FUTURE ITEMS

If you’re one in a million in China, there are 1,300 people just like you.

1 in every 8 couples married in the U.S. in 2005 met on line.

There are about 540,000 words in the English language.  This is about 5 times as many as during the time of Shakespeare.

According to futurist William Halai, petroleum alternatives now comprise about 17 per cent of global energy use and are growing at 30 per cent per year.  By 2020, 30 per cent of global energy is likely to come from alternative energy sources.

The number of vehicles on the world’s roads will grow from 800 million in 2007 to 1.1 billion in 15 years.

Predictions are that the aging population in the developed world will cause an osteoporosis epidemic.  By 2020, predictions are there will be 47 million people affected by osteoporosis just in the U.S.

According to the World Resource Institute, the twenty-first century could witness a biodiversity collapse 100 to 1,000 times greater than any previous extinction since the dawn of humanity.

According to futurist William Holmes, electronically enhanced brains will make new sensory experiences possible.  As researchers better understand the neural processes that produce perceptions, such as the mixing of light allowing us to see colors, they may be able to design new neural structures that would allow us to perceive millions of colors rather than just four primary colors.

According to futurist James Martin, human knowledge capability is the quantity of available knowledge multiplied by the power of technology to process that knowledge.  This capability will increase by two to the power of 100, the equivalent of a thousand billion billion, in the twenty-first century.  

According to futurist Arthur Shostak, more people will age and die alone without spouses, immediate family members, or friends in their last days.  The trend is being seen particularly in the U.S. and Japan.

According to futurist Arnold Brown, decisions will increasingly be made by non-human entities.  Electronically enabled teams in networks, robots with artificial intelligence, and other non-carbon life-forms will make financial, health, education, and even political decisions for us.

Cocoa could become the next “miracle drug” or at least a vital food supplement.  Researchers have found that high consumption of cocoa can help reduce risk of death from heart disease and cancer.  The active ingredient in natural cocoa, epicatechin, helps blood vessels relax and thus improves blood flow.  This could help improve cardiovascular health as well as reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s disease and stroke. [THE FUTURIST November-December 2007]

As cameras become small enough to be disguised as shirt buttons to invade people’s privacy, engineers are scrambling to counter this trend with privacy protection devices such as light-absorbing capacitor that blocks the signals of a digital camera. [THE FUTURIST November-December 2007]

In India there are 1,100 people just like you.

The 25 per cent in China with the highest IQs is greater than the entire population of North America

In India it is the top 28 per cent.

Translation for teachers:  They have more honors students than North America has students.

Soon the number one English-speaking nation in the world will be China.

If you took every single existing job in the U.S. and shipped it to China, it would still have a labor surplus.

Every minute, 10 babies are born in the U.S., 40.6 babies are born in China, and 58.5 babies are born in India.

The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that today’s students will have 10 to 14 jobs by age 38.

The U.S. Department of Labor says that 1 out of every 4 U.S. workers have been working for their employer for less than one year.  More than 1 out of every 2 U.S. workers has been working for their employer for less than five years.

According to former U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley, the top 10 jobs that will be in demand in 2010 did not exist in 2004.

We are preparing students for jobs that currently do not exist, using technologies that have not yet been invented, in order to solve problems we do not even know are problems yet.

Name this country:  The richest in the world, largest military, center of world business and finance, strongest education system, world center of innovation and invention, currency the world standard of value, the highest standard of living?  England in 1900.

The U.S. is 20th in the world in Internet broadband penetration (just behind Luxembourg).

Nintendo invested more than $US140 million in research and development in 2002 alone.  The U.S. government spent less than half that much in research and innovation in education. 

There were over 106 million registered users of MySpace as of September 2006.  If MySpace were a nation, it would be ranked as the 11th largest in the world (between Japan and Mexico).

The average MySpace page is visited 30 times per day.

We are living in exponential times:  There are over 2.7 billion Google searches performed each month.  To whom were these questions posed before Google (B.G.)?  The number of text messages sent and received each day exceeds the population of the entire planet. 

More than 3,000 books are published every day.

It is estimated that a week’s worth of NEW YORK TIMES contains more information than a single person in the 18th century was likely to come across in their entire lifetime.

It is estimated that 1.5 exabytes (1.5 x 10 to the 18th power) of unique information will be generated world wide this year.  This is estimated to be greater than in the previous 5,000 years.  The amount of new technical information is doubling every two years.  For students beginning a technical degree program at a university this means that half of what they learn in their first year of study will be outdated by their third year of study.  It is predicted to double every 72 hours by 2010.

Third generation fiber optics have recently been tested by NEC and Alcatel that pushes 10 trillion bits of information per second down one strand of fiber.  That is the equivalent of 1,900 CDs or 150 million simultaneous telephone calls every second.  It is currently tripling about every 6 months and is expected to do so for at least the next 20 years.  The fiber is already there.  They are just improving the switches on the ends.  The marginal cost of these improvements is almost nothing. 

Predictions are that e-paper will be cheaper than real paper.

47 million laptop computers were shipped worldwide in 2005.  The $US100 laptop project is expecting to ship 50 to 100 million laptops a year to children in developing countries.

Predictions are that by 2013 a supercomputer will be built that exceeds the computation capability of the human brain.

It is estimated that by 2023 when today’s first graders will just be beginning their first careers it will only cost about $US1000 to buy a computer that exceeds the capability of the human brain.

And while technical predictions more than 15 years into the future are hard to make, predictions are that by 2049 a $US1000 computer will exceed the computational capabilities of the entire human race.

 

News Archives: 2008 January: Is the Yeti now extinct? 2007 December: Odd Body Miscellany November: Teenage risk-taking behaviour October: Peyronie's Disease September: The Othello syndrome August: The new wrap on swaddling July: Where did the belief in guardian angels come from? June: What is real success? May: Is a time machine possible? April: What to say to someone who's dying March: More odds and ends behaviour February: Tiny machines will change us forever January: Do you have to be manic depressive to be creative? 2006 December: Sick Sperm November: Odd Statistics 1 August: Is it more natural for children to be cruel or kind? July: Satanic Cults Won't Go Away April: Something to Panic About March: Step This Way for an Argument February: Who's Afraid of Intimacy? January: Endangered Speciesism?