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本帖最后由 紅塵市長 于 2013-12-11 17:35 编辑
Futurologists Report
Nov 22, 2013 Futurologist Ian Pearson
What does the future hold? That’s the question we asked futurologist Ian Pearson. The team here at Maxis has rubbed our crystal ball and predicted our vision of the future with the SimCity Cities of Tomorrow expansion pack, but now it’s time to see how a legitimate prognosticator pictures what the real world of tomorrow will look like. Below you’ll find predictions for a possible future. Read on to see if it matches up with what Maxis forecast.
Introduction
The world in 65 years will be very different in some ways but unchanged in others. People will still have the same needs and aspirations to have fun, make friends, have families and do something with their lives. The technology to let them do this will be very different and although we’ll preserve old buildings just as we do today, much of the future cities will look very different.
Buildings
The tallest building in Europe today is London’s Shard at 308m tall. With the materials and construction techniques available in 2078, it will be possible to build 100 times higher, so we will have some structures over 30km tall. Probably the only materials capable of acting as the main structural components will be based on carbon nanotubes and graphene, perhaps some boron too. These could be woven, extruded or blended with other materials to make super-strong lightweight building materials for walls, cables, and girders and so on.
Biomimetics will be very much in evidence in city and building design. A lot of structures will mimic those found in nature. Instead of using cranes to lift components and place them on top of others, most tall structures will be grown from the ground up using high pressure 3D printing techniques. Using 3D printing, high pressures would be used to extrude a material upwards. For intricate detail, 3D printing would be perfect, allowing extremely fine outer textures and architectural details to be made as the building rises.
Although the lower levels of a building may be finished with fine aesthetic detailing, only people in nearby buildings or flying transport would see upper levels close-up, so detailing would generally be a lot simpler and only major structural facets would be visible from a distance. In fact, a lot of future buildings will be very plain indeed. It will be cheaper and faster to build plain buildings, and the normal everyday use of augmented reality will have forced a move towards relying on virtual architecture. Ordinary homes and office may be just prefabricated structures, bolted together on site, to give very high functionality with low cost, and augmented reality used to make it look however the user wants. In the street, each person looking at a building will see a virtual architectural overlay tailored for their own preferences and the corporate image of the current building residents. No two people may see a building in quite the same way. There is little point in investing heavily in finishing for the few occasions when people look at the actual building.
For strength, the main structural members might well have a wood-like structure consisting of a lot of fine tubes, rather like the phloem and xylem in tree trunks, any fine architectural surface detailing a sort of biomimetic bark layer. Cross members could be joined just like branches. This would provide very high strength with low weight. Tubes could be clustered into larger tubes, much like fine steel wires are woven to make strong cables that can be woven into even thicker and stronger cables. This fractal tubular structure for the trunks would make them well-suited to carry electrical cabling and ducting for plumbing or air conditioning too, elegantly incorporating all the major needs of a tall building into a single structural part – though they could be kept separate of course if preferred. So the trunks would have a rather fractal cross section with tubes of various diameters from thick air conditioning pipework right down to molecular thicknesses of the core graphene tubes. Flooring and walls could then be built from more conventional materials on this tree-like supporting structure. Floors and walls could use carbon materials too, but with far lower demands on their strength, there would be no need for such restriction of choice. Glass, plastics, steel and ceramics as well as concrete would still be common throughout buildings. We may well see a lot of use of plastic inflatables too. Inflatable structures can be very cheap and allow rapid building, and since the main strength comes from the carbon supports, there is no need for walls or windows to carry any of the load. Inflatables can easily be made to withstand wind pressures even in the fiercest storms.
The extensive use of virtual architecture and other augmented reality means there is far less significance in being near a window. Virtual windows with any view required can be put anywhere at all, so real ones won’t look be anything special. Combined with the super-strong materials available and better indoor transport, buildings could therefore be allowed to cover much larger areas. We could see some buildings that are essentially towns in their own right. In the extreme, we could have 10km tall buildings measuring several square kilometres in area, thousands of floors holding millions of residents and all the social, leisure, business and sporting facilities a city would normally have. Some people would very rarely leave them.
One reason governments might want to encourage such large city buildings is that it would make it easier for them to control the population. With a limited number of ways in and out, people movements could be policed and restricted if necessary, for example to control the spread of disease or restrict civil disturbances.
Building appearance won’t only use augmented reality and plain materials though. Apart from the intricacy and frills available from 3D printing, surface textures could be living. Buildings might be furry. Vertical farms would grow up some buildings, nanotech fabrication on others. Others might grow fur for purely cosmetic reasons, using a wide range of strand types that would grow biomimetically from microscopic print heads. One useful side from this is that furry buildings could reduce the intensity of wind that can otherwise be a big problem in some city areas.
Plastics and polymer displays especially will be very common. Polymer displays will cover entire walls as well as a lot of 3D objects and add video or graphics to any décor.
Plasma force fields sound like science fiction today, but they will likely be part of the 2078 city. It won’t be possible by then to make them very strong, so we won’t use them for security doors, but for novelty indoor partitioning or giving a degree or wind-shielding around an outside space, they will be very useful. They will look nice too, and patterned auras could become a common part of décor. The force fields will rely on strong and tight magnetic fields holding sheets of charged plasma in place to make a sort of plywood structure, with air. These will resist bending into each other and the pressurised air inside will prevent air movement, allowing their use as structurally weak windows and barriers.
City layout
Although some cities may include a few of these ultra-high density buildings, much of the future city would be a similar mixture of buildings, roads, open areas, parks and so on that we see today. There will certainly be far more tall buildings and some will cover larger areas, but many buildings will still be low-rise and more conventional. Virtual architecture will mean that some buildings that are very exciting inside could be made to look deliberately plain outside. For the coolest nightclubs in town, invisible could be the new black. Everyone except their target clientele would walk right past a perfectly ordinary doorway and not even see it. The people they want to come in would instead be drawn a spectacular looking entrance.
The use of augmented reality could also make every street into an art gallery or a stage for performing arts. The companies in buildings could target their customers individually with personalised building appearance and theming. Even the products on display in the virtual malls would vary from person to person. It will give lots of scope for fun too. As one person chooses a new outfit, their partner might be shooting aliens and zombies with a virtual plasma cannon in the foyer.
Some large 2078 cities will need spaceports to cater for a rapidly growing space industry, for asteroid mining, leisure travel and research. Low orbit space travel will also be the fastest way to travel around the world for the rich and important.
Pressures to spread rising immigrant populations throughout the UK will mean huge expansion of some northern cities such as Glasgow, Manchester and Liverpool. London and Birmingham will see redevelopment but not as much expansion. Cities can grow organically, but entirely new areas or new towns will also be planned and built.
Floating structures and art
Tomorrow’s city will have a lot of decorative structures that are virtual, but that doesn’t mean the physical city has to be dull. Ultra-light foams such as carbon foam and aerogels can combine with various propulsion and levitation techniques to make massive solid balloons that can support enormous loads, and even act as the structure itself. We may not quite have the floating islands from Avatar, but future buildings could include parts that do indeed float, tethered to the ground or a building.
Light-emitting polymers and plasmas could add highly colourful and dynamic effects to make monuments, art galleries or other structures that can change shape and the appearance of their outer texture. We could see concentric rings, spirals or plates that continually change their orientation, bounce up and down, or twirl around, so that the structure never looks the same twice.
Electronically controlled magnetic suspension offers a wide range of options for future structures. Parts of any size and shape could be linked magnetically but remain quite separate. If they are mostly made from lightweight foam, large parts of buildings could appear to stay only loosely together, like birds in a flock. This would make an excellent fun campus for a high-tech company on an industrial park, the staff would be in a different place with a different view every day, and would meet different colleagues.
It is impossible to predict what artists will create, but at least we can know about some of the tools and materials they’ll have available. Building ornamentation could feature free-floating rings to top them off instead of boring radio masts. Nearer the ground, large holographic panels could be used to add dynamic 3D effects. Coupled with plasma partitioning from the air, company entrance foyers could be fabricated with only the most ethereal physical structures, just lightweight holographic panels interleaved with plasma force fields. Monuments or art works in a city might make liberal use of such combinations of floating holographic or light emitting panels and plasma effects.
Transport
Public transport will mostly be variations on pods. These will be compact self-driving vehicles of various sizes. Some would distribute goods or provide automated maintenance or policing services, some would transport people or bots. Fully automated public transport pods mean there will be no need for buses or trams, though a few legacy tram systems may remain. Pods will drive just centimetres apart front to back and side to side, and will coordinate electronic speeds to interleave perfectly at junctions. Transport pods will be small too, so road capacity will be over 15 times higher than today even without using multiple layers. With high density buildings resulting in fewer long distance journeys, congestion will be very low. Where there is still high traffic, multiple layers of traffic will solve the problem. That won’t always need a new road to be erected on raised platforms. Vehicles in some situations could actually ride on top of each other.
There will be some proper flying cars in 2078, but mostly they will be used by emergency services. Most other vehicles will travel just above surface level, hovering just like the ones we see in sci-fi, but quite close to the ground. They won’t need wheels, but use magnetic levitation, mostly using tracks either with a metal surface layer or with electrical coils embedded in the surface. The coils will act both to power the pods by inductively charging their super-capacitor banks as they fly over, and also to levitate them using magnetic repulsion, even dragging them along using linear induction motors. Super-capacitors will mean the pods only need small batteries, making them much lighter and less resource-hungry as well as emission-free.
Different types of vehicle might be needed for journeys going outside the city. Some will still use wheels, others will generate plasma beneath them, held within powerful magnetic skirt around the vehicle base, rather like a hovercraft, to hover over any solid surface. The plasma itself would provide enough magnetic repulsion to elevate the vehicle.
Emergency services
Robotics technology allows a lot of emergency services to be integrated closely into the infrastructure, rather as a sprinkler system is today. Robots would be extremely common and some would be designed to be used in emergencies, being more robust so that they could do search and rescue tasks, or deal with armed gangsters. With transport all electronically coordinated, it will be very easy for traffic to move aside to allow any emergency vehicles an unimpeded trip to the emergency. It will also be easy for the authorities to prevent traffic from entering specific areas, while rerouting traffic away from a problem to free roads so that people could quickly evacuate from affected areas. There will inevitably be some problems where government is accused of misusing these powers to prevent protests and disperse demonstrations.
There will be still be many people working in emergency services and they will undoubtedly still do heroic acts. In many cases though, they might enter burning buildings by using a direct brain link to remotely occupy a fireproof android built specially for such a task. Androids using polymer muscles would be over five times stronger than humans. Some robots would have special tools for cutting or blasting their way through walls or other obstacles. Others would have medical sensors that make the Star Trek tricorder look primitive and would be able to carry out some emergency treatments on the spot before gently carrying a victim to safety.
When people do have to perform a dangerous rescue themselves, they would often use suits with very special abilities. The suits would act as an exoskeleton, again using polymer muscles to give super-strength, but with the added ability of remote controlling them to walk the person out if they are somehow knocked unconscious. That would be unlikely though, since the suits would constantly monitor the wearer's medical state and relay it to senior officers, so they'd be ordered out before they were overcome by heat or smoke. Augmented reality displays linked to mm wave sensing and architectural plans would let them see through smoke and fire, even through walls. Images could be shared between crew members and chiefs to allow much better understanding of the whole picture.
Shopping
A lot of shopping will be delegated to robots that look after the home and office, leaving people to do the fun and socialisation bits, so these will dominate the human shopping experience. So we will have lots of fantasy environment overlays, gaming, and theming. People will see products they’re interested in highlighted and others dimmed. A lot of shops will be just try-on outlets. When people buy a garment, they needn’t even take it to a till, they’d just tell the computer system or robot assistant they want it and their shape details will be sent to a rapid customised manufacturer for personalisation and delivery later in the day to their home. Browsing craft shops would be a different kind of pleasure, enjoying the skills of another person.
Clothes will make use of colour-changing and shape-changing materials that will self-clean when the person is outside. The clothes will adapt to the surroundings to offer warmer or cooler fabric, or become skin-tight or loose on command. They will also extract energy from the environment to power the digital jewellery people will wear.
With physical products much cheaper, people will be able to spend far more on memorable experiences, and they might use shops to preview or sample them before spending heavily. Someone might wander around a resort virtually, or feel the g-forces on an amusement park ride. Then they can book and do it for real.
People will also shop for robots. There will be some for every kind of role, but some will have a special bond with the owner so it will be rather like choosing a pet today.
Future Christmas
Christmas is no longer seen as a religious festival but is an annual focus for everyone of all cultures for socialising, partying, gift-giving and having a peaceful time with family and friends. Fully immersive virtual reality and shared environments will let people spend time together even though they’re far apart, allowing the joy of having close family with you for a short time, without the rows that customarily go with them overstaying. Parties will also use imaginative virtual environments, with the added use of smart drugs, totally safe and legal chemicals that can cause pleasant effects that are consumed in advance and electronically activated when the atmosphere is right, so that everyone can enjoy the same effects simultaneously. They may be used in combination with trans-cranial magnetic stimulation headsets to increase the effects. Christmas parties will be even wilder, and even more fun, and because much of it is electronically mediated, you could set any personal limits on potentially embarrassing situations in advance, bringing you back to full normal awareness before any career-limiting or relationship-destroying decisions.
Gifts might well be very traditional crafts or personal service experiences, because the costs of buying material objects such as toys or robots would be very low. That puts a high premium on human skill and involvement, increasing the perceived value of traditional crafts and services. Giving someone a spa token will be far more welcomed than a new robot.
London
London has stayed much the same size, but modernised, with several areas of tall building, and its huge Estuary spaceport/airport complex. This carries real traffic but has also become a new social focal point, with the 30km high spaceport making the most of its rapid space-link to the new Space Elevator. Space tourism and exploration are both big business now, and those that can’t afford to go can still enjoy the huge theme park with simulated experiences.
The streets of central London are barred from any traffic except self-driving pods, which increased road capacity 50-fold. The pods can travel close side by side, front to back, and in several layers thanks to their universal size. The underground system still works fine with higher occupancy on the rails, but surface travel is now easier and faster. Pods can climb the sides of some tall buildings on magnetic rails.
Big Ben has been preserved in its original state, but another updated version has appeared in the centre of the Thames beside Westminster Bridge. The Millennium Wheel has been updated too with the pods able to detach and take the occupants on short tours around the New Ben before returning to the wheel. New Ben isn’t especially tall, designed to look good from ground level, but is made of holographic panels that show the time from any direction. Various large art objects orbit the tower, providing a local gallery for the New Tate, and a nice laser show accompanies the chimes. The Thames below carries far more self-driving boat traffic and has become a major route to cross London.
The Far Future
100 years from now, we’ll be doing a lot in space. There will be more space ports, more travel, more industry, and colonisation of moon-bases, planets and space stations. There will be several space elevators, and one of these may have had its base migrated to the UK, just outside Leeds, allowing rapid and cheap movement of people and materials into space. As well as the space elevators, new materials will enable structures hundreds of kilometres tall. The highest in Britain could be 500km, reaching far above many satellites. Accommodation at the tops of these will be for the most extreme super-rich.
By 100 years, we will actually have the floating structures making avatar style flying islands. These will offer desirable properties for the most status hungry. Flying cars will be more common too since ground level will be too clogged. Solid foam balloons will be common freight transport, as well as some carrying hotels to offer luxury cruises in the air.
Electronic immortality will mean that half the population is made up of people who live on in androids. With a superb youthful and superhuman body, more than a lifetime of experience, and a whole new lease of life, they will be starting to dominate the culture. They will freely hop between bodies, sometimes leaving androids frozen still in place, streets sometimes looking like a time-freeze scene.
The year 3000
A thousand years from now, humans will have redesigned themselves so much that we will be very little like today. It won’t even be just genetic redesign, because within 200 years most people won’t even be organic. Our descendant will have vastly superior minds, linked together totally, inhabiting any physical form they desire, with the ability to travel locally at the speed of light, and a network of wormholes around the galaxy for the long journeys. There will be so little that we have in common with them, they could essentially be any alien species you want to imagine.
Ian Pearson is a full time futurologist, tracking and predicting developments across a wide range of technology, business, society, politics and the environment. He is a Maths and Physics graduate, and a Doctor of Science. He has worked in numerous branches of engineering, from aeronautics to cybernetics, sustainable transport to electronic cosmetics. His inventions include text messaging and the active contact lens. He was BT’s full-time futurologist from 1991 to 2007 and now works for Futurizon, a small futures institute. He writes, lectures and consults globally on all aspects of the technology-driven future. He has written several books, recently including Space Anchor, Total Sustainability and You Tomorrow, and made over 500 TV and radio appearances. He is a Chartered Fellow of the British Computer Society, a Fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science, the World Innovation Foundation, and the Royal Society of Arts.
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SC小狗仔
发表于 2013-10-31 10:37
显身卡
发表于 2013-11-13 09:29
