Getting anywhere in 2019 is a real challenge…and a lot slower than it used to be. It’s more similar to 1880 than it is to 1980, and we are certainly something like a wagon train.
For one thing…a lot of the time we have to make our own biodiesel. We have a portable mini-refinery which is towed behind one of the trucks, and about every 500 miles or so we have to stop and make more fuel. We have one truck that tows a 1000-gallon tank trailer, and everyone carries extra jerry cans. Unfortunately, the process takes several days, at least.
First thing we have to do is stop in a town and make nice with the locals. I find that having gifts to give certainly helps the process, which is why I have a stock of cigars, cigarettes, whiskey and a few nice pocket knives.
Once we have established contact, we will attempt to barter for feedstocks for making the diesel. Usually this is used cooking oil, which many towns save in tanks now. A lot of time it is the waste from farming, which takes much more time to deal with. But once in a while we get lucky, and there is an abandoned gas station, and we find some old gasoline that has degraded, but which we can re-refine into usable diesel. Most of the time, the town will have some need for our services, which we trade for the feedstocks.
Today, we’re in Truckee, CA. This place used to be mostly a vacation town for weekend skiers, but that pasttime is no longer feasible. Now, it is an important way station on the difficult trek across the Sierra Nevada. Being nestled at the top of the mountain pass, this is where you will find some of the most hardcore and able people, who have managed to survive winters with forty feet of snow and sub-zero temps. But they are not stupid, either. They make us camp well outside of town…an threaten to shoot anyone who breaks camp without an escort. ReDS is all too real here, and real help is days away.
But the whiskey is a big help. The local “big man”, Jack Waters, is a tall, lanky guy of about 70 with the requisite western blazer and wide-brimmed hat. Jack and about 10 mean-looking guys with shotguns showed up last night with a local doctor. They were very fidgety. Apparently, there’s been rumors of some nastiness in Reno. Terrorists there showed up at the Peppermill Casino (gambling still thrives, can you believe it?) with lots of explosives and basically took it over, ordering everyone out. Meanwhile, their buddies went around in armed bands and rounded up all of the ReDS patients they could find. Forced them right out of their homes, supposedly. They brought all of the infected to the Peppermill and quarantined them there. There’s rumors that they threaten to blow up the whole building with the infected people inside! There’s no way to know if this story is true…but doc is here to make sure that we aren’t carriers, and the others are here to make sure that we aren’t terrorists!
Anyhow…after a night of drinking and negotiating, we agree to do some work on the town’s one satellite internet relay in return for access to enough raw vegetable oil to fill half our tanks with refined diesel. They are flush with “veggie” as we usually call it…they stockpile the stuff specifically for trading with passers-through. It’s one of the main ways that they make a living here…similar to mining gold in the 1800s. These “gleaners” travel the backroads trading with homesteads and prospecting abandoned sources of oil. The Gleaners’ main drop-off point is Truckee.
It’s amazing how these crises seem to bring out the best and the worst in human ingenuity…
[This post is part of SuperStruct: the global forecasting game. Come invent the future!]
Tomorrow, I leave Clayton for good. I have to say…I’m quite nervous. I’m joining up with a group of people that I don’t really know all that well, to go on a journey which may show me things that I’m not sure I want to see. But what choice do I have? Staying here really isn’t an option anymore…not since last year’s earthquake destroyed the last bits of infrastructure that we had out here.
Our community was an unusual collection of wealthy suburbanites and down-to-earth horse ranchers. The last few years saw the wealthy people, one by one, move to the city or back east, as gas prices rose and suburban real estate collapsed. In many cases, it made no sense to try and sell their houses, there was no one to buy them, so they simply left the houses to squatters and others. The horse ranchers didn’t really fare too much better, there being very few patrons to support the buying and selling of prize horseflesh. Some of them consolidated and stayed, while others left.
I stayed longer than most, because of a unique situation. The owner of the townhouse I rented had vanished in 2017. He was a Korean dentist, and had been living abroad for many years. He rented the house to me because he was unable to sell it after the real estate collapse of 2010. There was some rumors that he had died from an early form of ReDS, but there was no way to know for sure. When no relatives contacted me to claim ownership, I simply stayed on, rent-free.
Even with the declining situation all around me, and $10 gasoline, I was able to hang on due to the fact that I could work remotely. As long as I had the Internet, I was OK. For the time being, the utilities stayed on, and there was enough food to be had at local farmer’s markets to keep things tenable, although I had to deal with more and more frequent power outages.
The earthquake was the final straw. It just so happens that Clayton lies on top of both an earthquake fault and an (until recently) active oil pipeline. The quake, while not very big, was centered directly under Clayton, which resulted in the rupture of the oil pipeline. Most of the area surrounding my development has been contaminated, and I was only allowed back into the community briefly to evacuate what belongings I could. Given the current state of government in California, I think that it is very unlikely that anyone will be cleaning up the area any time soon. It will simply be cheaper to cordon it off and let it sit for a few hundred thousand years.
So…it was with much coincidence and serendipity…as usually happens in situations like these, that I met Mike. Mike is the leader of a nomadic group of techno-savvy people, who banded together for mutual support. They roam from place to place, attempting to patch together the computing and communications infrastructure where they can. They buy and sell computer and electronic hardware, and hack together solutions, for a fee. The rest of his group consisted of mechanics, cooks and the like. He was willing to bring someone on as long as they could contribute a skill that could either make them money or keep the group moving.
Mike’s group was in the area, had heard about the earthquake, and thought there might be some opportunities around. We met while browsing the bulletin board at a local emergency shelter.
It turns out that Mike was looking to bring aboard someone who had experience repairing 4-wheel-drive vehicles. It was just my luck that I had belonged to a Land Cruiser Club for many years, and I was able to perform some advanced maintenance procedures. Luckily, those vehicles were designed to be repaired in the field, so basic mechanical knowledge and a good manual go a long way. Mike thought that my computer skills and my mechanical aptitude would make a good fit for the group. I agreed to take on trial membership in the group while we make our way to the East Coast, where I will decide whether or not to become a permanent member.
So, I’m gathering up my things and saying goodbye to friends. I will be meeting up with Mike and the rest of the group tomorrow, and we will be heading to Sacramento as we make our way to Reno. I’m very apprehensive, but I am also very eager to meet the rest of my new traveling companions.
SuperStruct is basically a scenario planning exercise, which will be conducted by thousands of participants over a 6-week period. The “game” seeks to explore what type of soutions we can develop to several major “SuperThreats”, or global crises “predicted” to occur in 2019. The name SuperStruct refers to the human ability to build social structures, one top of another.
Super-threats are massively disrupting global society as we know it. There’s an entire generation of homeless people worldwide, as the number of climate refugees tops 250 million. Entrepreneurial chaos and “the axis of biofuel” wreak havoc in the alternative fuel industry. Carbon quotas plummet as food shortages mount. The existing structures of human civilization—from families and language to corporate society and technological infrastructures—just aren’t enough. We need a new set of superstructures to rise above, to take humans to the next stage.
Players will envision themselves in this future world, and write blog posts, make videos, build websites and create all types of content which will be filtered and guided through the five scenarios by a “game master”.
I have been honored by being selected as one of the game masters for SuperStruct. I will be leading the “Generation Exile” scenario, which will explore what will happen to the millions of people who will be displaced by climate change and other threats of the near future.
I think that this will be a great opportunity for everyone to contribute to the conversation and have some fun at the same time. In a few weeks, I’ll be posting more details about how everyone can participate.
Previously, I wrote about how powerful simulations games are, and the potential that they have for helping us navigate through the stormy waters of the early 21st century. Recently, I was discussing this with a friend of mine, and he suggested that I read Ender’s Game, a science-fiction book by Orson Scott Card.
In the book, humanity is faced with destruction at the hands of an alien invasion for, which takes the form of an intelligent, space-faring insectoid race called the Buggers. Unfortunately for the humans, the Buggers have superior numbers and superior tactics. The only thing that can defeat them is a genius military leader, and the only one available is long dead. For some reason that is never elaborated on in the book, the military leadership has decided to find the best and brightest children in the world, and train them to be military geniuses. (it stands to reason that perhaps a large portion of the adult males were wiped out in the prior invasions, or something like that, but it’s never mentioned.) The children selected have savant-level intelligence, ad the method of training involves two different types of simulation games. Without giving too much away, kids and games save the day.
The basic themes of the book are the intelligence and creativity of children, and the power of games as useful tools. There is a unique aspect to games, which is that you can always count on a select few individuals becoming really really good at each particular one. Also, if you design the game correctly, you can solve almost any poblem. This article outlines how a protein researcher from the University of Washington, David Baker, has discovered the usefulness of games in creating new proteins. Apparently, there are still some things which people are much better at than computers, and designing proteins is one of those.
“Proteins are made up of long strings of amino acids that are folded up into complex three-dimensional tangles with many subregions. The function of a protein is dependent on this three-dimensional structure. One pocket might be ideal for grabbing on to another protein, for example. Other parts of the protein may play a purely supportive, structural role, holding the molecule together. Baker’s new method for creating novel proteins begins with the active sites. Once they’re in place, structural concerns, especially how tightly packed the protein is, determine whether the design is feasible. Figuring out the best way to hold together the active sites is a complicated search problem that requires a lot of processing power. There are a myriad of possibilities, but most won’t work.”
The computer programs take a brute-force approach, trying every possible combination for folding the proteins, and then checking to see if the combination is any good.
“When the computer doesn’t know what the best next step is, it changes the structure randomly. Baker says that he began to wonder whether people working with computers can solve a hard problem that computers can’t solve alone.”
Several people, using Baker’s algorithm, were able to see the steps that the computer needed to take, well before the computer did. Unfortunately, they had no method of providing feedback. Baker teamed up with a game designer, and the result was the game FoldIt, which combines the computer program with human creativity.
“The first several levels of Foldit are designed to teach players what good proteins look like and how to manipulate them using the tools of the game…. For example, it’s good to pack proteins tightly, but not too tightly: electrical charges in different regions of the side chains will repel each other if they’re too close to each other….After improving the designs of a few test proteins, players can advance into competitive play, working in teams or alone.”
Baker proposes that, like Ender’s Game, FoldIt has an interesting added benefit: discovering “protein savants”:
“By making the game available to anyone over the Web, the researchers expect to find people they call protein savants–people who are very good at solving protein structures and who will spend several hours a week playing the game.”
Now, just imagine if your son could find a cure for cancer, while playing Halo 6 with his buddies! Wouldn’t it be cool if your daughter, the smart one, figured out a new way to manage the power grid, saving thousands of megawatts of energy, while playing SimPower, Deluxe Edition, on her PC?
I’ve heard of a lot of unusual and interesting ways to recycle waste back into usable products, but this one has to be one of the coolest and funniest.
The Great Elephant Poo Paper Company (www.poopaper.com), as its name says, is taking elephant dung and turning it into paper. How do they do this? Well, apparently elephant poo contains quite a bit of undigested plant fibers. After washing the poo patties, what remains are the plant fibers, and these are what is converted into paper products.
What’s really neat about this company is the way they close the loop: the poo is turned into paper, the paper is sold on their website and a protion of the profits goes back into elephant welfare and conservation.
If only it were this easy with technological waste.
One of the big problems with solar power is bringing the cost down so that it is competitive with fossil fuels. This post fro Gizmodo describes a new technology which would probably make solar technology much cheaper:
“Solar poweriseverywhere at the mo, maybe because it sounds more sci-fi than wind: which is the case with this new technology that turns windows into power sources. Clever bods at MIT have worked out how to use organic dye solar-concentrator coatings to collect light over a whole sheet of glass and “concentrate” it at the edges. This lets you have a much smaller (and hence cheaper) solar-electric cell mounted in the side of a window, more easily achieved than typical mirror-based concentrators. And by tuning the dyes (originally designed for lasers and OLEDs) to different wavelengths, and stacking them up, you get an even bigger power output. Clever stuff. [Physorg]“
Computer simulations represent some of the most useful tools ever invented, allowing us to experience all manner of complex, dangerous, expensive or long-term situations in short time periods, and letting us try them out over and over and over again without experiencing the potential consequences. The applications range from nuclear weapons testing to pilot training to immersive gaming environments.
I’ve always loved simulation games, ever since I first discovered SimCity on the original Macintosh during the mid-80s. I’ve played every version of SimCity since then, and watched it grow more and more complex and realistic. There’s something very satisfying and innately human about building your own little empire, watching it grow or even destroying it with virtual disasters. The only problem is that, eventually, you get bored with it. There’s no way to “win”. There’s no goal. After a while, you give up and start over again.
Eventually, I got tired of not having a goal in my games, so I progressed to turn-based simulation/strategy games such as Alpha Centauri and Civilization. I love these games, and they can go on for weeks, with more than a few all-nighters, until you finally “win” and launch your Civ into space or some similar thing. Unfortunately, after a while, you begin to feel that the payoff of a short video sequence (especially after you’ve seen it 10 times), doesn’t seem to match up to the hours and hours you spent playing. Once again, the end result is that you have nothing to show for all of your effort.
So, now I’m in business school, working on my MBA in Sustainable Management. While many of my fellow students focus on biofuels or reducing waste, I think about ways that computer technologies can help us solve some of the masisve sustainability problems we’ve created for ourselves. This inevitably leads me to wonder if simulations and games can somehow aid in this effort. It seems to me, that is so many people are willing to spend hours upon hours on their computers playing games, there’s got to be a way that we can harness some of that creative energy, and turn it into something that makes a real difference in the world.
In the 1960s, futurist Buckminster Fuller saw the potential of simulations to help change the world. He envisioned a whole-world simulation, called the World Game, which would attempt to solve problems by taking a “whole-systems” approach and a worldwide scale, instead of the piecemeal method of individual countries and cities acting alone. A key element to this, and the reason that it was called a “game”, was the ability for regular individuals, not just politicians and powerful people, to be able to participate in the process. The Buckminster Fuler Institute describes it this way: “Fuller wanted a tool that would be accessible to everyone, whose findings would be widely disseminated to the masses through a free press, and which would, through this ground-swell of public vetting and acceptance of solutions to society’s problems, ultimately force the political process to move in the direction that the values, imagination and problem solving skills of those playing the democratically open world game dictated.”
Unfortunately, at the time that Fuller proposed the World Game, the technologies which would allow people to receive and manupulate data about the state of the world in real time did not exist. It would have required that players have access to “better data than their politically elected or appointed counterparts.”
Of course, now, with the existence of the Internet, Wikipedia, YouTube, the 24-hour news cycle and powerful video and audio tools in the hands of the masses, we have finally reached a point where a World Game is possible. As a matter of fact, the immense popularity of the virtual world Second Life, where players spend enormous amounts of their free time, is a testament to the power of simulations on the human psyche, and the willingness of people to explore alternate realities. What are the potential problems that could be solved if these games and simulations could bring about positive change in the real world? Are there potential implications for sustainability?
In my next post, I will describe several different simulation games which are actually making positive differences in the real-world, and introduce you to a young woman who is making a career out of it.
The potential market for energy technologies is huge.
New energy technology transitions will take decades to replace existing technologies, not the short adoption timeframes associated with typical Silicon Valley tech companies.
Because of the downturn in the credit and real estate markets, there is a lot of money out there looking for a good place to invest, and cleantech is an obvious place to put this money. The flip side to this is that in down markets, investors traditionally turn to commodities investing, which should place downward pressure on oil prices. Lower oil prices means greater competition and risk for most cleantech companies.
Due to the high competition with oil prices, some VCs are focusing on investing in cleantech which does not have a high correlation to oil prices. The example given was solar power in China, which competes with coal power plants and there for is dependent on the price of coal and not oil.
Cleantech companies compete with long-established energy technologies and therefore face severe price competition. One effect of this is that most cleantech companies are global companies, with manufacturing and distribution on different continents to take advantage of price efficiencies, such as manufacturing in China and distribution in the US.
There has been an increase in the number of quality entrepreneurs starting companies in the cleantech space. These are “2nd-stage” entrepreneus, who had previously worked at leading-edge companies and became aware of the gaps in the market. These entrepreneurs are now attempting to fill these market opportunities.
The best quote of the day came from Steve Bengston of PricewaterhouseCoopers. When asked to define what, exactly is cleantech, he paraphrased Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart quote on pornography by saying that “cleantech is hard to define, but we know it when we see it.”
About solar power:
Solar is still very dependent on subsidies to be competitive.
Most of the panelists felt that the unsubsidized cost of solar is still too high to be competitive with existing energy sources, and is still a factor of 2 or 3 away at the retail level. The consensus was that the retail price for solar needs to come down to at least 30 cents/KWh to be competitive. On a wholesale level (large power plants), solar is even farther away, where it needs to be around 5 cents/KWh to compete with fossil fuels.
The solar business model is still based on an assumed theoretical declining cost curve. While this cost curve remains to be proven out, most people believe that it is accurate.
There are some locations where solar is already competitive, due to very high energy costs or favorable conditions.
When asked about solar’s dependency on scarce raw materials (i.e., silicon) one panelist said that third-generation solar tech is focusing on becoming less resource-dependent. He also stated that a large portion of the cost of solar panels was in the aluminum and glass components.
About storage technology:
While energy storage technology is potentially a very important component in the adoption of new energy generation technologies, the cost is still much too high to justify implementation.
Even if energy storage technology becomes price-competitive, it is not clear who will pay the cost to implement it. Will is be the energy generators, the suppliers or the consumers?
About alternative fuels:
Alternative fuels are “sexy”. They are easily understood by the public, because of their day-to-day experiences fueling their vehicles, etc.
Alternative fuel investing is extremely risky, but also has extremely high rewards. The VCs who are investing in alternative fuels see it as a necessary component of their portfolios, albeit a small one for now.
The biological and chemical expertise necessary to implement alternative fuel technologies is extreme.
There is an opportunity in techologies which can convert e-waste plastics into biofuels. This is viable technology which can also greatly reduce waste.
About pollution and recycling technology:
Current efforts are focusing on mercury, sulfur and nitrogen waste reduction.
Silicon Valley is not currently investing very heavily on these types of technolgies. Sillicon Valley VCs focus more on products than services, because products are easier to scale up to profitability levels that VCs are interested in. Pollution and waste reduction technologies are viewed as mostly services, which are harder to scale up.
Most of the panelists cited the need for an appropriate regulatory framework in order for these types of services to be feasile. There is some debate on whether regulation should lead the way or wait for technologies to prove themselves before regulating them. Countries like Germany are taking the leading approach, while the US is mostly taking the lagging approach.
All in all, the news was very positive. It seems like cleantech is not being affected by the downturn in the economy. Om the contrary, it appears to be benefitting from high oil prices and a dearth of good investment opportunites.
Carectomy brings us this cool, new concept for increasing the efficiency of a train by allowing the bulk of it to stay in constant motion:
“Yu-Lun envisions a small separated car perched atop the train. When the train enters a station, this car slides along on elevated rails that smoothly and gradually remove the car from the rest of the train and bring it to a stop.” At the same time, a second car picks up new passengers.
The animation is very cool, albeit very slow in getting to the point.
I like this idea, especially if the design incorporated a maglev (magnetically-leviated) element to it. If you theoretically could combine the reduced friction of maglev wth the added efficiency of not having to speed up/slow down most of the train’s mass, this form of transportation would probably be way ahead of most rail and light-years ahead of automobiles.
It looks like Netflix has bowed to overwhelming pressure and will not be removing their Profiles feature after all. Check out this email I just received from them:
Dear Steve,
You spoke, and we listened. We are keeping Profiles. Thank you for all the calls and emails telling us how important Profiles are.
We are sorry for any inconvenience we may have caused. We hope the next time you hear from us we will delight, and not disappoint, you.
-Your friends at Netflix
It’s good to know that, sometimes, companies do listen. Good work, people!
Getting anywhere in 2019 is a real challenge…and a lot slower than it used to be. It’s more similar to 1880 than it is to 1980, and we are certainly something like a wagon train.
I’ve heard of a lot of unusual and interesting ways to recycle waste back into usable products, but this one has to be one of the coolest and funniest.
Computer simulations represent some of the most useful tools ever invented, allowing us to experience all manner of complex, dangerous, expensive or long-term situations in short time periods, and letting us try them out over and over and over again without experiencing the potential consequences. The applications range from nuclear weapons testing to pilot training to immersive gaming environments.
