Green Futures Tuesday: The Next 20 Years: A Time of Nice Surprises? #gfstu

This event in the Green Futures Tuesday series was arranged on January 31st 2012, at 6pm GMT, by the Department of Green Innovations and Solutions.

Tweeter Martin Wright	Room #gfstu
Evening everyone! Welcome to the latest @SvTwuni @greenfutures twitter lecture! About to start uploading 15 Tweets now! #gfstu 6:03 PM
Remember the days before internet and mobiles? In 20 years, they’ve transformed society – mainly, most would say, for the better. #gfstu 6:04 PM
	@ozonist RT @SvTwuni: Evening everyone! Welcome to the latest @SvTwuni @greenfutures twitter lecture! About to start uploading 15 Tweets now! #gfstu 6:04 PM
Yet few saw them coming. So what are the surprises in store for the next two decades? @greenfutures polled some futurists… #gfstu 6:05 PM
First up, nanotech. We’ve barely scratched the surface of its potential. Nano-desalination could make the sea safe to drink… #gfstu 6:05 PM
…at a fraction of the cost of today’s methods. That could quell the fear of water wars – and turn deserts into bread baskets. #gfstu 6:06 PM
Cheap nano-fibre, teabag-like filters could turn polluted rivers into clean, safe water too – for less than a penny a litre. #gfstu 6:06 PM
And new nano-solar techniques, using carbon not silicon, capture infrared as well as solar rays: cheap energy indoors or out. #gfstu 6:07 PM
@Optimistontour even suggests we’ll have carbon neutral petrol stations – turning CO2 from the surrounding air into fuel. #gfstu 6:07 PM
Remember – if you can! – how hard / costly it was to phone India, say? And how London worried about ‘running out’ of phone lines? #gfstu 6:08 PM
Now such worries seem absurd. So will techniques like those above make today’s fears about energy and water seem equally groundless? #gfstu 6:08 PM
Just as the internet and mobiles ‘solved’ the communications crunch, will comparably revolutionary techs tackle the resources one? #gfstu 6:09 PM
And what about medicine? We might soon be able to sequence any given person’s genome for $1 – compared to millions a few years back. #gfstu 6:09 PM
That could unleash an age of personalised medicine – drugs designed to work with your genetic code. Even ones to instil empathy! #gfstu 6:10 PM
And if this all seems too much like dodgy sci-fi, what about collaborative consumption and peer-to-peer trading / lending? #gfstu 6:11 PM
Enabled by the internet, we’ve only begun to explore possibilities of new wave of co-operation. Living better, together, with less. #gfstu 6:12 PM
	@Sustshipping #gfstu @gfstu tech solutions of the past often involved throwing resource at the problem. how will this work in a resource crunch? 6:12 PM
	@stromsjo @SvTwuni I suggest you add tweet-numbering like in previous lectures. used to make it easier to keep track of things. #gfstu 6:13 PM
So, just some of the surprisingly pleasant surprises which might be around the corner. Read more here: http://t.co/Bqmeadnq #gfstu 6:13 PM
And what do you think? Is this realistic optimism? Or are we fooling ourselves that we can escape the resource/climate crunch? #gfstu 6:14 PM
@sustshipping: yes, but maybe the resource we need most now is ingenuity, not materials? #gfstu 6:16 PM
	@stromsjo @SvTwuni I’d say a lot of this is technologically realistic if we as a species could avoid self-destruction for a few decades more. #gfstu 6:21 PM
	@MartinFutures Just finished ‘Twitter lecture’ for @SvTwuni: join in the debate by going to http://t.co/REXNRfuO – or just search for #gfstu 6:20 PM
@stromsjo – agree! Do you think the search for solutions will drive us to be more collaborative,or (violently) competitive, I wonder? #gfstu 6:22 PM
	@stromsjo @SvTwuni I guess the answer is both. fundamentally, history shows that we’re not exactly peaceful creatures. #gfstu 6:28 PM
@stromsjo. Indeed… I guess the question is whether technology can remove some causus belli – eg, water shortages. #gfstu 6:30 PM
@stromsjo Just as, arguably, the internet helped break the power of dictatorships – to some extent anyway. Facebook revolutions etc. #gfstu 6:32 PM
	@stromsjo @SvTwuni that’s a good point. research in systemic #resilience could help predict future conflicts and limit the risk. #gfstu 6:33 PM
@stromsjo Identifying flashpoints and focusing innovative research on them could be a valuable new form of active diplomacy, perhaps? #gfstu 6:38 PM
	@stromsjo .@SvTwuni not a bad future to be hoping for. working for. #gfstu 6:43 PM
@stromsjo A good note to sign off on! Hope you’ve all found this interesting. Follow us @martinfutures and @greenfutures for more. #gfstu 6:43 PM
	@stromsjo @SvTwuni thanks, I’m enjoying this minimalistic learning format. @martinfutures @greenfutures 6:45 PM

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