concept. To get things going, here are some of the things I imagine can be happen in the near future (coming decades) with the widespread use of “anything as a service”. Feel free to submit your own ideas in the comments below. With your approval I may integrate these in the article, giving proper credit.

  • Since I mentioned fashion earlier, let’s start with a lovely example of how a company is disrupting the way people use clothes. Enter Rent the Runway^: for a monthly fee of $159, the service allows you to rent four pieces of clothing or accessories at a time and make exchanges as often as you like. The fee includes shipping both ways, dry cleaning, and insurance. Granted, that’s a hefty fee, but given that the company offers products from top designers (including clothes that retail for $1500), it is understandable. There are other clothing companies that have excellent return polices, even though there are some challenges^ that will need to be overcome.
  • What if instead of having to replace a smartphone every couple of years, or a TV once every five years, there would simply be a smartphone subscription, or a TV subscription? Pay $300 yearly and you are guaranteed the best smartphone in a given class, with a bi-yearly upgrade included (without the hassle of chaining yourself to a mobile carrier or the risk of spending hours bickering only to end up fooled by a sly salesman). Pay $200 yearly and you are guaranteed that your TV is always upgraded to the latest display standards. There will still be plenty of brands to choose from, all with their own different prices and features. Some retailers might even group several brands into the same pricing segment (not everybody cares about what brand their TV is, and if they’re not satisfied they can simply ask for another brand, with all transportation costs covered). Simplicity without harming diversity. Pricing and production philosophy will change drastically and for the better of everybody involved.
  • The main and definitive difference with this strategy is that instead of buying a particular model, you would buy into an entire line. For example, you want a smartphone with a screen of a certain size, featuring a good camera, not necessarily from a certain company. Or you want a TV that is good for gaming. Or a road-warrior notebook that is very light, has a secondary backup battery and has a mobile data subscription included. A buyer would simply add features on top of a base cost, each feature costing an additional $X per year. This will greatly simplify a customer’s decision process and it will make companies more responsible for what they manufacture, since they would lose yearly subscribers if their products aren’t good enough.
  • This will lead companies to improve their designs so that devices can have their parts easily replaced and upgraded. They will have to reuse as much as possible before throwing anything away. Eventually, the reusability standards will spread around companies and lines of products, as a way to reduce costs. If we look at the Rent the Runway example above: it encourages manufacturers to produce quality textiles, as they wouldn’t want these to be destroyed after a couple of washes, which is what happens very often to most clothes today. I have a sweater that I’m wearing since the 90s and it still looks better than some of the clothes I purchased a couple of years ago.
  • What happens when an entire generation of devices or appliances is replaced? This system would make it very simple for these devices to make it to lower price tiers, or be repurposed. For example, previous generation TVs could be used inside airports or restaurants.
  • While most of this will evolve naturally out of the need to keep a product alive for as many years as possible, some governmental regulation is also required, particularly when it comes to batteries and cables. This has become the main tool to force people to replace their electronics. Cables and adapters have always been a gold mine that companies abused in order to obtain additional profit (although it’s becoming quite ridiculous as of late). Design and water-proofing is another lie that companies use when justifying irreplaceable battery designs. Watertight watches have existed for decades and this didn’t prevent their manufacturers from allowing easy access to the device’s innards. Governments should enforce better practices in this area.
  • Another area that is in need of regulation is software. As Apple has proven, it’s not so difficult to regulate software. Did you notice the efficiency ratings on various home appliances? How about having the same ratings, but for software. If I download a text editor, I don’t expect it to take more than a second to start up, no matter how many features it has. Features can be loaded on demand, and based on their complexity, they shouldn’t be consuming ridiculous amount of resources. Anything else is simply bad coding. Poorly designed applications will be rated low on the efficiency scale (E or F). With the advent of machine learning, the process of rating software might become quite easy in the future, driven mostly by automated inspection programs.
  • How would “anything as a service” affect competition? Let’s start with an extreme but very useful example. If we look at Spotify, a music streaming service, it is quite obvious that less popular artists are having a very tough time competing with known artists, because income is based on the number of times a song is played. In turn, playtime is based on the taste in music of the majority, or even worse, on how some producers have become good at forming and exploiting what the general public likes. This situation will probably not be as bad in the case of appliances, electronics and software (unlike art, they have very specific functionalities). Even so, I believe a fix is possible for both situations.
    Again, I’ll be using Spotify as an example. The company’s Discover^ functionality is a recommendation system used to promote all and any music hosted by the service. I have already found hundreds of new artists using this feature. All “pay as you go” markets would have such a system. I believe the functionality can be improved, so that artists and products that are risking bankruptcy can be given an extra lifeline consisting of additional promotion. A human factor could also be introduced in the form of community voting and accredited judges that can save overlooked or underrated creators. Such a system will work well even for the top performers, because increased competition is often a source of great ideas.
    Another factor that can hurt competition is when a company takes advantage of its product catalog in order to force others out of business. Read about the concept of closed ecosystems (also known as walled gardens)^. This also happens within the current retail model, but it might become even more damaging for competition when a company can offer lower subscription prices to customers who purchase more of its subscriptions. This is a challenge that possibly requires regulation by an authority of some kind.
  • There is also one major positive competitive disruption that will occur when “anything as a service” takes hold. Companies that will stick to ways that are destructive towards the environment and disrespectful towards customers will pay a steep price, perhaps even face bankruptcy. If we consider companies to be similar to lifeforms^, what the “anything as a service” model will cause is nothing short of an extinction event of the old business model. And I sincerely can’t wait for that.

The Futurology Disclaimer: I do not claim that my ideas are original. I’m sure these suggestions are just scratching the surface of what can be achieved, but hopefully they’ve scratched enough to get somebody inspired to come up with more. I’m also sure many of these ideas are already being worked on by several organizations. If any of the ideas listed by anybody on this page are original and will benefit any organization, I expect credit to be given where it’s due.

Version history:

2018-02-11 – 1.0 – Written.

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Futurology, Technology

Machine Learning and Our Future

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Machine Learning is all the rage these days. Be it computer vision, speech recognition, pattern matching or high-speed decisional capabilities, this century is the century of software. Like all technological revolutions, there’s potential for miracles and catastrophes.

Large corporations have started to realize^ that Machine Learning is a way to prevent smaller competitors^ from threatening them. This is because small companies can’t (yet) afford the huge infrastructure and Big Data investments that ML requires. It’s not surprising then that Microsoft, Google, FaceBook and others have open-sourced ML platforms, trying to attract developers and smaller companies to their ecosystems.

This post will touch on but a few of the changes we can expect in the coming decades thanks to the upcoming advances in Machine Learning. Looking at our history, we can see how the industrial revolution has supercharged our progress as a species. I believe that the Machine Learning revolution will make the industrial revolution seem like a snail in slow motion. This is both hopeful and scary.

The purpose of any post in the Futurology^ category is to launch a wild, boundless speculation regarding what the future holds regarding a certain concept. To get things going, here are some of the things I imagine can be accomplished in the near future (coming decades) by Machine Learning. Feel free to submit your own ideas in the comments below. With your approval I may integrate these in the article, giving proper credit.

  • Speech recognition is already quite advanced. In the coming decade, most day-to-day electronic devices will understand what humans speak. Additionally, these devices will form an interconnected sensorial mesh via the Internet of Things. Privacy will obviously be a major concern.
  • Without any prior technical knowledge, people will soon be able to talk to the robots that are about to enter our daily lives, both indoors^ and outdoors^. Countless jobs will be transformed or outright eliminated. Companies will jump at the opportunity of cutting costs. While some of this will have beneficial effects on some (company stakeholders for example), society might be negatively impacted as there will be plenty of those that cannot find a new job in a world that is increasingly robotized. Hopefully at least a part of the next generation of superrich few will empathize with the disadvantaged many.
  • Advanced algorithms are already able to take better (and much faster) decisions than humans in some fields (for example management of traffic, energy and bandwidth). This capability will expand to more and more areas. This development should not be confused with True Artificial Intelligence^, but will still mean that yet more jobs will be given to automated systems. Here’s for example how Google used machine learning to save a massive 15%^ in data center costs.
  • Companies that own data infrastructure will become dangerously powerful. Just look at how FaceBook allowed^ Russia to interfere^ in one of the most influential electoral contests in the world. Given the narrow difference between the candidates, it is quite possible that Russia’s influence (of which only a small part will ever be uncovered) will have been a decisive factor.
  • Governmental oversight could prevent a lack of balance in society, but strong lobbying from powerful corporations will continue to corrupt the purpose of government (in most countries, our representatives have long ceased representing us, if they even ever did).
  • The influence of ML throughout the economy means that society will have to find ways to protect those that are at risk of being crushed under the weight of the coming changes. In a way reminiscent of the industrial revolution, entire job sectors will become obsolete overnight, except that this time around the changes will come even faster and affect more people. Fortunately, we are also wiser and richer than a century ago so we are well positioned to find constructive solutions.
  • We may enter a period where creatives (artists) will again be in high demand. At least until True A.I. is upon us, machines still can’t create art. No matter how advanced an algorithm may be, the art it creates will still be a soulless mixture of unoriginal and random.
  • We run the risk of falling under total surveillance, aka Super Big Brother. This is much worse than what George Orwell could have even imagined when he wrote his 1984 novel. Super Big Brother doesn’t need humans to listen-in to conversations. It simply records everything (this is already being done, as the Snowden leaks proved). Then, somebody (like an oppressive authority that seeks to exterminate dissent) asks it to find certain information in text, audio or video recordings. If we now think that we have little privacy left, Super Big Brother will make things exponentially worse. Update 2018-04-30: check how China is using facial recognition in Guiyang^.
  • However, all is not so bleak. If good people act, there is another invention that will shackle Super Big Brother. That invention is open surveillance. All systems used for surveillance shall be based on open source software. All people being surveilled will be able to access their information and know why it was recorded (you were in a public space, you were suspected of a crime, etc.).
  • Government will put privacy back in the hands of the people. Because government has to be the people. And because lies and secrets never truly saved the world (although perhaps they helped in postponing major conflicts without, however, fixing the underlying problems). It will be openness and communication that will be proven to be the only way forward if we are to survive.

The Futurology Disclaimer: I do not claim that my ideas are original. I’m sure these suggestions are just scratching the surface of what can be achieved, but hopefully they’ve scratched enough to get somebody inspired to come up with more. I’m also sure many of these ideas are already being worked on by several organizations. If any of the ideas listed by anybody on this page are original and will benefit any organization, I expect credit to be given where it’s due.

Version history:

2017-11-23 – 1.0 – Written.

2018-04-30 – 1.1 – Added link about Guiyang use of facial recognition.

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Futurology

Robots on Our Streets (and Everywhere Else)

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The development of self-driving vehicles is progressing at a steady pace. It’s only a matter of time before seeing a human drive a vehicle on public roads will be akin to seeing a horse and carriage on a motorway. Even if introduced globally right now while still in development, self-driving technology would drastically reduce fatalities.

Unfortunately, today’s society would only accept this technology if it is perfect. That’s because it is “understandable” that crazed primates may kill other beings because of recklessness and inattention, but it certainly won’t be tolerable for a computer to make a mistake, even if it would happen a thousand times less often – and most likely due to freak coincidences rather than the machine actually making a mistake. But society will evolve. Self-driving is here to stay and like it or not, primates will soon be relegated to driving on the race track or some other place where the potential of threatening life is lower.

And while self-driving is currently one of the most debated topics, we should really be talking about self-piloting, which is a more generic term. It covers more of what will actually happen: all machinery will soon be able to pilot itself. So how would worldwide fleet of interconnected self-piloting machinery change life on Earth?

The purpose of any post in the Futurology^ category is to launch a wild, boundless speculation regarding what the future holds regarding a certain concept. To get things going, here are some of the things I imagine can be accomplished in the near future (coming decades) by self-piloting vehicles. Feel free to submit your own ideas in the comments below. With your approval I may integrate these in the article, giving proper credit.

  • A Vehicle Management System will control all traffic. The system will have different behaviors based on vehicle type and region. For example, the VMS will have special policies for motorways. The motorway VMS will be responsible for managing inter-city travel. When a vehicle reaches a city, the VMS will switch to city-specific policies which have been set by the city’s authority. This allows for seamless vehicle control which adapts to any number of different regional rules (for example what side of the road a vehicle can drive on or at what altitude can a plane fly in a certain airspace).
  • Obviously, the VMS will have to be extremely well protected against security threats and will have to be thoroughly tested for many years. It should be decentralized, redundant and a server located no further than two network hops away, guaranteeing millisecond-precision. I believe that such a system should be open source, so that the community (especially engineers and scientists) can peer review it and safeguard it. Quantum cryptography could be one way for ensuring security but lacking that, a multiple-server, low-latency redundant cross-reference system could also be employed.
  • No more traffic jams. This is one of the most important advantages of having a Vehicle Management System. The system will balance traffic across entire regions so that the time spent to reach any given destination is approximately equal for everybody. When the traffic is congested in an area, it will be improved by redirecting a part of it.
  • No more traffic lights for cars. The VMS will manage intersections easily because it will know each car’s route, physical characteristics and current state. Not only will there be telemetry from cars, but this will be cross-referenced with sensors installed along the road. Imagine a crossroads where cars go with 70 kmph (45 mph) all day long, not breaking for a single millisecond, frequently “missing each other” other with less than a meter. Perhaps it’s scary to imagine now, but this will be a common sight in a few decades. This change leaves more time for pedestrian traffic lights.
  • Quieter cities, cleaner cities. Due to increased efficiency and distribution of traffic, roads will be less noisy. With fewer traffic lights, there is less breaking and accelerating, less pollution.
  • Priority tiers. Public services such as ambulance, fire department and police will be able to use the VMS to make sure they can reach their destinations in the fastest possible way. Lives will be saved when room is made for an ambulance for many kilometers in advance. Such a system could also allow regular citizens to save lives. For example somebody that happens to have the nearest car to the victim of some accident can immediately declare the emergency by calling the appropriate number. Then, the vehicle will be given top traffic priority and used to transport the victim to the hospital or to a rendezvous point with a proper ambulance (and since all vehicles are in the same network, an ambulance rendezvous will be very easy for the VMS to achieve).
  • High efficiency transportation. Vehicles will be able to form trains where a more powerful vehicle (such as a truck) can pull several cars at once while also acting as an aerodynamic shield. Such trains will often be reconfigured while moving based on what destinations each vehicle has (a vehicle will often disconnect from the middle of the train only for the two parts of the train to reconnect to each other after the departing vehicle changes lanes). Fuel costs will be automatically calculated by the VMS and billed to traffic participants. For example the truck I mentioned will be paid (from the accounts of all vehicles it helped) for the extra fuel it spent as well as for the aerodynamic shield it offered, providing an incentive for powerful vehicles to help optimize fuel consumption for everybody.
  • Fewer cars. Much fewer cars. As a consequence of having a VMS, people will be able to more easily engage in carpooling. It will be easier to implement systems where more buildings share the same cars. Commuters will also be helped by small, regional buses that are adjusting real-time to the transportation demands of a region.
  • Most of this can also be extended to all other types of traffic. Planes, subways, cargo ships, ferries and trains will coalesce into a global mesh of moving machinery where the VMS can handle a person’s entire itinerary for thousands of miles using the cheapest and most environmentally friendly means of travel, also taking into account the person’s preferences and budget. Because the system has a view of everything moving everywhere, it will be able to dynamically allocate entire transportation fleets according to demand. For example no more clogged buses after a concert. The VMS will know that an event is over and will automatically adjust the entire “transportation chain” from buses to trains and airplanes for quick & smooth transportation of participants.
  • Delivery services will see drastic improvements. Private vehicles that reach remote areas sooner than dedicated delivery vehicles could earn extra money for delivering items. The driver wouldn’t have to lift a finger. If the destination is along the way, the vehicle will be able to make a short stop to drop the delivery for other robots to pick up, or if not, it will take care of the delivery after the passenger leaves.
  • Less boring jobs for pilots of airliners, ferries and trains. A part of these pilots will become “incident managers”, called upon when there are situations when robots require human intervention. A quantum internet will allow these persons to control machinery with zero latency, as if they were inside the vehicle.
  • Automated farming and mining^. There are plenty of places where this is already in place, especially because there is much less regulation for self-piloting vehicles when outside of public roads. I expect that the industrial applications for self-piloting vehicles will be the main profit drivers going forward. This will create space and resources for the technology to mature.
  • Some of the foremost companies to look out for in the field of AI and self-piloting are: nVidia^, Google^ and Amazon^ (click on the links to read one of the interesting things that each of these companies are doing in the field of AI).

The Futurology Disclaimer: I do not claim that my ideas are original. I’m sure these suggestions are just scratching the surface of what can be achieved, but hopefully they’ve scratched enough to get anybody inspired to come up with more. I’m also sure many of these ideas are already being worked on by several organizations. If any of the ideas listed by anybody on this page are original and will benefit any organization, I expect credit to be given where it’s due.

Version history:

2017-05-31 – 1.0 – Written.

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Futurology, Technology

Kitchen 3.0

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The age of interconnected devices and gadgets is slowly dawning. This category of communications-capable electronics has been labeled “the Internet of Things” – somewhat of a misnomer now-a-days when it is obvious that the security threat of any machine reachable from the Internet is enormous. Perhaps quantum cryptography will one day address this issue. Until then, home owners will probably be safer by using offline “smart home controllers” with manually-upgradeable firmware in what will be an Intranet of Things.

Irrespective of the name, this new wave of electronics is still barely in its infancy. Any company worth its salt has to prepare for how business will change in the coming decades. And there’s nothing more disruptive than what is basically the rise of the first mainstream generation of highly task-optimized robots. Indeed, a smart refrigerator is basically a robot focused on a certain task.

While the first robots accessible to everybody will still function very much like our current appliances, their smarts will open up a myriad opportunities for ground-breaking innovation. Because the kitchen contains a large amount of appliances, let’s explore how all these can be interconnected in order to provide an evolutionary leap when compared to today’s emerging Kitchen 2.0 where we do have smart devices but they are working by themselves rather than in cooperation.

The purpose behind any post in this Futurology^ category is to launch a wild, boundless speculation regarding what the future holds regarding a certain concept. To get things going, here are some of the things I imagine we’ll find in the kitchens of the near future (coming decades). Feel free to submit your own ideas in the comments below. With your approval I may integrate these in the article, giving proper credit.

  • Among its kitchen brethren, the refrigerator is going to see some of the largest changes to the way it operates. First of all, it will be able to manage its own contents and automatically order things its owners usually consume. Secondly, it will become smaller due to the increased efficiency in food delivery.
  • The way goods arrive in our household will fundamentally change, paving the way for new companies to establish themselves or creating new opportunities for profit for existing companies, such as Walmart which, 7 months after this article was published, has started experimenting with deliveries directly to the refrigerator^. Almost all perishable goods will be delivered by robots, most likely by self-driving trucks. We can’t exclude aerial drones that land packages on the rooftop of buildings. However, this is far less energy efficient and current experiments with this technology are either marketing gimmicks or attempts to create a segment for very fast but also very expensive shipping.
  • After delivery, a property’s own small transport robots will take the goods and store them in a Central Refrigerator. From there, the products will be distributed upon request to individual household refrigerators.
  • There will be no need for a refrigerator to have more than a day’s quantity of milk because more milk will be just 1 to 5 minutes away. Apartment buildings will have a Central Refrigerator somewhere in the basement, so quite close to family refrigerators. Product delivery will be slightly longer for areas with villas (due to the Central Refrigerator being located in a separate building somewhere close by).
  • All food orders will go to the Central Refrigerator. This will, in turn, bulk orders together and get the best offers from various warehouses in the area. Such a system will also save power due to having more efficient storage and much less heat leakage – the main door of this large refrigerator will almost never open because small delivery robots will go in and out through isolating access hatches.
  • Cooking a meal will often be as easy as pressing a button. People will be able to download recipe-programs for their kitchen. A recipe will therefore consist of a list of items that the refrigerator has to order and a set of instructions for various kitchen appliances. Some ingredients such as flour, sugar, oil, will be available to purchase in packages with the exact dosage required for the recipe, reducing waste and making it easier for Kitchen 3.0 to prepare the recipe.
  • Kitchen appliances will be integrated in one single block inside which ingredients can be transported from one section to another using various robotic arms. I’ll call this the Kitchen Block. Products that don’t require refrigeration will be brought from a larger storage compartment, either inside the home or a common storage location used by more families.
  • Baking a cake for example will consist of the mixer requesting items from various storage locations. The mixer will also be able to assign tasks to other sections of the Kitchen Block, such as asking the oven to toast some nuts before sending the cake batter to it.
  • All appliances will therefore be a part of a single unit, able to give instructions to each other. This will be done using preferably open source protocols and open standards, which is probably the only way for the manufacturers of various robots to be able to allow these machines to work with each other.
  • There will still be plenty of room for people to cook by themselves if they so wish, but more and more citizens will become recipe downloaders and/or developers. Creating a recipe program will probably not be so difficult, since in the coming decades computers will be operable using natural language. This transition is already taking place.
  • Despite the recipes being programs, they will be human-readable, making it very hard for an attacker to hack Kitchen 3.0. Combined with a strict security policy based on user approval and only minimal communication with the Central Refrigerator and similar “Master” robots, Kitchen 3.0 has good security prospects.
  • On the topic of Master robots, does every home really need something as complex as a Kitchen Block? Perhaps it should belong together with the Central Refrigerator, serving more than one household. This way, costs will be kept down and cooking will be more efficient. Then, Kitchen 3.0 could be split into a central section and a trimmed down “thin client” located inside each family’s home.

The Futurology Disclaimer: I do not claim that my ideas are original. I’m sure these suggestions are just scratching the surface of what can be achieved, but hopefully they’ve scratched enough to get anybody inspired to come up with more. I’m also sure many of these ideas are already being worked on by several organizations. If any of the ideas listed by anybody on this page are original and will benefit any organization, I expect credit to be given where it’s due.

Version history:

2017-02-16 – 1.0 – Written.
2017-09-23 – 1.0.1 – Added a link about Walmart experimenting with deliveries directly to the refrigerator.
[ax_meta lnimgurl=’http://mentatul.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/01904-Kitchen30-Thumb.jpg’ lnimgw=’250′ lnimgh=’250′ title=’Kitchen 3.0′ desc=’While the first robots accessible to everybody will still function very much like our current appliances, their smarts will open up a myriad opportunities for ground-breaking innovation.’]

Futurology, Technology

Productivity in the Age of Mixed Reality

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In the past few years we’ve witnessed the launch of more than a dozen HMDs (Head Mounted Displays). Several of them are already available in large numbers. HMDs focused on entertainment (Oculus, Vive) rely on taking over visual perception completely via Virtual Reality. HMDs focused on productivity (HoloLens) mix real life with computer generated imagery drawn upon a transparent display. There are other combinations and means of mixing visual information, so all of this technology has recently been put under the umbrella term Mixed Reality.

This post concerns the productivity aspects of Mixed Reality. It’s a topic I’ve been meaning to play with for more than a year. I find it quite fitting to debut the Futurology^ section on Mentatul with this text, especially since just as I was preparing to write, I stumbled upon the following news (this has to be the work of a muse):

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/microsoft-trials-hololens-technologies-construction,33490.html^

The purpose behind any post in the Futurology^ category is to launch a wild, boundless speculation regarding what the future holds regarding a certain concept. To get things going, here are some of the things I imagine can be accomplished in the future (productivity-wise) using Mixed Reality.

I’ll list my ideas chronologically, starting with the first things that came to my mind back when I read about what Google Glass can do. Feel free to submit your own ideas in the comments below. With your approval I may integrate these in the article, giving proper credit.

  • Workers are busy adding the finishing touches to a building. Using an HMD similar to a pair of glasses (like HoloLens for instance), they see the position of all other workers, as if they would see through walls. All wiring and pipes are also drawn in their exact positions inside the walls as the user looks around.
    All workers see directions pointing them towards the location of the next task. Let’s take for example the installation of a network socket. The worker is helped to locate all tools required for the task. After the task is completed, a test immediately shows if the connection is successful. If it is not, the worker can simply look around through the walls and see where to go and fix the connection.
  • Operators of large machinery are assisted in anything they do by architectural plans projected over real life terrain. Machines are integrated with this projection and “snap” automatically to the highlighted locations, needing only rough supervision. Of course, operators will soon become completely unnecessary because…
  • Architects are allowed to control and direct robots directly from their office. Work done in CAD applications, after passing several simulations and authorizations, is downloadable by robots that simply print out the structures. Architects are able to use Mixed Reality to fly around the construction site from the comfort of their homes. This technology can be used to construct human-ready colonies as well as mining stations anywhere in the solar system.
  • Before AI becomes sufficiently advanced to perform all these tasks, humans are recruited to supervise the operation of these robots (as is already done in the mining industry^). Gamers might find employment opportunities in a future that relies on a person’s multi-tasking skill, quick reflexes and ability to channel one’s mind into an alternate reality. Think of it as a huge real time strategy game where a gamer controls an army of construction robots.
  • Taking this to the next step, humans supervise self-driving vehicles that are stuck for some reason or require human intervention. Planes, boats and anything that moves is accessible in a “first person” view.
  • The security implications of all that I’ve written are enormously hugely massively gargantuan, and that’s an understatement. However, quantum cryptography might address this issue.
  • Repair manuals are displayed onto a device as the user is fixing it (this tech already on its way!^). With a good system in place for spare parts management, this enables any reasonably handy person to fix almost anything. Of course, this means that the religion of Consumerism^ should give up on one of its founding principles: planned obsolescence.
  • Taking this one step further, in times of crisis when a hospital is not accessible, simple surgical programs can help lightly trained individuals to perform tasks that would normally be beyond their capability.

The Futurology Disclaimer: I do not claim that my ideas are original. I’m sure these suggestions are just scratching the surface of what can be achieved, but hopefully they’ve scratched enough to get anybody inspired to come up with more. I’m also sure many of these ideas are already being worked on by several organizations. If any of the ideas listed by anybody on this page are original and will benefit any organization, I expect credit to be given where it’s due.

Version history:

2017-02-08 – 1.0 – Written.

[ax_meta lnimgurl=’http://mentatul.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/01866-ProductivityMixedReality-Thumb.jpg’ lnimgw=’250′ lnimgh=’250′ title=’Productivity in the Age of Mixed Reality’ desc=’Here are some of the things that may be accomplished in the future (productivity-wise) using Mixed Reality.’]