The good news is that, for octogenarians among us, this phenomenon should no longer bother us. We should however be concerned about our descendants. The ”bahala na” attitude that prevails among Pinoys can mean the end of our lineage. We should be more responsive to what science is developing as suggested by the following: VISIONS OF HOPE and 2 other prognosticators. It’s all up to how we respond.
Over the next 50 years, humanity will experience change at an unprecedented pace. What lies ahead? And can science save us from catastrophe during what Sir Martin Rees has dubbed ‘our final century’?
Predicting things to come is fraught with uncertainty. Nevertheless, for the 50th issue of COSMOS, we decided to try: to commission four of our top writers to look at the best science today, and cast forward to the next 50 years and see what might change our lives, our cities, our economies and the planet on which we live.
How will we feed a world of nine billion – almost three times the number of people alive in 1963? How will we mitigate and adapt to climate change? What innovations are on the horizon that might allow us to live our lives in wealth and comfort, without stripping the planet of resources and damaging it beyond repair? And how will we care for ourselves in a smarter future… where our ageing population is more likely to be treated with an app rather than an aspirin.
The world’s population is ageing faster than ever before. It is an enduring phenomenon – according to the United Nations, we will never again return to the young populations our ancestors knew. As contributing editor Robin McKie discovered in our future health special, this ageing effect will have profound consequences, as our stressed health systems balance the needs of larger, frailer populations with the potential benefits of innovations in genetics, personalised healthcare and the increasing global interconnectivity brought by mobile devices.
Suzanne Cory was 21 in 1963. Now an immunologist and molecular biologist at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI) in Melbourne and president of the Australian Academy of Science, ’63 was the year Cory “fell in love with molecular biology”.
We should aim to have people remaining healthy right up to the last stages of their life, stresses Cory. “I would like to be as active as I am now and have been all my life until the day I drop dead. I suppose [living to age] 95 is a realistic dream right now; I think that’s certainly within the realms of possibility.”
“I think it’s very difficult to predict 50 years hence. If I’d asked even the most experienced and brightest scientists around me at that time, in 1963, I don’t think they would ever have predicted we would now be where we are –in terms of understanding or what we were tackling. So I think we can only see a little way forward, and through a glass dimly.”
We can predict some likely research advances, argues Gus Nossal, professor emeritus at the University of Melbourne, and a consultant for both the World Health Organisation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He cites new anti-cancer chemotherapy involving highly multidisciplinary teams from cell biologists to genomic specialists, proteomic experts, X-ray crystallographers and medicinal chemists, for instance. “This multidisciplinary research will produce results. What needs to be understood is that it will take 12–15 years and cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
“At the same time, it is the very essence of scientific discovery that there will be unpredictable, paradigm-shifting breakthroughs resulting in advances that we haven’t yet dreamt of,” he adds.
The 1960s saw the dawn of a revolution in immunology and preventative medicine, where we first learned to take care of our health, not just battle our diseases, says Nossal. He was 32 in 1963, and was already working at WEHI, which he directed from 1965 to 1996. In the next 50 years, he says, we can expect to see this same kind of revolution in regenerative medicine, and particularly in stem cell science. The latter is “equally replete with hype and hope”, he adds.
IN 1968, WALT PATTERSON, now a physicist and author, laboriously typed out his first novel and sent six carbon copies to friends. This debut effort led to further attempts and, finally, in 1976, to his first non-fiction book Nuclear Power, which sold some 130,000 copies and is still downloaded from his website around 2,000 times a month. Patterson, an associate fellow at Chatham House in London, and a visiting fellow at the University of Sussex in Britain, spent the next four decades writing about energy.
“The whole energy scene is changing faster now than I think it’s ever changed, and I don’t think people realise how fast or how far it’s going to change,” Patterson tells me over the phone from his home in the village of Chesham Bois in Buckinghamshire, Britain. “I think the traditional mindset about what people mean by energy and its role in society is just utterly misguided. And provided we manage to get this right and don’t simply trash the planet – and I think the odds are that we are indeed going to trash the planet – but if we manage somehow, at the last minute, to start thinking about it the right way, then the possibility of doing this dramatically differently is just dangling there in front of us.”
The energy mix of today may not have changed much since 1950, as writer and long-time contributor Richard A. Lovett discovers. But as Patterson points out, that’s going to have to change. He envisages a world where each building, perhaps powered by its own fuel cell and a coating of solar panels, becomes effectively its own power station, able if necessary to be completely off-grid. How soon we get to this kind of innovative energy system is a question of how willing our leaders are to confront the traditionalists, the “fossil mongers”, Patterson says.
“The ground rules are wrong. We have to change the ground rules, including the financial ground rules, so that we can take advantage of the different way that you have to buy and pay for infrastructure electricity. You buy it as an investment, not a commodity; it becomes part of the function of the building.”
If Patterson is right, and the “fossil mongers” are wrong, the subsequent decrease in emissions from a slew of innovations may take us partway to mitigating our “dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”, as writer Stephen Pincock notes in his feature on the future of climate change. Yet, realistically, much of this change is already “baked into the system”. In terms of limiting temperature rise to below the forecast 2°C, we have, as Australian climate change researcher Andy Pitman, director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science in Sydney, points out, “a snowball’s chance in hell”.
“We live on a finite planet that doesn’t have an infinite capacity to support continuous growth in consumption,” says Michael Raupach, from CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research in Canberra. Raupach is one of the authors of a book released in February 2013 by the Australian Academy of Science; Negotiating our Future: Living Scenarios for Australia to 2050. It’s an attempt to “catalyse a scientifically informed national conversation”, says co-author John Finnigan, chief research scientist of CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research. “As far as knowledge allows, we must work through the consequences of inevitable trends and possible choices and, where the results of these are uncertain, we must try to put honest limits on what we know.”
When I ask Cory if she thinks this positivity is justified, she replies with characteristic candour: “Well, you know, it depends which day you ask me.” So is this a good day or a tough one, I ask?
“I think basically I’m very positive, but I do have concerns. One thing I’d like to say is that humanity shouldn’t look to science to solve problems, because we won’t be able to solve all problems. I hope that humanity uses science to become wiser… to enhance the quality of life, not just to allow us to cope with an increasingly unpleasant world.
“We have an incredibly beautiful and amazing planet. I marvel at it every day: I marvel at evolution, I marvel at the complexity and the diversity in this world. It’s very precious. We must use science to protect it and save it from us; and that requires us becoming much wiser through our knowledge of science and communicating that wisdom and persuading society to take certain decisions.”
With or without flying cars, robot handmaids and food replicators, I think Cory neatly captures the key to understanding and benefiting from science: its ability to both arm us and steel us for change. And that’s a future we can all strive for.
Present technology breakthroughs – with quotes from Boo Chanco
In Newark, California, a self-driving car of Uber was caught going through a red light in San Francisco by a dashcam video taken by a taxi driver. Uber had apparently unleashed a fleet of driverless cars for testing.
This is the kind of twilight zone we are in right now as new technology changes the world as we know it. Laws and human behavior are struggling to catch up with the way life is lived from now on.
Uber and Grab, 2 leading ride sharing operations using a computer program to match car and passenger, have disrupted not just the taxi business but also the way people now view car ownership. In traffic- choked MetroManila with very little space for parking, Uber and Grab operations make total sense. You just type in your location and where you want to go in an app in your smart phone and a car and driver materializes before you. No need to circle 10 times around the block praying for a parking space.
It is predicted here that there will be less and less people wanting to buy cars, especially if government discontinues the various car-volume reduction schemes. They will instead opt to share rides by using Uber and Grab or similar services.
So it may well be that we are living in times similar to that when electricity was first invented and the first electric bulb was lighted. Those of us who are digital migrants may not know how to integrate the new technologies into our lives as well as our children and grandchildren who grew up with them.
But even with us, many of us cannot imagine living in a world without WIFI. Even as seniors, the first thing many of us do when we wake up in the morning is to grab our smart phones and scan our e-mail’s in-box and then quickly check out Facebook.
Our clan used to have our Christmas holiday exchange-gift reunions here in our QC home for Christmas and at my elder brother’s home in San Juan for New Year. In our Loyola Heights home, we seniors meet with our children and grandchildren, distributing and opening presents, partaking of our traditional dishes, picture-taking and basking in one another’s affection.
But since we are now scattered far and wide, those who are celebrating the holidays in USA have decided to get together in the east coast where our younger sister lived.
Via Viber, while lying in bed, I monitored the US-based contingent as they got together from as far away as Seattle, Washington for a day in my sister’s home in Richmonde, Virginia. In the De Leon clan, kins always keep in touch — emotionally, spiritually, virtually.
In other words, digital technology has already disrupted our lives in many good and not so good ways. I thank God for the presence of technology that enables me to talk to my kins an ocean away virtually face to face as often as I want. But I must admit, I will still think twice before riding a driverless vehicle and I still don’t trust technology enough to do online banking.
But amazing developments in technology will continue to surprise and amuse us and help us improve the quality of our lives.
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Last Wednesday, U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx announced a new advisory committee on autonomous vehicles. The committee’s mission: develop recommendations for how automated technology can transform the way we move people and goods, on our roads and railroads and in our airspace.
Thinking about autonomous vehicles holistically is to be applauded. Yet automation on land still seems to dominate the conversation. You’ve likely seen the headlines about driverless cars, buses, and trains: Tesla launches Autopilot and Elon Musk proposes the Hyperloop. Google’s driverless car logs 700,000 miles on the roads of California and Nevada. Toyota, BMW, Daimler, and others invest billions in technologies that could allow humans to take their hands off the wheel.
But it’s another technology altogether that will dominate the future of autonomous navigation: drones. It is autonomous aircraft, not cars, that have the advantages that will make widespread adoption of vehicles without human operators possible in the very near future. Here are four reasons why the future of autonomy is about drones, not driverless cars.
1. We can design low-altitude airspace for drones, not humans.
From the very beginning, our network of roads, highways, bridges, and overpasses has been built on the premise of human drivers. The roadways are static, the street signs are static, and traffic flows much as it did when the first roads were mere dirt paths. If we designed our cities anew today, we’d create a fundamentally different traffic system: cloud-based and capable of microscale adjustments to efficiently manage millions of cars in constant communication with each other and the network.
An onboard driverless navigation system isn’t enough to make a car autonomous; these vehicles will also need help from high definition maps, real-time road capture via computer vision, an integrated network that connects each car with other driverless vehicles, and a constant flow of information about obstacles, hazards, and traffic. And as driverless cars come online, they won’t be replacing human-operated cars altogether. Instead, they will be sharing the roads…and with human drivers comes human error. Safe, autonomous driving will be difficult to accomplish until every car is a driverless one.
Low-altitude airspace, on the other hand, is largely untouched. As drones take to the skies, industry stakeholders have the opportunity to build a network that is designed to accommodate autonomous navigation from the very beginning: digital, connected, and data-driven.
2. Traveling in three dimensions offers more flexibility than two.
The path a car travels is often simpler than the one a drone must fly, but it is also lacking in flexibility.
Cars are constrained by the road itself, and by the two dimensions in which they travel: forward and backward, right and left. Drones have more degrees of freedom, able to maneuver in 400 feet of airspace. As autonomous flight becomes the norm, this means that adjusting routes to avoid obstacles, hazards, and other constraints will be far easier for a small, nimble drone than a car constrained by the lanes of the highway.
3. An open platform accelerates innovation.
Car companies have long competed with each other, and driverless technology is no exception. Autonomous navigation technology is being built vertically: each automaker is a closed system, making it difficult for second party developers (such as a contractor building a feature for a vehicle) or third party innovators (such as the inventors of a new app) to leverage autonomous vehicle platforms at scale.
We’ve seen before that open platforms can fast-track innovation. Consider the impact that the internet, the ultimate open platform, has had on our world. Or consider how Apple, one of the most ubiquitous tech companies in history, owes the success of the iPhone in large part to opening up the app store to third party developers.
This is a remarkable advantage for drones. Unmanned aircraft are part of a much more democratic system. While some drone technologies are proprietary, there is tremendous collaboration across platforms and between hardware manufacturers, software developers, and service providers. These partnerships will amplify and enable innovation for the entire industry because anyone can invent a solution that powers or is enabled by a drone.
4. An affordable technology is an accessible one.
The price of entry into the automotive market is incredibly steep, and the industry is full of established, well-funded players. In contrast, drones can be purchased at a wide range of price points, opening the ecosystem to many more innovators and entrepreneurs. Buying a drone to test a new application, experiment with a new business model, or start a new company is relatively affordable. The result: drone technology can be adopted quickly, drone businesses can iterate rapidly, and new innovations can take root
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Taken together, these advantages suggest that millions of autonomous drones will fly our skies long before millions of fully autonomous cars travel our traffic-choked roads.
Perhaps we might even ride in flying cars before we ride in driverless ones.
Gregory S. McNeal is a professor at Pepperdine University and co-founder of AirMap. Daniel Rubio is CTO of AirMap and the former CTO of road-mapping platform for autonomous vehicles HERE.
Meanwhile, we are learning that change can be abrupt. Both the Philippines and US have willingly elected presidents who display grand amoral behaviors, stepping away from Christian-based diplomacy and toward crude, autocratic ways that seem anchored to little more than getting a rise from the popular following that put them into high office.
