ThinkingShift

I was pretty useless with Maths at school. All those boring numbers and equations. History was far more interesting - full of rich, colourful stories of people living in a time long ago and long forgotten. But recently I’ve been getting into figures and numbers - not because I’m making up for lost time but because the future of humanity may depend on a certain number. And that number is 134 trillion. I can’t even imagine such a whopping big number. Does the world even have a trillionaire?…let me check…does Google recognise the term? Is it Bill Gates?

So….apparently, Wired magazine predicted in 1999 that Bill Gates would be a trillionaire by 2005. But that prediction was bombed by the dot.com meltdown. Okay, so could it be de facto Prez, Dick Cheney with his fingers in the “golden oil fields of Iraq” pot? Is it those two smart dudes who came up with the whole Google algorithm thing? Or is it some rich sultan or sheik in some Middle Eastern country? Or is it Queen Elizabeth II?

A little sleuth work…. the combined wealth of the Rockefeller family in 1998 was approximately $US11 trillion and the Rothschilds $US 100 trillion - but I’m looking for a single, extremely wealthy person, not a family. Actually, there does seem to be a very mysterious bunch of dudes, the Global Elite - families with wealth beyond our wildest dreams and who make Buffet and Gates look like small change. But that’s another blog post.

Back to finding my trillionaire. I searched Wikipedia for “trillionaire” and it took me to the “billionaire” page where I found some very rich dudes like Anil Ambani (only worth US$45 billion) and Mukesh Ambani (older bro of Anil and only worth US$20.1 billion). Mmmm….if I combine 45 and 20.1 billion I still don’t get to one trillion (which is 1,000 billion, although remember I flunked Maths) and what’s in the water in India I ask that they have so many rich dudes?

Continuing my search for the world’s elusive trillionaire. Could it be Guy Cramer? Who you ask? In 1993, Cramer discovered a number of algorithms that accurately forecast stock market indexes. In case you’re seriously brainy, you can check them out here because Cramer has very kindly made these algorithms free. He’s not the world’s first trillionaire because, as a Christian, he felt it morally wrong to keep the secret of the algorithms to himself. Now, if I could just work out what the heck all the tables and numbers mean, I could become a trillionaire!

Didn’t end up finding a definitive answer as to who is the world’s first trillionaire if in fact there is one (although I suspect it’s some very shadowy person who is part of that Global Elite mob). But I did find out that 134,000,000,000,000 (wow, check out how many zeros) is a serious, scary number. According to The Optimum Population Trust, if the global population keeps growing at its current rate, it will reach 134 trillion by 2300 (and this is despite Europe’s population decline). World population is expected to reach 6.66 billion in April 2008 (anything in that number: 666?!).

Can you imagine? 134 trillion sweaty bodies trying to hustle and bustle around our cities. I can’t even navigate Pitt Street Mall in my lunch hour without bumping into people or having to avoid idiots who refuse to get out of your way. Forget global warming: population growth could be THE most serious threat to the human species’ continuing existence.

Of course, some global epidemic could wipe a large proportion of us out or we’ll snuff ourselves out with ongoing violence and stupidity. But the UN predicts the world’s population will stabilize at 10 billion in 2200. That’s a whole lot less that 134 trillion. Even so, can you imagine all the food necessary to feed this amount of people? The cattle that will need to be raised to provide meat and the forests that will need to be chopped down to make way for cattle and so on.

Now, before those neo-Nazis I recently had an email tussle with say “let’s revisit eugenics”, let me say I’m not suggesting we should mandate one child families, enforced contraception or that we should all turn to vegetarianism to avoid 33% of the world’s grain being fed to cattle (although there’s a good idea). But it does seem that population growth is going to be a significant future issue. And how many of the 134 trillion (should it come to that) will be poor I wonder? And to what extent will we see a huge gaping divide between those who can spend, spend, spend in our materialistic society and those who will struggle just to feed themselves on a planet over-burdened by the heaving mass of 134 trillion people?

And if you’re wondering how on earth you could spend one trillion dollars, here’s a fascinating fact for you:

• if you spent a million dollars a day, it would take you 2,737.8 years to spend your one trillion (assuming you earned no interest). That’d make an awful lot of lip gloss I’d have to buy

Inspiration: AlterNet

Regular ThinkingShift readers would know that I love a good doomsday prediction or two. Is the human race going to be kicking around still in another 1000 years or will we have been snuffed out by our own stupidity, a super volcano blowing its stack or the Mayans being right about December 21, 2012?

So today’s post brings you some of the latest apocalyptic End Times scenarios. Forget global warming, there are more serious things to contend with if any of these predictions turn out to be true.

Mayan calendar: 2012 could be it, kaput. Another four years to go. The Mayans created their calendar 5,122 years ago and they set the expiry date after thirteen 394-year baktun cycles. Just in case you’re not fully up to speed with the Mayans, that expiry date is December 21, 2012. Great…just before Christmas! We’ll go up in smoke accompanied by volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and a comet or two smacking into us. But the author of 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, Daniel Pinchbeck, thinks we shouldn’t panic because the concept of apocalypse means ‘uncovering’ or ‘revealing’ and so 2012 will be a catalyst for a transformation in human consciousness. Good to know: guess I don’t need to pack the cat just yet then. But there is a word of warning from New Age guru, José Arguelles, who says we should just accept the 2012 apocalypse, don’t fight it because those who do will be carried away on silver ships. To where, I’m not sure.

If we don’t get wiped out in a Mayan inferno, then we might need to duck lava and hot ash spewing out of a super volcano. I’ve finished rereading Simon Winchester’s fabulous book, Krakatoa, which left me wondering when that famous volcano’s child, Anak Krakatoa, might blow up. Perhaps I needn’t fret because there’s a super volcano hiding under Yellowstone National Park in the US that could be far more to concern ourselves over. 640,000 years ago this volcano had a mega hissy fit and Greg Breining, author of Super Volcano, says this volcano is due for “another shake up” (witty guy). Should it erupt, it will take a chunk of Earth far larger than Mt Everest with it. Mmmmm….wonder if that chunk will include Australia. Apparently, the way to survive this cataclysm is to head west of Wyoming since the jet stream blows East and will carry far less ash and debris going West.

Honey Holocaust. This one isn’t about super killer bees. Since 2006, honey bees have been vanishing. It’s said that Albert Einstein once muttered: “”If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live” - although Einstein most likely didn’t say this. Nevertheless, the disappearing bees is a serious matter. Bees pollinate more than a quarter of the world’s food supply, so no bees equals no honey, no fruit or veges and so on. The solution would seem to be to learn how to be a bee keeper super fast.

Then there’s the usual predictions of pandemics but global health experts expect a global pandemic that might make the Spanish Influenza outbreak of 1918 look like the common cold. H5N1, aka bird flu, is seen as the likely suspect for a pandemic. Although not easily transmitted to humans, 61% of people who have contracted bird flu have died. Virologists think that should H5N1 mutate, the death toll would be in the billions. I must say that I’ve always thought that a pandemic is the most likely doomsday scenario - how many more people can our Earth withstand before Nature turns on us?

Blue gold. We’ve heard this one repeatedly in recent years - a future scarcity of clean H2O - which may lead to conflict, famine and huge disruption of food supplies. More than a billion people lack access to safe water and 3.4 million people die each year from water-related diseases. An estimated two billion people are expected to have no access to clean water by 2050. China and India, superpowers-in-waiting, already face issues with the infrastructure necessary to distribute and clean water. The problem is really a fast-growing global population and its need for food rather than a lack of water.

Resistance is futile. Here’s one I hadn’t heard of before. Do you know what telomeres are? The DNA of nearly every life-form contains telomeres—protective coverings on the ends of chromosomes that aid in replication and linking. Over the course of generations, telomeres degenerate and erode and this has been linked to ageing, cancer and diabetes. So it’s a ticking time bomb - a countdown to extinction. Some scientists are linking the increase in cancer, for example, with telomere degeneration.

Gray-goo. The so-called gray-goo scenario was first suggested by nanotechnology pioneer K. Eric Drexler in his 1986 book, Engines of Creation. This is all about robots going wild. If nanobots break free of their controls, they’ll run amok, reproduce at an exponential rate and ” reduce the biosphere to dust in a matter of days”.

Kick-ass chunk of rock. Didn’t think I’d leave this one out did you! The fatal impact of a comet or asteroid could wipe us out for sure. Maybe it will happen in 2029 when 99942 Apophis, a near-Earth asteroid passes very close to Earth. Most likely it will just be a close brush but this chunk of rock could set up a “gravitational keyhole” - a precise region in space no more than about 400 meters across, that would set up a future impact on April 13, 2036. Said chunk of rock will have a 1 in 45,000 chance of hitting the Pacific Ocean or Denver, Colorado on Easter Sunday. That will sure spoil any chocolate eating on that day! And I guess Bruce Willis won’t be around to save us.

Don’t mess with nature or space. Messing around with human DNA strikes me as not a good thing. And this scenario suggests that some dude in a lab coat could turn things horribly wrong and you might find a human embryo growing inside a rodent. Alternatively, you have the artificial worm-hole scenario. Scientists are suggesting that a short-cut or worm-hole in the space-time continuum could be artificially created. But those of us who spend our time watching Star Trek or Alien movies might wonder what sort of unspeakable horrors lie beyond our known universe just itching to slide down a worm-hole heading to Earth.

Well, better mark my calendar for December 21, 2012 and April 13, 2036 - seem like possible glitches for mankind in the 21st Century, that is if water wars, pandemics, crazy nanobots and eroding DNA don’t get us first.

Sources: Radar Online and Cracked.

I always like reading about what the future has in store for us. I’d love to pop back in 1000 years or so - would humans still be roaming the Earth or would we have snuffed ourselves out? I imagine a forlorn landscape of abandoned cities being reclaimed by the jungles and forests. Okay, I probably watch too many dark sci-fi films.

So what are the futurists saying we can expect beyond 2008? I always like to read The Futurist’s predictions and they have just announced their Top 10 forecasts. Here’s a taste:

1. By 2025, there will be a million billionaires in the world. Globalisation and technological innovation mean increasing opportunities and prosperity. You only have to look around to see how quickly some people seem to be able to come up with an idea and cash in quick to figure that this prediction is probably a goer. And I wonder how many of the billionaires will be Russian?
2. We’ll all be wearing clothes made of smart fabrics and clothes that are wired to sense temperature or change colour. I sure like this one - I can never decide what colour to wear each day, so I usually end up in black of some sort. I’d love to wear a shirt in red and if I didn’t like it one hour later, have it turn itself into green. Wristwatches that hold every piece of data about you and which you can use to pay bills by swiping it at point of sale. Shoes that tell you “watch out for that pothole”. Or clothes that clean themselves.
3. I’m not at all surprised by this forecast - a new Cold War hotting up with China or Russia, replacing terrorism as the bogeyman.
4. A cashless society. If you read just a little bit about new technologies, you’d know for instance that passports with RFID chips can be read by a mobile scanner nearby and you could be the victim of identity theft. And so with sophisticated scanning technologies - they may provide counterfeiters a golden opportunity for printing fake currency. The world may move to adopting a cashless economy.
5. The Earth is on the verge of a significant extinction event. No surprise with this one either I reckon. The 21st Century could see a biodiversity collapse 100 to 1,000 times greater than any previous extinction since the dawn of humanity.
6. Water will be what oil was to the 20th Century. I’ve blogged before about my fear that water wars could erupt as this precious commodity becomes scarcer. Recently, I saw a marked car that had Water Conservation Police written on it (might have been Authority but either way it said “Water Conservation”). It was parked outside a house of a chap who loves his garden and waters it regularly. Now, the car may have belonged to a friend or relative. But maybe it was the first signs of a world in which our consumption of water will be very tightly controlled and watched.
7. By 2050 the world’s population may be a whole lot more than expected, mainly due to longer-living and healthier people. The UN has increased its forecast from 9.1 billion to 9.2 billion.
8. By 2080, the number of Africans threatened by floods will grow 70-fold. The natural flow of water is being disrupted by increasing development and urbanisation in Africa, which may result in flooding. If climate change causes global sea levels to rise by the predicted 38cm by 2080, then 70 million Africans could be affected.
9. There will be a stampede to the Arctic. No surprise with this one I think, not when you think about Putin’s recent grab for a large chunk of the Arctic region. The Arctic has glittering resources like copper, zinc, forests, fish etc. I think this will be too much temptation for our greedy world and the pristine Arctic will sadly be exploited.
10. And finally…and a bit scary I think - more decisions will be made by “non-human entities“. Well, frankly a lot of people who make decisions in this world could be accused of being “non-human”! But the forecast is talking about robots and intelligent, non-carbon networks that will make financial or even political decisions for us. And the reason for this? Humans’ competency is not keeping pace with advances in technologies well enough to avoid human error.

Well, I think most of these are pretty sensible forecasts. If I had to predict things, I would include the declining power of the USA and the rise and rise of China and Russia. So any future Cold War might not factor in the US. But who knows: once the US kicks out Bush, it could be a whole different ball game. I think too we’ll see portions of society breaking off into smaller communities in an attempt to get away from the chaos of the world. We may see a return to caring more for each other and the environment - focusing less on the individual and more on the collective. A return to a simpler life perhaps.

What are your predictions?

As regular ThinkingShift readers know, I love stuff about future predictions. Part of me just wants to be able to hang around for the next 500 years (without getting old of course) and witness all the mind blowing technology that will no doubt emerge. Not too sure I want to hang around though to see if the planet totally blows a gasket or if the world will be a dark, dystopian place.

So on 2spare.com, I found some wild predictions about the future that went a little awry. 87 to be exact. The front runner for number one crazy prediction has to be that of Nikita Krushchev, former leader of the now kaput USSR, who uttered confidently in 1958 that the mighty Soviet Union would bury the West - Communism would triumph over greedy Western capitalism. Oops. Alas, the Milton Friedman-style rampant, destructive global capitalism model is what we’re now all facing. Privatization of public infrastructure using taxpayer’s dollars so that corporatists can make obscene profits. But that’s another post.

Back to the classic predictions. Charles Darwin clearly underestimated the impact of his survival of the fittest theory when he wrote in 1869 “I see no good reasons why the views given in this volume should shock the religious sensibilities of anyone”.

“They couldn’t hit an elephant at this dist….”. These were the last words uttered by General John Sedgwick, spoken as he looked out over the parapet at enemy lines during the Battle of Spotsylvania in 1864. Seems the elephant was well and truly hit.

Margaret Thatcher clearly wasn’t gazing into her crystal ball in 1969 when she was quoted as saying “It will be years - not in my time - before a woman will become Prime Minister.” Some people might say it would have been better if she hadn’t become PM. And I wouldn’t want this dude as my doctor - Dr Peter Duesberg said in 1988, “That virus is a pussycat”, when he was referring to HIV.

And my all time favourite? A 1926 prediction. “To place a man in a multi-stage rocket and project him into the controlling gravitational field of the moon where the passengers can make scientific observations, perhaps land alive, and then return to earth - all that constitutes a wild dream worthy of Jules Verne. I am bold enough to say that such a man-made voyage will never occur regardless of all future advances.” Note to Lee DeForest, American radio pioneer and inventor of the vacuum tube, don’t come out with bold utterances, they may come back to haunt you. And you’d think this dude being an inventor might have had a wilder imagination.

The 87 predictions are arranged into various categories: technology; rockets; atomic and nuclear power; radio; film; computers; television and so on. Go off and have some fun.

Let’s just hope that those of us who might suspect that KM is dead, dying or teetering on the brink don’t one day regret making bold assertions :)-

I really have to stop reading future predictions. In yesterday’s post, we read about some of the future predictions that didn’t quite happen. Well, here’s a future prediction that I certainly hope doesn’t happen! Well, it’s not really a prediction; maybe it’s already a reality. I thought I’d stick my nose into transhumanist or post-human stuff - you know, humans enhanced by technologies that eliminate stupidity (well, that would eliminate most business people), disease, ageing and involuntary death (mmmm…think most of us don’t want to voluntarily shuffle off). I discovered that transhumanism is sometimes symbolised >H or H+ okay, I’m probably years behind everyone else, because you knew this already.

Anyway, I’ve read Nick Bostrom’s stuff before. He’s a transhumanist philosopher and I very much liked his article, A History of Transhumanist Thought, which you download here or check out on his site. He makes the logical argument that the human desire to acquire new capacities is as ancient as humanity itself, going back to the Epic of Gilgamesh and the yearning to extend our present life to the work of medieval alchemists transmuting substances.

But in a recent article in the New York Times, Bostrom suggests that “it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation”. Now, I’ve often thought I’m trapped in a Salvidor Dali painting when the weird or the wonderful happens to me, but here’s a thought: maybe one day computers will be so powerful and have more cognitive functioning than all the combined brains of humanity and advanced humans could run ancestor simulations of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems. The virtual ancestors would have no clue whether they were trapped in virtuality or reality and maybe there are so many virtual ancestors because of the super computing power, that an individual thinks “well, I must be real as there are millions of us”. Why not? Who knows what sort of computing power the future will harness? But maybe advanced humans will have better things to do than run ancestor simulations. And would a simulated entity possess the consciousness to know that it is part of a virtual reality simulation?

Bostrom says: “My gut feeling, and it’s nothing more than that is that there’s a 20 percent chance we’re living in a computer simulation” right now. So I guess he’s thinking that our current world is run by God sitting up there with a copy of Sim City? Or some pimply computer geek from the year 8000 is running our world. Or multiple worlds theory might suggest that there is a landscape of realities - the multiverse - and so there will be exact copies of each and everyone of us but with slightly differing realities. Think of Schrödinger’s Cat experiment - you have one reality with a live cat; another reality with a dead cat and each version you exist in. I realise I’m mixing up virtual reality with reality (and the definition of reality is a whole other topic) - but if Bostrom is right (and if I’ve interpreted him correctly) then transhumans would be able to run such perfect simulations that the distinction between virtual reality and reality wouldn’t be realised.

Freaky stuff! Check out Bostrom’s site for some great reading.

As regular ThinkingShift readers will know, I am very interested in future predictions (and I don’t mean the type you get from staring into a crystal ball hoping your soul mate will suddenly pop up in front of you). I mean the type where some heavy weight thinkers outline their thoughts (possibly with glazed eyes) of what the future holds in store. Check out the Future Predictions category of this blog if you want to whizz through some posts with sometimes dire predictions for the future.

I also get a kick out of predictions that didn’t happen - most cringe-worthy for me is Ken Olsen of Digital Equipment Corporation who said in 1977: “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home”. I’m sure Steve Jobs wasn’t attending the meeting Olsen spoke at - the World Future Society in Boston - just as well, otherwise I wouldn’t be sitting here now with my beloved MacBook laptop.

Growing up, I watched The Jetsons reruns and had visions of whizzing to work in a personal spacecar. I would have special places to store lipgloss as the space car would be automatically zooming along a highway in the sky so I’d have time to apply said gloss. Imagine the thrill for me when I saw Minority Report with those nifty flying vehicles! I also imagined Star Trek like phasers being a reality so I could stun a few work colleagues if they didn’t “volunteer” their knowledge :)- I guess the taser comes close.

So I found The Future piece in Forbes fascinating. There are some interviews with “visionaries” where they talk about what they were sure would happen in the future but didn’t and as it turned out, what totally surprised them. Here’s a taste.

Nicholas Negroponte: placed his bets that sophisticated speech recognition would be in daily use in 2007. But as my recent experience with calling up a taxi company would tell anyone - often the robotic voice doesn’t understand a word you say and you end up flinging the phone out the window. I certainly can’t speak to my car and have it turn on; or open my front door with the dulcet tones of my voice. Negroponte was totally taken aback by LCD screens - must say I was too. And I’m really looking forward to getting rid of laptops and PCs (sorry Apple!) and getting one of those fab screens on Minority Report where you move icons around with your fingers like in this video. Awesome, goodbye mouse!

Esther Dyson (futurist): now, I 100% agree with her - Dyson was sure there would be outrage and people would rise to protecting their online privacy and security much more effectively than they currently do. She is surprised (I am staggered) by people’s carelessness with their personal information. And she’s surprised (a tad naive?) that companies haven’t done a better job of educating the public about what information they collect and how it’s used. Even more, she’s surprised at how people are establishing their online presence, particularly around social networks. I will do a post soon outlining my thoughts on the need to establish a public persona in digital space.

Richard Lamb (another futurist) thought that climate change would be taken more seriously (hey you gotta get by all those deniers out there first) and he’s most surprised at the power shift from government to private sector. I’m not. I’ve been concerned about this for years, particularly with the health sector. I’m currently reading Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, which is all about how free market policies are dominating the world usually after a shock of some sort like 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina. Freaking me right out.

Rudy Rucker (mathematical whizz): poor dude, he’s as naive as me. We both thought we’d be seeing flying cars a’la Jetsons. He grew up in the 1950s at the start of the space age; I didn’t but I still had that vision. He puts it down to litigation - there’d be a lot of prangs up in air or flying cars hurling into houses. And it’s also more energy efficient to roll vehicles on wheels. He thinks noise pollution would be an issue, but I reckon some smart person would come up with silent flying cars. The Internet took Rucker by surprise and that social networks work heaps better than individual minds (told you he was smart).

Wendell Bell (Prof of Sociology): my personal favourite. All good intentions but I wonder how naive futurists sometimes are. Bell expected that by the year 2000 people on this Earth would be living in peace and would have established strong and effective organisations through the UN to prevent conflict. Mmmm….guess he missed predicting the rise of the fundamentalist religious right in the US and he must have missed out on history classes that have outlined the decline in authority of the UN. He also must have skipped his anthropology classes that tell us that humans are an aggressive lot by nature. He was also hoping for self-governing societies for all people to achieve personal well-being and with equal opportunities. Oh dear.

Check out some of the articles on the site and especially check out five authors who tackle this fictional scenario: “It’s the year 2027, and the world is undergoing a global financial crisis. The scene is an American workplace”. One of the authors is Cory Doctorow, love his stuff.

Now, ThinkingShift readers I think are a pretty smart bunch. What do you think the future holds? How would you respond to this scenario? “It’s the year 2057 and the world is in crisis“. Go on; give it a go!

Anyone who doesn’t believe in global warming, read no further. If you do, then here’s something to think about. We tend to get caught up in talk over carbon emissions, carbon offsets, doing our bit to save the planet and so on. All good. But….something that I think is missed is: what will be the security implications of a planet heating up?

I’ve touched on aspects of this before here and here. But I came across a new report from the International Institute for Strategic Studies - Strategic Survey 2007 - and a part of this report looks at security issues. It looks at America’s profound loss of authority following its failure to impose order in Iraq and explores who is filling the vacuum - Putin attempting to reassert Russian power; Iran pressing ahead with its nuclear programme. As a result of various powers flexing their muscles, the report highlights key strategic policy issues in the years to come - Islamic terrorism and the military use of space for example.

But the strategic policy issue entitled Climate Change: Security Implications & Regional Impacts is pretty scary stuff. We’ve all heard scenarios of a future world with scarcity of water and wilting crops leading to less food to feed billions of mouths. The IISS report said the effects that would follow would cause a host of problems including rising sea levels, forced migration, freak storms, droughts, floods, extinctions, wildfires, disease epidemics, crop failures and famines. And it likens the impact of global security implications on a par with nuclear war.

Dwindling resources will lead to competition between haves and have nots. And as countries struggle to provide, we will see State failures increasing the gap between rich and poor and heightening racial and ethnic tensions, which in turn would produce fertile breeding grounds for more conflict. Urban areas would not escape - falling crop yields due to reduced water and rising temperatures (predicted to be between 1.8 and 4.0 degrees Celsius this century) would push food prices higher.

The report highlights that 65 countries are likely to lose over 15% of their agricultural output by 2100 at a time when the world’s population is expected to head from six billion now to nine billion people. And it goes on to say: “Fundamental environmental issues of food, water and energy security ultimately lie behind many present security concerns, and climate change will magnify all three“.

This all reminds me of a Pentagon report published in 2003, which created a climate change scenario and asked you to imagine the unthinkable - nations with resources building up virtual fortresses around their countries and preserving resources for themselves; unlikely alliances forming based on survival rather than ideology or religion; military confrontation and violence breaking out in regions around the world like Latin America. It scared the heck out of me then and still does - you should take the time to read it. Download it here - Pentagon report Abrupt Climate Change.

Strike me down! In a post just a few days ago, I told you about poor Leon, the French bulldog, and the possible dangers inherent in RFID technology. VeriChip is the US company at the centre of criticism over its plans to microchip medical patients. VericChip won approval from the FDA to implant microchips into humans. And it has started doing so.

VeriChip has just announced plans to conduct a 2 year pilot study to test their RFID technology. It will implant 200 Alzheimer’s patients located in Palm Beach County, Florida with tiny electronic capsules that contain a 16 digit unique patient identifier. The patients will be scanned and their medical and personal information held in a database, which can be accessed by medical staff.

I really do have a problem with this. VeriChip says that the patients have volunteered for the pilot study. Last time I looked, Alzheimer’s was considered to be a progressive form of dementia with symptoms of impaired thought and degeneration of brain function. This means that these patients may not be truly capable of giving informed consent. I’m wondering if this is exploitation of a group of people in society who really can’t stick up for themselves. We also know from my previous post that there are questions being raised about the medical safety issues of microchips, with animal studies pointing to a possible causal link with cancer.

VeriChip is saying that microchipping Alzheimer’s patients will give families peace of mind as any patient who wanders or gets lost can have their arm scanned to identify them. But it’s no secret that RFID technology can be used for tracking purposes and it’s no secret that hackers can nab medical data as it is transferred from chip to reader to secure database.

It’s the notion of tagging people that gets me. Tagging for folksonomies, okay; tagging for Flickr okay. But tagging humans? Not okay - very Orwellian. I think once you get acceptance of tagging a small population of medical patients, it’s an easy jump to say the prison population, then parolees or sex offenders, then perhaps to get through immigration - then the whole population. Always the argument would be - it’s to protect the population from criminals; it’s to protect military bases or nuclear power plants; we need to identify wandering Alzheimer’s patients and so on. And then it’s a small jump from the chip carrying medical information to holding other information about you, for example, chip-based payment for groceries would require your credit card details be recorded on the chip. I see no reason why airline tickets couldn’t be disposed of in a future of microchipped humans - pay for your ticket and when you get to the airport a scanner verifies payment and processes you through immigration. And to keep kids safe, how about a future where a baby is microchipped at birth - the parents can track their movements or police could find a missing child. One microchip in the human arm can hold an infinite number of potential uses to track and control humans albeit some uses might be beneficial or innocent. But well-meaning and innocent can often turn into exploited and abused.

No doubt a whole new crop of evasive technologies would spring up to evade the signals being emitted by RFID chips (if they’re emitting a radio signal) and a black market in avoidance. Special clothing material to block the signal from being omitted might be invented for instance and dodgy back street “implant extractors” (people who will surgically remove the microchip should you wish to avoid being tracked and monitored) will offer their services. The microchip black market would be full of counterfeit chips that you could swap for your implanted one and take on a whole new identity.

If you want to read more on a potential future of humans chipped like cattle or if you wonder if VeriChip’s microchip can be duplicated easily, go here and read the interview with Liz McIntyre, author of Spychips: How Major Corporations Plan to Track your Every Purchase & Watch your Every Move. The creepiest part of this interview is when you read that VeriChip, like vultures circling, swooped down on corpses following Hurricane Katrina and had coroners implant chips. Scary stuff; scary interview. I even find the slogan on VeriChip’s website creepy: “RFID for people” - I guess they point this out just in case we confuse ourselves with cattle or domestic pets!

Photo credit: Spychips.com

A number of my posts have looked at what the world of the future may be like. There will be some great technology and medical advances, but there will also be a widening gap between rich and poor; the rapid growth of megacities in the developing world; increasing scarcity of conventional oil resources; loss of species and habitats. And the one that really worries me: flash mobs - groups of criminals and terrorists who suddenly gather in a public space to organise themselves into action, responding to socio-economic issues.

But here’s a threat to global security that I perhaps didn’t pay much attention to before I read this article in Reuters. A United Nations study has been released and highlights the issue of desertification. Sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia are facing the environmental challenge of desert areas encroaching on lands and agriculture. The report was put together by 200 experts from 25 countries and says that tens of millions of people could be forced from their homes, creating an international refugee problem and social turmoil. Specifically, some 50 million people could be displaced within the next 10 years. One third of the Earth’s population could be vulnerable to desertification and surrounding societies may be threatened by instability.

The causes of desertification are numerous: land over-use, climate change, unsustainable irrigation practices, degradation of soil and so on. Here’s a BBC map - showing the human impact on deserts in 2000 and 2050. Interestingly, the UN Report points the finger of blame at climate change. You can get a copy of the UN Report here from the United Nations University site - pdf version entitled “Rethinking Policies to Cope with Desertification“.

New Statesman has news of another UN Report that highlights the rapid growth of the urban population in Africa - it will double in size to 742 million by 2030 and the result will be a dramatic increase in the number of teenagers living in extreme poverty. By 2030, 80 per cent of the world’s urban population will live in the developing world and 60 per cent will be under 18. This is consistent with what I’ve been reading about the world of the future: inhabited by a majority of young people living in less well-off circumstances. It’s referred to as the “youth bulge”.

The consequences of jam-packed megacities are obvious: squalor, infections and disease, lack of access perhaps to essential services, civil unrest and violent crime as people struggle to survive, fortress mini-cities existing side by side with slums and so on. Without a solution to this problem and well-planned cities, there will be growing pressure on natural resources as the Earth herself struggles to cope with an expanded and demanding population. In East Africa, the average time spent waiting for water increased from 28 minutes each day in 1967 to 92 minutes a day in 1997 - how will the region cope when the population doubles in 20 or 30 years from now?

You can check out the full copy of the UN Report entitled “State of the World Population 2007: Unleashing the Potential of Urban Growth” here at the United Nations Population Fund site.

Well, here’s an interesting way to look at humanity’s impact on the environment - if all humans disappeared off the planet, how would the world fare without us? This is a scenario that the current issue of Scientific American explores (subscription needed, but I’ll give you the gist of the article). Science writer, Alan Weisman, conducts a thought experiment in his book, The World Without Us, and looks at the sequence of events that would most likely occur in the years, decades and centuries following our demise.

Weisman doesn’t actually say what might cause humans to be snuffed out but he starts off by saying that infrastructure would begin to crumble immediately - without street maintenance, road crews and cleaners - highways and boulevards would crack and crumble. Over the decades, houses, office buildings and shopping malls would become dusty caverns but ordinary, everyday items made from stainless steel, like pots and pans, could last for millennia and common plastics could last for years before microbes evolved to consume them. The concrete jungles that are our cities would be reclaimed by verdant forest. Subways would be overrun by water - apparently the New York subway system requires 13 million gallons of water per day to be pumped out otherwise the subways would flood. Focusing on Manhattan, Weisman says that the waterways and rivers that used to form part of Manhattan have been channelled underground and it takes an extraordinary daily effort to hold off nature in her attempt to claim back land and waterways.

Should humans disappear, one of the first things that would happen is the power would go off without people to maintain grids, pumps and so on. The subways would flood; sewer systems would overflow; leaf litter, which is normally swept away by maintenance workers, would clog up drains. The rising rivers would cause the steel frames that hold up the subways and office buildings to corrode causing streets to collapse into the subway system and tall buildings to topple over, perhaps taking others with it. Into the cleared spaces, seeds from plants would blow in off the wind and take hold in the cracks, crevices and pavements. Powdered concrete from decaying buildings would provide lime - a less acidic environment for various species. A city would start to develop its own little ecosystem.

As part of his research, Weisman visited places that humans had abandoned or left to see how nature has evolved. One of these places was the primeval forest in Europe, on the border between Poland and Belarus. It was a game reserve set aside in the 1300s by a Lithuanian duke who later became king of Poland. A series of Polish kings and then Russian czars kept it as their own private hunting ground. There was very little human impact and after World War II it became a national park. Giant oaks and ash trees gently sway in the breeze; wolves howl at night; woodpeckers stuff pine cones into trees; and the last remaining wild herd of Bison bonasus, the native European buffalo, still roams. Weisman also visited the Korean demilitarised zone where a thriving wildlife reserve exists between two armies facing off each other and where wild cranes roost. He suggests that without humans North America would turn into a giant deer habitat; forests would re-establish themselves over the continent and, over time, large herbivores and predators would evolve. The chemicals we have introduced, specifically since the end of WWII, the pollutants and the damage we are currently doing to the environment may have longevity that we can’t yet predict.

It’s not all prophecies of doom and gloom. As Weisman points out, humans have created beautiful and expressive artefacts - sculptures; architecture; fine art; literature - and he asks wouldn’t it be sad for the Earth not to have humans?

The picture he paints of deserted, decaying cities reminds me of a film where many years later humans who survived whatever calamity visited the urban canyons that were once thriving cities. Wild winds whooshed through what were once busy streets and intersections; a lion appeared on the steps of a public building. I can’t recall the film but it sure gave me shivers. Would the world be better off without us?

Okay, I admit I haven’t read the book yet, just the Scientific American article - but I wonder if Weisman considers the hundreds of nuclear reactors out there. If they’re not maintained, wouldn’t they suffer a melt down and leach toxic waste into the atmosphere or soil and kill off life sans humanity?

Anyway, it’s an interesting thought experiment and you can watch a video of it here - but the scary looking dude in the video put me off a bit!