Tomorrowland (15 page)

The final technology worth considering are Small Scale Nuclear Reactors (SMRs) — or so-called “backyard nukes.” These mini-nukes generate between 45 and 300 megawatts of power (compared to 500 megawatts for the smallest thermal reactor now on the market), are built modularly (and, at roughly $1 billion per, relatively cheaply), then sealed completely at the factory, shipped via rail, and arrive at their destination “plug and play.” Once installed, they’re designed to run for years without maintenance. A number of familiar faces (like Toshiba and Lawrence Livermore Laboratories) and several nuclear newcomers (like New Mexico–based Hyperion Power Generation and Oregon-based NuScale Power) have gone into this area because SMRs are believed to fill a niche.

In places where water shortages are a problem, SMRs could be used to run desalination plants; in places too remote for other options, SMRs could be the best alternative to trucking in barrels of diesel. Much interest is centered around providing power for remote mining operations (like extracting oil from tar sands, which currently uses more oil than it produces), backing up intermittently plagued solar or wind facilities, or even — in the very long term — serving as hydrogen generators.

All that said, as a pilot project of sorts, Toshiba has spent five
years trying to give their SMR — known as the 4S for “super safe, small, and simple” — to the remote town of Galena, Alaska. But, as Greenpeace’s Jim Riccio points out: “How good do you think the technology really is if they can’t even give it away?” Along similar lines, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has said it’s unwilling to review SMR applications until each of the companies involved has found a domestic utility partner and, so far at least, none have.

While in office, President Barack Obama has been supportive of nuclear energy, but he also called the Nuclear Regulatory Commission a “moribund agency that needs to be revamped and has become a captive of the industries it regulates.” This doesn’t bode well for new nuclear technologies since they all must be approved by the Commission before deployment. And if Obama plans on revamping an agency that already claims to be severely understaffed, then once again we run into the wall of time.

Which raises the final question worth asking — what does all this excitement really mean? Not much as yet. In fact, despite recent and significant forward progress, because of the devastation that occurred when an earthquake, then a tsunami, struck Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, many countries are revamping their nuclear plans. Japan itself has shut down forty-eight of its plants. Germany halted its efforts to become a leader in nuclear power. Once again, the experts are predicting the end of the industry.

Yet a few key facts are often left out of the post-Fukushima debate. First, nuclear development hasn’t completely stalled. As of September 2014, there are sixty-seven new plants under construction and more on the way. China continues to ramp up production and Saudi Arabia just announced plans to become a major player, wanting to draw 15 percent of its total energy from nuclear by 2034. More importantly, if the reactors inside the Daiichi plant had been Generation IV, their passive safety design would have ensured that all of this mess could have been avoided. Instead of tragedy dominating the news, we could have
been having discussions about the safety and efficiency of new nuclear designs. Either way, whether it’s a new nukes revolution or a Manhattan-style project to bring renewables up to speed, everyone agrees that if something doesn’t happen soon, we may very well be designing our future technologies in the dark.

Space Diving

THE FUTURE OF SPORT

In the first section of this book,
The Future In Here
, we looked at the ways science and technology are impacting you and me. In
Part Two: The Future Out There
, we’ve been examining the inverse, the ways science and technology are impacting the world at large. In this chapter, we’re going to look at the point at which these trends intersect: the future of sport.

If you scratch under the surface of sport, you’ll pretty quickly encounter the burgeoning science of play. Over the past few decades, a topic that was once dismissed as mostly unimportant is now considered a critical biological process, a developmental necessity that allows us to learn fundamental social and survival skills, stimulate creativity and innovation, and test the limits of our own potential. Sport, meanwhile, is the cultural manifestation of play, the place where — in the guise of a game — we collectively explore the limits of human potential, penciling the outlines of future possibilities.

That’s what makes this story so compelling. It’s technically the tale of skydiver Felix Baumgartner’s attempt to break a world record, except that the record he’s set his sights on is actually an off-world record — it is a demonstration that our urge to play, interwoven with our need to push limits, has actually left the planet. In short, we have just added an entirely new level of meaning to the phrase “We got next.”

1.

The balloon is a marvel, ghostly silver, as thin as a dry-cleaning bag. Partially inflated at the Roswell, New Mexico, launch site, it looks like an amoeba dressed in haute couture. In the lower atmosphere, at full height, it rises a majestic fifty-five stories. In the stratosphere, pancaked by pressure, it stretches wider than a football field. And it’s the stratosphere where skydiver Felix Baumgartner is heading.

The date is October 14, 2012. The plan is for Baumgartner to ride that balloon higher than anyone has ridden before — some twenty-four miles above the Earth. To make this possible, he wears a one-of-a kind pressure suit designed to buffer temperatures as low as 70 degrees below zero and wind speeds more than 700 miles per hour. His ultimate goal: “space-diving” out of the balloon, falling back to Earth, and becoming the first human being to bareback the sound barrier — exceeding Mach 1 without aid of an engine or protection from a craft.

Conceived in 2005, the Red Bull Stratos Project, as this space dive is known, began as a joint venture between the energy drink company and Baumgartner, an Austrian skydiver. The big idea is to “transcend human limits which have existed for fifty years” — that is, since Air Force pilot Joe Kittinger plunged nineteen miles out of a balloon as a test procedure for “extreme high-altitude” bailouts. The big question was: Could an energy drink company and an action sports hero accomplish what a half century of government-backed space programs could not?

But it’s not the only question. The space dive also raises queries about the future of action sports. Over the past few decades,
extreme athletes have pushed progression farther and faster than ever before. In this evolutionary eye-blink, more “impossible” feats have been accomplished than at any other point in human history. Thus, despite the fanfare, the most incredible thing about Stratos might be the fact that it’s actually the next logical step.

Still, it’s no small step. The technological issues are myriad, the list of catastrophic unknowns even longer. No one has any idea whether the human body can go supersonic. Will the shock waves tear Baumgartner’s body apart? Will the suit breach? Even bigger are the athletic hurdles. Normally, skydiving is sensation rich: an exceptionally wide field of view and a full complement of air friction. But Baumgartner’s face mask narrows vision to a slit and the suit puts four layers of thick protection between skin and sky. Instead of reacting to the air itself, flying the suit requires reacting to far subtler clues — sort of like playing a video game with a delay built in.

More alarming, in the nonexistent atmosphere of the stratosphere, falling objects have a tendency to spin — and keep spinning. If Baumgartner can’t regain control, as he once told reporters: “At a certain rpm there’s only one way for the blood to leave your body, and that’s through your eyeballs.”

Under such duress, redundancy is security, so when the balloon reaches its top altitude, Mission Control runs through a forty-item checklist: “Item 26, move seat to rear of capsule; item 27, lift legs onto the door threshold.” When the list is complete, Baumgartner stands outside the capsule, on a tiny exterior step. He takes a moment to take in the view then says a few words: “Sometimes you have to go up really high to understand how small you really are.” Next he salutes; next he leaps.

It takes him 30 seconds to reach 600 miles per hour, less than a minute to shatter 700. He just became the first human being to go supersonic. This is also when he started spinning. At mission control, where they’re watching the entire dive on monitors, everyone holds their breath. Some begin praying. But somehow, miraculously, Baumgartner gets everything back under control.
He pulls out of the spin and locks into delta position: feet down, head up, and heading home.

In total, his freefall lasts 4 minutes and 19 seconds; his complete air time lasts approximately 10 minutes; his top speed reaches 833.9 miles-per-hour — Mach 1.24. Baumgartner also takes over the records for the highest manned balloon flight and the highest altitude jump and, with 8 million watching the broadcast live on YouTube, the highest numbers of concurrent viewers.

Perhaps more interesting than these records is the deeper why. On the Stratos website there’s a short list of potential applications for the knowledge gained from Baumgartner’s jump: “Passenger/crew exit from space; developing protocols for exposure to high-altitude and high-acceleration environments; exploring the effects of supersonic acceleration and deceleration on the human body; and testing the latest innovations in parachute systems.” In plainer language, experts have said that if the passengers on the space shuttle
Challenger
had been equipped with Baumgartner’s suit they might have lived through their midair crack up.

Along just these lines, some six months after Baumgartner’s jump, Virgin Galactic’s
SpaceShipTwo
powered up its engines for the first time.
SpaceShipOne
, you might remember, was the craft that won the Ansari XPRIZE in 2004. This original XPRIZE was a demonstration project, both proof that a private company could produce an affordable, reusable spaceship and the necessary first step in opening the space frontier. The idea behind
SpaceShipTwo
is the next step: tourism — taking paying customers on suborbital cruises.

This is why Baumgartner’s jump is critical. We’re going to space. That’s what’s next. Within a few years, human beings will be routinely visiting low-Earth orbit. In fact, Bigelow Aerospace, another private space company, is now developing an inflatable space hotel that’s scheduled for 2017 deployment. With these developments around the corner, having basic space evacuation procedures in place — including a supersonic-capable space suit — just seems to make sense.

But if you want to really talk about the adjacent possible: The combination of Baumgartner’s success and the birth of the space tourism industry means that space diving could be the next extreme sport frontier. It sounds silly, of course, but it wasn’t too long ago that surfing a 100-foot wave or free-soloing Half Dome — two “impossible” feats lately accomplished — were equally ludicrous. Plus, consider the space-diving upside. Imagine giving athletes 25 miles of fall time to work with. Talk about pushing the limits of kinesthetic possibility. Despite the acrobatics involved, formation skydiving never really took off — but 25 miles is enough fall time for a team to pull off an entire aerial opera. Space ballet anyone?

Consider, in 2003, Shane McConkey paradigm-shifted skiing when he invented the ski-BASE (that is, ski an amazing line that ends in huge cliff, ski off the cliff, then deploy a parachute). Baumgartner touched down in the desert, but sooner or later isn’t someone going to try to land on a ski slope? How long then until we turn the space dive into the first stage of a double ski-BASE? How long until it gets stranger than that? In other words, while Baumgartner’s triumph seems the apex of achievement, the truth might even be stranger: The space dive was merely the beginning.

Building a Better Mosquito

THE WORLD’S FIRST GENETICALLY ENGINEERED CREATURE

Over the course of this book, we’ve discussed a number of topics that could be considered “miracles,” in the biblical sense of the word. In this chapter, we are investigating two more: the curing of disease and the creation of life, and both at the same time.

Taken together, these feats are among our oldest dreams. They are ideas that comprise our myths and legends, ideas that have been with us for so long that they seem woven into the fundamental fabric of our being, ideas that combine into what might be called our “aspirational genome.”

But aspirational no more. 3.5 million years ago, life emerged on this planet from the primordial soup; 3.5 million years later, we have duplicated this miracle and then some. Call it hubris, call it the opening of Pandora’s box, call it what you will — but that’s the point. Call it something. Put a name on it. Over time, the miraculous always becomes the mundane, so before that happens, label this moment. Preserve it, so that later, when recall becomes dim, we can remember just how far we’ve come.

1.

In 77 CE, Pliny the Elder published his
Natural History
, an imaginative, thirty-seven-volume attempt to catalog the entire contents of the world. From Pliny, we learn that the artichoke is one of the earth’s great monstrosities; that rubbing mouse poo on bald spots can increase hair growth; and, on islands off the coast of Germany, there lives a tribe of people whose ears are so large they cover their bodies. It is also in
Natural History
that we first hear of a mixture of arsenic, sulfur, caustic soda, and olive oil being used to protect crops against pestilence. This last bit of information might seem trifling compared to the more mythic elements in Pliny’s compendium, but it is the first written record of an insecticide and, for reasons that will soon become clear, an entry that seems especially prescient.

Right now, the threat posed by mosquito-borne illnesses — malaria, dengue fever, yellow fever, West Nile virus — is growing at alarming rates. In America, where many of these ailments haven’t been seen in over fifty years, the danger is especially menacing. Asian tiger mosquitos, a carrier of yellow fever, encephalitis and other diseases, have been seen as far north as Chicago. In Key West, Florida, researchers have identified a unique strain of dengue fever — meaning the virus was not recently imported by an unsuspecting tourist but rather has been around long enough to become genetically distinct.