What our descendants will deplore about us

How will the future view us? Tom Chatfield asked some of the world’s best minds, and discovered that we will be seen as barbaric in ways we may not even realise.

I had a discussion that made me ask a disconcerting question: how will I be viewed after I die? I like to think of myself as someone who is ethical, productive and essentially decent. But perhaps I won’t always be perceived that way. Perhaps none of us will.

No matter how benevolent the intention, what we assume is good, right or acceptable in society may change. From slavery to sexism, there’s plenty we find distasteful about the past. Yet while each generation congratulates itself for moving on from the darker days of its parents and ancestors, that can be a kind of myopia.

I was swapping ideas about this with Tom Standage, author and digital editor of The Economist. Our starting point was those popular television shows from the 1970s that contained views or language so outmoded they probably couldn’t be aired today. But, as he put it to me: “how easy it is to be self-congratulatory about how much less prejudiced we are than previous generations”. This form of hindsight can be dangerously smug. It can become both a way of praising ourselves for progress rather than looking for it to continue, and of distracting ourselves from uncomfortable aspects of the present.

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Is this three-deck, zero-emissions super jumbo plane the future of flight

(CNN) - Designer and aviation enthusiast Oscar Vinals is slightly addicted to crafting concept planes.

Last year, he came up with the design for the AWWA Sky Whale, a futuristic aircraft that he said would revolutionize green air travel and carry an astonishing 755 passengers. Now, he's bested himself.

With his newest design, the AWWA-QG Progress Eagle, he imagines the future of travel as a triple-decker aircraft with zero carbon emissions.

Rather than relying on traditional fossil fuels, the plane (which he envisions taking to the skies in 2030) would rely on six hydrogen engines to lift the plane off the ground. The aircraft would also be fitted with a rear engine that would double as a wind turbine, and solar panels on the roof and wings.

"The best aspect of the Progress Eagle would be its capacity to generate its own energy," says Vinals. He adds that the flight would also be "noiseless."

Vinals also envisions the plane, which would carry up to 800 passengers (275 more passengers than the largest aircraft today could handle), would have a new passenger class in the front of the plane.

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The invisible world viewed by drones

A few metres above the ground, a drone glides through London’s streets. It sees a man, scans his face, and quickly looks up his criminal record. Elsewhere, a traffic drone spies on vans and cars, checking their emissions and identifying illegal drivers. Another hovers in a living room, sees a little girl has a cat on her T-shirt, makes an algorithmic decision, and feeds a cat-related advert to her parent’s phone.

This is a near-future vision of the life of the urban drone, imagined by design agency Superflux. As part of an exhibition at the V&A Museum in London, a team led by Jon Ardern and Anab Jain designed and built a series of drones to explore how these flying machines will soon populate our cities.

The video they created, above, depicts how these machines will perceive an invisible world of information within our cities. They scan buildings, vehicles and people, track faces and geolocation, and look up personal data on distant databases somewhere in the cloud. And all this is done with existing technologies.


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Lockheed’s U-2: The spyplane from Area 51

Imagine driving a car whose engine cuts out if you drive it only a few miles below its maximum speed. A car so finally balanced that placing your coffee cup on anything other than the cup holder could cause it to swerve uncontrollably. You have to drive it – for anything up to 15 hours – in a diving suit. And when it comes to parking you can’t look out the windows, but have to rely instead on the directions of another driver guiding you to your destination from another car.

Congratulations – you might just make it as a Lockheed U-2 pilot.

The U-2 was one of the Cold War’s most infamous aircraft, a plane designed to fly over unfriendly territory too high for enemy fighters or missiles, and take pictures of unparalleled detail - and, as it has just been revealed, helped spur the development of the secret Area 51 airbase.


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What’s the most we can remember?

People with extraordinary memory talents suggest that your mind may be capable of retaining more than you think, says Adam Hadhazy.

Unlike digital cameras with full memory cards that cannot snap any more pictures, our brains never seem to run out of room. Yet it defies logic that one adult human brain – a "blood-soaked sponge," in writer Kurt Vonnegut's words – should be able to limitlessly record new facts and experiences.

Neuroscientists have long tried to measure our maximum mental volume. However, what scrambles any simple reckoning of memory capacity is the astounding cognitive feats achieved by dedicated individuals, and people with atypical brains.

Many of us struggle to commit a phone number to memory. How about 67,980 digits? That's how many digits of pi that Chao Lu of China, a 24-year-old graduate student at the time, recited in 2005. Chao uttered the string of numbers during a 24-hour stretch without so much as a bathroom break, breaking the world record.

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Future cities may harvest energy from human footsteps

(CNN) - From footfalls to climbing stairs, to opening doors, the cities of the future will look at ways of tapping energy from all the mechanical energy we expend going about our daily lives.

When looking at the amount of kinetic energy produced in the average metro station at rush hour, or even on the dance floors of nightclubs, harvesting electricity from human activity makes sense.

The technology that makes it possible -- the piezoelectric effect -- is more than 130 years old: in 1880, the brothers Jacques and Pierre Curie discovered that placing crystals under pressure produced an electric charge.

Today, manufacturing technology has made it possible to place piezoelectric devices in the most unlikely places and one company, Pavegen, has developed power-generating systems for pavements, football fields and even school corridors.

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