2019 is off with a bang! (and a TEDx Talk!)
Engineered symbiosis. For those of you who follow us, you may already be familiar with this concept. For those who did not spend their month of December reading our Medium page (what?!), you can catch up on our thoughts on Symbiosis, the Earth and us.
OR you could hit the play button just below and let Arnaud de la Tour, Co-Founder of HT, guide you on the journey from Symbiosis to Parasitism and right back again.
At Hello Tomorrow, we believe that technology can transform our lives and our planet, thus restoring the symbiosis of man and nature from long ago with a new kind of Engineered Symbiosis.
We believe we are entering a new era of innovation. Deep technologies have the potential to shift entire industries and trust us, they’re already doing it.
Let’s look at a few examples.
Clean meat
In recent months, much awareness has been raised about the environmental cost of growing meat to meet the growing demand (pun intended!) for meat.
If we’re not quite ready to all go vegan, many companies like Memphis Meat or Finless Food (one of our HT Challenge finalists from 2017!) are now working on growing meat in labs, with cells from muscle tissues.
(Bonus: if you want an in-depth view of clean meat, check out the meaty (!) report that our friends over at Massive Science wrote. It’s enlightening! )
Organ on a Chip
Say what? How is that restoring the symbiosis, you may be wondering? Well, the numbers are harrowing. In the US alone, 100M animals are killed every year to test new drugs, food, chemicals, or cosmetics. Enter organs on a chip.
The idea behind this futuristic concept is to use the traditional computer chip manufacturing methods, coupled with microfluidics to build devices that reproduce the microarchitecture and function of a real human organ.
Thus sparing animals and allowing for much faster clinical trials as it can be automated, while animal testing can’t.
Technology helps us today to decrease our impact on the environment.
But it can also boost the planet’s capacity to adapt.
Depolluting soils
A startup called Novobiom is using mycelium to help depolluting soils instead of using traditional techniques like heating or additional chemicals.
Planting trees
This is where Biocarbon Engineering, the grand winner of the 2015 Hello Tomorrow Challenge steps in. They use drones to do massive reforestation, at a fraction of the time and cost than what we can do without the technology. Thanks to drones, they are able to reach remote areas and to shoot seeds to boost tree-growth.
Technology created the gap between us and our environment. Yet today, it’s driving the change and closing this gap by lowering our impact and supercharging our environments capacity to adapt.
What’s key for us as an organization is that technology for technology’s sake doesn’t mean that much. It’s what we do with the tech that counts.
What kind of future do we want and what are the possible scenarios? At Hello Tomorrow, our goal is to put the innovators, the researchers, the bigger companies, the policy-makers and the governments around the table.
Ultimately it also comes down to us. Let’s choose our future together.
