The effects of global warming are a bit theoretical, until you start to imagine actual cities, and actual neighborhoods. The streets of San Francisco, for example.
Johnny O, author of the site Burrito Justice, has created maps of his native city after 200-foot sea level rise—which could happen in the next 60 years, if ice-sheets in Greenland and the Antarctic start melting.
The Earth has a roughly 12 percent chance of experiencing an enormous megaflare erupting from the sun in the next decade. This event could potentially cause trillions of dollars’ worth of damage and take up to a decade to recover from.
Such an extreme event is considered to be relatively rare. The last gigantic solar storm, known as the Carrington Event, occurred more than 150 years ago and was the most powerful such event in recorded history.
When we set New Year’s resolutions in our house, we tend to tweak the list for a few weeks, figuring out what’s more wishful thinking versus realistically achievable. Then up they go, taped to the kitchen cupboard over last year’s lists. It’s always a chuckle, sometimes an inspiration, to compare last year’s list with this year’s.
We’ve all seen the predictions — both fictional and pseudoarcheological — that the world will end in 2012. But while some of science fiction’s predictions for the year 2012 are apocalyptic, some are merely disastrous — and a few are downright upbeat. Let’s see what triumphs and tribulations science fiction says we can look forward to in the coming year.
“In the future we might not prescribe drugs all the time, we might prescribe apps.” Singularity University‘s executive director of FutureMed Daniel Kraft M.D. sat down with me to discuss the biggest emerging trends in HealthTech. Here we’ll look at how A.I, big data, 3D printing, social health networks and other new technologies will help you get better medical care. Kraft believes that by analyzing where the field is going, we have the ability to reinvent medicine and build important new business models.
Experts are making predictions for 2012 in a wide variety of technology, business, and economics areas. Here’s our pick of the most interesting.
The solar surface and atmosphere are highly dynamic plasma environments, which evolve over a wide range of temporal and spatial scales. Large-scale eruptions, such as coronal mass ejections, can be accelerated to millions of kilometres per hour in a matter of minutes, making their automated detection and characterisation challenging. Additionally, there are numerous faint solar features, such as coronal holes and coronal dimmings, which are important for space weather monitoring and forecasting, but their low intensity and sometimes transient nature makes them problematic to detect using traditional image processing techniques. These difficulties are compounded by advances in ground- and space- based instrumentation, which have increased the volume of data that solar physicists are confronted with on a minute-by-minute basis; NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory for example is returning many thousands of images per hour (~1.5 TB/day). This chapter reviews recent advances in the application of images processing techniques to the automated detection of active regions, coronal holes, filaments, CMEs, and coronal dimmings for the purposes of space weather monitoring and prediction.
Within the next 30-40 years, we’ll have a machine that can record our dreams (and our realities) in HD, enabling us to watch those experiences and show them to others.
The Japanese have begun doing precisely this. Eventually, the sophistication of this technology will allow us to participate in the dreams of others, enjoy customized dreams, and relive old experiences . The Japanese, who usually dive into the future head first and with fewer apprehensions than their western counterparts, have already constructed a primitive dream recording machine, a video of which is attached below. The resolution of the image rendered by the first dream recording machine in the world is modest, but so were the first video games (Did anyone play FIFA 95?). Improving the picture quality is the logical next step in this process, and such advances tend to accelerate rapidly once the wheels are in motion.
Over-promising of future change is a venerable and lucrative practice.
Since the origins of speculative fiction in the 19th century, authors have found that a surefire way to rev up your readership and get positive reviews is to offer a plausible but startling vision of an exciting future that is just around the corner—near enough that you and I will live to see it!
