(English) The World in 2050 (The Real Future of Earth) - BBC & Nat Geo Documentaries [PDF]

Zitiervorschau

we are in a race the race is against time we have to build cities we need them but we have to make them in a different way we need a wave of innovation not only for our way of life but also the planet the consequences would be enormous if we lose this battle I'm Thomas gets executive editor at Wired magazine and wired we look at the innovators innovations that are changing our world in the next hour we'll see three stories from acclaimed film makers about the future of energy will explore cutting-edge innovations in how we drive how we live and in our first story how we fuel our hearts they're all ideas that promise to shape the path to the world of 2050 all the world has right now close to a billion cars and by double the number of cars of the plant addicted so we doubled our vehicles we really increase the amount of fuel they consume and that's gonna have a big big footprint in terms of our demand for resources to move on most vehicles around we're pulling up carbon has been stored underground and burning in our automobiles and putting all that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere we don't reduce that can have changes in the

climate that we could never recover from there's a number of forecasts for what type of Transportation economy we could move into one vision is that we will use more and more liquid fuels another one is will use more electricity right now more of the industrial activity is focused around liquid biofuels the thing about the fuel is it's really unparalleled on a weight basis how much energy is in a gallon of fuel and even if batteries develop as some of the advocates hope they develop we're not going to see batteries running large trucks and we're certainly not going to see an electrified air plate we're going to need transportation fuels for those that will directly replace the petroleum-based fuels that were using today this is kicked off people looking at whole range of other alternatives to petroleum in your tank commercial production of ethanol as fuel started in Brazilian 1975 when we started the ethanol program nobody talking about reducing emissions this was not the issue at that time first and most important we didn't have money to buy oil anymore after the first

oil shock we were importance of oil and today more than fifty percent of all cars use ethanol set of gasoline Brazil made a very conscious choice to try to find a way to reduce their fossil fuel dependence and they didn't have to look very far because Brazil's climate is ideal for growing sugarcane when you have sugar cane plantation you have only two things who make sugar methanol my family has been in sugarcane business since nineteen fifty-five and about 30 years ago who i thought there is opportunity to make more ethanol now we are producing 120 thousand cubic meters of the tunnel Brazil today has very close to 400 sugar mills the overall sales sturdy billion US dollars on this number is increase if you look at how they make ethanol and how efficient the process is it it's really a model for all of us they grind the plant up extract the sugar from the cane the sugar goes into these large fermentation tanks which combines sugars together with yeast that naturally produces ethanol they use the rest of the plan to generate heat to distill the ethanol and turned into fuel they also use that heat generate

electricity renewably not putting excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere brazil has God to a point today where they're using about forty percent less petroleum and they would be otherwise but Brazil cannot supply the whole world of ethanol because they would have to cut very strongly in food production and into critical natural areas like the Amazon to make that happen and this really boils down to the fact there's only so much arable land and growing fuel for our gas tanks is yet another demand on that landscape we cannot get ourselves into thinking that we found a general solution for the world problem i think we will have to face the awarding this way today we have no oil and very large plenty of this anymore you have no call transforming the clean way in the meantime we'll have to do the best weekend the best at the moment is that they can do biofuels sugarcane ethanol is an incredibly efficient process you get out about seven times the energy you put into growing the sugarcane in the US when we produce ethanol from corn for every unit of input of energy we get

about the same amount of energy out so we're really not gaining anything we need a better process we don't have to take what nature has given us we can actually engineer plants and yeast to be more efficient and that's the basis for a lot of the work that we're doing what we need to look at though is which of the pathways that come out of this are not only good financially but those that are also good news sustainability and this equation is is really wide open right now we are in a race to develop fuels the race isn't with other countries the race is against time to meet they mediate and future demands we made the energy solution spring from the ground Brazil is the most efficient is an old producing country in the world sugarcane alcohol from Brazil can reduce the total carbon footprint right up to seventy percent compared with the castle the biggest challenge for field providers and common factors is to reduce co2 emissions over the next 20 years demand for mobility will continue to grow we believe that biofuels are very important because they help in immediate way all forms of fuels are

going to be needed hydrocarbons natural gas biofuels all of them are going to be part of the energy means for the future of transportation brazil has been very successful at taking a resource they had and finding the process to make that into ethanol and people call those first-generation biofuels we have lots of lab work around the world that are looking at the second generation that's generally turning cellulosic material from for example weeds into biofuels and United States is very much at the forefront of the innovation park equation for centuries we have been using yeast to consume glucose and produce wine and beer we're trying to do something very similar only wear engineering the east to consume that glucose and turn it into a fuel or drug chemical we call this synthetic biology and when I started in this area many of my colleagues that oj this is great work but where's the application what are you gonna do with these tools who cares malaria is an enormous problem in any one year a million or so people die of the disease and most of them are

children under the age of five so we thought this is a great opportunity to engineer yeast to produce an anti-malarial drug called argument this drug is derived from plants right now but it's too expensive for people in the developing world so my laboratory engineered yeast to produce small quantities of our innocent now that process is being scaled up and we'll have this drug on the market shortly but at a substantially reduce costs it turns out that anti-malarial drug is a hydrocarbon and it's very similar in many ways to diesel fuel we thought gosh we can turn our attention now to fuels we could make a few changes in that microbe to turn it into a fuel producing micro if we imagine that glucose is going to be our new petroleum we need a source for that glucose and so the crops that we're looking at our crops like switchgrass this is a native grass that grows without a lot of water and our marginal lands we could turn into energy farms the challenge though is that unlike sugar king is very difficult to get the sugar out of that violent so we use what we call pretreatment process to extract

the glucose from the plant and then we feed that glucose to a yeast that we've engineered to produce hydrocarbons and that East takes in the sugar and it changes its composition that gives us this high energy molecule a float to the top you skip them off you put them in your tank but it takes a lot of work to get from that small test tube all the way up into the million gallon tank so we have to give it time but i think that some of the discoveries that are happening might be applied by the end of the decade terms of a sustainable equation for the planet roll biofuels is quite tricky there are a variety of crops that do not compete directly with food and finding ways to utilize those types of crops first that's very attractive so solving the science is part of the story but then evaluating all of the new fuels terms of the land use impacts that they could have that is even harder story than doing the good sign imagine that you could have one process that could take in sunlight and carbon dioxide and turn it into fuel and imagine if that didn't involve growing

anything at all the synthetic biologists are trying to take plants and make them do things that they wouldn't normally do on the other hand materials chemists like myself want to do artificial photosynthesis to improve on the process that nature does in real photosynthesis we should follow the blueprint of plants converting sunlight into fuel but take the approach that it could be much simpler all we really need is a light absorber that absorbs sunlight we also need a catalyst like iron or nickel so when you see the hydrogen coming off of a photoactive material that's an example of a semiconductor breaking the chemical bonds of water make hydrogen and oxygen ultimately our pieces are going to be contained in something that is easy to roll out like bubble wrap or in would come sunlight and water you would vent the oxygen to the air but the bottom would work out your liquid or gaseous fuel but then you could collect and use our cars and planes and storage our goal is within two years you have the first artificial photosynthesis solar fuels generator that we can hold in our hands and then get to scale beyond that time we're certainly not

good at predicting the future but electric vehicles looks like a sustainable option we've heard proposals about things as far as nuclear power planes and even some proposals grade around with lighter than air vehicles and so if the future 2050 does include a friend olive oil what it means would be that we haven't deployed as many of these clean technologies as we already know where possible if you think about how long it's taken for us to build up for petroleum industry we can't hope to reverse that overnight it's huge change in our infrastructure yes we should have been working on it 30 years ago we didn't we're trying to make up for that and that means basic research needs to be done now and buy as many people as possible we have a long way to go but i'm confident that we'll get there in the future 3d maps are going to help people get places more efficiently as we just saw the race to produce cleaner energy is charging ahead in the meantime demand for cars continues decline by 2050 its predicted they'll be

2 billion cars on the planet and fuel consumption will have tripled to keep pace left to radically change the way we drive here's our next story driven by design the auto bill came around in many ways it was the future we thought of it as one of the more positive changes that happened to society suddenly our ability to get a job changed we can be further away with bigger plots of land with better quality of living it all looked quite good but there are limitations to swearing by the car if it gets congested your quality of life drops immediately to spend so long in the car it's very inefficient use of fuel consumption things start making sense all the sudden doesn't bring you closer to where you want to get it actually sometimes bring your father the average american spends nearly 300 hours a year in their car 38 of them stuck in traffic annually congestion consumes over 1 billion dollars in gasoline in the united states alone the inefficiency caused by traffic both financial and personal is enormous Dirk sheen and Carmen white story is not that unusual today

Dirk works an hour and a half away in warren go Illinois generally he wouldn't leave work until six or 630 and i would say usual time for him to get home around eight usually when i wake up on the only one up sometimes the kids wake up with my routine more often than that I don't see them in the morning I think about my commute when I wake up I check the traffic report see if there's any delays the worst-case scenario it takes me two hours to get to work we are already so limited in the amount of time you can spend with the kids and our expenses are crazy-high you're spending 400 bucks a month on gas it takes away from our food budget and we never paid for gas like that before ever there's technology that would allow me to spend less time in the car spend less money on gas and spend more time at home I'd be all for that the cost of traffic is people's time fuel wasted it's an emotional toll of frustration utilizing the roads more intelligently is a much more efficient approach to the inability to have supplied keep up with

traffic demand if you took a satellite picture of the highway you can see that there's actually a lot of open space and if we had the technology for cars to drive more closely but safely then you can increase the utilization of the road network what this means is that to be more efficient to use less fuel we need to see the road differently we need cars that can navigate through the urban landscape in a radically different way maps in the future are going to be able to help people get places either more safely or more efficiently today just helps you get from point A to point B but what if i want to get someplace and use the least amount of fuel possible or if I've got a hybrid vehicle i want to make sure I've got plenty of charge not only get there but to get back home so information that is going to help people achieve the more efficient or the safer route is more detailed information about the road than a lot of people realize as possible to collect today here in Chicago Nokia's location & commerce is developing the next generation of mapping lidar sona 360-degree video all

are components of what Nokia calls digital mapping we use 64 lasers that rotate and they collect data in a 3d way about the world that creates what we call a point cloud of information that point cloud allows us to measure distances than between the points that we collect that system combined with the cameras with higher precision location detection through inertial measurement units that whole data system allows us to collect 1.3 million points of data per second probably within two to three years you're going to see 3d maps that are going to integrate the traffic information into your routing help you understand i've got five different routes to take which one is the most efficient today given way to stoplights are running giving away traffic is running all of those factors are going to be taken into consideration to make sure I've got the best route but better mapping that can integrate topography infrastructure and density is only part of the answer another key to improving transport efficiency is building cars that drive themselves autonomous vehicle

technology has tremendous potential to improve efficiency of a road infrastructure by removing humans from the equation we eliminate all the things we do wrong time will be speeding changing lanes too often merging haphazardly and by marrying autonomous vehicles with sophisticated 3d maps we can make driving safer and more energy-efficient that next generation vehicle is being built right now by the swedish trucking company scania the solution is to see it is that the vehicles too can utilize intelligent maps three-dimensional maps with traffic information the vehicles will be intelligent and communicate with each other they will talk to each other they will talk to the infrastructure and we'll see completely autonomous driven vehicles ok the goal was to have multiple robots and see if they could go 60 miles fully autonomously my name is helen taylor my husband John and I were very passionate about fuel economy

yeah it's great to break world records but that's not the order and all them it's more important to educate people together with showing drivers around the world simple techniques to improve their fuel efficiency from these education programs get people on the road with us and we finally tweak their driving techniques things like just checking the higher pressures before you even getting to car for everyone psiu tires are under-inflated be wasting three percent of the fuel efficiency and the difference between 65 and 75 miles prayer is a saving of 23% when you talk to the general public they're very surprised that an energy company like shell is trying to educate people how to save money how to reduce co2 emissions and here we have shell sending us around the world to do that we always hope when you on this planet but you can make a real difference in people's lives when you get emails from people saying save this amount of money this year looking for food on the table when you know you are really making a difference by displaying traffic density in the

urban infrastructure in a revolutionary way 3d digital maps will help create a more fuel-efficient future but these technologies are limited by the drivers who sit behind the wheel some believe that for cars and trucks to be truly energy-efficient they will need to drive themselves the technology is coming into play through sensors and and capabilities for cars to drive autonomously in 2007 the united states department of defense held a competition to see if a completely autonomous self-driving vehicle as possible DARPA stands for the defense advanced research projects agency they have a competition to develop self-driving robots that could drive themselves in traffic the goal was to have multiple robots turn them loose on a course and see if they could go 60 miles in six hours fully autonomously driving maybe one of the most complex things we do everyday drivers make dozens of decisions at any given moment one study found that drivers were exposed over 1,300 items of information per minute we make so many decisions when we're driving without even thinking

about it so in creating our vehicle a great component the enterprise was developing software to handle lots of sensors feeding lots of data and generating a bunch of potential paths that the vehicle might follow and even though the robot doesn't have the ability to predict the future by using this fast random path generation the robot could anticipate potential accident and choose a path to avoid it because it's always thinking about what things could the car do next no one expects millions of cars driving themselves anytime soon but there is a place where self navigating technologies are being optimized to create the vehicle of the future be honest kanya test track outside Stockholm where we have basically looks like in highway but it's a separate test track when conducting experiments scania the Swedish trucking company has recently begun testing its next generation of long-haul truck utilizing radar sonar and intelligent mapping they've been able to drastically reduce

fuel consumption we have this example with platooning where we make use of the reproduction in air resistance or a drug that you get from driving close to each other with heavy-duty vehicles and in order to control this you need to know where the other vehicles are where they're positioned the velocity their actions in the near future to be very close to the vehicle ahead of you that requires that you have very accurate control if you look at robotics broadly there's wonderful set of research and people looking at schooling fish and and and trying to develop the ability for robots to work together like that so they're wonderful examples from nature of how cooperation can lead to more efficient resource utilization you can see it when people are competing into the france they platoon to reduce air drag they are not bicycling behind each other that close because its father or because they are racing it is because they are reducing air drag sitting behind the man who is leading a truck traveling 55 miles per hour expense half its energy just to move the air around it at 65 miles per hour that number jumps to

almost two-thirds even if platooning can reduce the energy used by ten percent the savings would be substantial if a vehicle in front of another vehicle wants to break it immediately sends out the break message to be other vehicles so they actually break at the same time the way we do this is by we have an automated system so now for instance if i take my feet off the acceleration pedal and turn the system on the velocity is automatically governed by getting information from the vehicle ahead through his wireless system we want these vehicles to maintain a short relative distance through this system we can reduce the fuel consumption by utilizing the Air drag reduction by ten percent and ten percent would mean he will be able to save approximately eight thousand euros per single heavy-duty vehicle per year it may be some time before autonomous vehicles make up the majority of cars on America's highways nevertheless some of these technologies are already making their way into our lives now this polar baby wants to sleep you get to pick up books every day or is

it just something I can put takeout look sometimes ok when we look toward the future systems will absolutely make it safer and more efficient and less costly for you and also make your life easier because you're spending less time on the roads the city begins to talk begins to tell you where they're congestion what's going on in different areas of town suddenly the car becomes a part of a much bigger ecosystem we can look at how cars interact with other cars are car interact with infrastructure and us the drivers you start to make smart decisions about how to move around suddenly mobility becomes a whole other thing no matter how much money they have no matter how much oil they have everybody has to go in a different direction we've seen that changing the way we drive can improve transportation efficiencies what if we change the way we build and live in our cities that's the subject of our next story searching for utopia will travel to the United Arab Emirates and discover a city rising out of the desert let's take a look from the beginning we dreamed of utopia a place where we could

live in harmony with each other and in balance with nature many have imagined it tried to design it but the dream always slipped away then I heard they were building a new city called Masdar near abu dhabi in the Arabian desert it sounded like an unlikely place for you told you and I wanted to see it the last half century has been a pretty bad time for the making cities the natural tendency has been to accommodate to the automobile more than anything else try walking around abu dhabi it's impossible to obtain car everywhere dubai the same thing they are among the least pedestrian friendly places in the world they are not bringing by any other measure either and leaving that easy things to fit master is still under construction and it doesn't look like much from the highway but they claim it's going to redefine the way cities are designed built and Power Master city in abu dhabi will be the city of the future and the role model for the world once you see what they have envisioned for this utopian city it's very

impressive its carbon neutral pedestrian-friendly and powered by renewable energies but I do notice we're going to have to change our relationship with cars welcome to muster city and in beacon to medina just that we are driving and they're in the bowels of mouse are set in an electric transportation system slightly unnerving to seeing this for the first time and where we go in the first big move the architects at foster and partners made was to put all transportation underneath the city leaving the streets of Masdar totally free of cars the place reminded me of a medieval city and actually many design elements are adapted from ancient Arabic towns and villages it's all about looking back into history to move forward with some very very simple ideas I have a huge impact this is the pedestrian zone there's no cars here this and this is enabled us to push the streets together take the advantage of shade channel the cooling breezes through the whole scale here is based on the human being is not based on the motorcar soon as you lift up the potassium

playing by seven meters you've certainly captured this breathe what you can see here in the balconies we've got a modern interpretation of an ancient Arabic screen we must avoid is direct sunlight hitting any piece of glance soon as the Sun hits the glass the heat transferred into the building and we have to use more energy to cool it down and this will make all that much of a difference yeah absolutely for example Downton Abbey 60 meter wide streets black asphalt mirrored reflective buildings no relief from the Sun holiday in September the air temperature in both places was 39 t greens and I'm gonna be the temperature measured at the asphalt was 57 degrees in master the temperature measured on the ground 33 degrees so we've actually lowered the air temperature we're trying to do as much as possible with as little as possible these simple design moves cut air conditioning needs by sixty percent but this place is also technically very sophisticated the roof panels not only provide shade they also generate

electricity and the walls themselves are made of glass reinforced concrete literally sand taken from the desert everything here is geared towards maximizing energy efficiency nazdar does represent a whole different value system it represents an acknowledgement that eventually everybody has to go in a different kind of Direction no matter how much money they have no matter how much oil they have no matter anything else all the cities here in this part of the world have come out of nowhere there was nothing here not so long ago except small settlements in the desert and then all of the soil and all of his money and suddenly you know wham the city started popping up but they sprung up in a false love of a Western model that was already out of date the model of the late 20th century automobile based energy hogging city for most of the world energy is very expensive but the united arab emirates is sitting on ten percent of the world's oil and energy is cheap sochi you can run a ski slope in a shopping and build the world's tallest skyscraper but even here

cheap energy won't last forever and the people behind Masdar are determined to find alternatives one of the most crucial aspects of our energy modeling and scenario quantification is how much energy in total is the world going to use in 2050 scenarios team is a bunch of people with rich imagination i would say we have political scientists economists geopolitical experts really be tried to simplify the complexity all around us we in the seriously not currently putting a lot of attention into cities and city development a lot of mega cities are going to be built in the coming decades we're talking about the equivalent of a new city of a million people every week that is an incredible demand most of the world's resources are consumed by the city's but if we could offer a blueprint for a better City public transportation information energy we understand man will rise we understand the current supplies will struggle to keep pacing so we have to of course find ways of bridging the gap between the demand and the supply decisions that we take now

are going to have a major impact on decades to come there's enough oil under these sands to last a hundred and fifty years but fundamental to the Masdar ideal is getting energy from renewable sources from geothermal and wind and most of all from a source they have in abundance in the desert the Sun this field of solar panels makes more than enough electricity to run master and the excess power is sent to the abu dhabi grid but silicon panels are expensive and the price of solar power needs to drop if it's going to be competitive from Africa to Asia to Arizona in the future master hopes to get energy from this prototype called the solar beam down using highly reflective mirrors the solar beam down may generate power more cheaply and ecologically than silicon panels the mirrors bounce the sun's rays up to the tower and then down to a point reaching a temperature of 600 degrees steam can be generated to run turbines to make electricity there's just one problem

neither of these solar technologies work at night so master needs to draw power from the grid when the Sun Goes Down and that power comes from natural gas the reality is it's just not yet possible to power mast are entirely without fossil fuels the great challenge with Masdar will be how do you make it a place that will not be just this ideal city that no other place could actually aspire to cause it doesn't seem real what Masdar has to be is a laboratory that develops things that then can be applied in existing cities all around the world because that's where it will pay off there's no payoff if it's just about itself the payoff is how can everything it's trying to do matter in the rest of the world right now there's only a store to restaurants a bank and a few hundred students living here it's too early to tell if master will work as a city when it's finished but much has been achieved they are carbon neutral and largely powered by renewable energies solutions here won't work everywhere though many cities are in cold climates and cooling

is not their energy problem they need to let sunlight in not keep it out cities like Los Angeles or houston are built around cars can masters lessons be applied to them still it's a step in the right direction and it's impressive that this step is being taken by country that doesn't need to take it i met a guy who said actually they did need to take it he took me to the desert to explain God says widen the man at the ala similarity well be with G Betty God talks about man's place in in the university that this world is a trust and God offered this trust to the mountains to the heavens 22 to the land to earth and all and all refused to refuse to take this trust but man being adventurous vain may be too ambitious being manned accepted now accepting it and there is a responsibility taking responsibility isn't always easy utopia may be unattainable but we must reach for it and master does give us a clue to what cities will be like in the future they may not look quite like mass star but they will be shaped by the same concerns by energy where it comes from

and how it's used the way we've been building cities lately is unsustainable we can't go on building them that way but to say that we can't build cities the way we have been building them doesn't mean we can't build cities in the future in fact we have to build cities cities are the essential statement of human civilization so we will continue to make them but we have to make them in a different way what we've seen is that the world of 2050 won't look drastically different from the world today but the challenges of a growing population increased energy demand real solutions its innovations like those we've just seen that will be critical and charting our path to the world of 2050