Christine Peterson

Foresight Co-Founder and Past President Christine Peterson is interviewed on the Singularity Weblog in a 47-minute tour that covers nanotechnology, the founding of the Foresight Institute, her work on personal life extension through Health Activator, open source, and the Technological Singularity. “Christine Peterson on Singularity 1 on 1: Join Us to Push the Future in a Positive Direction“:

During my Singularity 1 on 1 interview with Christine Peterson we discuss a variety of topics such as: how she got interested in nanotechnology and the definition thereof; how, together with Eric Drexler, she started the Foresight Institute for Nanotechnology; her interest in life extension; Dr. Drexler’s seminal book Engines of Creation; cryonics and chemical brain preservation; 23andMe and other high- and low-tech tips for improved longevity; whether we should fear nanotechnology or not; the 3 most exciting promises of nanotech; women in technology; coining the term “open source” and using Apple computers; the technological singularity and her take on it…

Hear Christine discuss some challenges while presenting an essentially optimistic message—a wonderful future is coming from science and technology over the next few decades—a future that encourages everyone to get involved.
—James Lewis, PhD

Foresight Presents: “GENOGEN: Regenerating Skin for Life“
Dr. Nancy Mize
Date/Time: Thursday, May 31, 2012, 6:30pm in PDT
Drinks/Dinner: 6:30pm, Talk: 7:30pm
RSVP: $40 via http://www.paypal.com/ to foresight@foresight.org
Location: Ristorante Don Giovanni
235 Castro Street, Mountain View, CA 94041

GENOGEN is developing products that activate resident skin stem cells to stimulate local areas of regeneration of skin naturally – the way children heal. GENOGEN’s first product is a re-purposed agent, currently FDA and EU approved and marketed, and used in humans for over 5 years, with significant utility in the aesthetics sector for treatment of aging skin. Localized skin delivery of the stem cell activator with a growth matrix activates local regeneration and repair in situ – with no stem cell isolation, no stem cell prep, no surgery, extraction or re-implantation – resulting in accelerated healing and young skin.

NANCY K MIZE, PhD, Scientist, Innovator, and CEO of GENOGEN Inc., has researched stem cell activators since 2000, and is the co-inventor on 11 issued patents. Dr. Mize served as the BioMarker Expert for Personalized Medicine at Pacific BioDevelopment, the Director of Protein Bioinformatics at Hyseq/Nuvelo, and Scientist, Drug Delivery Technologies at Alza Corporation. Dr. Mize holds a PhD from UCSF in Cell Biology in the department of Human Physiology, BS from UC Berkeley and has completed Postdoctoral studies at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), Heidelberg, and Genentech.

Join us for an intellectually stimulating evening with best-selling author and tech analyst Sonia Arrison! Dinner and drinks will be served h’orderve/tapas-style at 7pm; Sonia will present at 8pm, with personalized, small-group Q&A on the future of technology to follow.

Wednesday March 21, 2012 at Ristorante Don Giovanni, 235 Castro Street, Mountain View, CA 94041

This is a limited-audience event; to RSVP, please Paypal $40 to foresight@foresight.org at http://www.paypal.com/

SONIA ARRISON is a bestselling author and technology analyst who has studied the impact of new technologies on society for more than a decade. Her book, 100 PLUS: How the Coming Age of Longevity will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family and Faith, is a national bestseller and has been featured in top media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, MSNBC, Bloomberg News, Fox News, and the Today Show.

As a founder, academic advisor, and trustee of Singularity University, she is focused on exponentially growing technologies and their impact on society. She is also a Senior Fellow at the California-based Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy (PRI) and a columnist for TechNewsWorld. She is author of three books and numerous PRI studies and was also the host of a radio show called “digital dialogue” on the Voice America network.

What are reviewers saying about 100+?

NEW SCIENTIST
“Brilliant …. The chapters devoted to advances in regenerative medicine and the search for interventions that slow ageing are exhilarating. Growing new limbs, copying internal organs like a Xerox machine, exponential increases in computing power, better eyes and ears—I could read stories like this endlessly. We need such vision to help carry the science forward, and some of the most exciting advances in the scientific study of ageing are forthcoming. Arrison paints a realistic picture of the science driving the next longevity revolution, and makes the case that, if we play our cards right, humanity will reap huge dividends for the effort. In that way, this book is the most comprehensive treatment of the socioeconomic consequences of life extension that I’ve seen …. [T]he costs and benefits of life extension and, more importantly, health extension, are subjects in desperate need of open dialogue, and Arrison begins this process with elegance and style.”

WALL STREET JOURNAL
“Ms. Arrison entertainingly chronicles efforts to conquer aging and death from antiquity to today. Food, sex, exercise and alchemy have all been employed to keep the grim reaper at bay. But technology offers the most plausible route, she says, noting that biology and computing are drawing ever closer together with the sequencing of the human genome …. [Her] sunny outlook is infectious.”

SINGULARITY HUB
“Easy to read, and easy to understand, 100+ walks you through the incredible achievements in regenerative medicine we’ve already seen, projects them forward, and discusses the changes in environment, economy, family, and religion that will follow…. Arrison states her case strongly enough to convince almost anyone, and in a style that will be as accessible to your techno-phobic Uncle Walter as it is to your computer loving self.”

Remember, space is limited! To RSVP, Paypal $40 to foresight@foresight.org at http://www.paypal.com/

Since the dawn of humanity, a privileged few have lived in stark contrast to the hardscrabble majority. Conventional wisdom says this gap cannot be closed. But it is closing—fast. In Abundance, space entrepreneur turned innovation pioneer Peter H. Diamandis and award-winning science writer Steven Kotler document how progress in artificial intelligence, robotics, infinite computing, ubiquitous broadband networks, digital manufacturing, nanomaterials, synthetic biology, and many other exponentially growing technologies will enable us to make greater gains in the next two decades than we have in the previous two hundred years. We will soon have the ability to meet and exceed the basic needs of every man, woman, and child on the planet. Abundance for all is within our grasp. …

Providing abundance is humanity’s grandest challenge—this is a book about how we rise to meet it.

A preview of Chapter 1 and other information is available on the Abundance web site. Kudos to Diamandis and Kotler for showing why the future is brighter than it appears, and laying out a roadmap to get there.
—James Lewis

The difficult thing to keep sight of when you’re talking about the Singularity is that even though it sounds like science fiction, it isn’t, no more than a weather forecast is science fiction. It’s not a fringe idea; it’s a serious hypothesis about the future of life on Earth. There’s an intellectual gag reflex that kicks in anytime you try to swallow an idea that involves super-intelligent immortal cyborgs, but suppress it if you can, because while the Singularity appears to be, on the face of it, preposterous, it’s an idea that rewards sober, careful evaluation.

After a brief but very informative survey of the concept of the Singularity, covering nanotechnology and life extension as well as artificial intelligence:

A hundred years from now, Kurzweil and de Grey and the others could be the 22nd century’s answer to the Founding Fathers — except unlike the Founding Fathers, they’ll still be alive to get credit — or their ideas could look as hilariously retro and dated as Disney’s Tomorrowland. Nothing gets old as fast as the future.

But even if they’re dead wrong about the future, they’re right about the present. They’re taking the long view and looking at the big picture. You may reject every specific article of the Singularitarian charter, but you should admire Kurzweil for taking the future seriously. Singularitarianism is grounded in the idea that change is real and that humanity is in charge of its own fate and that history might not be as simple as one damn thing after another. Kurzweil likes to point out that your average cell phone is about a millionth the size of, a millionth the price of and a thousand times more powerful than the computer he had at MIT 40 years ago. Flip that forward 40 years and what does the world look like? If you really want to figure that out, you have to think very, very far outside the box. Or maybe you have to think further inside it than anyone ever has before.

The Humanity+ @ Caltech conference will be divided into four main sessions:

• Session 1, Re-Imagining Humans: Mind, Media and Methods
• Session 2, Radically Increasing the Human Healthspan
• Session 3, Redefining Intelligence: Artificial Intelligence, Intelligence Enhancement and Substrate-Independent Minds
• Session 4, Business and Economy in the Era of Radical Technomorphosis

Humanity+ @ Caltech
December 4-5, 2010
Redefining Humanity in the Era of Radical Technological Change
Pasadena, CA

Several times a year, Humanity+, the world’s leading nonprofit for the ethical use of technology, holds conferences about the sciences, technologies and social issues concerning the future. Past Humanity+ conferences have taken place in Cambridge, Massachusetts at Harvard University and Irvine, California. Our next conference, Humanity+ @ Caltech, will take place on December 4-5th (Saturday-Sunday) at Caltech in Pasadena, California.

Speakers will include many of the top visionaries and leaders of the transhumanist community, as well as new voices from the worlds of science, art, media and business.

The Humanity+ @ Caltech program will be divided into four main sessions, each one of which will cover a key area of transhumanist thought:

• Re-Imagining Humans: Mind, Media and Methods (Saturday morning)
• Radically Increasing the Human Healthspan (Saturday afternoon)
• Redefining Intelligence: Artificial Intelligence, Intelligence Enhancement and Substrate-Independent Minds (Sunday morning)
• Business and Economy in the Era of Radical Technomorphosis (Sunday afternoon)

For information about registration: http://humanityplus10.eventbrite.com/

The H+ Summit is a two day event that explores how humanity will be radically changed by technology in the near future. Visionary speakers will explore the potential of technology to modify your body, mind, life, and world.

What will it mean to be a human in this next phase of technological development? How can we prepare now for coming changes?

We foresee the feasibility of redesigning the human condition and overcoming such constraints as the inevitability of aging, limitations on human and artificial intellects, unchosen psychology, lack of resources, and our confinement to the planet earth. The possibilities are broad and exciting. The H+ Summit will provide a venue to discuss these future scenarios and to hear exciting presentations by the leaders of the ongoing H+ (r)evolution.

I was at their December 2009 conference in southern California and it was great.  They’re planning another one for December 2010, again in southern California.  —Chris Peterson

Burj Dubai

The Burj Dubai opens today.  It’s the worlds tallest building at about half a mile high.

Except for being only half as high, it resembles Frank Lloyd Wright’s mile-high tower in overall shape — but of course the Burj is real.  From what I can tell, it could not only house but form the complete social and economic infrastructure for at least 5000 people.  In luxury.  Scale it up to a mile and you’re talking 40,000.

Given its elegant shape, the Burj has an incredibly tiny footprint (the foundation slab, not the surrounding plaza) of less than two acres. It seems reasonable to imagine that one could build a mile-high with a 5-acre footprint.  Put only one of these per square mile — it takes up less than 1% of that area, so the land is left pretty much untouched — and you can put the current population of the Earth in about the area of Montana.

Give people flying cars and/or underground high-speed trains to get from one tower to another, and you can really turn the whole Earth into a park.

But you have to be able to do a lot of high tech building, and the people have to be pretty wealthy. Building a world full of mile-high towers would strain the world’s supply of steel and concrete significantly. What could nanotech do to bring this closer to reality?

Some years back I suggested that a good X-prize for nanotech would be to build a tower ten miles high.  The reason was that you’d have to come up with a working manufacturing method to make the material, nanotubes and diamond probably, cheaply.  You could build a 10-mile tower with current composites and/or aircraft alloys but it’d be way too expensive to be worth it.

The Burj Dubai used a recent advance, the ability to make concrete at higher strengths than before.  Use of polycrystalline diamond in that role would enable much higher towers. When can we expect mile-high, or ten-mile-high, towers?

tall towers

The surge in building heights coincided with the industrial revolution and the use of steel in building, as exemplified by the Eiffel Tower. Here are tallest buildings on a semi-log scale:

tallest buildings

The blue line is tallest building (height in feet), the red is an eyeball-fitted trendline.  This puts the tallest building at a mile in about 2065.  However, all the structures in this trend are steel-and-concrete, and so, even though they follow an exponential curve, a shift into nanomanufacturing and materials could easily kick the curve into a different mode.  We could even see a major jump, like the Eiffel in 1889, if someone took the new capabilities and set out specifically to build a structure just to be impressive.