During the month of April 2012 we had about 7500 hundred visitors to futurist.com from around the world. The top ten nations from which visitors came are:
World Visitors to Futurist.com April 2012
People who know me know about my fondness for all things space-related. This began when I was very young, but no doubt was driven mostly by growing up in the first space age. Then falling into the happy circumstance of the college I was attending hiring as its president the Director of Program Planning for the Apollo program at Rockwell, and then that person, Dr. Ed Lindaman, becoming a futurist mentor, all combine to mean that, for me, space is always alluring.
So it was a thrilling 90-minutes yesterday to watch the online video feed of the coming out news conference of Planetary Resources. Few announcements of new ventures in recent memory have attracted such great attention. This is the company, of course, that intends to mine near earth asteroids for critical materials. 
There are millions of asteroids, and thousands of them come near earth; at current counts 1500 are as easy to reach as the moon. A single asteroid the size of a large conference room could hold enough platinum to be worth 20-50 billion dollars. Many contain water that can be turned into the most precious of space resources, fuel, and then used to create fueling stations in space, dropping the cost of space travel by orders of magnitude.
Asteroid mining has been a staple of science fiction, both print and film, and now some very serious people with very serious money think the time is right to start the venture. As the news conference was concluding I got a call to interview with ECT News Network. The reporter wanted to know if I think the prospects for asteroid mining are real.
My answer: the prospects are not only real, such an enterprise is inevitable. It is simply a matter of when the timing will be right in terms of matching technical ability, need, and capital availability. As company co-founder Peter Diamandis explained, Planetary Resources has concluded that five forces have converged: exponentially improving technologies, availability of commercial space launch, investors with adequate capital and vision, high need for critical resources, and alignment with NASA policy (as they will be a customer).
So, it looks likely that with the Shuttle program over, but private launch ready and projects like Planetary Resources becoming real enterprises, the next space age (is the second or third space age?) is underway.
Good news for the future and the imperative to become a space faring civilization. Good news too for the Seattle area where I live, on the verge of becoming the hub of this new era in aerospace.
Glen Hiemstra is a futurist, author, speaker, consultant, Founder of Futurist.com, and founder and Curator of DoTheFuture.com. To arrange for a speech, workshop or consultation contact Futurist.com.
A few years ago I had the opportunity to work on several television projects, for producers like Steven Bochco, on shows that were to be set in the future. In providing technical advice, one thing I mentioned to prop and set designers was that rapid prototyping and 3D printing had advanced to such a state that it was possible to consider 3D printing companies for assistance in manufacturing props, then still made by hand. I did not get any interest at the time, but it appears that 3D printing has come to Hollywood.
Daniel Terdiman of Cnet describes how 3D printing was used in the movie Iron Man II, to produce props and costume parts like those seen below.
This glove, used in 'Iron Man 2,' was made using a 3D printer, and is part of a full-body suit used in some of the film's live-action scenes. (Credit: Objet on Cnet News)
3D printing is coming of age.
Glen Hiemstra is a futurist, author, speaker, consultant, Founder of Futurist.com, and founder and Curator of DoTheFuture.com. To arrange for a speech, workshop or consultation contact Futurist.com.
Last week I attended an excellent monthly breakfast program of the Washington Clean Tech Alliance. The April program featured a panel on the future of natural gas. I attended because I am very interested in whether the energy picture has changed as much as it appears, in the past three years.
In 2006 when I wrote my last book, Turning the Future Into Revenue, I began the energy chapter with the following words, “The world is running out of oil. Just in time.” At that time, two years before oil prices hit their (so far) historical high of $147 a barrel, investors and institutions were catching up to peak oil, the knowledge that at some point we will have used up half the oil in the world and started down the back side of the supply curve. The only question is when. It seemed to many observers, circa 2006-2009, that the halfway point had been reached. It is still safe to say that the cheap and easy oil days are mostly behind us, but the energy picture has become more complex recently.
Hydraulic fracturing of oil and gas bearing shale rock, or fracking, when combined with improved horizontal drilling has begun to push the peaks forward in time. The biggest change in the energy picture, we learned last week, comes from shale gas. At the same time I was writing about energy in 2006, the natural gas industry was warning utility commissions that big price increases were on the horizon, because of short supplies, increases that would take the price per million BTU’s to $14. The U.S. and Canada were gearing up to build port facilities to import liquefied natural gas. Today the price hovers a bit below $2, because there is a glut of gas being developed in the shale oil fields in North America, and instead of anticipating import facilities, the focus is on the need for export facilities.
This chart, from the Energy Information Agency, illustrates how much more natural gas is anticipated by 2035, and how much of that comes from shale fields. At the WCTA session that I attended, there was confidence expressed that the gas is there and recoverable. The larger concerns focused on how to develop sufficient demand for all the gas by switching much electricity production and transportation to natural gas. In addition there is concern that the price has been driven so low that exploration and development will slow, having become uneconomical.
On the risk side there are concerns about water supply, as it takes a lot of water to produce a barrel equivalent of natural gas. While gas is cleaner than coal or diesel at the point of combustion, there is concern that gas leakage at the well head can make it actually a dirtier fuel in terms of green house gases, although the industry assures us that this is a technical issue that can be fixed by best practices. And of course there is concern about long run contamination of ground water from fracking chemicals used to force the gas from the shale rock. Again, the industry assures everyone that the shale is so much deeper than ground water there is little chance of contamination through migration. However, since the fracking pipes are left behind when a well plays out, leaving a long term channel between layers of rock, it seems reasonable to predict that some migration will occur in the very long run.
Regardless of the long-term risks, it is pretty safe to assume that an energy hungry world will continue to develop these resources. Whether there is really a 100-year supply, as industry advertising insists, is open to conjecture. But, on the whole, natural gas appears to offer a cleaner and cheaper bridge to the long-term energy future.
Yesterday, Easter Sunday, we here in Seattle finally joined most of the rest of the nation in setting a high temperature record. It has been an unusual year in that regard. Is it a harbinger of the future, or a one-year anomaly?
It was nice to be warm here, for the first time this year. The day finally put a long, unusually cool and wet winter and early spring behind us. I will use the occasion for one last memory from the winter, a day of snow shoeing with David on the one of more gorgeous winter days of the year. Enjoy some highlights.
