Future Shock

If you have a free hour or ten, check out some of the learned, mind expanding answers to this year’s edge.org question, which is “What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?”

I am going to try and cover some of the more interesting responses over the next few days. I’ll start with John Gottman’s anticipation of earthlike colonies: 

 

The technological changes were small at first. In 2007 a telescope was developed that could search for planets in the Milky Way within 100 light years of Earth. The next version of the telescope in 2008 did not have to block out the light of the new star to see the planets. It could directly see the reflected light of the planets closest to every star. That made it possible to do spectroscopic analysis of reflected light and search for blue planets like Earth. Within a decade, 100 Earth-like planets had been identified within 100 light years. In the next two centuries that number increased to 50,000 blue planets.

Within the next two centuries the seemingly impossible technical problems of space travel began to be solved. Problems of foil sails were solved. Designs emerged for ships that could get up to 85% of the speed of light within 2 years, using acceleration from starts and from harnessing the creative energy of empty space itself. The Moon, Europa and Mars were colonized. Terra-forming technologies developed. Many designs emerged for the spinning complete 2-mile Earth-habitat ship that produced a 1-g environment. Thousands of people wanted to make the trips.

Transferable Skills

The NYT has a piece on laid off bankers chasing literary/creative dreams:

With Wall Street hemorrhaging jobs, bonuses disappearing and the financial sector going through a seismic shift, some bankers and lawyers are switching lanes to more creative career paths. They are putting down their Wall Street Journals and picking up Variety as they try their hands at comedy, filmmaking and writing. “The economy couldn’t survive on speculation and what really amounted to advanced financial alchemy,” he said. “We are now realizing it is our human creativity that is our real capital. 

“The economic downturn is going to free up top talent to do other things that are going to change the metabolism of cities like New York in a very good way.”

Not so fast:

Still, Jonathan Bowles, director of the Center for an Urban Future, says that while there is no question that creative fields are not faring as badly as Wall Street right now, they are hardly immune to the economic downturn. The advertising, publishing and newspaper industries are all cutting jobs, he noted.

 

 

Green, Not-So-Green

TreeHugger reports on a new shoebox made from 100% recycled material:

Pretty cool, but, the real question is: How will this affect the  manufacture of gradeschool dioramas?

Also, just in case that story tempted you into indulging in any optimism about the green revolution, there’s this report in the NYT about an artificial beach currently under development in Dubai which will feature air conditioned sand. Yep. Air conditioned sand. That has to be the energy equivalent of burning hundred dollar bills in a fireplace, right?

Walkable Urbanism

Matthew Yglesias has a smart post on “walkable urbanism” as distinguished from “living in a city”. The thrust is basically that the benefits of urban living (a walking lifestyle, conveniently located retail and restaurants, etc.) don’t necessarily have to occur within today’s major cities. With tweaks in building patterns citylife can be brought to suburbs and small towns. One example:

I think trying to build housing in shopping malls is a potentially promising idea.

My sense is that housing would change the malls in important, beneficial ways also. There would probably be an increase in restaurants and other small shops which appealed to the everyday needs of residents. Those tenants would likewise help the malls to survive downturns (like one we’re currently in) when spending on purely consumer goods plummets radically. I could see mall housing being particularly attractive to community college students who could work and live in the same structure while also experiencing a taste of the citylife their away-at-school friends are enjoying.

The Self as Cartoon

Jonathan Franzen quoting Scott McCloud:

Scott McCloud, in his cartoon treatise Understanding Comics, argues that the image you have of yourself when you’re conversing is very different from your image of the person you’re conversing with. Your interlocutor may produce universal smiles and universal frowns, and they may help you to identify with him emotionally, but he also has a particular nose and particular skin and particular hair that continually remind you that he’s an Other. The image you have of your own face, by contrast, is highly cartoonish. When you feel yourself smile, you imagine a cartoon of smiling, not the complete skin-and-and-hair package. It’s precisely the simplicity and universality of cartoon faces, the absence of Otherly particulars, that invite us to love them as we love ourselves. The most widely loved (and profitable) faces in the modern world tend to be exceptionally basic and abstract cartoons: Mickey Mouse, the Simpsons, Tintin, and – simplest of all, barely more than a circle, two dots, and a horizontal line – Charlie Brown.

Shooting Up

Amanda Schaffer at Slate looks into a new Japanese fad:

Located in a tony complex—upstairs from L’Occitane and Armani, down the hall from Morgan Stanley—the clinic offers 10-minute intravenous drips to urbanites in need of a pick-me-up. (The place is called Tenteki 10, after the Japanese word forintravenous.) When I drop in, three women are on their way out, exuding relaxation, as if they’ve been to a spa. A technician tidies up the treatment room, where patients sit on elevated stools. IV bags release liquid into their veins as a flat-screen TV displays images of red leaves and water rushing over rocks. Many of the treatments include recognizable fare—vitamin C, biotin, and various amino acids—however questionable it may be to infuse unspecified doses of these “treatments” into healthy adults. But the kicker is the key ingredient in one of the cocktails: human placental extract.

The article goes on to detail some of the supposed benefits of human placenta, among them  increased energy, improved skin and a youthful appearance. As is usually the case with these sorts of fads, the science doesn’t stick:

To date, at least, that evidence supporting placenta as a health treatment is scant. The effects on skin are also fairly speculative. In theory, topical gels or creams containing placental extract might help chronic wounds to heal. That is plausible since placenta contains compounds that facilitate collagen formation and skin cell proliferation, says Michael Nelson of Washington University School of Medicine, who edits the scholarly journal Placenta. But this paper, at least, finds that the wound-healing effect is merely comparable to that associated with a common antiseptic. Nor did I turn up any clinical trials that demonstrate anti-aging effects on skin, at least in the peer-reviewed, medical literature. Perhaps the fountain-of-youth claims spring from a belief that substances connected with childbirth or infants must hold some power to turn the clock back.Meanwhile, claims that the extract aids both insomnia and fatigue are cause for some head-scratching.

Silver Linings

Sarah Hepola at Salon makes an interesting link between the tragic death of Heath Ledger and the sagging demand for celebrity gossip:

The year kicked off on January 22 with the shocking accidental death of Heath Ledger. The story had all the familiar and sordid mixings of juicy tabloid tragedy: Drugs! Depression! A heartbroken (and famous) ex-wife! An Olsen twin! And yet, Ledger’s death wasn’t fun, wasn’t funny, wasn’t the kind of downward spiral whose images you pass around like Christmas snapshots — images like, say, a baldBritney Spears banging on an SUV with an umbrella or Lindsay Lohan passed out in a car. No, the demise of Heath Ledger was dark, baffling, sad. 

Anecdotally I tend to agree. Ledger’s death packed an emotional punch which I had never experienced in the context of an incident involving a celebrity. I remember calling my wife immediately.