It's 2032: print some energy and drink the sea

If the internet took you by surprise, imagine what nanotechnology, 3D printing and genome sequencing might do...

Extrapolation can get you down.

How often do you hear sentences beginning with the dreaded phrase, “On present trends…” followed by some gloomy prediction of diminishing reserves of this, soaring prices of that…?

So at times like these, it’s worth remembering that present trends rarely stay that way: surprises always lurk around the corner – and they’re not always nasty ones. Cast your minds back a generation. Who would have predicted in 1985, say, the extraordinary transformations brought about by the internet and mobile phones? And who but the most resolute of Luddites would deny the enormous benefits – in terms of connectivity, and access to information, markets, even power – we’ve drawn from them?

So cast your mind forward two or three decades. What might we be looking back on in 2032, which is now just a glint in the eye, but which will have had a similar impact?

Green Futures polled the opinions of some leading future thinkers.

Nanotech: the very small gets very big
It’s some years since nanotech was front page news – usually accompanied by dire warnings of self-replicating nanobots taking over the world in a tide of grey goo. But it hasn’t gone away. Quite the contrary: it’s present in thousands of products, from skincare to showers to bicycle parts, but its impact may be greatest at a much more basic level of human need: water.

Stick this on top of a bottle, and it makes dirty water drinkable for less than a penny 

Nano-engineered desalination, based on superstrong, highly efficient membrane technology, could turn the sea into something fresh enough to drink at a fraction of the cost – and energy consumption – of today’s methods. “This could take water wars off the table”, says Mark Stevenson, author of An Optimist’s Tour of the Future. Meanwhile, a filter made of nanofibres and based on a teabag could do the same for pollution. “Stick it on top of a bottle, and it turns a river full of pathogens into clean water for less than a penny.”

Too cheap to meter?
Nanotech could help make clean energy affordable, too. Researchers are already exploring a range of ‘organic’ solar technologies, using carbon instead of silicon, which has the potential to be mass produced at a fraction of the cost of today’s modules. Combined with the latest 3D printing technology [see below], this could result in a thin film combining “a solar PV material on top, a battery in the middle, and some LED printed lights underneath”. And the sun wouldn’t even have to be shining… New materials could capture infrared rays (from ambient heat) on the bottom, and ultraviolet on the top.

Jamais Cascio, research fellow at the Institute of the Future, cautions that while solar remains “disgustingly inefficient” there will still be a role for other energy sources – including small, stable thorium reactors, which could revolutionise people’s perceptions of nuclear power. And some still hold a candle for nuclear fusion – which has been predicted as lying 30-odd years in the future for the last, um, 30 years or so. Hugh Knowles of Forum for the Future points to the investment in ITER (International Thermonuclear Experminetal Reactor) and the hype surrounding the E-Cat cold fusion energy catalyst reactor, “which is probably nonsense, but always fun to keep an eye on the big outside bets”.

Air capture of carbon dioxide could become routine. Stevenson has plans for “carbon neutral petrol stations” which would “take CO2 out of the air, stick it through some genetically engineered bacteria, and turn it into gasoline”. It’s all part of reframing the way we view carbon, he says. “It is not a pollutant, it’s a resource. It’s Mother Nature’s preferred building block for just about everything. This is stuff that makes diamonds, graphene… This is a revenue stream that we’re just throwing into the sky! How stupid is that?!”

Sooner or later, says Knowles, someone will stumble on the holy grail of long-lasting, effective energy storage. “Ultracapacitors that charge instantaneously and hold the charge for a long time could change everything.”

We don’t have an energy crisis: we have an energy conversion crisis

Together, such technologies could make today’s worries over energy security fade like mist in the electrifying sun… As Stevenson puts it, “We don’t have an energy crisis: we have an energy conversion crisis. The sun is waving this massive energy paycheck in our face every second, and we’re not banking it. So we go into our savings account, and that’s fossil fuels. Unfortunately, we’ve been raiding it like some credit card crazed junkie.”

Whatever you want, print it out
2012 is already sure to go down as the year when 3D printing comes out of the lab and into the home [see 'Will 3D printers see the end of consumerism?']. Fast forward into the future, and we could not only be printing everything from shower heads to homes, but cars, computers – and even skin. Such “additive manufacturing” uses readily available materials, explains Cascio. “So rather than shipping aluminium halfway across the world, you make use of carbon nanotubes, carbon fibres… In the most full-blown scenario”, he continues, “it becomes vanishingly cheap to produce things that were previously very expensive. If it costs the same to print a laptop as it does a shoe, this leads us to a very different economy. [It also implies] an entirely distributed manufacturing system, a heavily localised system. But it’s not local specialisation; everyone is a generalist.”

Designed for life
Personalised medicine and health advice could become commonplace as the costs of genome sequencing plummet. Stevenson predicts that “the $1 genome” is not far off. Expect “drugs designed to work with a particular genetic code”, says Cascio. And – more controversially perhaps – drugs that allow people “to think more clearly and feel more empathy”.

And if drug-induced empathy is a disturbing notion, other trends are likely to instil it in more organic ways. Take collaborative consumption, one of the internet’s surprising byproducts. “This not only allows you to make money from things you already have” [as with AirBnB or WhipCar], says Stephanie Jacometti of futures strategists Jacometti Associates. “It also takes people right back into their communities. Suddenly they’re enjoying talking to new people, meeting new people, rather than living alone in a lonely box. And environment-friendliness comes as a by-product.”

Reasons to be cheerful?
So is it time to stop worrying and embrace the future? As befits someone who’s just founded a ‘League of Pragmatic Optimists’, Mark Stevenson dismisses fears that we’re headed for a Malthusian crunch. “If we stick with the technologies we have now, Malthus is right. But when have we ever done that? We are at the stage where we can engineer ourselves past this, if we want to.”

Ruben Nelson of Foresight Canada is less sanguine. “Technology in itself is not sufficient. We may have grossly over-estimated the amount of time we have in which to adapt. We need new levels of meta-reflection and meta-insight. Most people are hopelessly trapped in Newtonian models…”

Jack Jacometti, formerly of Shell, agrees. “As Einstein put it, ‘No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it’. The human species has to raise its game, and move towards intelligent living.” He warns that we could be heading for a ‘great disruption’ of the sort envisaged by Paul Gilding: things will get worse before they get better [see 'Can sustainability activists learn to love the military?'].

Jamais Cascio remains cautiously optimistic. “All these technological developments give us a greater capacity to deal with large-scale environmental problems. They mean we reduce our carbon footprint, and increase our ability to use renewable energy and smart materials. They help create a smarter world. So I think we have a real potential to meet the resilience and sustainability demands we’ll be facing by the mid-point in the century – but it’s in no way guaranteed. That’s where the challenge lies.”

Compiled by Martin Wright, Editor in Chief, Green Futures. 

Photo: Thomas Northcut / thinkstock; Pixland / thinkstock