The presentation started with an overview of the successes from 2005. Next, Geoff Hansen presented an IT Outlook for 2006. This was followed by the Ready to Rocket 25 for 2006 and the “Ones to watch” – 40 emerging companies that might graduate to the full “Ready to Rocket” Top 25 in 2007. Along with those lists, Price-Waterhouse Coopers presented an overview of the M&A and IPO activity across North America for 2005, and Bill Koty, a professor from UBC presented a brief overview of a newly released Premier’s Technology Council report titled “Ahead of the Future” which gives a series of scenarios and predictions for B.C.’s technology economy development from 2005-2020. The summary notes are below along with some of my opinion at the bottom.

NASA should be in BC – we launched a lot of rockets last year.

Some interesting notes came from this session:

• 2005 was a breakthrough year on the Rocketbuilders list.
• These companies were successful because they had a laser focus on a niche market.
• Key highlights of the 2005 list include:
• PureEdge Solutions Inc. (Victoria, BC) was acquired by IBM
• Over 45% of the 2005 Ready to Rocket companies received new investments
• 100% of the 2005 Ready to Rocket companies exceeded 30% revenue growth
• Over 60% of 2005 Ready to Rocket companies exceeded 100% revenue growth
• Over 35% of 2005 Ready to Rocket companies exceeded 200% revenue growth

2006 – the rise of the phoenix

Here were some of the highlights of the predictions for the year ahead;

• general projections seem to predicting that companies will increase their IT spending 5-6% across the board this year
• SMB spending is double that and includes factoring in old hardware replacement cycles for hardware purchased before the collapse.
• there is a trend away from cost-cutting measures and back to the value creation side in terms of prioritizing projects.
• Key Themes that have been identified for 2006:
• Choice: give the user what they want, where they want, in the form they want (Tivo, xFM)
• Make it easy: make it simple to learn and use
• Safe & Secure: ensure that they can store their data safely and people will trust you with that data
• Search is king: there is a lot of work to do here
• Microsoft Office enablement: now that Microsoft has opened up the APIs, companies are succeeding by building things that integrate into Microsoft Office, even more than they were before.
• Storage is still hot: Networked attached storage companies (for example) are growing at up to 300%/yr
• Make it portable: give people the ability to stay mobile: Blackberries, iPods, xFM
• Ensure compliance: people are going to spend 30% of their IT budgets on compliance

For more information on the 2006 IT Outlook, contact Geoff Hansen at Rocketbuilders at 866-824-8785 or at gchansen@rocketbuilders.com.

Ready to Rocket 25 2006 list

Some interesting notes came from this session:

• For the 2006 list, the selection team had great difficulty keeping it DOWN to 25, which meant that the Ones to Watch list expanded to 40 companies.
• There were so many interesting technologies coming up that Rocketbuilders considered launching an “Interesting Concepts” category…but didn’t
• Success factors. The Top 25 shared some key success factors:
• they were heavily verticalized (we had 5 Financial service companies and 4 Healthcare companies on the list.)
• they were well-funded to grow
• Some of these companies are approaching $5 – 10M in revenues – a point at which they become a LOT more interesting as acquisition targets.

Here is the direct link to the Ready to Rocket 25 List. But they are here for review as well:

The Ones to Watch

This list was presented but the final list will not be out until January 13th, 2006.

Lane construction finally complete – traffic now moving slowly towards IPO exit lane

In this 2005 review of M&A and IPO activity across North America presented by Randy Garg of Price-Waterhouse Coopers , there were quite a few interesting tidbits:

• The IPO market has finally been resurrected.
• $100B of private equity was present in 2005.
• Private equity funds are becoming more active in M&A (25% of $100B or 25B) which is a new development.
• Local companies are going public…but not necessarily on the TSX. Some have gone to London or to the USA. This is a new development.
• Debt and subordinated debt as financial instruments have started to appear and this is a new development which is being enabled by the fact that newer companies have (gasp) revenues that can support the debt and are more financially solid and lendable from a cash-flow perspective.
• Public companies are going private again in order to lower their costs, and simplify their operations because the costs of compliance are huge (up to 30% of IT spending per above notes, not to mention other back-office charges.)
• Rule of Thumb: if you’re looking to get acquired, make sure that you have audited financials
• BC and Canadian companies are now on the U.S. radar but our prices have gone up and our currency has gone up, leaving us as less of a bargain than before.
• The major M&A deals are still predominantly cross-border – U.S. companies buying Canadian ones or vice versa. There was very little activity in Canada between Canadian entities.
• M&A is still a revenue purchase decision for companies. They are buying revenues, not necessarily technologies. Once a company crosses the revenue barrier, there are a LOT more suitors.
• $5M seems to be a baseline deal size.
• 2006 is poised to be the best year yet for M&A activity!
• There is a ton of money out there – $100B raised in the U.S. in the Private equity markets in 2005
• therefore money is not the problem
• finding good deals and good teams are the problem
• M&A is still the preferred route of exit when compared to IPO, but IPOs are now back as options.

I’d like a micro fuel-cell powered proteomics machine for gene therapy web research

William Koty of UBC presented some of the findings from the Premier’s Technology Council report on Emerging Technologies titled “Ahead of the Future”. It evaluated 39 emerging technologies, boiled those down to a short-short-list of 12 Emerging technologies and then presented two almost contradictory charts – one from the academics and one from the industry advisory board.  It was long on research methodology and somewhat short on conclusions.

I am hoping that they will do a follow-on or that it will feed into a larger discussion where they do indeed flesh out the scenarios that they discuss very tentatively in the report.

At the end of the day, what did they really say?

If I had to summarize the session, I would say it like this:

• The tech industry is ramping up again. A lot of people had that gut sense but the numbers now prove it.
• We are building some really kick-ass companies here in B.C.
• Those companies are growing again.
• M&A activity will be at an all time high in 2006 and the IPO markets are opening up again as exit routes.

“Your playing small doesn’t serve the world”

We build good companies here that are very capital efficient and that are still attractively priced for acquisition. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It brings money into the economy, it gives local entrepreneurs access to global acquisitors’ systems and training and talent, and spawns more entrepreneurial ventures. A year or two ago, one of the local entrepreneurs hosted a VEF event titled something like: “Why acquisitions are gutting B.C.’s economy.” The resulting talk though had every one of the entrepreneurs on the panel saying that their acquisition was a good thing and that in fact it had had a net positive benefit across the board on a bunch of different things. I remember the host lamenting at the end that he should have talked to the panel BEFORE naming the talk.

Another key point was that we are finally starting to grow our companies again to a decent size We need to keep thinking bigger. Even the statement that they are growing to a decent size is deceiving since we are referring to companies approaching $10M/yr in revenues, which is laughable in the U.S. But it’s a starting point. If you are an entrepreneur, don’t say, “We’re going to dominate the lower mainland”, say “We’re going to dominate the western world” or the whole world for that matter.

I am always reminded of the quote that was incorrectly attributed to Nelson Mandela but which was actually written by Marianne Williamson in her 1992 book, “Return to Love”:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of god – your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people will not feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of god that is within us. It is not in just some of us. It is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

B.C. entrepreneurs would do well to think about that and learn from it. Our playing small doesn’t serve the world. So get out there, think big, and serve the world.

Thanks to the good people at Rocketbuilders for the invitation and for all the hard work in putting this together!

I’m just starting on it but I love all of his books and this one is already awesome and I’m only on page 19!

The ideas build heavily on Ray Kurzweil’s work on the double exponential technology growth rate and singularity theory.

“Ray has spent several decades studyingand modeling technology trends and their impact on society. Perhaps his most profound observation is that the rate of change is itself accelerating. This means that the past is not a reliable guide to the futre. The 20th century was not 100 years of progress at today’s rate but, rather, was equivalent to about 20 years, because we’ve been speeding up to current rates of change. And we’ll make another 20 years of progress at today’s rate, equivalent to that of the entire 20th centure, in the next 14 years. And then we’ll do it again in just 7 years. Because of this [double] exponential growth, the 21st century will equal 20,000 years of progress at today’s rate of progress — 1,000 times greater than what we witnessed in the 20th century, which itself was no slouch for change.”

In one fell swoop, he has come up with a process to improve the environment (both by having plants around and by having the plants decontaminate the soil), make money (enough to pay for the process AND make a profit), and also keep small artisan miners in business, although now they are watching over crops instead of pouring chemicals into the old mines.

UPDATE: Closer to home, Matt brought my attention to a successful joint effort between Teck-Cominco, Western Bioresources Consulting, and Celgar Pulp Mill. Thanks Matt!

These are great examples of triple-bottom-line thinking.

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The Massive Change project encompasses a variety of media including a book, an international exhibition, public events, a radio program. The online forum and film are in the process of being created.

I had the good fortune to be given, as a present for completing my 35th year outside of the womb, a ticket to attend a day long series of panel discussions with some very brilliant minds of the day including such visionaries as Esther Dyson (Chairman of EDVenture Holdings – a venture capital firm, and author of Release 1.0), and Dean Kamen (creator of the Segway.)

The day was broken up into five separate conversations on a theme with a moderator and two panelists. The subject matter included the continued exponential expansion of the “global mind”; wealth & politics; evolution’s designs (biology as template); urban design, space, and transportation; and finally military applications of design and the transfer of technology from the military to the public sector and also in reverse.

I did not take a lot of notes as I did not have a laptop with me so this posting contains some overall impressions, a few specific notes, and a few of my own thoughts on some of the discussion points.

Session 1: Information and Image: Building the Global Mind
With: Bill Buxton: human/computer interface researcher and designer and Esther Dyson: venture capitalist, and general techno-diva.

Interestingly Esther has no phone at home, nor does she drive a car. I figured that if she doesn’t drive a car, she must live in New York. I checked the address of EDventure holdings and sure enough, that’s where it is. I’m not sure that’s where she lives, but where else could somebody with her schedule get by without a car?

I was really expecting a lot from this session but Esther couldn’t seem to connect to Bill’s conversation at all. Bill on the other hand was engaging, energetic, and driven. I could have listened to or talked with him for hours.

Esther gave the audience a long explanation of her work with ICANN over the past couple of years and if I may be so bold as to summarize it, it was this:

It sounded like she had been through a war.

Bill Buxton, having for the most part, his own conversation on his side of the stage waxed poetic about why Alvin Toffler’s ideas were wrong the night before, how humans can’t think on large timescales (or was that Dyson?), and how it is impossible to be a renaissance person but that the way to handle that is to build renaissance teams.

One of the interesting points of his conversation was where he talked about James Murray, one of the key editors of the Oxford dictionary, perhaps the single largest open-source off-line project in the world, where every word in every book in the history of the English language had to be found, traced, and documented. A fascinating history can be found over here at Wikipedia.  According to Buxton, this type of document exists in no other language in the world.

Unfortunately for this session and two others, Bruce Mau moderated it and while I think he did a superlative job with organizing the whole Massive Change project, he is not a moderator and that role should have been handled all day by somebody like Charlie Rose who moderated sessions 2 and 4. Without a strong moderator, the conversations did not connect, the panelists were often left trying to fill the space on their own, and a lot less real content was delivered in the end.

Session 2: Wealth and Politics: Is the World Getting Better?
With: Andrew Zolli, founder of Z+Partners, specializing in analyzing cultural and economic shifts, design innovations and strategies for ethical leadership and Hazel Henderson, futurist, evolutionary economist, worldwide syndicated columnist and sustainable development consultant.

My take-away from Andrew was that there are serious demographic changes that will drive severe global economic changes and that those forces are different in different countries. He gave a brief tutorial on the work that he does with the Demographics Society, showing the various demographic bell-curves of various countries. He showed a normal curve (looks like a bell); the U.S. curve (lots of kids at the bottom makes it like bell-bottomed pants); and terrorist  states (lots of young men, no economic middle class, very few old people to lead the society).

The fundamental message from Hazel and from the work that she has been so passionately involved in for many years was that the currently used metrics of capitalist economies around the world, are wrong. GDP and GNP are measuring the wrong thing. What gets measured (pure economic output), improves. Therefore we increase efficiency to bump up the numbers but we end up with high outputs and a lousy society. So her goal is to build a new set of measurements and then disseminate those far and wide in the hope that if countries were measuring quality of life rather than just pure economic outputs, they would at least have a useful measuring stick.

This was a topic of frequent conversation when I attended the Environmental Studies department at UVic a decade ago. For example, if you introduce a set of policies and environmental carcinogens that end up causing a higher incidence of cancer, which in turn requires more expensive doctor visits….voilá…higher GDP. Often, extremely negative real-world results translate into higher GDP rankings.

One of the new measurement systems that Hazel discussed is the Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators:

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Helen managed to bring up a few more issues noted here:

• Her friend Jeremy Rifkin has just launched his new book titled The European Dream: How Europe’s Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream.

[I have another of Jeremy Rifkin's books titled The Biotech Century: Harnessing the Gene and Remaking the World and it is an incredible read. I am also interested in his book The Hydrogen Economy: The Creation of the Worldwide Energy Web and the Redistribution of Power on Earth but have not yet had a chance to read it.]

• Another interesting website/project that is currently underway is Freecycle.org, an international free + recycling project where people can give and receive things that they have to other people in their local community. So rather than keeping that old box of cables, many of which you probably paid $10-30 for, you can list them on Freecycle. Then somebody else who happens to need that thing can come by and get it from you – for free. There is no bartering, all of the items listed must be given free of charge.

[I subscribed to their site which actually runs the listings using Yahoo Groups with notifications that come into your mailbox of your mail client which you can set up a rule for to siphon off into a Freecycle folder. I would prefer to see it done via something like Craigslist and using RSS feeds, but hopefully they'll get there.]

Session 3: Designing Evolution
With: Janine M. Benyus, author of Biomimicry and advocate of nature based design innovation and John Todd, biologist and designer of Eco Machines for the treatment of waste, food production, generation of fuel and water treatment.

Janine began the session with an overview of biomimetic design principles by examining the stage furniture (chair, table, water jug) and explained the differences between how nature would make a material and how we make that same material using toxic, ecologically wasteful processes.

Then John Todd discussed his eco-machines, large greenhouses that contain a few thousand species of creatures and plants from all five bio-kingdoms – monera, protista, plantae, fungi, animalia – a classification that has recently been usurped by a three domain model.

Some notes from his waste-water Eco-machine:

• to build an eco-machine, you combine ecologies and direct them towards a goal; to do this, he combines ecologies in order to solve particular problems;

• he can build systems that require only 1/10 of the inputs of a traditional man-made system;

• his sewage treatment Eco-Machine treats 100,000 gallons / day of sewage and outputs perfectly clean water. The input speed has no effect on the output quality.

• in order to build something of this complexity, he can’t plan it. He can only build them by combining several thousand species from all five kingdoms and then let them self-select out until they find their balance equilibrium at which point there are usually still around 300 unique species left in the Eco-Machine.

Back to Janine Benyus, she discussed her new project called “Google for Biodiversity.”

She started by getting a bunch of biologists together with a bunch of industrial designers. She then had the designers say things like, “I would like to build a pump.” Then the biologists would go away, compile all the information on the 24 pumps found across 68 creatures (I made those numbers up) and then present that to the designer. The designer would find the one that was the best fit, replicate it using other materials, and then voila – biomimetically inspired pump design! However, this was very labour intensive. The biologists and designers didn’t speak the same language. And the biological data was not organized by function, but by animal.  So, “Google for Biodiversity” was formed.

The goal of this project is to catalog all biological data by function rather than by animal and then to build a translator between the biology world and the design world, such that a designer working on a project can say, “I need a solar desalinization device” and then the website will identify all of the potential possibilities that exist in the world’s creatures and allow the designer to pick and choose from that of the mango for example, and try to replicate the function in his design.

The problem is a difficult one. The two ontologies do not connect and have to be mapped to each other. The biological data is currently referenced by creature, not by function. And having biologists and designers sit side by side is expensive and not very scaleable.

Janine and her students are currently building a proof of concept of this system where they have tagged 12 species of creature appropriately and can now search the animals using designer language.

I asked Janine whether or not she was using Semantic Web tools to build her system, and surprisingly she wasn’t and in fact, had never heard of the semantic web at all. I suggested to her that she should look into it as it would help her with the ontological mapping and tagging. It would also be interesting to see if you could deploy something like Axonwave‘s NLP-based tools to assist the humans by applying the semantic tags or else aiding in the re-categorization of biological data by function.

My favourite quote of Janine’s was: “Limits [of resources] should be considered by designers as a design contest – an opportunity to exercise their skill in designing efficient mechanisms.”

However, I personally believe that the best way to ensure that this happens in any particular area is for constraints to be quantified, clarified, and made explicit. And in those cases where they don’t exist, make them up if you have to. Humans rarely if ever design efficiently for the sheer challenge of it. Design is hard enough as it is. They wait until they are pushed into it. That is why the best thing that could happen to alternative energy development would be for something horrendous to occur that jacks oil up to $500/barrel – a 10x multiple over its current Fall 2004 price. THAT would boost spending and ingenuity in the energy/transportation sector like nothing else. Designers the world over would engage their efficiency creativity and you can be darned sure that automobiles would be getting 100mph in about 12 months.

Session 4: Urban Space, Movement, and Energy
With: Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway, entrepreneur, founder of DEKA Research that builds the stair-climbing wheelchair; and Jaime Lerner, architect and former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, where he revolutionized transit and recycling programs.

Lerner spoke on the history of Curitiba, Brazil and his mayoralty there. When he first became mayor and the city was at 600,000 people and approaching a million, he was advised by mayors of all of the other major cities of the world that he absolutely HAD to build a light rail transit system. Fortunately for Curitiba, they did not have the money to do so. So he built a bus system that ended up surpassing most if not all LRT systems in the world, that is self-funding (it pays for itself and requires no subsidies) and that moves more people than LRT systems at 1/8 of the cost. It has been hailed the world over as a transportation model to be applied to many of the world’s cities as they face increased density, and mounting LRT construction and legal costs and timelines.

He talked about how New York has been talking for FIFTY years about putting an LRT line on 2nd Avenue. They have finally approved it. But it will take twenty years to build. Seventy years of not moving people because the solution is so drastically expensive and difficult to execute!!

Here were some of Lerner’s notes:

• live work and play in one part of the city. Separating functions is an economic and ecological disaster in the making.

• when you build transit, stay on the surface – don’t tunnel and don’t go above ground – both are expensive in terms of land-buy-backs and both are slow in terms of actual people moved across distances because of having to go underground and then above. Most of all, stay on the surface to minimize the costs of building underground or above ground on raised platforms.

• Ignore the peer pressure that says you need an LRT. You don’t. No city does.

• Curitiba moves 2 million people per day by bus. It pays for itself from ticket revenue.

• if a regular bus can move X people per day through the city, there are a couple of things you can do to get higher multiples. If you have a dedicated lane, that bus can move 2x the people. If that bus is articulated, then you can move another 1.7x the people. If that bus is a double-bus, it can move 2.5x the people. Add that all up and they are getting an 8.5x multiple over using a regular stand-alone bus! Because they are using double-decker articulated buses that get their own dedicated bus lanes all through the city. BRILLIANT.

• another awesome part of their buses is that to get on a bus you enter a bus-tube that is a tube-shaped building at the bus-stop. You pay to go into the tube, and then when the bus arrives five sets of doors on the bus open into the tube platform. It’s like an LRT but only two bus-lengths long. So the people can move in/out of the bus in 5 or 10 seconds and then all of the doors shut and the bus moves off again. When you leave the bus, you then exit the tube from the opposite end you entered from. This tube-platform minimizes idle time and keeps the passengers sheltered from the weather.

• Their buses arrive at the tube every 30 seconds. As he noted, many people do not like taking the bus because they have to learn the routes and the timing or they waste a lot of time. Well, if a bus is coming by every 30 seconds, that’s not an issue!

• Recycling is handled by exchanging items of value for the goods that need to be recycled. Even the poorest squatters are paid for their garbage with tickets for the buses, or food from outlying farms. Curitiba recycles 2/3 of its garbage, one of the highest urban recycling rates in the world.

• Even the fishermen are paid to clean up the ocean. They are paid if they catch fish, and they are paid by the city if they catch garbage like tires or car parts.

My favourite quote of Lerner’s was: “The city is not a problem; it is a solution.”

I loved this guy. He laughed quickly and easily and it was obvious that he was extremely passionate about the principles that they had used to build Curitiba. He was also pleased that at last count, 87 more cities had begun to build using these same principles. But it had taken 20 years for that to happen!

–

Dean Kamen spoke about his motivation to build the Segway 2 wheeled device.

• When Ford built the car, 9% of people lived in cities.

• As of 2000, >50% of the global population lived in cities (>3.2B of 6.4B).

• the average speed of the automobile in most cities is 9mph, the same speed of the Segway.

• he feels that the car is designed for the freeway and should absolutely be used to drive on the freeway, but then it should be left at the city gates in much the way that horses and carts were also left outside the ancient cities. We should be using other forms of transportation from the outer ring to the inner core of the city.

I have to say that as much as I like Dean Kamen and as cool as the Segway is, even I wouldn’t run around on one because they’re just so….geeky(?) I’m not sure what it is but something bugs me about them. Maybe it’s just the dorkiness factor. I can’t quite pin it down.

Also, bikes widely distributed by the city and covered bike routes would do more for commuters than expensive electric Segways everywhere, although Paris is trying an experiment with them.

I think the biggest difference between the panelists was the following. One had built an incredible city of 1.6 million people on ecological principles and the values of simple, cheap, and quick. Kamen was trying to solve the commute problem by adding a heavy, electricity-using scooter that was difficult to get up and down stairs and that would pretty much require putting a rack onto your vehicle in order to carry. It is the solution for cities that we don’t actually have. I mean, I give the guy points for long term fifty year vision, but I still don’t get it. And there are a lot of other things we can do that are cheap, quick, and simple like Lerner has done.

(To be continued…)

• outsourcing is a good thing and in the bigger picture not an issue because it’s not a zero-sum game – he gives a 200 year view of these similar trends;
• China is committed to building 50 MIT equivalent institutions;
• their move towards generating intellectual property may result in them actually caring about same;
• computer technology will disperse and become ubiquitous – routers, desktop computers and servers will disappear – [I have a hard time with the server part.]
• IT departments will become Information Departments, focused on privacy, data protection, and security against pathogens;
• humans and machines will merge through the application of nano-machinery and nano-computing intelligence added into the body and brain;
• culture shock won’t happen because of the boiling frog theory (my paraphrase);
• biotech is just beginning [I agree, we're only 36 years into what may well be another standard 80-100 year technology cycle.]
• we currently have the means through diet and supplementation (he takes 250 supplements per day) to slow down aging such that the person can still be around to take advantage of biotech discoveries that will allow them to rebuild their bodies and brains in order to live a longer life;

I love Ray Kurzweil because his interviews and writings are always so completely outrageous to most people.

And my favourite quote of all was when the interviewer, in response to the augmented intelligence comments, asked him, “Aren’t you smart enough already?”

Ray replied:

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I love this because I relate! I am interested in so many fields that I find it difficult to specialize and deepen my skillset in any one of them.

This is a very good article which articulates a wide range of industries that will be affected by nanotech developments. The message is essentially that it will be everywhere, it will be very disruptive (in the economic sense), and it will be hyped to the point that one will need to invest carefully. Overall, an excellent article.

Mike Crissey, writer for Associated press wrote:

One of his recent posts discusses the very ideas that I mentioned in my blog-defining first post – namely that the next 20 years (2005-2025) will bring the same amount of change that we saw in the past 100 years (1900-2000). Seems hard to believe but that is the problem with exponentials. They creep up on you when they hit the curve.

If you don’t know Steve or his interests in nano-technology and accelerating technologies, I recommend reading this for a while.

Steve writes:

Some odd combination of forces are driving interest in renewable energies (many of the things that I discussed in my previous posting on bioproducts).

The web is cluttered with noise about bioproducts, solar energy, and other non-petroleum based energy sources.

Here is an article from SiliconValley.com discussing how VCs are now funding solar companies that they would not touch previously.

I like this article for several reasons:

I wrote a research paper back at UVic on Alternative energy sources, and had as my instructor, Dr. Fred Knelman, a major thorn in the side of the global nuclear establishment. I learned a lot from him and from that class. The biggest thing I learned was that renewable and non-petroleum, non-coal power was only capable of creating 5% of the global power that was required (and that was ten years ago). I probably have that number wrong but the point was that the energy density of these alternatives was not very high in comparison to oil, coal, and nuclear. And that was one of the primary reasons that they had not gone anywhere. The costs were relatively exorbitant to create the same amount of power. Until the economics become reasonable, there still exists very little reason for the global energy economy to shift dramatically.

I am looking forward to getting back into reading about these technologies to see what the past ten years has brought us and what new biotechnologies and nanotechnologies may yet bring us in this field.

Another good addition may be: “Look at both, since they will likely converge in NBIC applications within a few years. NBIC stands for Nano, Bio, Info, and Cognitive Sciences – the intersection of nano-scale, life sciences, info science (for tracking what’s happening), and cognitive sciences (for building smart systems.)

Now for the bad news. The sun in our solar system is expanding and it is expected that it will eventually absorb Mercury, Venus, and Earth, causing life here to only last for another half billion years. I am pretty sure that the last life forms left will be single-celled bacterium, cockroaches, and spammers. So the window of opportunity for life to develop here and then migrate throughout the rest of the solar system and Universe is about a billion years. Given that we didn’t invent space travel until the first half billion were over, that window is now a half billion to get off the planet and out into the Universe. Given that we only have another half a billion years, shouldn’t we all just get along, enjoy the sunset while it’s that far away, and figure out how to get the hell off this planet? Of course, while we’re here, we should do as much mountain biking, trail-running, paddling, travelling and exploring as we can.

By the time the Earth has hit 8 billion years, long after we are gone, the oceans will have vaporised and at the 12 billion year mark, Earth will have folded entirely into the sun. If the planet is going to be gone, does that mean I think that we should use up the precious natural resources pollute our biosphere while we are here? Of course not, that would be asinine and short-sighted. But then again, humans are not the best at extending their time-scales, nor at empathizing enough with future generations. Although that does seem to be changing in some small but important ways with the spread of the sustainable development movement. I may be a bit of an odd realist/pragmatist in the sustainability movement in that I’m not sure I believe in the implicit value of resources, plants, and animals on earth for their own sake. If they’re all going to be gone anyway, that seems moot. But since these things took tens and hundreds of millions of years to develop, I do believe that we should learn from them (biology), design things based on them (biomimicry and nanotechnology), be efficient in our use of them so that we do not mortgage our children’s future (sustainability), and learn how to build efficient systems so that we can spread out into the universe and live in harsher, resource constrained regions as we do so.