Why Tomorrow Won't Look Like Today: Things that Will Blow Your Mind

Asteroid Mining and Space Expansion (Eric Anderson, Planetary Resources)

• Mission Objective: Planetary Resources aims to expand Earth's resource base by mining near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) to sustain global prosperity over the next century, as Earth's finite resources cannot support infinite growth.
  • Target Assets: NEAs are prioritized due to low energy requirements for access; one 50-meter asteroid contains approximately $600 billion in platinum group metals and strategic fuels.
  • Resource Concentration: Platinum group metals are 10,000 times more concentrated on asteroids than in Earth's best mines; these heavy metals sank to Earth's core billions of years ago and only surface via asteroid impacts.
• Technological Disruption: The company is reducing space travel costs through autonomous robotics, lowering the price of a deep-space probe from $250 million to $2 million.
  • Component Costs: Critical components have been reduced to approximately $1,100 each, enabling the deployment of robotic swarms for prospecting.
  • Launch Timeline: A test launch is scheduled for October; a second test launch is planned for the following year, with the first mining swarm targeting an identified asteroid in 2016.
• Economic Strategy: The primary near-term commercial goal is establishing propellant depots to create "refueling stations" for spacecraft in the Earth-Moon system.
  • Fuel Production: Volatile materials on asteroids (hydrogen and oxygen) serve as highly efficient rocket fuel, allowing future missions to travel without carrying all fuel from Earth.
  • Analogy: Asteroid mining is compared to the industrialization of aluminum; once separation technology became viable, a previously rare and expensive metal became ubiquitous.

3D Bioprinting and Regenerative Medicine (Dr. Eric David, Organovo)

• Core Technology: Organovo utilizes 3D bioprinting to create functional human tissues using "bio-ink" composed of cells (stem cells or patient-derived cells) that self-assemble into 3D structures.
  • Mechanism: The technology mimics natural embryonic development where droplets of cells fuse via surface tension to form complex structures without artificial scaffolds.
  • Output: Capable of printing tissues like arteries, liver patches, and heart muscle patches that maintain viability and structural integrity for weeks in vitro.
• Commercial Applications: The company is transitioning from research to commercialization by offering off-the-shelf liver tissue for drug discovery.
  • Drug Development: The platform addresses the failure rate of late-stage clinical trials by allowing pharmaceutical companies to test drugs on human tissue rather than animal models or 2D petri dish cultures.
  • Therapeutic Goal: Short-term aim is to replace damaged tissue (e.g., liver patches) to improve transplant patient outcomes; long-term vision is printing whole replacement organs.
• Technical Validation: Printed arteries have demonstrated the ability to withstand burst pressures up to 800 mmHg after 14–21 days, approaching the 1,200 mmHg limit of natural human vessels.
  • Cellular Function: Tissues exhibit native cell communication, collagen deposition, and functional segmentation between cell types.

Cognitive Computing and AI (Dr. John Kelly, IBM)

• Strategic Shift: IBM is transitioning from mechanical/semiconductor computing to "cognitive systems" designed to process the exponential explosion of unstructured data (projected to reach 10^24–10^25 bits by 2014–2015).
  • System Capabilities: Unlike traditional computers, cognitive systems learn, reason, and process natural language without explicit programming, demonstrated by Watson's victory on Jeopardy!.
• Healthcare Integration: Cognitive computing is being applied to oncology to process genomic data and medical literature to assist in personalized cancer treatment.
  • Problem Scale: No human oncologist can digest the 23 million relevant research articles or the billions of base pair mutations associated with cancers like glioblastoma.
  • Application: Systems map specific tumor mutations against literature and pharmaceutical records to generate tailored treatment protocols.
• Future Architecture: Development is underway for bio-inspired, low-power semiconductor devices capable of simulating brain-like processing.
  • Efficiency Gap: Current supercomputers (e.g., 8 million-watt systems) operate 1,500x slower than the human brain (20 watts); future chips aim to match the synaptic horsepower of insects.
• New Capabilities: IBM is prototyping a "Debater" system that autonomously analyzes vast knowledge bases (e.g., Wikipedia) to construct pro and con arguments on complex topics.
  • Human-Machine Synergy: The system does not replace human judgment but enhances it by rapidly surfacing relevant information and counter-arguments for collaborative decision-making.

Cross-Disciplinary Synergies and Future Outlook

• AI in Space Exploration: Cognitive computing is essential for autonomous asteroid mining due to 5–20 minute communication lag between Earth and space targets.
  • Autonomy: Spacecraft must possess on-board intelligence to make real-time decisions and execute mining/refueling operations without Earth intervention.
  • In-Situ Manufacturing: Integration with 3D printing (e.g., via 3D Systems partnership) could allow raw asteroid materials to be used for building stations and infrastructure in space.
• AI in Tissue Engineering: Cognitive systems will accelerate regenerative medicine by analyzing the complex interactions of hundreds of cell types required for specific organs.
  • Optimization: AI can sift through decades of research to determine optimal cell combinations and culture conditions for creating bio-inks for organs like the kidney.
• Forward-Looking Projections:
  • Space Tourism: Space Adventures plans its first moon circumnavigation mission (International Space Station visit + 6-day lunar flyby) in 2018, with a full circumnavigation mission in 2020.
  • Computing Evolution: Dr. Kelly predicts quantum computing will emerge within a decade, offering processing power billions of times greater than current systems, though applications remain currently unforeseen.
• Investment and Partnership: The panel cites active investment from figures such as Richard Branson, Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, and Ross Perot Jr. validating the feasibility of these technologies.