Category: Reasons For Optimism

For awhile now I’ve been planning a post about some awesome technologies that will probably bring great changes to the world by the end of this decade. Azmyth recently did a similar post and inspired me to stop procrastinating on mine. So, without further ado, here is my list:

1. Driverless cars

What is it? Cars that are smart enough to drive you places safely while following all traffic laws. Also known as “autonomous” or “self-driving” car.

Why is it so cool? It will greatly reduce vehicle accidents, which still kill over 30,000 Americans each year and injure many more. (No more worries about drinking and driving. Or texting and driving.) It will also greatly reduce the opportunity cost of driving, as you’ll be able to do a lot of other things during your commute. Some folks have utopian visions of automated taxi services that reduce the need to own a vehicle or build a bigger parking lot. It could disrupt the shipping industry. It could keep all the old Baby Boomers active. I wonder if police will have fewer people to pull over.

How close are we? Google has been driving around a real prototype for a couple of years, although it’s probably not quite ready to handle all the driving conditions and complicated intersections of the American landscape (though as some say, humans are so bad at driving it’s not hard to make a computer that’s better). A few states have pre-emptively signed laws allowing driverless cars, and many manufacturers are supposed to be working on them. We’ve had cruise control for a long time, and we’re starting to see cars that can parallel park themselves and use cameras to warn you when you get too close to things. Completely reliable driverless technology is probably at least a couple years away, and even when it comes it will take awhile to trickle down from the new expensive models (unless we come up with a cheap way to convert older cars, but it seems like you need a lot of sensors – i.e. hardware – around the vehicles). But by 2020, even if we just have thousands of cars with a fancy cruise control that can stay in the lane and avoid collisions on highways, that would still be an incredibly valuable leap.

Continue reading The Awesome Technologies That Will (Probably) Change This Decade

I generally find more bad news than good news in the actions of governments, but there have been a few recent bright sports.

Continue reading Reasons For Optimism 15-19

I’ve been hoping that SpaceX’s successful commercial launch would lead to an awesome future involving the privatization of outer space, and it looks like it’s already leading to some cool new stuff.  The non-profit B612 Foundation has announced plans to launch a telescope that will scan for asteroids in our solar system and assess their potential threats to Earth.

Continue reading Non-Profit Asteroid Hunting

Fortunately I’m not just going to leave you with some reasons for pessimism. Here are the latest reasons for optimism, involving marijuana, patent trolls, government land, state revenues, and oil production:

Continue reading Reasons For Optimism 10-14

For years we’ve been hearing about the looming global food crisis caused by climate change and overpopulation. But the world continues to refuse to cooperate. This morning, Bloomberg reports the world is likely to have a third consecutive record year for rice production:

Farmers will harvest 466.4 million metric tons in the 2012-2013 season, boosting stockpiles by 0.7 percent to 104.9 million tons, the largest since 2001-2002, says the U.S. Department of Agriculture…

“There is enough supply to meet all the demand in the world,” said Concepcion Calpe, a senior economist at the UN’s Food & Agriculture Organization, where’s she is also secretary of the Rome-based group’s inter-governmental body on rice. “There will be ground for a further slide in prices.”

Continue reading Where is the Climate Change Food Crisis?

It’s been a while since I added to the Reasons For Optimism series, but that’s more due to me lacking focus than because of any dearth of good news. Just in the last week we saw some cool progress in all three of the sectors that I think will greatly transform our lives in the next decade.

7. Outer Space. After a successful rocket launch on Tuesday, SpaceX’s Dragon capsule successfully docked at the International Space Station yesterday, becoming the first private company to do so. The numbers are complicated, but SpaceX has essentially caught up to NASA’s capabilities and costs in just a few years and is on track to make things even better and cheaper and faster (using more reusable parts, for one). It’s pretty cool to read this latest Elon Musk interview about their current successes and future plans, and then look at the confidence he had four years ago after some initial failures made others skeptical.

Continue reading Reasons For Optimism 7-9

5. The latest Gallup poll puts public support for legalizing marijuana at 50% for the first time. Regardless of your personal feelings about what people should be allowed to do, I think it’s rather obvious that the “war on drugs” has been very costly yet very unsuccessful. It is very costly to find people with marijuana and catch them and build prisons to put them in and keep them in. The law and its enforcement has not killed the demand for the drug but only sent it to the black market, supporting violent drug cartels. It makes little sense to put people in prison for consuming something that hurts themselves and no others, especially when prisons often merely serve as a network for recruiting and running the drug cartels – creating more problems for law enforcement, not less.

Sooner or later I expect California to be the first state to successfully pass a public resolution to legalize marijuana, and as overall public support continues to increase, I expect an alliance to emerge between varying political factions that will begin to see legalizing marijuana as a silver bullet to decrease budget costs, increase tax revenue, reduce border violence, and more. (Though I also hesitate to express that expectation with too much confidence or put a time interval on it.)

6. One of the leading iPod developers has created a smart thermostat. Technology has been hurtling forward in devices like phones and cars, but the programming in most thermostats is still clunky and hard to use. Tony Fadell has done his part to bring that device into the digital age, and it’s supposed to have Apple-inspired ease of use combined with enough artificial intelligence to save energy – and money – on your air and heating bills. $249 isn’t a bad starting price, and that’s before competition brings it down.

Today’s cool breakthrough comes from a 13-year-old kid who discovered a more efficient way to collect power from the sun:

My investigation asked the question of whether there is a secret formula in tree design and whether the purpose of the spiral pattern is to collect sunlight better…

I designed and built my own test model, copying the Fibonacci pattern of an oak tree. I studied my results with the compass tool and figured out the branch angles. The pattern was about 137 degrees and the Fibonacci sequence was 2/5. Then I built a model using this pattern from PVC tubing. In place of leaves, I used PV solar panels hooked up in series that produced up to 1/2 volt, so the peak output of the model was 5 volts. The entire design copied the pattern of an oak tree as closely as possible…

I compared my results on graphs, and they were interesting! The Fibonacci tree design performed better than the flat-panel model. The tree design made 20% more electricity and collected 2 1/2 more hours of sunlight during the day. But the most interesting results were in December, when the Sun was at its lowest point in the sky. The tree design made 50% more electricity, and the collection time of sunlight was up to 50% longer!

Continue reading Reasons For Optimism 4

A few days ago I talked about my determination not to become overly pessimistic about the future based on current trends, mainly and simply because current trends have a way of surprising those who expect them to continue. So when I came across a handful of news articles about new medical and technological discoveries, I thought it would be appropriate to kick off a new occasional series called “Reasons For Optimism.”

Continue reading Reasons For Optimism 1-3