The Home of the Future

I don't remember how I started getting The Red Bullitin, Red Bull's extreme lifestyle magazine (Klout? Some promo thing?), and I certainly don't have an extreme lifestyle unless you count, like, making things myself and trying to not eat junk, but sometimes there's a neat article in it*. This month's issue had an article about the home of 2030, as they see it, and it has some really neat ideas.

• Instead of having a separate living room, dining room, media room, workout room, tinkering room, etc, you'd have one space that is configurable for any need. And the really cool part is that it would configure itself, with a home-computer-controlled system of moving walls, self-moving furniture, customized lighting, etc.
• Most of a home's food needs would come from a mini-farm back garden for each house, tended by a tiny (by farming standards, anyway) automated gardener / farmer bot that would make sure everything grows the best it can and stays healthy.
• Including raising chickens, and having a built-in greenhouse that uses no energy from the grid but allows people to grow out-of-zone exotics and off-season basics.
• Everyone's work spaces would be customized to perfectly suit their work AND their own particular best ways of focusing, reaching that flow state everyone wants, and coming up with new ideas, innovations, and ways to be creative.
• And everyone will have access to video games that also keep them healthy and help them wind down heathily so they can sleep well and have lucid dreams that help them be stronger, faster, better, more accurate, and more creative.

Sounds like a pretty good life to me, and if you add, like, totally renewable power, souped-up recycling that integrates into the community so everyone is recycling and composting, and maybe walls that can be big computer or TV screens, it'd be a perfect close-future home!

NOTES:
*And always neat pictures--I use them for collaging all the time.

Tech, singularity and the FYOOTURE

Over on io9 again. This time, talking about how everything is going to get worse before it gets better. It's an article about how environmental collapse forces change, and how in the long run, that's good. As usual, the comments went somewhere else. Here's my thoughts:

• If rejuvenation becomes a thing, the issue won't be that some can afford it and others can't; the issue will be that no one is dying off and leaving space for those who keep coming after. 
• If there's perfect and endless rejuvenation, it's not likely that it's going to be only for the rich OR only for everyone. Likely, it'll land somewhere in the middle, or it'll develop gradually so that people don't think about it-- or the whole issue will be drowned by some other tech spinoff / invention / discovery that no one saw coming and the whole path will be diverted somewhere else. In the 60s, we could have colonized the moon by now, but focusing on small tech devices was cheaper or whatever, and we have the internet instead.*
• One of the commenters thinks there'll be revolution, and soon. Just says it offhand like it's a foregone conclusion. I don't think there will be. I have no doubt that people will do crazy things and think it's a revolution at some point, but a full-on one? There's too many people here who can't be arsed to answer their phones, let alone live in a ditch somewhere, plotting a war. If it comes, I think it'll be more that people have chosen other ways of doing things, not by fighting, and the social pressure will force change.

* Incidentally, I'm old enough to have noticed as things changed. I was 24 when I got my first cellphone; my niece was seven. And then there's the ubiquity-- I know that for my senior project in high school, I used the library research books to get my info, but now, I don't know that I remember how. What the hell did I do before Wikipedia and Google??

re: UN calls for greener food production to feed world in 2050

"aimed at helping developing countries boost clean energy technology, sustainable farming and other initiatives, the survey said.

The survey said the 2007-2008 food crisis and higher food prices “revealed deep structural problems in the global food system” that produce high carbon emissions and lead to a warmer climate, as well as more polluted land and water."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia-pacific/un-calls-for-greener-food-production-to-feed-world-in-2050/2011/07/05/gHQAVnlqyH_story.html

There's an opportunity here: If we of the First World really have an obligation to fix everything, why not really fix it? Third World countries are only making horrible messes of themselves because they don't have the infrastructure and the resources to use the resources they have properly, and they're taking the cheapest, fastest ways to catch up with us. So, why not help them? It's not competition: it's mutual survival. If the whole world is at the same level, no one is getting cheated, so we should find a way to get them there.

And here's the opportunity: All those Third World Countries don't have infrastructure like we do. There isn't the need to dismantle a US food system to get something better in place. We could (or the UN could, or the World Health Organization could, or a new entity meant for this could) build an ideal infrastructure for them, and show them how to support it, maintain it and keep it healthy. The Third World could show the rest of the world how it's done, elevating them above that mental space where everyone seems to think there's nothing Africa or South Asia can offer the rest of the world other than manufacturing.

It's not simple to do, I know. There's issues of imperialism and local instability and we'd have to have the country as a whole behind the plan, but I think it's a very simple idea. Make Everyone Better. Isn't that a better goal than Bigger Faster Cheaper Now?

re: 2050, the year we all eat each other

Quotables, because Mark Morford is so very quotable:

"It's not like it's easy being here on the planet 40 years from now, around the year 2050, the time when the new U.S. census data indicates, after much sighing and general wringing of hands, that we as a rapacious and relentlessly procreative species will be exploding all over ourselves in numbers that, at first glance, seem entirely ridiculous and untenable and doomed, but which, when you look at them more carefully, are completely ridiculous and untenable and doomed.

Here it is: A mere 40 years from now, the world population, which just recently reached a sweating, gasping seven billion, will be well over nine billion. Ethiopia and Nigeria are on track to grow the fastest, nearly tripling in population, along with similar patterns in other "high-fertility" African regions, which is all kinds of absurd given that continent's struggles to adequately feed and water even a fraction of its current population.

Minorities will soon flip to the majority in America, much to the horror of Arizona, Texas and many, many panicky Tea Partiers, who very much believe that God really wants America to look exactly like a giant Idaho Wal-Mart, only with more gluten.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/07/06/notes070611.DTL#ixzz1Rij7BuBC"

"America will retain its place as third largest in the world, mostly by birthing 100 million more confused coffee slurping fans of reality TV (308 million now, 423 million then), some of them very beautiful, life-affirming and totally cute in those jeans, but many of them mal-educated, broke and living with their parents -- and by the way, if you're around 25 and reading this right now, that parent is probably you.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/07/06/notes070611.DTL#ixzz1RijXSzwT"

"Sure, we've managed to avoid complete cataclysm so far. But only barely. It turns out we are fabulously good at reproducing like drunken rabbits. It's everything after that where we seem to lose our collective minds.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/07/06/notes070611.DTL#ixzz1RijsB3mu"

"Some experts argue that the human species, if we did ourselves right, could sustain all those bodies fairly well. We have plenty of physical space. Plenty of natural resources, even. It's simply a matter of distribution, of economic health/wealth, conservation, environmental protection, careful resource management. Also, consciousness, awareness, spiritual evolution, a shared sense of humanity and ethical mindfulness. I know: Good luck with that.

Nevertheless, some say we're fully capable of sustaining 10 billion humans. We just don't seem to have it in us to do what it takes. We're terrible at efficiency, long range planning, distribution of wealth and power.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/07/06/notes070611.DTL&ao=2#ixzz1RikFxWWP"

"The wolf is lurching ever closer to the door. In fact, he's almost here. Unless that's just the UPS guy with a new iPad 2, yoga books and our new wine club delivery. Gosh, maybe it's not so bad after all. Guess we won't know until we open the door.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/07/06/notes070611.DTL&ao=2#ixzz1RikpVGib"

I love the snark, but snark aside, this is what people are actually talking about more and more often: can we survive the way we have been? I think the answer is no, not entirely. And I think sometime soon it's going to be a Big Deal and we'll have to start taking Drastic Measures to keep things going. Probably in my lifetime, or my kids' (though, really, I hope I can witness it, because that's something amazing, isn't it, the end of everything we think we know?).

My favored solutions are also, apparently the expensive ones that will probably get dropped in favor of, like, police states and wartime-rationing mentality, but I think they're better ideas: Vertical farming in cities to feed the people who live there, home farming to feed individual families as much as possible, extensive terraforming of marginal areas using ancient methods of making a place livable, and then sending people to live there--give them some incentive, some reason that's better than slums and death and crime, and then send them there. Space colonies to create more space. Clean, new energy to reduce the need for coal and oil until it's just a footnote--water and wind and geothermal are super-efficient, and we can mine natural gas off garbage dumps which we have plenty of. New planned cities that function as organisms, not horrible sprawling eyesores. 

There are people who know how to do this stuff, we just have to decide, as a planet, that we're willing to take the chances and pay the costs to make the whole planet better and cleaner and more sustainable. I think the decision will have to be made this century.

x-prize is back on my radar

I've been following the X-Prize for years, but last night I watched a show about Virgin Galactic, and now I'm all enthused about the whole New Space Race all over again. VG got Space Ship Two to fly, and there's still lots of other teams out there trying to do the same thing. I want to be a part of it. I need to figure out how to get a job with one of them, painting the machines or sticking carbon fiber or something. They've got to need someone for basic grunt work, and then I can work my way up to wiring or something.

I wonder how ones goes about starting to build a space ship in their own back yard?

More info:
X-Prize on YouTube
X-Prize homepage
Virgin Galactic homepage
VG booking -- only 200K$