And now – immortality in 30 years...

Thirty years later
Stanislav Rozmirovich, "Expert"Sergey Pereslegin, head of the theoretical department of the Designing the Future research group, talks about the most promising technologies and the changes they will bring to our lives.

There is no way without the "atom"– Which technologies or technological trends will have the greatest impact on human life and humanity as a whole in the next thirty years?

– It is difficult to compare, but in general, four main types of technologies can be distinguished, each of which will have a revolutionary impact on man and society.

I'll start with the simplest – these are environmental management technologies. We will certainly move away from ecological paradigms in three decades, which for some reason persistently oppose man to the rest of the world. We will move from the paradigm of nature conservation to the paradigm of rational use of nature.

I am often called an anti-ecologist. This is, of course, true, but in some matters I go much further than the representatives of the green movement themselves. For example, I say that in the world of the future, the economy will be part of environmental management. That is, the "Economy" package will occupy a subordinate position. This, for example, will change the structure of cities. I'm not talking about carbon-free cities, which are so fond of talking about in the West, because I don't believe in them at all. But the idea of a transportless city, the idea of a transportless economy seems to me very, very interesting. Quite a lot has been done in this area.

"Like what?"– There are already industrial systems of three–dimensional processing of objects - distant descendants of numerical control machines.

Since such a production system is automatically rebuilt for any new task, there is no need for the advantages of producing large series for its effective operation. For her, two products are already quite a large series. And since you do not need the advantage of seriality, you do not need to separate production into small elements and then build a long and tedious system of cooperation and logistics, which extremely overloads transport. Imagine: your cities can do almost without industrial transport links.

– But the cities will not be able to do without energy.– It is really necessary to solve the problem of energy.

Today, the commissioning of energy capacities lags far behind the pace of their withdrawal. Imagine that this will last for another number of years… And this may well happen, if only because the energy industry is extremely regulated by environmental and other laws, and a lot of entrepreneurs simply do not want to get involved with it. There are very long payback periods for investments, a very low rate of return, and at the same time you are also constantly to blame for everyone. The problem is not so much that there is not enough capacity. The problem is that the existing economic structure actually does not allow you to engage in this business, it is not profitable.

– Will alternative energy help?– The West has taken the path of transition to the so-called alternative energy: wind, solar, biofuels and so on.

But these sources are by no means so convenient and harmless.

Solar energy is semiconductors that get dusty and fail in the conditions of a normal atmosphere. The manufacture of silicon semiconductors is very expensive and, to be honest, quite a dirty process from the point of view of ecology.

Wind turbines have an extremely strong effect on the movement of birds. Well, we can live without birds, but we, in general, do not really understand how the noise of wind turbines affects people. Wind turbines make noise in the infrasound range. Offhand, this noise doesn't seem to be harmful or dangerous, but we don't really know how. In addition, wind turbines have a very limited maximum power, and they are very expensive. And we want cheap and clean energy.

Hydropower… Apart from our big Siberian rivers, all the other hydroelectric power plants in the world that made sense to build have already been built. Well, we will add another 10-12 gigawatts on our large northern rivers, but they both occupied their 10 percent in the balance sheet, and will continue to occupy.

So it turns out that the only place where you can count on a serious increase in the share is nuclear power. And there everything depends on whether it will be possible to close the nuclear fuel cycle. That is, to learn to use the 238th, and not the 235th uranium is, firstly, and secondly, to learn, if not to destroy all radioactive waste, then at least to recycle and safely store all spent – extremely toxic – fuel. These problems were theoretically solved in the 60s, but there is no large-scale practical implementation today.

– And thermonuclear fusion? Let's launch ITER, which will confirm the theoretical estimates, and we find ourselves in a completely different development paradigm.– Don't be afraid, it won't confirm.

– And suddenly. You yourself understand what the scale of changes will be as a result of the effective launch of ITER.– Understand, if it could be effectively launched, it would have been launched long ago.

There has been no progress in thermonuclear energy for a long time. It is a pity for countries to spend money on this, but it is also very scary not to invest: what if, while we are not spending, someone else will get the result. Therefore, ITER-type programs are being created, the main point of which is to invest a minimum of money and monitor what competitors are doing in this area.

Modification or symbiosis– What other important technological areas are there?

– Information technology.

They are developing rapidly and have not reached the limit of their development. Now we are talking about the "three globalities". The first is a global connection, a connection between any two points of the world. It is not there yet, because the roaming system is very complex and vulnerable. That's when we make a global communication system that does not depend on the Earth, when any two stations are connected via satellites, then truly global communication will become a reality.

The second is global information. This issue has, in fact, been resolved, but a very serious reform in the field of copyright is required. Such a reform is overdue, forecasters are already saying that the patent market should soon collapse, followed by the rest of the copyright market. But while the transfer of information is very complicated. Finally, the third IT direction is global navigation.

Further, information technology can offer us a world of high virtuality. This is not just a virtual world, it is a world in which you will not be able to understand by any internal experiment that you are in a virtual world, and not in the real world. Now we are still far from creating a world of high virtuality, but sooner or later it will appear, and then there will be an interesting task of interacting a real Earth with a bunch of virtual "lands".

– And in the real world, what other technological changes are waiting for us?– Two more technology packages are currently under construction.

These are biotech and nanotech. The situation with biotechnologies is extremely interesting because the main structure–forming mechanism – working with recombinant DNA - has already been mastered in principle. What delays the development of bioengineering is that the generations of animals change very slowly. Experiments are being slowly set up.

There is an opinion that a plant is simpler than animals, and even more so than a person. In fact, the plant that converts solar energy into nutrients is a natural high–tech. And animals that eat other organic matter are much easier to organize. So, since we have already received GM plants, expect both GM animals and genetically modified human organs very soon. For example, a liver that is fundamentally resistant to alcohol, or a heart with a 900-year warranty. Whatever happens to you, it will work. Already now there are carrots that treat hepatitis. You eat it and automatically get a large amount of antibodies to hepatitis of all three types.

– Aren't ethical problems holding back the development of biotech?– Here we face a whole set of problems.

The question immediately arises: to what extent it is possible to introduce changes, while continuing to consider the person with whom you communicate as a person. At what point will we stop considering a modified being a human being? As soon as this line begins to be defined, we immediately fall into the zone of fascism and racism of the highest level. Because who can prove to you that Negroes or Japanese are not a genetically modified product? After all, each of us genes went through a whole stage of modifications. If we start to introduce distinctions according to the genetic principle, we will not have time to breathe, as it turns out that only our specific race and nationality are people, and everyone else is not, human rights do not apply to them.

If we do not see this boundary, then we will completely lose the concepts of "human personality", "human identity". The problem is very serious. I will note in parentheses that the development of bioengineering can easily lead us to immortality, which in itself is also a philosophical and ontological problem. Although less creepy than the identity issue.

– What can we expect from nanotech?– Nanotech does everything the same as biotech, but in a different way.

Instead of modifying a person, there is a symbiosis of a person with nanorobots, nanosystems that change the structure of his blood, solve problems with diseases and the like. For example, nanorobots can easily cope with cancer in the metastasis stage. They will simply destroy only cancer cells without touching any others.
(Dreaming is not harmful... And it's even useful to think what you're saying: say less nonsense – VM. :)

Nano- and biotechnologies seem to be completely opposite, but they lead us to the same result – to a fundamental change in a person. Either by nanosymbiosis, or by changing the genetic apparatus. In biotech, the decisive project was the "Human Genome", it has already been implemented. The situation in nanotechnology is complicated, there is no decisive project there, there is a set of technologies of different origins, which we conditionally call nanotechnology. There is still a competition for large projects.

I would like to note separately that all the technologies I have described have already been accepted by the world's elites. Appropriate institutions have been created – somewhere full-scale, somewhere partial. And significant sums of money have been deposited. Therefore, it would be strange if these technologies were not implemented within 30 years.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru
30.09.2009