NextWorld (2008) s01e01 Episode Script
Future Life on Earth
NARRATOR : ln the future, we will fly over traffic.
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live to 150.
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and travel the world at the touch of a button.
Technology is pushing from every direction, getting faster with each passing second.
Prepare yourself.
The future is closer than you think.
As future cities grow, so do the dangers of climate change.
More than half of the population are living in cities worldwide, and that is forecast to go up to as much as 75 % over the next 30 years.
NARRATOR : 8 of the 10 largest cities in the world are located on the coastline, and nearly half of the entire world's population lives within 90 miles of the sea.
JOACHlM : l n the current world crisis that we're in, especially climate change, we need to rethink cities from scratch.
NARRATOR : But what if we could build cities that ride the rising tides? OLTHUlS: So, we have to find new solutions.
Not fighting against the water, but living with the water.
The house you see is a floating house.
This house can go up and down with the water.
NARRATOR : But homes like this are just the beginning.
Koen Olthuis wants to build entire cities that float using building blocks of foam slabs encased in a concrete shell.
Putting them together, he can create platforms as large as 400, 000 square feet.
That's the size of two city blocks.
OLTHUlS: That gives us a lot of very stable, large-scale foundations on which you can do almost anything.
You can build towers on it, apartments, put trees on it.
We're really floating right now.
lt feels really stable.
NARRATOR : Floating homes will combine into floating neighborhoods, which can detach and float to a new area whenever they like.
OLTHUlS: Floating roads, floating car parks, floating airports.
NARRATOR : Koen's architecture firm, aptly named Waterstudio, plans to build whole sections of movable cities.
OLTHUlS: Built in one place, and after 10 years, maybe relocated to another part of the city.
NARRATOR : l n fact, whole cities can decide to weigh anchor and drift off in search of more appealing climates.
This is really gonna happen.
NARRATOR : Even existing cities will find ways to escape the limitations of land.
l nstead of merely scraping the sky, we'll be building entire avenues in it, suspending massive structures in the air.
The first glimmer of what that might look like is the Chinese television tower CCTV in Beijing, arguably the world's most audacious building.
SCHEEREN : l n many ways, the design is an anti-skyscraper.
lt really proclaimed very clearly not to follow the race for height, to dominate the skyline by being the tallest.
NARRATOR : At over 4 million square feet, the CCTV building will be the largest office building in the world, pushing the Pentagon to number two.
SCHEEREN : The building will house 1 0, 000 permanent staff and receive several thousand visitors daily, which really makes it a building at the scale of a small city.
NARRATOR : The CCTV building is big, but big was never the point.
The point was to create vast areas of usable space that do not take up space on the ground.
But this is not simply a sky bridge.
lt is an 1 1 -story building hanging 500 feet in the air.
SCHEEREN : Here you can see the overhang of the building, a cantilever that projects out 7 4 meters and 1 62 meters height with up to 1 1 stories on top.
NARRATOR : Two main towers lean 1 0 degrees on a diagonal.
During early construction, Chinese officials called it ''the dangerous building.
'' SCHEEREN : There was, indeed, great concerns at the beginning of this project -- kind of public disbelief if a building like that could really stand up.
lt stands on two big raft slabs, two concrete footings that, in themselves, are anchored by 1 , 400 piles that go 33 meters into the ground.
Maybe one of the most important contributions that the building could make is to go a lot further and to imagine new possibilities for people to inhabit space.
NARRATOR : Buildings suspended in the sky are an intelligent use of future real estate.
But in the future, every square inch of every city will be alive with intelligence.
Because every street and every building will have a network of microcomputers built right into them.
Dr.
Kris Pister calls it ''smart dust.
'' PlSTER : A smart dust particle, or mote, is a wireless sensor with sensing computation, communication, and power in one package.
NARRATOR : These all-in-one microcomputers will be small -- very small.
PlSTER : The size of a mote today is about the size of a grain of rice.
We've shown that we can make the circuitries small enough and light enough that, eventually, it will be possible to make things that are on a submillimeter-size scale.
NARRATOR : Tiny specks of computer smart dust will form a vast invisible network that can help manage the infrastructure of even the largest city.
PlSTER : Smart cities in the future will take this low-power, inexpensive, small technology and basically distribute it everywhere.
NARRATOR : These tiny computers record information about their surroundings, information they can send to other computers or to you.
Smart dust on the tracks will monitor your commuter train so you know if it's running late.
Potholes will be able to report themselves and warn your car.
And you'll never have to wait for a radio traffic report again.
PlSTER : They're monitoring the flow of traffic and giving you alerts about what route is the right way to go to keep the traffic moving.
NARRATOR : Bridges will get a coating of smart dust particles that can warn us when they detect stress fractures, helping avoid deadly collapses.
But smart dust will also allow buildings and streets to recognize you and respond accordingly.
jOURET: l think increasingly the environment will respond to who we are and adapt in consequence.
The city will know where you are if you want it to.
NARRATOR : Your workplace will know you.
Smart dust at the entrance will boot up your computer.
And smart dust embedded in the elevator doors will automatically ring your floor.
Smart dust is going to sense the environment and allow us to improve the way that we live our lives.
NARRATOR : No matter how we live in the future city, it will be radically different.
And once you leave the future city, the road you take may not be a road at all.
HANCHETTE: One day, you'll simply be able to get into your personal aircraft and push a button, and the airplane will do everything on its own.
NARRATOR : There are approximately 600 million vehicles on the planet today.
By 2020, it's estimated there will be 1 .
2 billion automobiles on the road, leading to a traffic nightmare.
[ Horns honking .]
But the coming decades promise entirely new ways of getting from ''A'' to ''B.
'' The advances in civilization has always come about with advances in the way we can travel.
NARRATOR : Where we're going, we don't need roads.
lt's every kid's dream to be able to fly, have no constraints, and be completely free to fly through the air.
NARRATOR : And let's admit it.
lt's also the dream of most grown-ups.
Eric Strauss and Troy Widgery would like to introduce you to the 2 1 st-century jetpack.
SCOTT: The feeling of flying this machine, it's like jumping off the ground and not having to come back down.
l n the future, l could see people buying jetpacks to commute back and forth to work 'cause it is much easier.
You don't have to worry about traffic, and you can fly directly from work to your yard, almost like you had a helicopter.
NARRATOR : Today even a 20-mile commute into Atlanta or New York City could take up to an hour.
But you could fly it in five minutes.
Fly as the crow flies, so to speak.
30 years from now, as power plants evolve and technology evolves, it could be possible to fly a jetpack for 1 0 minutes, 20 minutes.
A 22-minute flight would be a 65-mile flight.
NARRATOR : Tomorrow's jetpacks could be fueled at a local filling station.
And what they lack in luxury, they will deliver in speed, convenience, and future fun.
l n 30 years, you could probably get one for 50, 60 grand, like you'd pick up a Hummer or a Mercedes for.
And it'd be a lot cooler way to get to work, for sure.
NARRATOR : But for those times when you need to get a little farther a little faster, you'll probably want to fly your own automated jet.
The future of flight to me is being able to fly on my schedule, utilizing state-of-the-art technologies in first-class comfort, and doing it at 500 miles an hour.
This is the future -- making aircraft stronger, lighter, and faster, like this aircraft.
NARRATOR : The next generation of personal jets, like the Viper Fanjet, will be able to fly you from point ''A'' to point ''B'' in comfort and style.
ltalian leather, Brazilian burl wood, full, integrated flight system, autopilot.
All the things that you might expect on a corporate jet, the Viper Fanjet has.
NARRATOR : Except the operating costs.
Your average corporate jet chugs over 400 gallons of fuel per hour in the air.
Thanks to its state-of-the-art carbon-fiber frame, the Viper sips only 55 gallons per hour.
And while a corporate jet will set you back around $20 million, you'll be able to get your very own Viper Fanjet assembly kit for a mere 400 grand.
But best of all, you won't have to pay for a pilot.
Because in the future, we'll be flying ourselves.
One day you'll simply be able to get into your personal aircraft and push a button where the coordinates of your next destination will be preprogrammed, and the airplane will do everything on its own.
NARRATOR : Someday you'll be able to go out to your home hangar, pull out your airplane, jump in, and go.
No more canceled flights or long waits for overpriced and underserved seats.
But how will it be possible for everyone to share the sky without causing a far more deadly version of a fender bender? You've already got a highway in the sky.
NARRATOR : That's right.
The engineers at Boeing's Phantom Works are building a highway in the sky.
We are working on technologies that will enable anybody to be able to fly these vehicles in a safe manner with minimal or possibly even no training at all.
NARRATOR : Boeing is developing a system that will create flexible and trackable preprogrammed routes that will allow aircraft to take off, fly, and land themselves.
jONES: lt's really this tube in the sky.
The paths would be generated on the fly based on your takeoff and landing locations.
lt's like a roller-coaster track.
lt allows you to understand and know what the vehicle's going to do before it happens.
NARRATOR : The system depends on building intelligence into our future air vehicles.
These vehicles know where they are, know where the weather is, know what is available for takeoff and landing, and that allows a vehicle to be fully autonomous and get to your destination exactly where you want to go.
NARRATOR : Future aircraft will talk among themselves, automatically keeping out of each other's way no matter how thick the traffic, and doing it far more safely than any human could.
Flying every day, it will be a common thing for everybody.
NARRATOR : And not just flying in the air.
We'll also be flying underwater.
HAWKES: This is an ocean planet, and no one seems to have figured that out.
We need the freedom of flight in this place every bit as badly as we needed it in the air.
NARRATOR : Graham Hawkes thinks our future lies beneath the waves, so he's working on perfecting one of the world's most advanced submersible crafts -- the Deep Flight Super Falcon.
HAWKES: lt's been built for human comfort, human safety, to be the highest performance in underwater flight.
lf you want to go and do barrel rolls with the whales, that's gonna be the machine to go do it with.
NARRATOR : Graham sees a future where people move underwater as easily as they take to the highways.
HAWKES: l magine a world where it begins to seep into the public consciousness that this is actually an ocean planet.
NARRATOR : The current two-seater Falcon flies at a moderate speed of 1 0 miles per hour, though future models will go faster.
l magine how much more fun it would be to zip over to the Bahamas underwater, stopping off along the way to check out a sunken treasure or two.
HAWKES: The Super Falcon, we think, will change everything.
We can train somebody to fly underwater in about three days.
lt is such a sexy, gorgeous machine.
lt's hard to look at that and not want to take a ride in that machine.
NARRATOR : We won't always need personal vehicles that can venture out into or under the oceans.
Sometimes you wish you could drive over a river or through a lake.
But that only happens in the movies, right? We just decided to put this fiction into reality and make a car actually dive.
NARRATOR : Frank Rinderknecht's latest concept car is everything you'd expect from a futuristic vehicle -- fast, stylish, and -- with zero emissions -- eco-friendly.
At the touch of a button, it can even drive itself.
But that's not why they call it the sQuba car.
Strap on your seat belts.
lt doesn't just ride on the water.
lt goes under it.
We are the first guys to build a car which can dive.
Probably the most astonishing fact is that we dive in the open, which means that people get wet, that the whole compartment is flooded.
NARRATOR : l n diving mode, the car provides its passengers with oxygen masks attached to an integrated tank of compressed air, much like the ones scuba divers use.
Today, the sQuba's underwater speed tops out at around 2 miles per hour.
RlNDERKNECHT: We have two propellers in the back and two water jet engines in the front to really get it moving.
NARRATOR : The squba can stay underwater for up to three hours, which should be enough to get you across any river or lake that happens to lie in your path.
Whether we fly through the air or under the water, once we leave the crowded roads of today, getting there will definitely be twice the fun.
But if all you care about is getting there, the future holds other options, like being someplace without having to go there.
Transported presence is the next big thing.
Ultimately, it'll erase the distance that exists between us, the ability to connect to anybody across the globe in a heartbeat.
NARRATOR : l n the future, you'll be able to be someplace without having to physically go there because new technologies are ushering in an age of transported presence, the ability to experience a place right from where you're sitting.
You'll be able to watch where you're going -- literally.
JONES: We're the last generation that will ever be lost, ever be confused about where things are or how to get there.
NARRATOR : The people who have already organized most of the world's information are building the ultimate interactive map of the future, a 360-degree panoramic view of every spot on the planet, complete with information about that spot, all accessible on your computer screen.
We think of them as geo browsers.
NARRATOR : As a geo browser, you'll have the option of surfing the l nternet geographically.
Phase one is already under way.
JONES: We extended the capabilities of Google maps to have something called ''street view, '' which is the picture that you would see standing in a street.
NARRATOR : lt won't just be a pretty picture, but an interactive experience with all the l nternet's information about any particular location embedded right on the picture.
JONES: lf you see a store, you'll know what they sell.
lf you want to find a club, you'll know where the clubs are.
Everything will be connected.
NARRATOR : Street view promises a ground-level, three-dimensional view of every road on Earth.
How are they doing that? By mounting special omnidirectional cameras on top of cars -- lots of cars.
But their vision extends far beyond the street corners.
ln the future, this ultimate map will be able to take you everywhere because everywhere will be captured on video.
There'll be underwater cameras, cameras in space.
NARRATOR : You'll be able to check out a new city you're moving to, or confirm the ocean view on your beach rental.
But you won't just be able to look at far-off places.
You'll project your presence there.
jOURET: We don't have to travel.
We don't have to commute for us to do our work.
We can do that pretty much anywhere.
HOOSH MAND: Hey, how are you? Did you check out the june 12th conflict? l've been working with Cisco for almost five years now.
NARRATOR : Margaret likes her job as an executive assistant in San Jose.
The only problem? She lives a good 1 ,700 miles away.
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in Texas.
HOOSH MAND: l lived in California for 10 years, and the cost of living was really high.
So l decided to move out here.
NARRATOR : But she doesn't complain about her commute.
Because to get to her office, all Margaret has to do is press a button.
Marthin De Beer's office.
This is Margaret.
Actually, he's coming down the hallway right now.
Can you hold on a second? Hey, Marthin.
lt's your wife on the phone.
Okay, thanks.
l come in, and l push a button in here in the Dallas office, and l pop on a screen there in San Jose at my old desk.
DE BEER : This new concept of transported presence is the next big thing that we're gonna see over the next 10 to 20 years evolve.
With transported presence, we get to communicate naturally without having to go there.
So, uh, what does tomorrow look like? Really crowded.
The video quality and the audio quality is so good that you really feel like you're in the same room.
HOOSH MAND: l don't feel like l'm missing any of the human interaction at all.
l definitely have lots of friends that are at the Cisco office.
l see them every day.
We chat, and, once a week, we get together and make sure we have coffee.
DE BEER : You know, l think she's a pioneer for how the workplace might look in the future.
NARRATOR : Future business travelers won't need to burn fuel and time by jetting to Barcelona for a meeting.
just send your presence.
DE BEER : l can be in seven countries in a single day.
ln the last year, l traveled two-thirds less, and l spent twice the amount of time that l used to at home.
l expect to lose my platinum status on my favorite airline this year.
Telepresence will be changing all of our lives because it will allow us to connect to anybody across the globe in a heartbeat.
Distance won't be a barrier any longer to getting the best quality medical care.
[ Heart beating .]
Hi, l'm Josh Reviz.
l'm here to see Dr.
Hemel.
Hello, Josh.
Welcome to lstanbul.
HSlEH : With these health presence pods, you can just go to the closest available pod, which, hopefully, would be down the hall or in your office building or in your town or village.
One moment while l call up your medical records.
You go to this kiosk, and there's a medical assistant there.
Your doctor will be there, and he'll say, ''Hey, how are you feeling? What's wrong?'' Good to see you again.
What's going on? Well [sighs.]
l've got chest pain, and l'm a little freaked out.
Let's get an EKG.
HSlEH : They can take a connected device, like a blood-pressure cuff or a heart-rate monitor, and hook it up to you.
So, they can basically do just about everything that they could do in person.
l see some widespread changes on your EKG.
HSlEH : They'll be able to meet with the specialist no matter where they are in the world to get the best possible diagnostics and the best possible treatment.
Josh, l've called in a cardiologist, Dr.
Hudson, to take a look at your results.
Okay.
l'm looking at your EKG, and l'd like to run a scan.
HSl EH : lt reads all your vitals.
lt does some kind of matching in the network to figure out what disease you might have, and that information is actually transmitted to a doctor on the other end of the telepresence connection.
Josh, you have pericarditis, an inflammation around the heart.
For this, l'm gonna prescribe some anti-inflammatory medications.
Okay, how, uh, long will that take? Why don't you check back with Dr.
Hemel in two days? You should be feeling much better by then.
Oh, that's great.
Thank you so much.
HSlEH : So, it's a pretty exciting way to extend healthcare to far corners of the Earth and to areas where getting quality medical care is just not as easy.
Josh, remember -- check back in two days.
Will do.
DE BEER : This is going to happen in our lifetime.
l n fact, l'm convinced it will happen within the next 10 years.
NARRATOR : And transporting your presence onto flat screens is just the beginning.
DE BEER : Very close to be able to transport a full three-dimensional image and, therefore, presence of you or any object and render it on the other side in full 3-D, high-definition color.
lt will change everything.
NARRATOR : With fewer of us jetting around the world, telepresence will greatly reduce our reliance on fossil fuels.
But what about our planet's other natural resources? With the Earth's population steadily rising, how will the planet be able to sustain us all? ln the future, we will need more of everything.
Will there be enough? With new technologies, we may be on the edge of an era of great abundance.
KURZWElL: l believe within 25 years, the common denominator will be a very high standard of living.
We'll be able to create all the physical products we need, even for an expanded biological population, at very, very low cost.
NARRATOR : What if the future was so smart, we never ran out of the things we needed? What if the price of gas hardly mattered? What if we were our own energy source? We are going to have substantially greater population in our urban areas in the future.
lf we can all contribute our kinetic energy to generate the electricity we consume, why not? [ Chuckles .]
PowerLeap is a flooring system that generates electricity from human foot traffic.
NARRATOR : Future sidewalks might be covered with smart panels that capture piezoelectricity -- power generated from applied mechanical pressure.
REDMOND: So, when you step down, you're stimulating the piezoelectric plate that generates charge to be output to the battery to harvest it, to export it for electrical production.
NARRATOR : By placing piezoelectric pads like this one in high-traffic spots, electricity can be harvested and then stored right where it's used.
REDMOND: So, the more local your energy, the more efficient the distribution model can be.
Store the power that's created and use it for exit signs, for elevators, for all sorts of things in our public infrastructure that consume small amounts of power.
NARRATOR : A person walking at a moderate speed for an hour can only produce about 50 watts of electricity.
But multiply that person by thousands, and it starts to add up.
REDMOND: As this technology develops, we will be able to place this into every single airport terminal, every railway station, every large-city intersection, on every sidewalk.
This could really be enough to power all of the streetlights in a city.
We'll be able to generate a whole lot of power.
NARRATOR : Great inventors can't help themselves.
They're problem solvers.
And with advanced technology will come advanced solutions.
KAMEN : To me, technology is a tool.
You figure out what human problems exist, and if there's a technology that can be applied to a great human problem, you set about making it happen.
NARRATOR : just as power will be generated locally, so will clean water.
At least this is the vision of legendary inventor Dean Kamen.
Today, more than a billion people have a crisis every day trying to find clean water to drink.
We're all gonna have to deal with the fact that water is not free.
lt's not infinite in its availability.
ln 30 years, a gallon of clean water will cost more than a gallon of oil.
NARRATOR : l n fact, only 3% of all the water on Earth is freshwater.
So, in the future, it may be water, not oil, that will drag nations into war.
.
.
unless someone is smart enough to turn something polluted into something pure.
Our goal was to create a small, portable machine that could be placed anywhere, and, at point of use, create clean, reliable drinking water from any source.
NARRATOR : Dean Kamen believes he can turn anything wet into drinkable water -- anything -- ocean water, sludge, even sewage -- using a device he calls the SlingShot.
KAMEN : A simple box with two hoses on it -- one that goes into anything that looks wet, out of the other one comes pure drinking water that's safe.
Water goes into the SlingShot, where it gets literally boiled to the point that it not just boils as you watch it on a stove, it turns completely into vapor, into steam.
NARRATOR : Recondense that steam, and you get pure distilled water no matter how polluted the source water was.
KAMEN : lf the water coming in has metals or other kinds of inorganic toxins in it, they don't vaporize.
NARRATOR : Until now, no one's been able to create this effect in a portable machine because of the vast amount of energy the distillation process takes.
The secret of the SlingShot is that it uses a closed loop of energy.
Once the first batch of water is vaporized and recondensed, all that energy is preserved in a sealed heat-exchange system.
The result? A machine that runs on less power than a toaster oven and about 2% of the power required by other water-purifying systems.
We can take any bad water and turn it into pure water, and we can do it with a machine this size and an amount of electricity that runs half of a handheld hair dryer.
And that's a big deal.
NARRATOR : And each will be manufactured for under $2,000.
This machine was designed to make 1 ,000 liters of water a day, enough for a village of 100 people.
NARRATOR : 5,000 children die every day from dirty water.
Dean Kamen sees a future where that number is ancient history.
l n 30 years, the world will hopefully have access to more reasonable and more secure ways to give everybody those basic needs of water and power.
NARRATOR : But man cannot live on water and power alone.
Feeding the crowded cities of the future will take more farmland than currently exists.
But in the future, farms will be cropping up in the unlikeliest places.
DESPOMMlER : Why don't we grow our food someplace else? Why don't we grow food inside buildings? We're good at making buildings.
NARRATOR : Dickson Despommier thinks the key to a more abundant future is growing the food where the people are.
He thinks skyscrapers are the farms of the future.
DESPOMMlER : Why can't we just grow our food in vertical greenhouses and raise most of the consumable crops that you and l would buy at a local grocer? ZABAR : We're on East g 1 st Street in the middle of Manhattan, New York City.
And it is a farm.
lt's a rooftop farm.
DESPOMMlER : 80% of the things that you can grow in the soil, you can grow inside of urban centers.
That's my dream is to see cities behave that way.
lf you could construct a building that was 30 stories in height and perhaps one square New York City block in footprint, you could continuously produce enough food to feed at least 50, 000 people comfortably per year.
NARRATOR : The math is simple.
Using Despommier's calculations, it would take 165 sky farms, only 165 buildings spread throughout its five boroughs, to continuously feed New York City.
There are huge advantages to feeding people who live in the city from the city.
There is virtually no crop that can't be grown inside.
NARRATOR : While we can look forward to a future of abundance, we also face a future that's vulnerable.
You can think of the Earth as flying around the sun inside a giant shooting gallery of hundreds of thousands of rocks like this, that if they struck the Earth would wipe out civilization.
We better either do something now, or it's gonna be too late.
NARRATOR : We spend a lot of time today worrying about the potential dangers of climate change.
But the biggest threat to our planet's future may not be carbon emissions.
Consider what happened to the last species that ruled the Earth.
An asteroid hit the Earth, killed everything within a few thousand miles in the initial impact, and over the next few hours, the Earth's atmosphere heated up to hundreds of degrees, which ignited everything on Earth.
So, anything that lived through that fire storm then starved to death.
A bad day.
NARRATOR : There's no reason why it couldn't happen again.
l n fact, there's a 10% chance of another major asteroid strike in the next 100 years.
This is not something that's in dispute by anybody.
NARRATOR : Ed Lu knows what he's talking about.
He had to in his last job as an astronaut aboard the lnternational Space Station.
The prospect of being hit by something from space is actually something you have to think about every day on the space station.
l used to see asteroids hitting the Earth all the time at night.
NARRATOR : Asteroids are simply rocks hurtling through space, ranging from tiny pebbles to mountain-sized mega-boulders.
The one 65 million years ago that killed off all the dinosaurs was between 5 and 10 miles across.
NARRATOR : A relatively small asteroid, say 1 50 feet across, could level everything within 770 square miles of the impact.
That's an entire city.
Right now, we know of perhaps 700 or so asteroids that are larger than a kilometer and a few thousand asteroids that have the potential of hitting the Earth.
NARRATOR : ln the future, we'll use larger, more sophisticated telescopes that can scan the skies, tracking potential planet killers while they're still far away.
LU : We're gonna discover thousands and thousands of asteroids that have a chance of hitting the Earth.
We'll be able to say, ''Yes, it's gonna hit the Earth, '' or ''No, it's not.
'' lf the answer is yes, then the question is -- What do you do about it? NARRATOR : Ed has a plan to intercept asteroids with an unmanned spacecraft.
Using an ion-propulsion system, the engines will generate enough thrust to intercept an asteroid years before it reaches Earth.
For most of these asteroids, we actually expect to have many decades of notice.
NARRATOR : Upon reaching the rock, the robot spacecraft will then attempt to change the asteroid's path by becoming a gravitational tractor.
There's a small gravitational pull between the asteroid and your spacecraft -- very tiny.
lf you stay there for long enough, that small, tiny force will begin to pull the asteroid.
NARRATOR : The spacecraft will maintain position alongside the asteroid using its thrusters, and over weeks, months, or even years, its very presence will create a tiny tug of gravity on the rock.
Even if the asteroid is only shifted by inches, that could make a huge difference in its long-term trajectory.
But if the asteroid is too large for such a nuanced approach, we could always do it the hard way.
You can actually take a larger spacecraft and just run into the asteroid.
NARRATOR : Ed sees surviving an asteroid hit as the universe's ultimate intelligence test.
lf there are other civilizations that are advanced in the universe, they will have passed this test, too.
Because if you don't, you eventually get wiped out like the dinosaurs.
We can go from this point of being at the mercy of the heavens to controlling our own fate.
NARRATOR : Safeguarding against the extraordinary effects of an asteroid hitting the Earth will take extraordinary measures.
Direct impact would mean instant death.
But beyond the point of impact, the swell of fire storms might wipe out crops everywhere, subjecting humanity to a slow starvation.
NARRATOR : Science is giving us the tools to avert catastrophes of the future, even to the point where we'll reroute hurricanes.
We can actually change its path or reduce its intensity.
NARRATOR : Everyone complains about the weather, but Dr.
Ross Hoffman of Atmospheric Environmental Research wants to do something about it.
And he's starting by tackling one of nature's most ferocious threats -- the hurricane.
Hurricanes are enormous, complicated systems, notoriously hard to predict, with many variables contributing to their path and ferocity.
HOFFMAN : The winds, the temperature, the humidity, the pressure -- the atmosphere is actually governed by chaos.
NARRATOR : But the same complexity that makes them unpredictable also holds the promise of a solution.
By tweaking one of the many variables that contribute to hurricanes, we might be able to influence them.
l n our computer models, when we try to modify hurricanes, very small changes at any particular point in time can result in a very large change further along in time.
NARRATOR : One of those variables is temperature.
HOFFMAN : We found that we could actually change the intensity of the hurricane just by changing the temperature.
NARRATOR : What if satellites in orbit around the Earth could channel the sun's energy into a beam and direct it to where these hurricanes are forming? We found that changes of the order of a degree or so were sufficient to make large impacts on the future path or intensity of the hurricane.
NARRATOR : As future computer models of weather get better, Dr.
Hoffman thinks we may be able to apply the technology of temperature variation to control other weather patterns.
HOFFMAN : For example, you might want to not have snowfall during rush hour.
We might want to not have a rainy day on the first day of school.
Or we might want to have no clouds for our 4th of july celebrations so we can see the fireworks.
NARRATOR : Before this century is over, humanity will be able to anticipate and avoid the planet's worst natural disasters, saving millions of lives.
But we may also solve an even more fundamental human problem -- death itself.
Death is the great equalizer.
No one here gets out alive.
But new advances in medical technology promise to extend our lives.
Could we delay the inevitable? DeGREY: Aging is a bad thing.
lt's a fatal disease that everybody has, so, ultimately, it is humanity's worst problem.
NARRATOR : Don't let his looks fool you.
Aubrey DeGrey is a Cambridge scholar and a biomedical gerontologist who believes we can fix aging by treating it as a simple engineering problem.
Keeping our bodies youthful, however long we live, is just a matter of maintenance.
When things break, we can fix them.
NARRATOR : Dr.
DeGrey heads up the Methuselah Foundation, which is offering the M prize -- $4.
5 million -- to the research group that can most successfully extend the life span of lab mice.
And labs around the world are getting closer and closer to claiming that prize.
We'll no longer need to fear getting older because we'll know what's in store.
Each of us is going to have a copy of our own body's instruction manual, a detailed map of the genome that lies within each and every cell of our bodies.
That genetic revolution is happening in lceland.
The importance of the sequence of the DNA of an individual only becomes meaningful when you look at it in the context of the DNA of other individuals.
NARRATOR : Dr.
Kari Stefansson is on a quest to unravel the secrets of our genetic limitations by decoding the DNA of an entire nation.
There was a relatively small group of people who came here, and there has pretty much been no immigration for 1 ,100 years.
lt is extraordinarily convenient because we can study everyone in lceland with a particular disease.
We don't select from a group of patients.
We just take them all.
NARRATOR : Dr.
Stefansson has already compiled the genetic information and medical records of over 100,000 lcelanders.
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in the subterranean vaults here at deCODE Genetics.
STEFANSSON : We are looking at the genomes of people who are at particularly high risk of disease and compare that with the genomes of people who are at very little risk of disease.
NARRATOR : His goal? To decode which parts of our DNA are responsible for what so that all of us can be smarter about our own body's medical future.
The fundamental premise is that the more you understand the risk, the better you can design methods to prevent the risk from becoming a disease.
l have very little genetic risk of Alzheimer's disease.
l have relatively high risk of prostate cancer.
l have relatively high risk of type 2 diabetes.
l'm convinced that a discovery of variations in the sequence of the human genome is gonna be the foundation of the development of new preventive medicine.
NARRATOR : Soon, we'll all be surfing our entire genetic profiles on a secure medical uplink.
People will have a profile of their genome in 5 to 10 years, just like the blood groups today.
This is gonna help a very large proportion of the population to lead a healthy, productive life and to become much, much older than people usually are today.
NARRATOR : Already, the mapping of the genome has had some rather interesting side effects, like a pill that might someday allow us to double our life spans.
WESTPHAL: Now that the genome has been sequenced, l think we're finding how various genes function.
ln the coming years and decades, we will greatly be able to extend life span.
NARRATOR : Drs.
Sinclair and Westphal have not only found a gene that increases life span, but they've figured out how to trigger it using a particular molecule that promises to fight aging at the cellular level.
lt's called resveratrol.
lt's found in red wine.
Resveratrol has extended the life span of every organism we've tested.
And it's been tried on worms and flies, and they also live about 30% to 40% longer.
Fish live 60% longer.
We can extend the life span of mice by twofold.
lf we can do even a fraction of that for humans and patients, that's gonna be an amazing future.
NARRATOR : Resveratrol works by activating the Sl RT1 gene.
Sl RT1 controls the body's emergency response systems.
When an organism is starving, it signals the body's cells to defend and repair themselves, and the cells are rejuvenated.
What we've stumbled upon is really the body's natural defenses against disease and deterioration.
WESTPHAL: lf we understand how we can intervene and modulate the aging process, l think that we have a way of treating diseases of aging in a new and safer way.
Sl NCLAl R : What we want is a little pill that you can take once a day and be protected against diseases as different as diabetes and cancer and heart disease.
NARRATOR : You'll be able to combat the effects of aging by popping a pill.
And it's gonna happen within your lifetime, which is about to get a lot longer.
Everyone would like a little more quality time.
There's no known reason why we can't double or even triple our life spans in the coming decades.
NARRATOR : lf the prophecies of scientists like Aubrey DeGrey come true, we'll have more time to enjoy all the benefits that technology is bringing to our collective future, a world where we live in smarter, eco-friendly cities with new ways of getting across town or across oceans and new ways to visit any place on Earth without ever leaving home.
A world where we enjoy an abundance of natural resources, preserving the planet for future generations.
No matter how long they live, the next world is closer than you think.
.
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live to 150.
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and travel the world at the touch of a button.
Technology is pushing from every direction, getting faster with each passing second.
Prepare yourself.
The future is closer than you think.
As future cities grow, so do the dangers of climate change.
More than half of the population are living in cities worldwide, and that is forecast to go up to as much as 75 % over the next 30 years.
NARRATOR : 8 of the 10 largest cities in the world are located on the coastline, and nearly half of the entire world's population lives within 90 miles of the sea.
JOACHlM : l n the current world crisis that we're in, especially climate change, we need to rethink cities from scratch.
NARRATOR : But what if we could build cities that ride the rising tides? OLTHUlS: So, we have to find new solutions.
Not fighting against the water, but living with the water.
The house you see is a floating house.
This house can go up and down with the water.
NARRATOR : But homes like this are just the beginning.
Koen Olthuis wants to build entire cities that float using building blocks of foam slabs encased in a concrete shell.
Putting them together, he can create platforms as large as 400, 000 square feet.
That's the size of two city blocks.
OLTHUlS: That gives us a lot of very stable, large-scale foundations on which you can do almost anything.
You can build towers on it, apartments, put trees on it.
We're really floating right now.
lt feels really stable.
NARRATOR : Floating homes will combine into floating neighborhoods, which can detach and float to a new area whenever they like.
OLTHUlS: Floating roads, floating car parks, floating airports.
NARRATOR : Koen's architecture firm, aptly named Waterstudio, plans to build whole sections of movable cities.
OLTHUlS: Built in one place, and after 10 years, maybe relocated to another part of the city.
NARRATOR : l n fact, whole cities can decide to weigh anchor and drift off in search of more appealing climates.
This is really gonna happen.
NARRATOR : Even existing cities will find ways to escape the limitations of land.
l nstead of merely scraping the sky, we'll be building entire avenues in it, suspending massive structures in the air.
The first glimmer of what that might look like is the Chinese television tower CCTV in Beijing, arguably the world's most audacious building.
SCHEEREN : l n many ways, the design is an anti-skyscraper.
lt really proclaimed very clearly not to follow the race for height, to dominate the skyline by being the tallest.
NARRATOR : At over 4 million square feet, the CCTV building will be the largest office building in the world, pushing the Pentagon to number two.
SCHEEREN : The building will house 1 0, 000 permanent staff and receive several thousand visitors daily, which really makes it a building at the scale of a small city.
NARRATOR : The CCTV building is big, but big was never the point.
The point was to create vast areas of usable space that do not take up space on the ground.
But this is not simply a sky bridge.
lt is an 1 1 -story building hanging 500 feet in the air.
SCHEEREN : Here you can see the overhang of the building, a cantilever that projects out 7 4 meters and 1 62 meters height with up to 1 1 stories on top.
NARRATOR : Two main towers lean 1 0 degrees on a diagonal.
During early construction, Chinese officials called it ''the dangerous building.
'' SCHEEREN : There was, indeed, great concerns at the beginning of this project -- kind of public disbelief if a building like that could really stand up.
lt stands on two big raft slabs, two concrete footings that, in themselves, are anchored by 1 , 400 piles that go 33 meters into the ground.
Maybe one of the most important contributions that the building could make is to go a lot further and to imagine new possibilities for people to inhabit space.
NARRATOR : Buildings suspended in the sky are an intelligent use of future real estate.
But in the future, every square inch of every city will be alive with intelligence.
Because every street and every building will have a network of microcomputers built right into them.
Dr.
Kris Pister calls it ''smart dust.
'' PlSTER : A smart dust particle, or mote, is a wireless sensor with sensing computation, communication, and power in one package.
NARRATOR : These all-in-one microcomputers will be small -- very small.
PlSTER : The size of a mote today is about the size of a grain of rice.
We've shown that we can make the circuitries small enough and light enough that, eventually, it will be possible to make things that are on a submillimeter-size scale.
NARRATOR : Tiny specks of computer smart dust will form a vast invisible network that can help manage the infrastructure of even the largest city.
PlSTER : Smart cities in the future will take this low-power, inexpensive, small technology and basically distribute it everywhere.
NARRATOR : These tiny computers record information about their surroundings, information they can send to other computers or to you.
Smart dust on the tracks will monitor your commuter train so you know if it's running late.
Potholes will be able to report themselves and warn your car.
And you'll never have to wait for a radio traffic report again.
PlSTER : They're monitoring the flow of traffic and giving you alerts about what route is the right way to go to keep the traffic moving.
NARRATOR : Bridges will get a coating of smart dust particles that can warn us when they detect stress fractures, helping avoid deadly collapses.
But smart dust will also allow buildings and streets to recognize you and respond accordingly.
jOURET: l think increasingly the environment will respond to who we are and adapt in consequence.
The city will know where you are if you want it to.
NARRATOR : Your workplace will know you.
Smart dust at the entrance will boot up your computer.
And smart dust embedded in the elevator doors will automatically ring your floor.
Smart dust is going to sense the environment and allow us to improve the way that we live our lives.
NARRATOR : No matter how we live in the future city, it will be radically different.
And once you leave the future city, the road you take may not be a road at all.
HANCHETTE: One day, you'll simply be able to get into your personal aircraft and push a button, and the airplane will do everything on its own.
NARRATOR : There are approximately 600 million vehicles on the planet today.
By 2020, it's estimated there will be 1 .
2 billion automobiles on the road, leading to a traffic nightmare.
[ Horns honking .]
But the coming decades promise entirely new ways of getting from ''A'' to ''B.
'' The advances in civilization has always come about with advances in the way we can travel.
NARRATOR : Where we're going, we don't need roads.
lt's every kid's dream to be able to fly, have no constraints, and be completely free to fly through the air.
NARRATOR : And let's admit it.
lt's also the dream of most grown-ups.
Eric Strauss and Troy Widgery would like to introduce you to the 2 1 st-century jetpack.
SCOTT: The feeling of flying this machine, it's like jumping off the ground and not having to come back down.
l n the future, l could see people buying jetpacks to commute back and forth to work 'cause it is much easier.
You don't have to worry about traffic, and you can fly directly from work to your yard, almost like you had a helicopter.
NARRATOR : Today even a 20-mile commute into Atlanta or New York City could take up to an hour.
But you could fly it in five minutes.
Fly as the crow flies, so to speak.
30 years from now, as power plants evolve and technology evolves, it could be possible to fly a jetpack for 1 0 minutes, 20 minutes.
A 22-minute flight would be a 65-mile flight.
NARRATOR : Tomorrow's jetpacks could be fueled at a local filling station.
And what they lack in luxury, they will deliver in speed, convenience, and future fun.
l n 30 years, you could probably get one for 50, 60 grand, like you'd pick up a Hummer or a Mercedes for.
And it'd be a lot cooler way to get to work, for sure.
NARRATOR : But for those times when you need to get a little farther a little faster, you'll probably want to fly your own automated jet.
The future of flight to me is being able to fly on my schedule, utilizing state-of-the-art technologies in first-class comfort, and doing it at 500 miles an hour.
This is the future -- making aircraft stronger, lighter, and faster, like this aircraft.
NARRATOR : The next generation of personal jets, like the Viper Fanjet, will be able to fly you from point ''A'' to point ''B'' in comfort and style.
ltalian leather, Brazilian burl wood, full, integrated flight system, autopilot.
All the things that you might expect on a corporate jet, the Viper Fanjet has.
NARRATOR : Except the operating costs.
Your average corporate jet chugs over 400 gallons of fuel per hour in the air.
Thanks to its state-of-the-art carbon-fiber frame, the Viper sips only 55 gallons per hour.
And while a corporate jet will set you back around $20 million, you'll be able to get your very own Viper Fanjet assembly kit for a mere 400 grand.
But best of all, you won't have to pay for a pilot.
Because in the future, we'll be flying ourselves.
One day you'll simply be able to get into your personal aircraft and push a button where the coordinates of your next destination will be preprogrammed, and the airplane will do everything on its own.
NARRATOR : Someday you'll be able to go out to your home hangar, pull out your airplane, jump in, and go.
No more canceled flights or long waits for overpriced and underserved seats.
But how will it be possible for everyone to share the sky without causing a far more deadly version of a fender bender? You've already got a highway in the sky.
NARRATOR : That's right.
The engineers at Boeing's Phantom Works are building a highway in the sky.
We are working on technologies that will enable anybody to be able to fly these vehicles in a safe manner with minimal or possibly even no training at all.
NARRATOR : Boeing is developing a system that will create flexible and trackable preprogrammed routes that will allow aircraft to take off, fly, and land themselves.
jONES: lt's really this tube in the sky.
The paths would be generated on the fly based on your takeoff and landing locations.
lt's like a roller-coaster track.
lt allows you to understand and know what the vehicle's going to do before it happens.
NARRATOR : The system depends on building intelligence into our future air vehicles.
These vehicles know where they are, know where the weather is, know what is available for takeoff and landing, and that allows a vehicle to be fully autonomous and get to your destination exactly where you want to go.
NARRATOR : Future aircraft will talk among themselves, automatically keeping out of each other's way no matter how thick the traffic, and doing it far more safely than any human could.
Flying every day, it will be a common thing for everybody.
NARRATOR : And not just flying in the air.
We'll also be flying underwater.
HAWKES: This is an ocean planet, and no one seems to have figured that out.
We need the freedom of flight in this place every bit as badly as we needed it in the air.
NARRATOR : Graham Hawkes thinks our future lies beneath the waves, so he's working on perfecting one of the world's most advanced submersible crafts -- the Deep Flight Super Falcon.
HAWKES: lt's been built for human comfort, human safety, to be the highest performance in underwater flight.
lf you want to go and do barrel rolls with the whales, that's gonna be the machine to go do it with.
NARRATOR : Graham sees a future where people move underwater as easily as they take to the highways.
HAWKES: l magine a world where it begins to seep into the public consciousness that this is actually an ocean planet.
NARRATOR : The current two-seater Falcon flies at a moderate speed of 1 0 miles per hour, though future models will go faster.
l magine how much more fun it would be to zip over to the Bahamas underwater, stopping off along the way to check out a sunken treasure or two.
HAWKES: The Super Falcon, we think, will change everything.
We can train somebody to fly underwater in about three days.
lt is such a sexy, gorgeous machine.
lt's hard to look at that and not want to take a ride in that machine.
NARRATOR : We won't always need personal vehicles that can venture out into or under the oceans.
Sometimes you wish you could drive over a river or through a lake.
But that only happens in the movies, right? We just decided to put this fiction into reality and make a car actually dive.
NARRATOR : Frank Rinderknecht's latest concept car is everything you'd expect from a futuristic vehicle -- fast, stylish, and -- with zero emissions -- eco-friendly.
At the touch of a button, it can even drive itself.
But that's not why they call it the sQuba car.
Strap on your seat belts.
lt doesn't just ride on the water.
lt goes under it.
We are the first guys to build a car which can dive.
Probably the most astonishing fact is that we dive in the open, which means that people get wet, that the whole compartment is flooded.
NARRATOR : l n diving mode, the car provides its passengers with oxygen masks attached to an integrated tank of compressed air, much like the ones scuba divers use.
Today, the sQuba's underwater speed tops out at around 2 miles per hour.
RlNDERKNECHT: We have two propellers in the back and two water jet engines in the front to really get it moving.
NARRATOR : The squba can stay underwater for up to three hours, which should be enough to get you across any river or lake that happens to lie in your path.
Whether we fly through the air or under the water, once we leave the crowded roads of today, getting there will definitely be twice the fun.
But if all you care about is getting there, the future holds other options, like being someplace without having to go there.
Transported presence is the next big thing.
Ultimately, it'll erase the distance that exists between us, the ability to connect to anybody across the globe in a heartbeat.
NARRATOR : l n the future, you'll be able to be someplace without having to physically go there because new technologies are ushering in an age of transported presence, the ability to experience a place right from where you're sitting.
You'll be able to watch where you're going -- literally.
JONES: We're the last generation that will ever be lost, ever be confused about where things are or how to get there.
NARRATOR : The people who have already organized most of the world's information are building the ultimate interactive map of the future, a 360-degree panoramic view of every spot on the planet, complete with information about that spot, all accessible on your computer screen.
We think of them as geo browsers.
NARRATOR : As a geo browser, you'll have the option of surfing the l nternet geographically.
Phase one is already under way.
JONES: We extended the capabilities of Google maps to have something called ''street view, '' which is the picture that you would see standing in a street.
NARRATOR : lt won't just be a pretty picture, but an interactive experience with all the l nternet's information about any particular location embedded right on the picture.
JONES: lf you see a store, you'll know what they sell.
lf you want to find a club, you'll know where the clubs are.
Everything will be connected.
NARRATOR : Street view promises a ground-level, three-dimensional view of every road on Earth.
How are they doing that? By mounting special omnidirectional cameras on top of cars -- lots of cars.
But their vision extends far beyond the street corners.
ln the future, this ultimate map will be able to take you everywhere because everywhere will be captured on video.
There'll be underwater cameras, cameras in space.
NARRATOR : You'll be able to check out a new city you're moving to, or confirm the ocean view on your beach rental.
But you won't just be able to look at far-off places.
You'll project your presence there.
jOURET: We don't have to travel.
We don't have to commute for us to do our work.
We can do that pretty much anywhere.
HOOSH MAND: Hey, how are you? Did you check out the june 12th conflict? l've been working with Cisco for almost five years now.
NARRATOR : Margaret likes her job as an executive assistant in San Jose.
The only problem? She lives a good 1 ,700 miles away.
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in Texas.
HOOSH MAND: l lived in California for 10 years, and the cost of living was really high.
So l decided to move out here.
NARRATOR : But she doesn't complain about her commute.
Because to get to her office, all Margaret has to do is press a button.
Marthin De Beer's office.
This is Margaret.
Actually, he's coming down the hallway right now.
Can you hold on a second? Hey, Marthin.
lt's your wife on the phone.
Okay, thanks.
l come in, and l push a button in here in the Dallas office, and l pop on a screen there in San Jose at my old desk.
DE BEER : This new concept of transported presence is the next big thing that we're gonna see over the next 10 to 20 years evolve.
With transported presence, we get to communicate naturally without having to go there.
So, uh, what does tomorrow look like? Really crowded.
The video quality and the audio quality is so good that you really feel like you're in the same room.
HOOSH MAND: l don't feel like l'm missing any of the human interaction at all.
l definitely have lots of friends that are at the Cisco office.
l see them every day.
We chat, and, once a week, we get together and make sure we have coffee.
DE BEER : You know, l think she's a pioneer for how the workplace might look in the future.
NARRATOR : Future business travelers won't need to burn fuel and time by jetting to Barcelona for a meeting.
just send your presence.
DE BEER : l can be in seven countries in a single day.
ln the last year, l traveled two-thirds less, and l spent twice the amount of time that l used to at home.
l expect to lose my platinum status on my favorite airline this year.
Telepresence will be changing all of our lives because it will allow us to connect to anybody across the globe in a heartbeat.
Distance won't be a barrier any longer to getting the best quality medical care.
[ Heart beating .]
Hi, l'm Josh Reviz.
l'm here to see Dr.
Hemel.
Hello, Josh.
Welcome to lstanbul.
HSlEH : With these health presence pods, you can just go to the closest available pod, which, hopefully, would be down the hall or in your office building or in your town or village.
One moment while l call up your medical records.
You go to this kiosk, and there's a medical assistant there.
Your doctor will be there, and he'll say, ''Hey, how are you feeling? What's wrong?'' Good to see you again.
What's going on? Well [sighs.]
l've got chest pain, and l'm a little freaked out.
Let's get an EKG.
HSlEH : They can take a connected device, like a blood-pressure cuff or a heart-rate monitor, and hook it up to you.
So, they can basically do just about everything that they could do in person.
l see some widespread changes on your EKG.
HSlEH : They'll be able to meet with the specialist no matter where they are in the world to get the best possible diagnostics and the best possible treatment.
Josh, l've called in a cardiologist, Dr.
Hudson, to take a look at your results.
Okay.
l'm looking at your EKG, and l'd like to run a scan.
HSl EH : lt reads all your vitals.
lt does some kind of matching in the network to figure out what disease you might have, and that information is actually transmitted to a doctor on the other end of the telepresence connection.
Josh, you have pericarditis, an inflammation around the heart.
For this, l'm gonna prescribe some anti-inflammatory medications.
Okay, how, uh, long will that take? Why don't you check back with Dr.
Hemel in two days? You should be feeling much better by then.
Oh, that's great.
Thank you so much.
HSlEH : So, it's a pretty exciting way to extend healthcare to far corners of the Earth and to areas where getting quality medical care is just not as easy.
Josh, remember -- check back in two days.
Will do.
DE BEER : This is going to happen in our lifetime.
l n fact, l'm convinced it will happen within the next 10 years.
NARRATOR : And transporting your presence onto flat screens is just the beginning.
DE BEER : Very close to be able to transport a full three-dimensional image and, therefore, presence of you or any object and render it on the other side in full 3-D, high-definition color.
lt will change everything.
NARRATOR : With fewer of us jetting around the world, telepresence will greatly reduce our reliance on fossil fuels.
But what about our planet's other natural resources? With the Earth's population steadily rising, how will the planet be able to sustain us all? ln the future, we will need more of everything.
Will there be enough? With new technologies, we may be on the edge of an era of great abundance.
KURZWElL: l believe within 25 years, the common denominator will be a very high standard of living.
We'll be able to create all the physical products we need, even for an expanded biological population, at very, very low cost.
NARRATOR : What if the future was so smart, we never ran out of the things we needed? What if the price of gas hardly mattered? What if we were our own energy source? We are going to have substantially greater population in our urban areas in the future.
lf we can all contribute our kinetic energy to generate the electricity we consume, why not? [ Chuckles .]
PowerLeap is a flooring system that generates electricity from human foot traffic.
NARRATOR : Future sidewalks might be covered with smart panels that capture piezoelectricity -- power generated from applied mechanical pressure.
REDMOND: So, when you step down, you're stimulating the piezoelectric plate that generates charge to be output to the battery to harvest it, to export it for electrical production.
NARRATOR : By placing piezoelectric pads like this one in high-traffic spots, electricity can be harvested and then stored right where it's used.
REDMOND: So, the more local your energy, the more efficient the distribution model can be.
Store the power that's created and use it for exit signs, for elevators, for all sorts of things in our public infrastructure that consume small amounts of power.
NARRATOR : A person walking at a moderate speed for an hour can only produce about 50 watts of electricity.
But multiply that person by thousands, and it starts to add up.
REDMOND: As this technology develops, we will be able to place this into every single airport terminal, every railway station, every large-city intersection, on every sidewalk.
This could really be enough to power all of the streetlights in a city.
We'll be able to generate a whole lot of power.
NARRATOR : Great inventors can't help themselves.
They're problem solvers.
And with advanced technology will come advanced solutions.
KAMEN : To me, technology is a tool.
You figure out what human problems exist, and if there's a technology that can be applied to a great human problem, you set about making it happen.
NARRATOR : just as power will be generated locally, so will clean water.
At least this is the vision of legendary inventor Dean Kamen.
Today, more than a billion people have a crisis every day trying to find clean water to drink.
We're all gonna have to deal with the fact that water is not free.
lt's not infinite in its availability.
ln 30 years, a gallon of clean water will cost more than a gallon of oil.
NARRATOR : l n fact, only 3% of all the water on Earth is freshwater.
So, in the future, it may be water, not oil, that will drag nations into war.
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.
unless someone is smart enough to turn something polluted into something pure.
Our goal was to create a small, portable machine that could be placed anywhere, and, at point of use, create clean, reliable drinking water from any source.
NARRATOR : Dean Kamen believes he can turn anything wet into drinkable water -- anything -- ocean water, sludge, even sewage -- using a device he calls the SlingShot.
KAMEN : A simple box with two hoses on it -- one that goes into anything that looks wet, out of the other one comes pure drinking water that's safe.
Water goes into the SlingShot, where it gets literally boiled to the point that it not just boils as you watch it on a stove, it turns completely into vapor, into steam.
NARRATOR : Recondense that steam, and you get pure distilled water no matter how polluted the source water was.
KAMEN : lf the water coming in has metals or other kinds of inorganic toxins in it, they don't vaporize.
NARRATOR : Until now, no one's been able to create this effect in a portable machine because of the vast amount of energy the distillation process takes.
The secret of the SlingShot is that it uses a closed loop of energy.
Once the first batch of water is vaporized and recondensed, all that energy is preserved in a sealed heat-exchange system.
The result? A machine that runs on less power than a toaster oven and about 2% of the power required by other water-purifying systems.
We can take any bad water and turn it into pure water, and we can do it with a machine this size and an amount of electricity that runs half of a handheld hair dryer.
And that's a big deal.
NARRATOR : And each will be manufactured for under $2,000.
This machine was designed to make 1 ,000 liters of water a day, enough for a village of 100 people.
NARRATOR : 5,000 children die every day from dirty water.
Dean Kamen sees a future where that number is ancient history.
l n 30 years, the world will hopefully have access to more reasonable and more secure ways to give everybody those basic needs of water and power.
NARRATOR : But man cannot live on water and power alone.
Feeding the crowded cities of the future will take more farmland than currently exists.
But in the future, farms will be cropping up in the unlikeliest places.
DESPOMMlER : Why don't we grow our food someplace else? Why don't we grow food inside buildings? We're good at making buildings.
NARRATOR : Dickson Despommier thinks the key to a more abundant future is growing the food where the people are.
He thinks skyscrapers are the farms of the future.
DESPOMMlER : Why can't we just grow our food in vertical greenhouses and raise most of the consumable crops that you and l would buy at a local grocer? ZABAR : We're on East g 1 st Street in the middle of Manhattan, New York City.
And it is a farm.
lt's a rooftop farm.
DESPOMMlER : 80% of the things that you can grow in the soil, you can grow inside of urban centers.
That's my dream is to see cities behave that way.
lf you could construct a building that was 30 stories in height and perhaps one square New York City block in footprint, you could continuously produce enough food to feed at least 50, 000 people comfortably per year.
NARRATOR : The math is simple.
Using Despommier's calculations, it would take 165 sky farms, only 165 buildings spread throughout its five boroughs, to continuously feed New York City.
There are huge advantages to feeding people who live in the city from the city.
There is virtually no crop that can't be grown inside.
NARRATOR : While we can look forward to a future of abundance, we also face a future that's vulnerable.
You can think of the Earth as flying around the sun inside a giant shooting gallery of hundreds of thousands of rocks like this, that if they struck the Earth would wipe out civilization.
We better either do something now, or it's gonna be too late.
NARRATOR : We spend a lot of time today worrying about the potential dangers of climate change.
But the biggest threat to our planet's future may not be carbon emissions.
Consider what happened to the last species that ruled the Earth.
An asteroid hit the Earth, killed everything within a few thousand miles in the initial impact, and over the next few hours, the Earth's atmosphere heated up to hundreds of degrees, which ignited everything on Earth.
So, anything that lived through that fire storm then starved to death.
A bad day.
NARRATOR : There's no reason why it couldn't happen again.
l n fact, there's a 10% chance of another major asteroid strike in the next 100 years.
This is not something that's in dispute by anybody.
NARRATOR : Ed Lu knows what he's talking about.
He had to in his last job as an astronaut aboard the lnternational Space Station.
The prospect of being hit by something from space is actually something you have to think about every day on the space station.
l used to see asteroids hitting the Earth all the time at night.
NARRATOR : Asteroids are simply rocks hurtling through space, ranging from tiny pebbles to mountain-sized mega-boulders.
The one 65 million years ago that killed off all the dinosaurs was between 5 and 10 miles across.
NARRATOR : A relatively small asteroid, say 1 50 feet across, could level everything within 770 square miles of the impact.
That's an entire city.
Right now, we know of perhaps 700 or so asteroids that are larger than a kilometer and a few thousand asteroids that have the potential of hitting the Earth.
NARRATOR : ln the future, we'll use larger, more sophisticated telescopes that can scan the skies, tracking potential planet killers while they're still far away.
LU : We're gonna discover thousands and thousands of asteroids that have a chance of hitting the Earth.
We'll be able to say, ''Yes, it's gonna hit the Earth, '' or ''No, it's not.
'' lf the answer is yes, then the question is -- What do you do about it? NARRATOR : Ed has a plan to intercept asteroids with an unmanned spacecraft.
Using an ion-propulsion system, the engines will generate enough thrust to intercept an asteroid years before it reaches Earth.
For most of these asteroids, we actually expect to have many decades of notice.
NARRATOR : Upon reaching the rock, the robot spacecraft will then attempt to change the asteroid's path by becoming a gravitational tractor.
There's a small gravitational pull between the asteroid and your spacecraft -- very tiny.
lf you stay there for long enough, that small, tiny force will begin to pull the asteroid.
NARRATOR : The spacecraft will maintain position alongside the asteroid using its thrusters, and over weeks, months, or even years, its very presence will create a tiny tug of gravity on the rock.
Even if the asteroid is only shifted by inches, that could make a huge difference in its long-term trajectory.
But if the asteroid is too large for such a nuanced approach, we could always do it the hard way.
You can actually take a larger spacecraft and just run into the asteroid.
NARRATOR : Ed sees surviving an asteroid hit as the universe's ultimate intelligence test.
lf there are other civilizations that are advanced in the universe, they will have passed this test, too.
Because if you don't, you eventually get wiped out like the dinosaurs.
We can go from this point of being at the mercy of the heavens to controlling our own fate.
NARRATOR : Safeguarding against the extraordinary effects of an asteroid hitting the Earth will take extraordinary measures.
Direct impact would mean instant death.
But beyond the point of impact, the swell of fire storms might wipe out crops everywhere, subjecting humanity to a slow starvation.
NARRATOR : Science is giving us the tools to avert catastrophes of the future, even to the point where we'll reroute hurricanes.
We can actually change its path or reduce its intensity.
NARRATOR : Everyone complains about the weather, but Dr.
Ross Hoffman of Atmospheric Environmental Research wants to do something about it.
And he's starting by tackling one of nature's most ferocious threats -- the hurricane.
Hurricanes are enormous, complicated systems, notoriously hard to predict, with many variables contributing to their path and ferocity.
HOFFMAN : The winds, the temperature, the humidity, the pressure -- the atmosphere is actually governed by chaos.
NARRATOR : But the same complexity that makes them unpredictable also holds the promise of a solution.
By tweaking one of the many variables that contribute to hurricanes, we might be able to influence them.
l n our computer models, when we try to modify hurricanes, very small changes at any particular point in time can result in a very large change further along in time.
NARRATOR : One of those variables is temperature.
HOFFMAN : We found that we could actually change the intensity of the hurricane just by changing the temperature.
NARRATOR : What if satellites in orbit around the Earth could channel the sun's energy into a beam and direct it to where these hurricanes are forming? We found that changes of the order of a degree or so were sufficient to make large impacts on the future path or intensity of the hurricane.
NARRATOR : As future computer models of weather get better, Dr.
Hoffman thinks we may be able to apply the technology of temperature variation to control other weather patterns.
HOFFMAN : For example, you might want to not have snowfall during rush hour.
We might want to not have a rainy day on the first day of school.
Or we might want to have no clouds for our 4th of july celebrations so we can see the fireworks.
NARRATOR : Before this century is over, humanity will be able to anticipate and avoid the planet's worst natural disasters, saving millions of lives.
But we may also solve an even more fundamental human problem -- death itself.
Death is the great equalizer.
No one here gets out alive.
But new advances in medical technology promise to extend our lives.
Could we delay the inevitable? DeGREY: Aging is a bad thing.
lt's a fatal disease that everybody has, so, ultimately, it is humanity's worst problem.
NARRATOR : Don't let his looks fool you.
Aubrey DeGrey is a Cambridge scholar and a biomedical gerontologist who believes we can fix aging by treating it as a simple engineering problem.
Keeping our bodies youthful, however long we live, is just a matter of maintenance.
When things break, we can fix them.
NARRATOR : Dr.
DeGrey heads up the Methuselah Foundation, which is offering the M prize -- $4.
5 million -- to the research group that can most successfully extend the life span of lab mice.
And labs around the world are getting closer and closer to claiming that prize.
We'll no longer need to fear getting older because we'll know what's in store.
Each of us is going to have a copy of our own body's instruction manual, a detailed map of the genome that lies within each and every cell of our bodies.
That genetic revolution is happening in lceland.
The importance of the sequence of the DNA of an individual only becomes meaningful when you look at it in the context of the DNA of other individuals.
NARRATOR : Dr.
Kari Stefansson is on a quest to unravel the secrets of our genetic limitations by decoding the DNA of an entire nation.
There was a relatively small group of people who came here, and there has pretty much been no immigration for 1 ,100 years.
lt is extraordinarily convenient because we can study everyone in lceland with a particular disease.
We don't select from a group of patients.
We just take them all.
NARRATOR : Dr.
Stefansson has already compiled the genetic information and medical records of over 100,000 lcelanders.
.
.
in the subterranean vaults here at deCODE Genetics.
STEFANSSON : We are looking at the genomes of people who are at particularly high risk of disease and compare that with the genomes of people who are at very little risk of disease.
NARRATOR : His goal? To decode which parts of our DNA are responsible for what so that all of us can be smarter about our own body's medical future.
The fundamental premise is that the more you understand the risk, the better you can design methods to prevent the risk from becoming a disease.
l have very little genetic risk of Alzheimer's disease.
l have relatively high risk of prostate cancer.
l have relatively high risk of type 2 diabetes.
l'm convinced that a discovery of variations in the sequence of the human genome is gonna be the foundation of the development of new preventive medicine.
NARRATOR : Soon, we'll all be surfing our entire genetic profiles on a secure medical uplink.
People will have a profile of their genome in 5 to 10 years, just like the blood groups today.
This is gonna help a very large proportion of the population to lead a healthy, productive life and to become much, much older than people usually are today.
NARRATOR : Already, the mapping of the genome has had some rather interesting side effects, like a pill that might someday allow us to double our life spans.
WESTPHAL: Now that the genome has been sequenced, l think we're finding how various genes function.
ln the coming years and decades, we will greatly be able to extend life span.
NARRATOR : Drs.
Sinclair and Westphal have not only found a gene that increases life span, but they've figured out how to trigger it using a particular molecule that promises to fight aging at the cellular level.
lt's called resveratrol.
lt's found in red wine.
Resveratrol has extended the life span of every organism we've tested.
And it's been tried on worms and flies, and they also live about 30% to 40% longer.
Fish live 60% longer.
We can extend the life span of mice by twofold.
lf we can do even a fraction of that for humans and patients, that's gonna be an amazing future.
NARRATOR : Resveratrol works by activating the Sl RT1 gene.
Sl RT1 controls the body's emergency response systems.
When an organism is starving, it signals the body's cells to defend and repair themselves, and the cells are rejuvenated.
What we've stumbled upon is really the body's natural defenses against disease and deterioration.
WESTPHAL: lf we understand how we can intervene and modulate the aging process, l think that we have a way of treating diseases of aging in a new and safer way.
Sl NCLAl R : What we want is a little pill that you can take once a day and be protected against diseases as different as diabetes and cancer and heart disease.
NARRATOR : You'll be able to combat the effects of aging by popping a pill.
And it's gonna happen within your lifetime, which is about to get a lot longer.
Everyone would like a little more quality time.
There's no known reason why we can't double or even triple our life spans in the coming decades.
NARRATOR : lf the prophecies of scientists like Aubrey DeGrey come true, we'll have more time to enjoy all the benefits that technology is bringing to our collective future, a world where we live in smarter, eco-friendly cities with new ways of getting across town or across oceans and new ways to visit any place on Earth without ever leaving home.
A world where we enjoy an abundance of natural resources, preserving the planet for future generations.
No matter how long they live, the next world is closer than you think.