Professional Pilot, March 2016

8 After several decades of research renewable energy will be produced at parity and will cost less than fossil fuels Some 60 of the new generation now comes from renewable sources There are several wholly untapped renewables with huge nascent capacity such as the high altitude jet stream wind the Gulf Stream using heat exchangers with the requisite cold water just a bit off to the side and solar hydrogen energy which is making progress with greater efficiency and less expensive catalysts We need just about 400 exojoules to replace fossil carbon fuels and we have some 16000 exojoules available in just the 4 major renewables of wind solar geothermal and biomass We are awash in energy Switching to renewables will be a matter of economics and with their cost reductions that transition is happening in real time The wild cards in energetics include low energy nuclear reactions LENR and positrons LENR from 25 years of experiments is real But we are still not really sure what is real It produces heat and transmutation without harmful radiation at very low cost and at an energy density in the order of thousands of times in comparison to chemical Positrons which are antielectrons are used in petscans they are E9 times chemical and storage via positronium may be viable This is yet to be determined 9 Human socialization will shift We have shifted our social fabric from hunter gatherer groups to tightly knit agricultural villages to industrial cities where weve learned about and experienced alienation The IT revolution is enabling 5 senses virtual reality that could be commercially available this year according to some And along with the bio revolution and neurologics there is an increasing capability to control thoughts directly We are dabbling in direct mind to mind communication People are spending more time looking at their phones instead of interacting with other people children are purportedly texting across the playground vice physically approaching the other child We are currently far into the tele everything age and were moving rapidly into the virtual 14 PROFESSIONAL PILOT March 2016 age It really is all in our heads 5 senses VR which will allow us to virtually hug relatives that are thousands of miles away whenever it is convenient will increasingly replace physical travel We are already far down the path to virtual social interactions being the norm In fact some opine that we are moving into each of us being a part of a global mind especially as the phones migrate into our heads as brain chips which are here now and improving rapidly In conclusion The shift from today to some 50 years into the future will be interesting As had been said May you live in interesting times A lack of jobs and the income disparities are at least partially behind the occupy and the Arab spring uprising movements As the developing technologies provide individuals with ever more economic independence there will be disruption And as the econometrics shifts from a growth mantra to sustainability there is bound to be unrest Almost all of the major changes discussed herein will provoke disturbances of various flavors Wending our way through all this will not be easy but we have brought this on ourselves by being extremely successful in technological development We have nearly invented ourselves at this point out of a job and a planet we are short some 50 of a planet now and as the Asians in their billions try to attain Western living standards we will be short some 3 planets In many cases for raw survival the various changes enumerated herein cannot come too quickly However the human mind developed the amygdala to keep us conservative And except for those of us who are evidently amygdala deficient any change often good or not so good is upsetting There is tremendous basic wide spectrum change in the offing enabled by our inventions and technological developments And it is required in order to avoid us doing irrevocable harm to our ecosystem and thereby ourselves Growth at some point has to be consistent with a finite ecosystem This was pointed out early on by Malthus and we were reminded by the famous Club of Rome Limits to Growth report Thus far we have employed technology to extend those limits But that process necessitates changes it always has and the magnitude of the changes we now have to make are societal altering Fortunately we will have again the technology to make the requisite changes that will be massive to our planet and to our societal structures The Kyocera Mega Solar Power Plant in Kagoshima Bay Japan can generate enough electricity to power some 22000 homes Dennis Bushnell is chief scientist at the NASA Langley Research Center where he is responsible for technical oversight and advanced program formulation His major technical expertise includes flow physics and control drag reduction and advanced configuration aeronautics Bushnell is a fellow of AIAA ASME and the Royal Aeronautical Society and a member of the National Academy of Engineering