Panel, Conference Presentation
Why Tomorrow Won't Look Like Today: Things that Will Blow Your Mind
- Technology, science, entrepreneurship, and innovation are expected to resolve complex global challenges, with concepts once considered impossible already becoming reality.
- Future prosperity and quality of life will depend on expanding the global resource base, specifically through the extraction of infinite materials from near-Earth asteroids.
- Eric Anderson plans to execute actual space missions with a first launch in October, a second test launch next year, and the deployment of a first swarm to an identified asteroid target in 2016.
- Within two or three years, asteroid mining is anticipated to be a documented reality, with costs expected to drop sufficiently to make asteroid materials ubiquitous.
- Space infrastructure plans include establishing massive propellant depots in the Earth-Moon system to refuel satellites and enable travel, as well as using near-Earth asteroids as a resource source for colonizing Mars and the Moon.
- Private space travel projects and investor backing are predicted to significantly alter the world over the next few years, with a first moon circumnavigation mission anticipated in 2018.
- A specific private space mission is scheduled for 2020 involving two people visiting the International Space Station for a week, followed by a six-day journey to within 50 miles of the moon.
- Companies plan to utilize 3D printing in space to build stations and other structures directly from raw materials, effectively converting asteroid mining into an information technology sector.
- Dr. Eric David anticipates that Organovo's first drug research product and off-the-shelf liver tissue will enter the market later this year, with liver tissue ready for use within 24 hours of printing.
- Printed artery tissue is expected to withstand pressures of nearly 800 millimeters of mercury by day 14 to 21, while vessel tissue typically requires a week or more to mature.
- Dr. John Kelly III predicts that by 2014 or 2015, data volume will reach approximately $10^{24}$ or $10^{25}$ bits, exceeding the processing capabilities of current and past computer systems.
- Personalized health care using the personal genome is expected to become available as profiling costs drop below one thousand dollars, potentially aiding in the treatment of brain cancer.
- The Watson system is expected to inform oncologists on treatment cocktails based on specific tumor mutations and rapidly identify edges of human knowledge to assist pharmaceutical research.
- Bio-inspired, extremely low-power semiconductor devices capable of matching a bee's synaptic horsepower are planned to be built to enable real-time complex image analysis without requiring over 12 billion watts of power.
- Future computing is predicted to involve man and machine reasoning together, with systems embedded in medical devices and hostile environments that can learn autonomously what works.
- Quantum devices are expected to power computers within a decade, offering processing power billions of times greater than today's systems with currently unimaginable applications.
- The integration of Watson into tissue engineering is anticipated to determine optimal cell combinations and culture methods for bio ink, while Dr. Eric David notes that bioprinting technology can be fully understood by researchers after two one-hour conversations.