I seem to be carving out a niche with books about the future for kids. I’ve just contributed to a second, the updated version of A Street Through Time, published by DK £10.99. Works well, I think, alongside the future of air map (not really for kids).
The best bit from the BBC series Years and Years (set in the near future). Watch from about 2-minutes in (2:40 to be precise). The £1 t-shirt (more often the £5 jeans and fast fashion generally) is a perfect way to demonstrate how ethics go out of the window in the face of money (“principles aren’t principles until they cost you money”). The removal of human contact in banks and supermarkets is also spot on.
I’m not sure this is a trend as such, but the concept is certainly interesting. On top of the Copenhill power plant in Copenhagen the architect has placed a dry ski-slope. Why? Why not? The architect uses the term “hedonistic sustainability”.
I’ve started buying old watches, notably old diver’s watches from the 1960s and 1970s.
They are generally cheap as chips, unless you pick a big brand. The one in the picture is a fairly obscure Sicura from the 1960s (probably). It’s rather worn, which is why I like it.
It cost me £110, so if it gets lost I wouldn’t lose sleep over it, although the more I wear it the more attached to it I become. If only I knew it’s history. Who wore it and where?
One of the best bits about the watch is it isn’t that great at telling the time. This one gains about 40-minutes a day, unless I wear it to bed, in which case the loss drops to 10-minutes depending upon how much I toss and turn in bed (it’s self-winding). The point is I always know roughly what time it is, and if it’s absolutely essential that I do something bang on time I can always look at the clock on my phone.
Anyway, I think there is something loosely liberating about not knowing the exact time.
What’s this got to do with the future? Nothing, except that if pushed I suppose one might start to ponder the nature of time and the relationship of past, present and future. And when is ‘future’ exactly? I was speaking with a friend and sci-fi writer Lavie Tidhar a while back and his working definition of ‘future’ was when things got weird. But that’s now surely? My own ‘future’ tends to be 10-15 years out, but personally I’m more focussed on the present these days. Anyway, the future was always a bit of an excuse to get people to engage more with the present.
As for clock watching, I think the purpose of clocks generally is to be prepared for future events. That’s possibly the worst load of mumbo jumbo I’ve ever muttered in a blog post.
Just had a lovely lunch at Riddle & Finns (in Brighton) with my web guy Matt Doyle (from Robertson NSW). I should perhaps have used this image above (seen pasted to a wall in Brighton) for yesterday’s post about dead tech.
Not 100% true (floppy discs or zip drives anyone?), but I like the thought.
I’m having a clearout of my office and I keep stumbling on various things. Here’s the cover from someting I did 10 years ago, along with a list of 10 trends for 2010. They seem pretty on the ball for 2020. Someone once said that I’m 10-years ahead of everyone else, which perhaps could be read as meaning that anything I say now can’t be assessed, or isn’t meaningful, until 2030.
I cannot wait to re-read this little lot and work out what they got right, what they got wrong and possibly why. The World in 2020 (top) was written in 1994, Horizons 2020 (Siemans) in 2004 , Future Agenda 2020 (Vodafone) in 2010 and Futrecast 2020 in 2008.
I should perhaps point out that this isn’t photoshop, it’s an actual fire globe in Austria. Can’t help but think that Sydney fireworks missed a trick. Perhaps they should have asked everyone around the harbour to simply turn they phone flash lights on instead and given the cost of the fireworks to the rural fire service.
Following on from my Table of 100 Disruptive Technologies, I recently received an enthusiastic email from Max Nocerino, a Sci-Fi fan and aspiring futurist from Queens, New York. His idea is a table of future tech, but one that’s very much in the Twilight Zone, to borrow a Sci-fi reference. In other words, tech that’s highly improbable, but hugely impactful were someone able to figure out how to do it. Clearly some of these ideas will be ‘impossible’ given today’s science, but remember the Earth was once thought to be flat and about 6,000 years-old, so perhaps our understanding of most things can change given enough time. His first entry is Faster Than Light Travel, an idea I myself had on a Future of Space graphic recently.
Max’s explanation below, along with some detail from the Future of Space.
“This has been something that has been depicted in sci-fi since the beginning of time. Our first Moonshot is Faster than light travel; but is it possible? Many sci-fi mediums have depicted a parallel dimension called ‘Hyperspace’ that allows a ship to move many times faster than light and reach other Star systems in mere hours instead of thousands of years. The Millennium Falcon from Star Wars can travel at a little over than the equivalent of 4 quadrillion miles per hour and can reach another galaxy in roughly 100 days. Even if we could move at the speed of light; it would still take us 4 years to reach the nearest solar system, Alpha Centurai.
So how do we achieve this since we don’t know if ‘hyperspace’ exists and even if we did; we don’t know how to access this dimension. In 1994, Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre envisioned what was eponymously called the Alcubierre Drive, in which a ship could create a warp bubble around a ship that would fold space in a sense and make the distance between the vast void between stars, much smaller.
Another option would be to travel in through a wormhole like in the sci fi movie Interstellar. A wormhole is a hypothetical singularity Point in space that connects two points in space time and would allow a ship to be connected to another region instantaneously. Unfortunately, wormholes (if they exist) may only exist for seconds and may not be big enough for a ship to fit into. There is also now new evidence that even if this is possible; travel through one would still be slow. My personal idea for FTL would be to heat something to absolute hot or the Planck temperature where the laws of physics no longer apply and then the ship could pass through the vacuum since the expansion of the universe; the fabric of space time DOES move FTL. A ship would need a way to generate this intense heat and then shield itself from the heat (perhaps with a deflector shield). This is all speculation but since the universe itself moved faster than light at the point of the Big Bang; it is a possible phenomenon. We just need to figure out how to initiate it naturally….”
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BTW, for further context: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.” Arthur C. Clarke.
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