Tomorrow’s World

Science holds the key to the advancement of humanity by affording us the luxury of our ever increasing wisdom as we strive to pursue the improbable. Every answer that the truth has historically given us throughout our history has turned out to be, not magic. Anything but the mystical wonders that ancient man told us was the truth. With an open mind and head full of universal truths, we are armed with the tools to take on any notion and extrapolate the truth from the burning questions that remain unsolved.

There are imminent issues that we face as the population of this planet continues to explode. We can no longer be voracious consumers anymore and we must face the impending challenge of feeding billions more people on this planet. Dutch water farms feed most of Europe today with its vegetables, which are all grown for the supermarkets on giant floating rafts. These rafts of multi hectare aquatic farms, sit under thousands of kilometres of polytunnels that house every type of salad greens, root vegetables, vines, legumes, squashes and soft fruits, all grown upon automated floating nurseries with only a small food pellet for nutritional sustenance. The food is artificial, the light is very often artificial or extended into night time and the growing season is very often cut down from anywhere by one third to one half. This provides beautifully presented, uniform crops that retain very little of the plant’s capacity for best flavour, and best nutrition.

This is the way of multinational conglomerates and their monopoly of the food markets, which means produce is created in half the time, with less waste, less labour, less cultivation costs, less transportation costs and uniform production with quantifiable profits, greater than ever before. This is industrialisation of our food on a global scale, yet we still don’t produce enough quality food to spread to every man, woman and child in the land. This happens because of the nature of consumerism, where the holding companies demand ever increasing profit margins to make next year’s books appear better than before. This allows companies to speculate more borrowing to fund even bigger projects that will guarantee the snowball effect of consumerism. It is a flawed system that only benefits the very rich stockholders of those companies. The people who can make a real difference in this world are unfortunately tied into the consumerism system as no other way is catered for, so shunning the system is detrimental to your way of life, meaning that you will have to go without. This is also part of the design of the system.

It looks like the future of the great food problem, like it or not, lies in 3D printed food. NASA are already talking about the benefits of creating 3D printed food for astronauts as a future exercise and several big companies are looking into studying this as an option. Although in its infancy, 3D printed food will become a way of life in our future as the raw materials to produce the food we need in our lives can be readily supplied without growing anything in a greenhouse. Proteins can be created in a machine or in bulk in a factory that can be compiled as and when it is needed to create any food we desire. The technology to create this exists today, but the cost of viable production for the masses is prohibitive for at least the next decade. After this, as things are in a consumerist society, only the very rich will be able to afford this technology, with a decade or two in between before this technology becomes mainstream. Flavinoids will become hot property as they will become branded and copyrighted as the technology matures and everyone wants a piece of the financial pie.

The biggest crisis we have currently other than poverty, pestilence and disease in the third world is the energy crisis. The fact that we have a third world, means there exist emerging markets. Very soon, all of these emerging markets will be simply ‘the market’, as there will be no more markets to emerge. One of the greatest redressing of world markets will be the tilting of the scales in technology and manufacturing. Emerging markets in India, Korea and China will be the driving force in automotive and white goods industries. The Middle East will take the majority of the tourism markets with amazing spectacle the westernised world can only dream of. The western world has become fat, lazy, uninspiring and above all greedy for markets to flock to them in droves. The world is redressing the balance, as the sweatshops and slave labour used to create the cheap goods of yesterday, are the skilled workers; who understand the nature of manufacture on a global scale; start to look after their own and harbinger their own tech start-ups that the Western world cannot start to compete with. This is the balance that awaits us all whether we like it or not.

Middle Eastern Emirates and Kingdoms such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman and the UAE are all investing heavily in clean energy and tourism like no other place on Earth. Qatar has several government sponsored foundations to become the forefront of Solar Energy production, redressing the huge oil and gas reserves it refines for world markets.

Britain is leading the way into Graphene based research. Graphene is an allotrope of carbon. In this material, carbon atoms are arranged in a regular hexagonal pattern. Graphene can be described as a one-atom thick layer of the mineral graphite, whereby many layers of graphene stacked together effectively form crystalline flake graphite. Amongst its other well-publicised superlative properties, it is very light, with a 1-square-metre sheet weighing only 0.77 milligrams.

In essence, graphene is an isolated atomic plane of graphite. From this perspective, graphene has been known since the invention of X-ray crystallography. Graphene planes become even better separated in intercalated graphite compounds. In 2004, physicists at the University of Manchester and the Institute for Microelectronics Technology, Chernogolovka, Russia, first isolated individual graphene planes by using adhesive tape. They also measured electronic properties of the obtained flakes and showed their unique properties. In 2005 the same Manchester Geim group together with the Philip Kim group from Columbia University (see the History section) demonstrated that quasiparticles in graphene were massless Dirac fermions. These discoveries led to an explosion of interest in graphene.

Since then, hundreds of researchers have entered the area, resulting in an extensive search for relevant earlier papers. The Manchester researchers themselves published the first literature review. They cite several papers in which graphene or ultra-thin graphitic layers were epitaxially grown on various substrates. Also, they note a number of pre-2004 reports in which intercalated graphite compounds were studied in a transmission electron microscope.

The isolation of graphene led to the current research boom. Previously, free-standing atomic planes were often “presumed not to exist” because they are thermodynamically unstable on a nanometre scale and, if unsupported, have a tendency to scroll and buckle. It is currently believed that intrinsic microscopic roughening on the scale of 1 nm could be important for the stability of purely 2D crystals.

Graphene is touted to become the next big thing in literally hundreds of applications around the world due to its unique properties. Graphene differs from most conventional three-dimensional materials. Intrinsic graphene is a semi-metal or zero-gap semiconductor. Some of the most important technology to benefit from graphene research will be microprocessor technology, semiconductor technologies, digital storage, optical lenses, sensors, cameras, supercomputing, quantum computing and telecommunications. Graphene is set to replace the market held for so long by silicon.

A team of scientists at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore has developed a new image sensor from graphene that promises to improve the quality of images captured in low light conditions. In tests, it has proved to be 1,000 times more sensitive to light than existing complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) or charge-coupled device (CCD) camera sensors in addition to operating at much lower voltages, consequently using 10 times less energy.

The new sensor is able to detect broad spectrum light, from the visible to mid-infrared, with great sensitivity. This will make it ideal for use in all types of cameras, including infrared cameras, traffic safety cameras, satellite imaging, and more.

Why is this so exciting for the photography industry? Camera ISO is one of the three pillars of photography (the other two being aperture and shutter speed). In simple terms, ISO is the level of sensitivity of your camera’s image sensor to available light.

The majority of people taking pictures have probably never adjusted the ISO setting on their cameras so here is an explanation. Essentially, a lower ISO setting reduces your cameras sensitivity to light creating higher quality images, while a higher ISO number increases sensitivity and your camera sensor can capture images in low-light environments without having to use a flash. But higher sensitivity comes at a cost; it adds grain or “noise” to the pictures. Not all grain is bad and we often see creative uses of it in black and white photography. But if you are a sports photographer shooting in a poorly lit indoor stadium, in order to freeze action, you have to shoot with a wide aperture and reduce the shutter speed. The only way to do this is to increase ISO and live with the resulting grainy pictures.

Canon and Nikon in particular, have been battling each other to develop the highest ISO levels with the least grain since the beginning of digital photography and no doubt “wires are buzzing” with these new developments, which currently is being won by Sony. What may be the ultimate heat sink is only possible because of yet another astounding capability of graphene. The one-atom-thick form of carbon can act as a go-between that allows vertically aligned carbon nanotubes to grow on nearly anything. That includes diamonds. A diamond film/graphene/nanotube structure was one result of new research carried out by scientists at Rice University and the Honda Research Institute, USA. The heart of the research is the revelation that when graphene is used as a middleman, surfaces considered unusable as substrates for carbon nanotube growth now have the potential to do so. Diamond conducts heat very well, five times better than copper. But its available surface area is very low. By its very nature, one-atom-thick graphene is all surface area. The same could be said of carbon nanotubes, which are basically rolled-up tubes of graphene. A vertically aligned forest of carbon nanotubes grown on diamond would disperse heat like a traditional heat sink, but with millions of fins. Such an ultrathin array could save space in small microprocessor-based devices. Testing found that the graphene layer remains intact between the nanotube forest and the diamond or other substrate. On a metallic substrate like copper, the entire hybrid is highly conductive. Such seamless integration through the graphene interface would provide low-contact resistance between current collectors and the active materials of electrochemical cells, a remarkable step toward building high-power energy devices. Whatever the future holds for graphene and the myriad applications it can and will be used for, you will certainly be hearing much more about this wonderful material that will aid in the continued advancement of technology.

A group of researchers from the U.S., Finland, Germany, and Japan worked with the U.S. Department of Energy to develop a way to turn cement into liquid metal. The groundbreaking new process transforms liquid cement into a glass-metal hybrid that’s good at conducting heat and electricity. The researchers believe the material could be used for liquid-crystal display screens. The new substance could easily be used as a semiconductor in electronics because it possesses very good conductivity, low energy loss in magnetic fields, better resistance to corrosion than traditional metal, less brittleness than traditional glass, and fluidity for ease of processing and moulding. Mayenite is a rare calcium aluminium oxide mineral; its main feature is cubic symmetry. The team melted the substance at 3632 degrees Fahrenheit using carbon dioxide laser beams. They then took the liquid that was produced and processed it under several different environments so that they could control the way oxygen bonded the glass.

The group developed a technique for suspending the material using an aerodynamic levitator that held the hot liquid in the air. This was to protect the liquid from touching the surface of the container and forming crystals. While in the air the liquid cools and produces the glass-like state that is able to trap electrons for conduction. This is certainly one very exciting avenue for the tech geek lurking inside all of us.

One of the biggest problems since the dawn of industrial age is the way that humanity has endeavoured to create more and more energy to move more and more matter further and further distances. Every day we find new ways of expending more energy in our daily lives. Rockets, space travel, our transport infrastructure, the world’s electricity grids and networks, food production, digital media and entertainment, and home heating and lighting all require massive amounts of power. Even though our light bulbs get more economical and our cars get more economical and our computers get more economical; each and every day we consume more and more energy, by the food we eat, the construction methods we use, the packaging we acquire, the creature comforts of modern day living means that year on year, we as a population consume more and more energy at alarmingly ever-increasing rates.

Mankind for the last 150 years has endeavoured to manipulate matter by using vast amounts of energy. Over the next 150 years, mankind will learn how to manipulate energy using the least amount of matter. Our survival as a rapidly expanding species means that we desperately need to quickly understand being more economical and using quantum physics is the key to understanding where we go next. We know that theoretically, we have the potential to create things that only a few years ago was the stuff of science fiction. Our best particle physicists are planning the next wonders of the age, and to my mind, every one of them deserves a medal for their insight, tenacity, and true inspiration in this modern age.

Stanford University scientists have developed an advanced zinc-air battery with higher catalytic activity and durability than similar batteries made with costly platinum and iridium catalysts. The results could lead to the development of a low-cost alternative to conventional lithium-ion batteries widely used today. There have been increasing demands for high-performance, inexpensive and safe batteries for portable electronics, electric vehicles and other energy storage applications. Metal-air batteries offer a possible low-cost solution. Most attention has focused on lithium-ion batteries, despite their limited energy density (energy stored per unit volume), high cost and safety problems. With an ample supply of oxygen from the atmosphere, metal-air batteries have drastically higher theoretical energy density than either traditional aqueous batteries or lithium-ion batteries. Among them, zinc-air is technically and economically the most viable option.

Zinc-air batteries combine atmospheric oxygen and zinc metal in a liquid alkaline electrolyte to generate electricity with a byproduct of zinc oxide. When the process is reversed during recharging, oxygen and zinc metals are regenerated. Active and durable electrocatalysts on the air electrode are required to catalyse the oxygen-reduction reaction during discharge and the oxygen-evolution reaction during recharge. In zinc-air batteries, both catalytic reactions are sluggish. A combination of a cobalt-oxide hybrid air catalyst for oxygen reduction and a nickel-iron hydroxide hybrid air catalyst for oxygen evolution resulted in a record high-energy efficiency for a zinc-air battery, with a high specific energy density more than twice that of lithium-ion technology.

At the start of 2013, a research paper was submitted to the Astrophysical Journal and made public about the discovery of 15 new planets, which add to the dozens of potentially habitable candidates out there. To travel to these planets in any meaningful time requires science to overcome the problem of the vast distances in the universe. Even the closest exoplanet found so far is four light years or 24 trillion miles away. Recent developments have NASA starting a laboratory called Eagleworks to develop interstellar warp drive technology. One idea they have is to create warp engine that enables faster-than-light travel. If this sounds all too Star Trek, it’s because the proposed warp drives are directly influenced by the cult sci-fi series.

However, there’s a loophole in Einstein’s general theory of relativity that could allow a ship to traverse vast distances in less time than it would take light. The trick? It’s not the starship that’s moving; it’s the space around it.

In fact, scientists at NASA are right now working on the first practical field test towards proving the possibility of warp drives and faster-than-light travel. According to Einstein’s theory, an object with mass cannot go as fast, or faster than the speed of light. The original “Star Trek” series ignored this “universal speed limit” in favour of a ship that could zip around the galaxy in a matter of days instead of decades. They tried to explain the ship’s faster-than-light capabilities by powering the warp engine with a “matter-antimatter” engine.

Antimatter was a popular field of study in the 1960s, when creator Gene Roddenberry was first writing the series. When matter and antimatter collide, their mass is converted to kinetic energy in keeping with Einstein’s mass-energy equivalence formula, E=mc2. In other words, matter-antimatter collision is a potentially powerful source of energy and fuel, but even that wouldn’t be enough to propel a starship to faster-than-light speeds.

Space doesn’t have mass and we know that it’s flexible: space has been expanding at a measurable rate ever since the Big Bang. We know this from observing the light of distant stars; over time, the wavelength of the stars’ light as it reaches Earth is lengthened in a process called redshifting. According to the Doppler Effect, this means that the source of the wavelength is moving further away from the observer. Alcubierre used this knowledge to exploit a loophole in the universal speed limit. In his theory, the ship never goes faster than the speed of light; instead, space in front of the ship is contracted while space behind it is expanded, allowing the ship to travel distances in less time than light would take. The ship itself remains in what Alcubierre termed a “warp bubble” and, within that bubble, never goes faster than the speed of light.

Since Alcubierre published his paper “The Warp Drive: Hyper-fast travel within general relativity” in 1994, many physicists and science fiction writers have played with his theory; including “Star Trek” itself. Alcubierre’s warp drive theory was retroactively incorporated into the “Star Trek” mythos by the 1990s TV series “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” In a way, then, “Star Trek” created its own little grandfather paradox: Though ultimately its theory of faster-than-light travel was heavily flawed, the series established a vocabulary of light-speed travel that Alcubierre eventually formalised in his own warp drive theories.

The Alcubierre warp drive is still theoretical for now. The truth is that the best ideas sound crazy at first. The first step towards a functional warp drive is to prove that a “warp bubble” is even possible, and that it can be artificially created. That’s exactly what physicist Harold “Sonny” White and a team of researchers at NASA’s Johnson Space Centre in Texas are doing right now. According to Alcubierre’s theory, one could create a warp bubble by applying negative energy, or energy created in a vacuum. This process relies on the Casimir effect, which states that a vacuum is not actually a void; instead, a vacuum is actually full of fluctuating electromagnetic waves. Distorting these waves creates negative energy, which possibly distorts space-time, creating a warp bubble.

To see if space-time distortion has occurred in a lab experiment, the researchers shine two highly targeted lasers: one through the site of the vacuum and one through regular space. The researchers will then compare the two beams, and if the wavelength of the one going through the vacuum is lengthened, or redshifted in any way, they’ll know that it passed through a warp bubble.

The new lab at Johnson Space Centre is seismically isolated, so the whole floor can be floated. White is now working on recalibrating the laser for the new location. He wouldn’t speculate on when his team could expect conclusive data, nor how long until fully actuated warp travel might be possible, but he remains convinced that it’s only a matter of time.

Astrophysics researchers from the University of Sydney, Australia, published a paper in Physical Review D in March 2012 about its catastrophic side effects. The researchers conclude that not only would a spaceship require shields to protect its crew from dangerous particles moving towards them, but light particles or anything else that’s picked up during the ship’s journey would be deposited at its destination as high-energy particles. Any people at the destination would be gamma-ray and high-energy-particle blasted into oblivion. Now, they plan to analyse this problem in more detail, which may involve parallel computing to simulate the warp physics in various space-time dimensions.

The Sydney-based researchers looked at three different scenarios: a warp bubble at a constant velocity, a warp bubble on a one-way trip, and a warp bubble on a round trip. From their calculations, a ship travelling at a constant faster-than-light, superluminal velocity would have the largest destructive result on a destination, also destroying the ship in the process. Realistically, the large build-up of energy at the front of the ship would almost certainly disrupt the warp bubble before it became too ridiculous.

The most devastating journey when comparing a one-way trip with a round trip would be the round trip, with the ship’s origin point receiving the most destructive blast of high-energy particles, picked up as a ship makes its way back from the destination to its origin.

These damaging particles are in a region in front of the warp bubble called P+. Space-time is compressed at such a high-rate that more space-time is compressed than light particles can travel through in the same time period, meaning that any particles caught here are trapped, while increasing in energy.

The burst or beam of explosive energy is a result of the ship decelerating from faster-than-light to sub-light speed, depositing a large number of high-energy particles in a very short space of time. This is similar to high-energy particles impacting our atmosphere, higher than anything created in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland.

Compared to the distances between stars, lightspeed is slow. The neighbouring star system nearest to us (Alpha Centauri) is more than four years away at light speed (as measured from the perspective of an external observer). The nearest habitable planet might be anywhere from 25 light-years to 200 light-years away, and to consider meeting new aliens for each week’s episode, our ship would need a cruise speed of at least 25,000 times light speed.

Wormholes and warp drives; approaches to FTL flight are theoretically possible, but the theory has not yet advanced to guide their construction. These theories are based on Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The ongoing progress mostly focuses on the energy conditions; how to lower the energy required and how to create and apply the required “negative energy.” One conclusion we have already found is that wormholes are more energy-efficient at creating FTL than warp drive. Quantum physics also presents tempting phenomena relevant to FTL questions. A number of phenomena, such as tunnelling and entanglement, fall under the header of ‘quantum non-locality’.

Picture your favourite fictional starship, where the crew is walking around normally, as if in a studio back on Earth. This means that the ship is providing a gravitational field for the comfort and health of the crew; in the middle of deep space where such fields do not exist. This would be a profound breakthrough! This hugely important feature often gets neglected in the shadow of the difficulty of achieving FTL. It is so ubiquitous in science fiction that many people do not even realise it’s there and the extent of its implications. Unfortunately, it does not yet have a cool-sounding name to help champion and convey its essence.

Given such an ability to create acceleration forces inside a spacecraft, it is not much of a leap of imagination to suggest that forces could be created outside a spacecraft too, thus moving the spacecraft through the universe. Such a non-rocket space drive would be a profound breakthrough. The physics of being able to manipulate gravitational and inertial forces also implies the ability to have “tractor beams” for moving distant objects, “shields” to deflect nearby objects, plus the ability to sense properties of space-time that we cannot yet even fathom. Researchers have published more than one way to generate such acceleration fields, and both methods are theoretically consistent with Einstein’s general relativity.

Interstellar flight; even when in the context of foreseeable technology requires enormous amounts of energy, more prowess than humanity has yet achieved. On “Star Trek,” they use matter-antimatter to provide energy (antimatter is existing physics), by fully converting matter into energy. Think Einstein’s E=mc2. Our fantastical spacecraft will need at least that much energy, perhaps more.

Nuclear power is a reality that, if used for spaceflight, would greatly increase the extent of space activities using foreseeable technology. The power levels required for FTL flight, values which were once astronomically high, have improved with continued research to where they are now just fantastically daunting. Other science fiction has cited quantum zero point energy as an ample energy source. Though quantum vacuum energy is rooted in credible theoretical and experimental approaches, this research is still too young to answer the hopes and wishes for ample energy conversion. Today, minuscule energy conversions are possible using tiny electrode gaps. Though these experiments are not energy extractors, they do serve as excellent tools to empirically explore this young topic in physics.

Although trends indicate that humanity is becoming more peaceful, overall, there is growing concern that this challenge might turn out to be harder than creating the new physics for FTL and controllable gravity. The good news is that this is something we can all work towards by being more thoughtful about how each of us chooses to resolve conflicts of views, wants and needs. Theoretically, faster than light space travel remains possible. How soon we can build and master such technology will slowly unfold over the next half century.

We are entering a brave new world, full of discovery and excitement. It is this discovery that makes mankind truly unique and very special in this world. First we need to address the current energy problems we face today. We can become masters of energy which is the key to discovering realms of other worlds and potentially other civilisations. Deep space travel would also give us almost endless supplies of natural resources from the depths of the interstellar regions of our universe. For now they are dreams. These are dreams that humanity has had since to the dawn of civilisation. Our drive to reach for the stars has only just begun, but the fate of mankind will ultimately need to terraform new homes upon far reaching planets. To rule the heavens we need to master living on our own planet. We cannot be trusted with the unlimited resources of time and space until we learn to economise with the limited resources we already have.

This is not talk of science fiction. This is open discussion and ferment of today’s theoretical potential as seen through the young, naive eyes of our own humanity. A child cannot be expected to think like an adult until it has come of age, with all of life’s learning curves building a picture which comes into focus when we most need it. Before we try to run, we need to learn how to walk. Our technological adolescence will be humorous to future generations. In retrospect, these texts may be seen as insightful, but it is merely an act of logic. We should be humble in our discovery as we should be mindful of where this places us in history and we should develop the foresight to be able to marvel at our own potential in the greater scheme of humanity. The story of our future begins now. What will you do with your life to aid the steering of our humanity in the right direction?