Tag Archives: future

Back to (almost) normal

Tonight, at the Inquiry Hub grad, will be the first time in a few years where I’m going to be talking to a live audience larger than a classroom. This is just another example of things going back to normal… except in 2019, when I spoke it was to an audience of most of the students and parents from our school. This year we only invited the grads and their parents, not the whole community.

The reason for the bigger audience in 2019 is that our grad isn’t just a grad, it’s an annual celebration with awards and we used to invite everyone. But the school was smaller and in 2020 we were planning to move to a bigger venue before the pandemic cancelled the big event. For 2022, after 2 years of grads crossing the stage individually with just their family in the audience, we chose this year to host only the grads at this event and to stream the event live for everyone else.

This is probably something we’ll do from now on. Times change. Traditions change. What’s ‘normal’ changes. That’s the theme of my speech, that normal changes, and this could be a good thing. We don’t have to go back to what used to be pre-pandemic. We can change things up, make things better, blend old and new.

When my family moved to China it was a major culture shock. Things changed for us drastically, and we adapted. When we returned from China, that was a really stressful point in my marriage. My wife and I fell back into old habits, but we weren’t the same people anymore. It was a major adjustment and a lot of work to create a new connection and relationship that wasn’t just the version from two years previous.

This is an exciting time to be living in, we’ve just had a very foreign two year experience, and now we’ve got to decide what do we keep from the pre-pandemic experience, and what do we change, for the better, thanks to living through the pandemic experience?

What’s the new normal that’s better than the old normal?

The Future holds promise

At Inquiry Hub Secondary we had the privilege of getting Richard Campbell to present to us. He did 4 topical presentation, chosen from a list of 20 by our students, as well as an AMA – Ask Me Anything session. Here was the day’s schedule:

9:10am-9:40am
30 minutes
Richard Campbell: Overpopulation & Food
Can we make enough food to feed the world population? What’s the maximum number of people the world can feed?

9:45am-10:05am
20 minutes
Student Presentation: Maiya – How to train a dog

10:10am-10:40am
30 minutes
Richard Campbell: Climate Change & Alternative Energy
Are solar power and electric cars the answer to climate change?

10:45am-11:05am
20 minutes
BREAK

11:10am-11:20am
10 minutes
Student Performance: Koen – Piano

11:25am-11:55am
30 minutes
Richard Campbell: Future of the Internet
How will the internet evolve and how will that impact us?

12:00pm-12:10pm
10 minutes
Student Presentation: Agata – LARP Announcement

12:10pm-1:00pm
50 minutes
LUNCH & Student Performance: Colin – Bagpipes

1:05pm-1:35pm
30 minutes
Richard Campbell: Jobs of the Future
With technology becoming involved in more and more jobs, how will jobs evolve? How will the workforce be affected? What jobs will be eliminated?

1:40pm-1:50pm
10 minutes
Student Performance: Mari – Singing “Part of Your World” in Japanese
Student Performance: Maiya – Singing & Piano “Try Everything”

1:55pm-2:15pm
20 minutes
Student Presentation: Jazmine – Designing and Building a Model of a House

2:20pm-2:50pm
30 minutes
Richard Campbell: Ask Me Anything!
What questions do you still have? Do you have questions about topics not covered today?

2:55pm-3:10pm
15 minutes
Debrief and Feedback

I’ve written a few thoughts on the future here on my Daily-Ink, but when I look back at these I see some dystopian views, and conversations about how we won’t see time travel and we won’t holiday on Mars any time soon. Yesterday I got to hear a lot of promise about the future ahead, and it was really refreshing.

Yes, the population of the world is growing, but that growth has slowed and the global population will likely peak at less than 11 billion. Advances in food production will continue and we will be able to feed the world.

Yes, energy production is a problem, but currently the two cheapest ways to produce energy are wind and solar, and their financial viability will make them more desirable. Also while fusion reactors are decades away, small modular nuclear fission reactors are an amazing technology far safer than current nuclear reactors. So the future of energy production holds a lot of promise.

Yes, climate change is one of the biggest concerns today, but in the coming decades we won’t just have the technology to reduce carbon emissions, but in the process we will develop the technology to the point that the byproducts of this process will be economically desirable. Richard posed the challenging question of how low do we take the carbon levels because if they are too low, that could create weather issues with more dangerous storms and shorter growing seasons… the problem won’t be too much CO2, but rather how much is too little?

It was so fascinating to have a futurist come to the the school and share with our students (and adults) the promise of a better future. I think that we often get the message that there is nothing but doom and gloom ahead. Having someone share a big picture view of a future that holds promise, new kinds of jobs, and exciting advances, was absolutely refreshing.

We will never have time travel

I’m not a physicist and I don’t play one on the internet, but I believe that we will never have time travel. My premise is simple: if it was invented 50, 250, 500, or even 5,000 years from now, there is no way that the first time we’d ever discover someone from the future was 2022. Surely if it will ever be invented a time traveller would travel to somewhere in the past before us, and we don’t have evidence of that… so at no time in the future will a time machine be invented.

The only possibility that I see for a time machine to work is that we live in a multiverse and if a person did go back in time then they wouldn’t change our history, they would create another new history splitting the history we know and creating a new one that they know… and so in this case while I’d be wrong, you and I will never know.

In the future, if we don’t blow ourselves up and send the world back into the Stone Age, we’ll get closer and closer to traveling the speed of light. A very long time from now humans will visit other planets beyond our solar system. Those travellers will experience time differently than anyone who stays on earth. But while they will age less, they won’t be going back in time.

Time travel like H. G. Wells wrote about will never exist. It’s a fun thing to think about, but the reality is that if it ever was to be invented, we’d already know about it… we wouldn’t have to wait for some time in the future to learn about it.

The free world

The free world isn’t free. It’s not. When a privileged few get to decide what people can and can’t do based on their out-dated beliefs, that’s not free.

More Than 1,500 Books Have Been Banned in Public Schools, and a U.S. House Panel Asks Why

“Most books being targeted for censorship are books that introduce ideas about diversity or our common humanity, books that teach children to recognize and respect humanity in one another,” said the chair of the Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, Rep. Jamie Raskin.

When believers of religious dogma limit the choices of non-believers, that’s not free.

We don’t live in a free world, we live in a world of privileged and unprivileged. A world of bias. A world of inequity.

If I took headlines of today, like the article above, or headlines on abortion laws, or on free speech on college campuses, or on lack of social programs, and I stripped away today’s date, in 25 years you wouldn’t know when the article was written dating back as far as 75 years ago. It’s 2022 but if I told you that the article above was written in the 50’s, 60’s, or 70’s, you’d believe me.

Think about that. How much freer have we become? How much more civilized?

Holiday on Mars… not in my lifetime

It’s fun to think of space tourism, now that the first civilian visit to the space station has happened. I’d love to spend a few days in space someday. Knowing my vertigo issues on spinning rides, I’d probably spend most of the trip with motion sickness and it will be far less fun than I imagine… but I want to try! I want to experience weightlessness for a few days, and to be an astronaut.

But that’s just for a few days. There are some serious issues that astronauts face when going to space for long periods of time.

“Astronauts on space missions suffer from balance problems, visual disturbances, ‎damage to the heart muscle and bone loss.” – The Dangers of Zero Gravity

These get more and more serious the longer you spend in space. Especially effects to our vision.

“…if we want to think about colonisation or extended stays on Mars, we’re going to have to consider blindness as a potential complication.

Right now, there are no solutions for how to treat or prevent fluid build-up in space, and with the brain damage that’s also expected to come from long-term spaceflight.” – Space Could Leave You Blind, And Scientists Say They’ve Finally Figured Out Why

Basically, a several year journey to Mars will be extremely detrimental to the health of anyone who makes the journey.

The next steps in getting there?

1. We need to find out if we need to replicate a full 1G environment or if long term travel at a less gravitational force will be required to rid ourselves of these health issues for long term space travel.

2. We need massive rotating space stations that are designed to provide us with some gravitational force.

3. We need to build these and experiment with them as we just start thinking about colonizing the moon.

4. We need a working moon colonization before even thinking about colonizing Mars.

This will take decades and decades.

I will be 100 if I can make it to 2067… it doesn’t matter how close they are to moon visits by then, and how advanced longevity Science is, I’ll be in no shape to make the moon journey, much less a several year trip to Mars.

It’s fun to think about space holidays like we see in the movies, and who knows, maybe in 100 years that will be possible. But without some significant scientific leaps in technology, space tourism in my lifetime will only go as far as the international space station or maybe a very short moon landing… I’ll just need to save up a few million dollars for the trip before I get too old. Because in my lifetime a trip beyond the space station (which might be affordable in my foreseeable future) will still only be the holiday destination of millionaires and billionaires. My feet will never touch the moon, much less Mars.

That said, if I had the chance to go to the Moon, I’d go!

Mars on the other hand? Not a chance of this happening. This will likely be an adventure opportunity for my grandkids or maybe great-grandkids. By then there might be a technology that allows faster space travel. Maybe they will take a picnic lunch on a trip to Saturn’s rings. It’s fun to imagine space travel that simply isn’t possible today.

The Jetsons, created in 1962 was supposed to depict our world a hundred years in the future. I don’t think we’ll be living and traveling like them in 2062. Technology does not advance as fast as our imaginations.

Breaking bread

Last night I had dinner with online principals from other districts in the province. We are on the online principals association executive, and this was the first time we met face to face in over 2 years. Yes, we are all comfortable with technology and communicating online. Yes, we’ve connected online several times over the last couple years. But there is something really special about connecting face-to-face and breaking bread.

Maybe in a decade or so we’ll be able to meet virtually online and have a full out of body experience, with avatars sitting next to each other and each of us wearing googles that allow ourselves to see the visited environment from a first person perspective. We might even be able to simulate the experience of shaking hands. At some point in the future we might be able to have an experience that feels just like we are together when we are not.

These virtual world experiences are something I look forward to. I’d love to sit in a room with my parents more than once a year. But I won’t be able to taste my mom’s cooking. I won’t be able to break bread. So while the promise of technology advancing so much that we can better simulate being together in a virtual room when we can’t be together is very promising, it won’t replace actually getting together in every way.

I still want to connect with people face-to-face when I can. Not just to eat with them and to taste good food, but to have that human connection that has been mostly absent for the past couple years. I’m excited about technology being able to get us together in new ways, to improve the opportunities of connecting in more meaningful ways, but not to replace actually getting together when we can.

The unseen casualties to come

I am saddened by the physical destruction, and especially the death and disruption of innocent lives happening now in the Ukraine. But I think (and hope) this will end soon. However, this war will affect far more than the Ukrainian people. As US President Joe Biden said,

“It’s going to be real. The price of these sanctions is not just imposed upon Russia; it’s imposed upon an awful lot of countries as well, including European countries and our country as well,” Biden said. “Both Russia and Ukraine have been the breadbasket of Europe in terms of wheat, for example — just to give you one example.”

This will have a massive impact on the world’s poor. Many reading this will feel the financial cost of increased prices, but that burden can be absorbed. We simply will have less buying power and less options of things to buy. But we won’t go hungry. For people living at or below the poverty line, and especially in developing countries where limited food choices become both expensive and scarce, it’s a different story. People will go hungry. People will revolt. People will die.

Since WWII many of the global conflicts have been about oil. The conflicts of the future will be about food and water. No matter what the reason, global conflict affects us all more and more in the interconnected world we live in. It’s one thing to look at the horror of lives lost in a conflict like this, still another to know that more casualties are coming.

Retail sale

It doesn’t matter what store you go into today, there are items on sale. Walk into a mall and it won’t surprise you to see discounts on certain items between 50-70%. The item you came for probably won’t be that cheap, but an item or two you leave with might.

I wonder about the future of retail malls and stores. I’m sure there are specific name brands that will survive, and people will always want to try certain things on before buying them. But how does a small store in a mall survive when the once hard-to-get items they sell are actually easy to get online? And how does a company compete with online prices when they have to pay exorbitant rental/retail space fees?

They do so by drawing you in with a hard-to-resist sale. Buy one, get one free. 75% off. Clearance sale, everything must go. Hardly anything goes for regular retail cost anymore. Everyone expects a deal. Only a few places, like the Apple store, don’t play by these rules. Everywhere else is about the sale. We have entered the era of the discount, and most places won’t survive unless they offer you a deal you can’t refuse.

Retail now means sale. And stores need to provide you with amazing deals that leave you happy to buy, and happy to return for more deals in the future. And if they don’t do this, they won’t be around in a few years. The choices are to specialize or to discount… the niche or the sale.

The real numbers

In the last week and a half I’m aware of 18 people whom I personally know have caught covid-19, likely the Omicron variant. But of these 18, (half of which are 2 families), I think only one of them is reported. Others sat on 811 for more than 2 hours before giving up on the call. Others have mild symptoms, and here in BC they are asking people with mild symptoms not to get tested, because testing locations are being overwhelmed.

Extrapolating on these numbers, even if I overestimated the amount of cases in BC to be 1/3 reported (that would be 6/18 rather than 1/18), then the real number of new covid cases is a massive number.

This is surprisingly a good thing. First of all, our hospitals are not overwhelmed with serious cases. Secondly, at this rate of infection, we are moving quickly to heard immunity.

Well, that’s my hope anyway. I am only working with my own anecdotal evidence, and coronavirus has kicked my predictions in the butt more than once. Still, it’s good to look forward and see a little light at the end of the tunnel.

Maybe by spring everything will be open and masks will be optional. Maybe. Still, it feels good to have a little optimism right now. Even if we really don’t know the real numbers, I think they are looking good… Time will tell.

The laugh track

Growing up, every sitcom I watched had a laugh track. In fact, I think most of them had the same laugh track. My wife was watching a show and left the tv on. What followed was a new show I’d never seen before. The humour was bad, and the laugh track made it even more painful. I think the last sitcom to use a laugh track that actually didn’t take away from the comedy was The Big Bang Theory. But even there, I think they could totally have pulled it off without one.

Then came the commercials. Wow, they are awful. I really don’t watch a lot of TV, and when I do, it’s usually Netflix or some other streaming service that I don’t have to watch commercials on. Is there some sort of strategy whereby really bad commercials somehow work better than good ones?

Bad laugh tracks, bad commercials, bad sitcoms. How is TV going to survive in the next 5 years? Streaming services will be the way everyone watches their shows. I think most TV stations are going to go the way of the laugh track… and it won’t be a funny thing for them.

On the other hand, the old sitcoms I used to watch, like Friends, Seinfeld, and Cheers, are now the shows that my daughters are watching, or have watched. What’s funny about that is that I missed a lot of the shows because I didn’t see them on the night they played, and didn’t catch all the re-runs, but my kids watch episode by episode on demand. And that’s the difference now, shows can be watched any time, and without commercials.

The laugh track will live on in re-runs, but I think the days of the laugh track are long gone, and any good quality comedies of the future will rely on good humour and not a fake audience to cue the laughter of the viewer.