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Sub-Topics Doomsday Also Try Ecology Future in Evolution Sustainable Living Sustainable Planet Development World Peace World Population Lesson Plans Resource Management and Environmental Planning - Grade 11 (British Columbia Ministry of Education) Provides a lesson plan for the 11th grade level. The materials are called an Integrated Resource Package. 2-01 News -09-29-07 The Future Clean Energy Source (MSNBC News) "What does the future of energy look like? Can we move to an entirely natural-gas-generated economy?" "Fifty years from now we will have developed a new energy infrastructure that is many times more efficient, largely through natural gas, solar and wind-powered electric generation, hydrogen fuel cells in the transportation sector and massive increases in end-use efficiency. We will then be entering the hydrogen economy as a result of a transition that began with natural gas." "The hydrogen economy?" "An economy powered by hydrogen gas released from seawater by electrical current, produced by solar or wind generation. Although this process of electrolysis has been known and used for over 100 years, it is not commercial for our economy today. We have already powered automobiles, boats, airplanes and towns on hydrogen, so we know we can do it. And it's 100 percent clean. It is not as if it is some "Star Wars" technology. Somewhere in the second half of this century, civilization will have finally achieved an energy system that can power its economic growth on an environmentally stabilized Earth. The hydrogen economy should be civilization's energy endgame." 09-07 -10-15-06 What America's Next 100 Million People Will Look Like (ABC News) "There will be 400 million Americans in 2043, climbing to 420 million by midcentury, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates. The added numbers will change the nature of the populace, reflecting trends already begun." 10-06 -12-10-06 Hydrogen Fuel Car for Honda for 2008 (MSNBC News) "I turned the key and heard a whir as air mixed with hydrogen. I stepped on the gas— make that hydrogen-gas pedal—and launched forward with a powerful pull. All was silent. That's because the [Honda] FCX's hydrogen is used to create power for an electric motor." 12-06 -12-10-06 New Green Cars Proposed (MSNBC News) "Carmakers at the L.A. Auto Show are falling all over themselves to look environmentally conscious. Here’s what you’ll see on the highway." 12-06 Futuristic Home (MSN Technology) "MSN Tech & Gadgets takes you on an exclusive tour of the Microsoft Home. Is this what your home could be like in 2015?" 10-06 Papers 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them (ScienceDaily.com) "In High Noon, J. F. Rischard challenges us to take a new approach to the twenty most important and urgent global problems of the twenty-first century. Rischard finds their common thread: we don't have an effective way of dealing with the problems that our increasingly crowded, interconnected world creates. Our difficulties belong to the future, but our means of solving them belong to the past. Rischard proposes new vehicles for global problem-solving that are startling and persuasive. With its clear-eyed urgency and refreshing specificity, High Noon is an agenda-setting book that everyone who cares about the future must read." 06-07 Census - 1950 to 2050 (InfoPlease.com) Provides historical and projected population of the world, as well as growth rates for each ten year period. 2-01 Census - The Past 100 Years (U.S. Census Bureau) Provides a summary of the past 100 years in terms of pollution, income, population patterns, and more. Clinton's Global Summit (ClintonGlobalInitiative.org) "...the Clinton Global Initiative will provide discussion and debate on four of our most pressing global challenges:" "* The Escape from Poverty: Forging a New Deal Between the Developed and Developing World" "* Religion, Conflict and Reconciliation" "* Climate Change: Business Opportunity, Business Challenge" "* Governance, Enterprise and Investment" 9-05 Clinton's Global Summit (Wire Service) "Former President Bill Clinton wheeled and dealed on Friday at his Clinton Global Initiative summit, yielding promises from global leaders to do things to make the world a better place and bringing the value of aid commitments over two days to nearly $500 million." 9-05 Clinton's Global Summit Report, 52 Ways You Can Make a Difference (ClintonGlobalInitiative.org) Suggests 52 ways to improve the world. 01-07 Clinton's Global Summit Report, February 2006 (ClintonGlobalInitiative.org) "The Clinton Global Initiative is a non-partisan catalyst for action, bringing together a community of global leaders to devise and implement innovative solutions to some of the world’s most pressing challenges." 02-06 Concept Cars (Toyota.com) Provides a variety of future cars from fast to efficient. 10-07 Future - Andrew Zolli's View (USNews.com) Provides highlights of the views of the futurist. 1-04 Future - Our Future (Awesome Library) Awesome Library's challenge to collaboratively develop a future that focuses on our children as our foundation. Provides a forum for discussing our next 50 years. Future - Time Travel (Live Science) " 'If you want to know what the Earth is like one million years from now, I’ll tell you how to do that,' said Greene, a consultant for 'Déjà Vu,' a recent movie that dealt with time travel. 'Build a spaceship. Go near the speed of light for a length of time—that I could calculate. Come back to Earth, and when you step out of your ship you will have aged perhaps one year while the Earth would have aged one million years. You would have traveled to Earth’s future.' ” 1-04 Future - Time Travel (USNews.com - Pethokoukis) "There are two basic obstacles to time travel. The first is energy. We need astronomical amounts of it, in either the form of positive or negative energy. At 10 to the 19 billion electron volts (a quadrillion times larger than that produced by our most powerful machine on Earth) space itself becomes unstable, and 'holes' and bubbles (baby universes) begin to form out of the space-time 'foam.' At this energy, it may be possible to build a time machine out of the discontinuities in space-time. Also, there is the problem of stability. [Stephen] Hawking once thought that time travel was absolutely impossible because a law of physics prevented it. After that, counterexamples have been found, so the burden of proof has shifted. Now, it’s up to the cynics to prove that time travel is NOT possible. But there is one last problem: radiation. Once we quantize the wormhole, there is the possibility that high-intensity graviton radiation will fry anyone who enters the time machines. This is still an open question, although string theory should solve it." 1-04 Future - Top Ten Forecasts (World Future Society) Provides the forecasts of the editors of The Futurist, such as "Two-thirds of the world's population will be chronically short of water by 2050." 1-04 Future - Virtual Countries (The DaVinci Institute) "The surge in interest in online communities has given rise to unique groupings of people based on cross-cultural commonalities. The strength of many of these commonalities often transcends present loyalties to country or nationality. In short, the driving force of money will, in many people's minds, force the issues of culture and heritage to take a back seat." "Emerging forces in globalism has given rise to the notion of creating Virtual Countries, countries without land and without borders. Citizens of Virtual Countries will live in existing land-based countries; abide by their laws; and, at the same time, hold two or more citizenships." 1-04 Future Cities (MIT.edu) "Contrary to conventional wisdom, which holds that cities distort natural processes, the authors of this book claim the opposite. Cities, the authors say, if properly managed "can be transformative arenas in which raw materials may be rationally and economically developed to support people decently and whole regions sustainably." "This book provides new ideas for managing the megacities of the future. The editors' goal is to shape new ways of thinking about megacities - one that promotes their function in modern societies as engines of the ideas, technologies, and loci of political energy needed to build a new regime of global sustainability." 03-07 Future Distribution of Audio and Video on the Net (PBC.org - Cringely) "The way to kick broadband growth back into top gear is to change the nature of the network and its interfaces, adding phones, television, and home automation to the mix. And that's why we see huge efforts in all these areas. But the point I made last week that inspires this week's column is the idea that only through peer-to-peer data distribution can this new network operate efficiently." "It is very hard to get your mind around the enormity not of the Internet, but of the Internet-on-steroids we'd need to absorb most other forms of communication and media distribution, but let's try anyway." 03-06 Future of Humans (MSNBC News) "Where are humans headed? Here's an imprudent assessment of five possible paths, ranging from homogenized humans to alien-looking hybrids bred for interstellar travel.” "When it comes to intelligence, some scientists say, the most likely route to our future enhancement — and perhaps our future competition as well — just might come from our own machines." On the other hand, "Two intelligent species, human and machine, just might work together to spread life through the universe." 9-05 Future of Humans - Distant Future (MSNBC News) Projects up to 4 million years into the future. 9-05 Gandhi's Grandson - An Interview (Adams) Provides an interview with Rajmohan Gandhi, Mahatma Gandhi's grandson, on how to achieve world peace. Household Revolutions Of The Century (applesforhealth) You may remember a column in which we spoke of how appliances changed the way our economy was structured. Once electricity and other forms of power were harnessed in the home, the need for domestic help started to wane. 01-14-00. Last Days on Earth (ABC News) "The world's top scientists, including Stephen Hawking, considered the foremost living theoretical physicist, describe seven riveting scenarios detailing the deadliest threats to humanity." 02-06 New Ways to Grow the Internet (PBC.org - Cringely) "Internet use in American homes is still growing, but the pace of that growth is slowing according to a study released this week by Parks Associates, a market research firm from Dallas, Texas. Based on a sample of 1,000 U.S, households, the survey concluded that 42 percent of U.S. homes have broadband, 22 percent use dial-up, but that 29 percent have no computers at all, thus placing a firm upper limit on potential Internet penetration." "This is a stretch, but it makes sense to me: If the prime directive here is simply to grow the Net as big and as fast as possible, then the best way to do that is through the balancing of data loads as much as possible across the Net. This is contrary to the client-server model that has dominated the Internet for most of its existence. Put differently, the major impediment to eventual Internet hegemony is the problem of scaling client-server applications. How big a data center do you need before you realize that no data center is big enough for some applications? Only a server-server or peer-to-peer architecture makes sense in the long run." "Grid's system, on the other hand, accomplishes two things from the end-user perspective: it is point, click and watch; and it is very very high quality. Using p2p, they can afford to send 1.5Mbps - 2Mbps video over their network because it costs the same as sending 150Kbps-200Kbps video. I was shocked by the video quality, watching a DVD-quality movie at Starbucks on my notebook computer with virtually no waiting." 03-06 Next 20 Years (ThomasLFriedman.com) "History of the world twenty years from now, and they come to the chapter "Y2K to March 2004," what will they say was the most crucial development? The attacks on the World Trade Center on 9/11 and the Iraq war? Or the convergence of technology and events that allowed India, China, and so many other countries to become part of the global supply chain for services and manufacturing, creating an explosion of wealth in the middle classes of the world's two biggest nations, giving them a huge new stake in the success of globalization? And with this "flattening" of the globe, which requires us to run faster in order to stay in place, has the world gotten too small and too fast for human beings and their political systems to adjust in a stable manner?" "In this brilliant new book, the award-winning New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman demystifies the brave new world for readers, allowing them to make sense of the often bewildering global scene unfolding before their eyes. With his inimitable ability to translate complex foreign policy and economic issues, Friedman explains how the flattening of the world happened at the dawn of the twenty-first century; what it means to countries, companies, communities, and individuals; and how governments and societies can, and must, adapt. The World Is Flat is the timely and essential update on globalization, its successes and discontents, powerfully illuminated by one of our most respected journalists." 9-05 Our Lives as a Simulation (New York Times) "Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, it never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody else’s hobby. I hadn’t imagined that the omniscient, omnipotent creator of the heavens and earth could be an advanced version of a guy who spends his weekends building model railroads or overseeing video-game worlds like the Sims." "But now it seems quite possible. In fact, if you accept a pretty reasonable assumption of Dr. Bostrom’s, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation." 03-07 Planning for Pandemics (ABC News) "A super-flu could kill up to 1.9 million Americans, according to a draft of the government's plan to fight a worldwide epidemic." "Officials are rewriting that plan to designate not just who cares for the sick but who will keep the country running amid the chaos, said an influenza specialist who is advising the government on those decisions." 10-05 Population in 2050 (CNN News) "The Hispanic and Asian populations in the United States are expected to triple by 2050, when non-Hispanic whites would account for the barest majority, according to a Census Bureau report set to be released on Thursday." 3-04 Report: Population in 2300 Expected To Be 9 Billion (CBS News) "Three hundred years from now, the world's population will have stabilized at about 9 billion and we will look forward to living until age 95. In Japan, that bastion of longevity, people will be hanging around until they're 106." "Still, the global population will swell in the decades to come, when there will be 57 million more people every year from now to 2050, fueled by growth in less developed regions, the report projects." 11-04 Rubber Sidewalks in Our Future? (USA Today) "The streets of America were never paved with gold, but now some of its sidewalks are made of rubber." 09-06 Space Tourism (CBS News) "If floating weightless and peering down on a shimmering-blue Earth sounds appealing, you might consider being a space tourist." 03-06

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