It’s an annual ritual: predicting the future, from Wall Street’s economic forecasts to the supermarket tabloids. But what do the "futurists", the professionals that make their living in the future, have to say?

Futurists tend to look at futures that are 10 or more years away, examined through the lenses of demographics, technology, the social science, aesthetics, industry, geopolitics and ecology.

Gregory Stock, director of the Program on Medicine, Technology, and Society at UCLA, predicts "In the future, what is really going to matter to us is our biology, because we are biological creatures. The notion of having chip implants in our brains sounds a little seductive until you imagine the realities of going in for brain surgery — a risky operation — and the actual benefits you’d have to be offered in order to be willing to subject yourself to that kind of an operation. Repairing biological deficits of one sort or another is something that we will do, and there have been all sorts of implants related to that. But the idea of going into a person who is healthy to try and expand their ability to recall tunes or something is very unlikely and not very realistic."

Washington University Forecast of Emerging Technologies, on the future of computers : "Optical computers. A computer that operates by light waves rather than electricity will be available in about 20111. All of the components for optical systems are in place: lasers for coding light waves with information and for reading the information, fiber optics for carrying light waves, and CDs for storing information in hard form. Optical systems will replace current computer technology within 10-12 years. .
These computers will be incredibly powerful. A single optical fiber as wide as a human hair can carry about a hundred channels of information now; it may soon carry a thousand. We will begin to reach the limits of our present computer paradigm in about five years. When that barrier is reached, optical computers will become the new paradigm, delivering limitless information at the speed of light."

Thinking Small

How might nanotechnology, the science of ultra-miniaturization, affect the future? UC–Berkeley economics professor Brad DeLong speculates that nanotech will come in three waves: materials, biological, and then, perhaps, a final "Drexlerian" wave ------ named after nanotech guru Eric Drexler—in which "universal assemblers" will actually build products from the atomic level up. But since the nanotech revolution in materials is closest at hand, that is what he focuses on. One big conclusion is there will be greater income inequality since "you don’t need as many fence painters when the paint is smart [and] you don’t need as many warehouse workers when things can be programmed to tell their container to move them to where they need to be…. The greater durability of ‘smart commodities’ alone promises a halving of the size of the manufacturing workforce, coupled with the vanishing of large chunks of that part of the service sector that is concerned with diagnosis, maintenance, and repair."

And while there may well be less need for low-skill occupations, there will be even more need for highly educated materials technicians and programmers—which DeLong thinks will be in short supply. As he puts it, "In order to keep the income distribution tight, the premium on skilled and educated workers must fall—which means the supply of such workers must increase rapidly as nanotechnologies promise yet another shift of labor demand toward the highly skilled and well educated. Yet there are few signs in American politics today of the renewal of the extraordinary educational effort which gave America such a huge edge over other advanced industrial economies in the 20th century."

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Wilbur and Orville Wright were two brothers from the heartland of America with a vision as sweeping as the sky and a practicality as down-to-earth as the Wright Cycle Co., the bicycle business they founded in Dayton, Ohio, in 1892. But while there were countless bicycle shops in turn-of-the-century America, in only one were wings being built as well as wheels. When the Wright brothers finally realized their vision of powered human flight in 1903, they made the world a forever smaller place.

In 1878 their father, a bishop in the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, gave them a flying toy made of cork and bamboo. It had a paper body and was powered by rubber bands. The young boys soon broke the fragile toy, but the memory of its faltering flight across their living room stayed with them.

And four years before they made history at Kitty Hawk, the brothers built their first, scaled-down flying machine—a pilotless "kite" with a 5-ft. wingspan, and made of wood, wire and cloth. Based on that experiment, Wilbur became convinced that he could build an aircraft that would be "capable of sustaining a man." When published aeronautical data turned out to be unreliable, the Wright brothers built their own wind tunnel to test airfoils and measure empirically how to lift a flying machine into the sky. They were the first to discover that a long, narrow wing shape was the ideal architecture of flight. They figured out how to move the vehicle freely, not just across land, but up and down on a cushion of air.

They built a forward elevator to control the pitch of their craft as it nosed up and down. They fashioned a pair of twin rudders in back to control its tendency to yaw from side to side. They devised a pulley system that warped the shape of the wings in midflight to turn the plane and to stop it from rolling laterally in air. Recognizing that a propeller isn’t like a ship’s screw, but becomes, in effect, a rotating wing, they used the data from their wind-tunnel experiments to design the first effective airplane props—a pair of 8-ft. propellers, carved out of laminated spruce, that turned in opposite directions to offset the twisting effect on the machine’s structure. And when they discovered that a lightweight gas-powered engine did not exist, they decided to design and build their own. It produced 12 horsepower and weighed only 152 lbs.

The genius of Leonardo da Vinci imagined a flying machine, but it took the methodical application of science by these two American bicycle mechanics to create it. With help from their wind tunnel, the brothers amassed more data on wing design than anyone before them, compiling tables of computations that are still valid today. And with guidance from this scientific study, they developed the powered 1903 Flyer, a skeletal flying machine of spruce, ash and muslin, with a wingspan of 40 ft. and an unmanned weight of just over 600 lbs.

On Dec. 17, 1903, with Orville at the controls, the Flyer lifted off shakily from Kitty Hawk and flew 120 ft. — little more than half the wingspan of a Boeing 747-400. That 12-sec. flight changed the world, lifting it to new heights of freedom and giving mankind access to places it had never before dreamed of reaching. Although the Wright brothers’ feat was to transform life in the 20th century, the next day only four newspapers in the U.S. carried news of their achievement — news that was widely dismissed as exaggerated.

Bill Gates

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1. The process started with the recognition by metal smiths that they could earn income (i.e., charge fees) for depository services. 
2. Depository (or warehouse) receipts issued for gold and silver on deposit consisted of liabilities (values owed) of the depository which the holder could use to redeem the specified amounts of gold or silver. 
3. The depository receipts could be transferred (endorsed over) to second, third, and subsequent parties who could redeem them for gold or silver; depository receipts thus were fledgling examples of paper currency. 
4. Deposit customers discovered that they could write orders to pay to second parties who could redeem them for gold or silver at the depository; these written orders to pay were the precursors of modern checks. 
5. Gold and silver placed on deposit tended to remain on deposit for extended lengths of time; typically, only a small proportion of the gold and silver on deposit would be withdrawn on any day. 
6. Depository operators discovered that the bulk of the gold and silver on deposit could safely be loaned at interest as long as an adequate proportion of all of that on deposit was reserved to meet withdrawal demands; the “adequate proportion” became regarded as a reserve ratio; the metal smiths, now functioning both to receive deposits and issue loans, had become bankers. 
7. Gold and silver specie (bars) and coins were discovered to be fungible. 
8. Many loan customers came to prefer to receive the proceeds of their loans in the form of depository receipts for the loaned amount rather than gold or silver. 
9. Loan customers eventually became willing to receive loan proceeds in the form of pure “promises to pay” which could be redeemed in gold or silver; these promises to pay in conventional denominations became bank notes which were dissociated with any particular deposits of gold or silver. 
10. Bank notes could be issued in total amount exceeding the actual quantity of gold and silver on deposit; experience indicated that the amount could safely become a multiple of the gold and silver on deposit; the “safe multiple” could be estimated as the reciprocal of the proportion of the total gold/silver deposit which could be expected to be withdrawn on any day; this proportion of the gold/silver deposit served as a reserve backing the note issue. 
11. Eventually loan customers became willing to accept loan proceeds in the form of additions to their checkable deposit balances; bankers no longer needed to issue loan proceeds in the form of bank notes; monetary authorities eventually removed the privilege of bank note issuance from banks and reserved this process for their exclusive monopoly. 
12. Interbank deposits (at other banks or at a “central bank”) could serve as the reserves backing checkable deposit liabilities; gold and silver reserves became unnecessary. 
13. Gold and silver, no longer circulating as a medium of exchange and unnecessary to serve as reserves backing issues of either bank notes or checkable deposits, became irrelevant to money and banking. 
14. Successive versions of Gresham’s Law: bad money drives out good money; cheap money drives out dear money; token money drives out full-bodied money; paper money drives out metal money; checkable deposit money drives out paper money; and electronic money...? 

Richard A. Stanford

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The House of Representatives displayed strong nonpartisan support of H.R. 3752, the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act of 2004 (CSLA), which passed March 9 by a vote of 402-1. The legislation, which streamlines and clarifies the processes needed to certify new space transportation systems, clears the bureaucratic runway so a host of new commercial spaceships being designed across America can soon begin to fly. According to the Space Frontier Foundation, this Act begins the dawn of the era of commercial human space flight, establishing in President Bush’s words, "A human presence across our solar system."

The Rationale

Why do Americans want to go to the moon? The short answer is based on three key elements: Survival, Progress and Adventure.

The Survival argument goes like this: We need to spread ourselves outward. To establish new beach heads and plant new civilization roots in as many places around the Universe as possible. We also need to do this quickly; if we don’t, we may not have the chance to even get started. There exist many threats to our planet and to our civilization. There are perhaps hundreds of millions of asteroids as yet unaccounted for which could cause catastrophic damage to the Earth. Even a small strike by an asteroid less than 100 meters in diameter could disrupt weather patterns on a global scale and wipe out one or more years of the global rice crop (a staple subsistence crop for a very large portion of the world’s population). Larger asteroids or comets, have in the past driven thousands of species to sudden extinction. Humans are not invulnerable to this same fate, especially if they continue to refuse to take advantage of their unique survival adaptation: the ability to think, to explore and decipher the mysteries of our universe, and the ability to predict future long term consequences of our present day actions.

Near Earth Object (NEO) impacts are just one of the risks to our survival. The list includes other, even more dangerous and likely catastrophic events. These can be either natural or man made. They include (but are not limited to) the following: super volcanoes, biological, nuclear or chemical warfare, resource depletion and ecological collapse.

Sounds gloomy, doesn’t it? The Progress or Prosperity argument is more sanguine. : Achieving mastery of space technology and beginning the earnest exploration of its riches will create entire new and unlimited economies that will generate wealth and resources sufficient to allow every man, woman, and child on this planet (and off planet dwellers alike) a life of dignity, freedom, and above all hope in a better future. This point actually accrues an additional benefit that could be listed under the Survival category: people who have hope are also patient and do not commit acts of desperation against their fellow humanbeings.

Adventure

Having taken the necessary measures to assure our survival, having created new sources of wealth that will benefit all of humanity, we can indulge ourselves in the perhaps the most satisfying of human endeavors – the quest for adventure.

Adventure, in all its various incarnations, is the primal force or essence of our very humanity. Whether it manifests itself as thrill seeking, or competition, or discovery, or epic travels, or just the yearn to feel alive and connected deeply to the Universe, human beings have a need for change and a boundless curiosity

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