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Tech-savvy entrepreneurs are aiming to find out whether vertical-farm markets, 3-D printers and other innovations can do some good for more than a billion people over the next decade … and do well enough to earn profits in the process. The ventures were born during a summer session at Singularity University in California's Silicon Valley, and announced by the university's founders just today.
Singularity U. started out three years ago as an idea that bounced around between inventor/futurist Ray Kurzweil (author of "The Singularity Is Near") and X Prize Foundation co-founder Peter Diamandis. The academic institution's graduate students pay $25,000 (minus scholarships) for a 10-week summer program aimed at filling them in on the promise of exponentially growing information technologies — a concept that Kurzweil is so keen on that I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up getting abbreviated to EGITs ("egg-its").
The way Kurzweil sees it, many walks of life are amenable to exponential acceleration — not just computer hardware, where the concept manifests itself as Moore's Law, but medical advances and energy possibilities as well. Kurzweil believes information technology will eventually help us crack the codes of life and take advantage of the terawatts of solar power hitting our planet. "Ultimately it transforms all these other areas," Kurzweil said today during a video briefing.
Dickson Despommier / Verticalfarm
An artist's conception shows the "Living Tower" vertical farm concept. Learn more about vertical farming..
So how do EGITS apply to entrepreneurship? Diamandis observed that most business ideas are based on technology as it is, not technologies as they will be. "It takes three or four years to bring a business to market, and by that time, it's obsolete," he said. During the graduate program, students are encouraged to think outside the box, or at least think inside an exponentially growing box.
Last year, as part of Singularity U.'s "10 to the Ninth Plus" project, the students came up with four ideas for spin-off ventures that they thought could improve the lives of at least a billion people over the next 10 years — including Getaround and CiviGuard. Getaround is an online rental service aimed at maximizing the usage of private automotive vehicles. "Their goal is to do for automobiles what cloud computing does for computers," Kurzweil explained. CiviGuard is working to set up a system for two-way emergency communication, linking victims with emergency responders.
This year's graduate students produced about a dozen ideas, aimed at providing more abundant food, cleaner energy, cleaner water, improved access to space and more sustainable use of technology (a concept dubbed "upcycling"). Here's the full lineup:
Food: A venture called Agropolis aims to put hydroponics and vertical farming to work on a local scale. "This particular project ... deals with producing little modules that can be decentralized," Kurzweil said. One potential application would be to grow produce as well as farm-bred tilapia fish and bioengineered meat inside a multistory building, and sell the foodstuffs at a market located in the same building. "They're off at this point to start up a company," Diamandis said.
"We have a schedule for research, and we're talking with partners to build a prototype," team member Maggie Jack told me. She said the first prototype facilities would be set up in California and India — but there's lots that has to be done before taking that step. "We're working on this kind of in our part time, spare time, until the winter," said Jack, who is a program manager for San Francisco-based Social Venture Technology Group. Â
Energy: Another potential startup is Amunda, which would seek to set up small-scale markets in energy for the developing world. "A group can basically say, 'We have 500 households that need this many kilowatts per day,'" Diamandis said. Potential energy providers could then bid to provide the energy for that market. Online tools, such as a "Google Earth with a marketing overlay," could facilitate such markets, Diamandis said.
Water: One team project, dubbed Naishio, would enlist converging technologies (bio plus nano plus solar) to desalinate seawater more efficiently. Former NASA astronaut Dan Barry, Singularity U.'s faculty head, thinks technological convergence was a key to success. "That's where it really starts to get exciting and explodes for me," he said today. Other ventures include Sensoria, which focuses on biology-based sensor technologies to test water purity; and H2020, which would set up an online destination about water resources.
Space: Made in Space would enlist 3-D printers to make spare parts for spacecraft such as the International Space Station, rather than having to ship up tons of parts just in case something breaks. "You just launch the goo, the plastic, the material that you're going to print parts out of," Barry said. That could dramatically reduce the amount of mass that has to be launched to support a particular mission. "It can be the difference between a Mars mission that gets funded and goes, versus one that's too expensive and too difficult to do," Barry said.
Another venture is working with NASA's Ames Research Center and the California Institute of Technology to develop a beamed-energy system that would send up laser light or microwaves to power spacecraft. "That system has the potential to be on the order of 50 to 100 times more efficient than traditional launch vehicles," Diamandis said. Still other teams came up with ideas to bioengineer organisms for extraterrestrial environments, or to do low-cost biological research in space.
Upcycling: The Fre3dom team is working on a 3-D printing process that would allow local communities in the developing world to make their own spare parts for broken-down equipment. "They've identified a new bioplastic that would work well with the existing cutting-edge generation of 3-D printers," Kurzweil said. Other teams are trying to come up with better methods to extract valuable metals from electronic waste (BioMine) and create more efficient markets for products that one company might see as industrial waste (i2cycle).
All these ideas will require financing to be turned into realities, of course, and part of Singularity U.'s appeal is that venture capital types (from companies such as ePlanet Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers)Â Â have been involved in the summer session alongside the entrepreneurs. That's part of the reason why the students are willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars for 10 weeks of summer school.
If you were an investor, which ideas would you bet on? If you were a philanthropist, which causes would you support? What challenges would you want to see next year's Singularity U. graduate students address? Or do you think there are better ways to do good while doing well? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.
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These are great concepts - only they all have the same Achilles. They're all concepts that rely on the abundance of cheap and plentiful energy, like the kind currently provided by coal, oil, and natural gas. Great concepts, but until you can completely remove fossil fuels from the equation and build and power them sustainably from scratch using renewable energy sources, its a pipe dream and a road to nowhere.
No one wants to say the two dreaded words - Peak Oil.
Its already too late for most of these concepts, we should have been using them 30 years back. And forget about the dream of some magical technology that'll solve the global energy crisis. We should've been working on that 50 years ago.
So unless some lab somewhere creates some invention that can magically turn back the hands of time and give us another 25 to 30 years of cheap none renewables, allowing us time to transition our global infrastructures to renewables - its just a case of too little too late. Maybe next time.
The way Kurzweil sees it, the energy problem is on its way to being solved with solar power. "We actually have 10,000 times more sunlight than we need coming from the sun, and it's free," he said today. In the next decade, solar power is "going to have real economic force," he said. He listed it along with "biology becoming information technology" and the rise of virtual/augmented reality as a transformative factor for the next decade. I don't know if Kurzweil's correct, but this might explain why these folks weren't agonizing over the dearth of energy sources.
Energy is never cheap, but it will always be plentiful. Basic economics will insure that we will not simply run out, nor will energy get so astronomically expensive that we can't afford it. As the supply of fossil fuels dwindles the price will naturally rise. It will not have to rise much before more resources (money) will naturally flow into r&d and improve solar panels, wind generation, and batteries efficiency, gradually taking an increasing bite out of fossil fuels which will in turn reduce demand for fossil fuels and lengthen their supply lifetime. This process could be easily jump started not by subsidizing current inefficient solar, wind, etc (which hampers innovation), but by ceasing to subsidize fossil fuel exploration through tax breaks etc and let fossil fuels true price be reflected in the marketplace. Basic supply and demand will not let us fall off a cliff.
Nuclear, while not ideal, is far more environmental than fossil fuels. France is supplying 90% of it's power in this fashion. The US has large open areas for safe plant builds and lots of room for supplemental solar, steam (the forgotten source) and wind generation.We could easily shift our entire economy away from Fossil fuels in 30 years, the public would just have to sacrifice automobile range and accept more rail for long trips.
And what could possibly go wrong with shading thousands of square miles of land? I'm half kidding actually, we already do that with our cities, on top of which much of the first solar panels will be placed. But if it becomes the next addiction instead of a balanced approach, covering great swaths of desert with solar panels that convert the light to electricity instead of heat has climate changing potential all its own.
Also, a misconception a friend had with vertical farming is that there is more total sunshine accessed by "growing up", as if the sunshine in the air above us doesn't fall somewhere else on the earth. Perhaps a better description is better sunshine harvesting to footprint ratio, if your neighbors don't mind you "stealing" their sunshine (they will if they have solar panels.)
The Agropolis/Verticle Farming idea looks interesting. Where it turns me off is that the produce would probably not be organically grown, even though hydroponics works well for organics, and farm raised fish are notoriously low in beneficial Omega-3 oils, and usually require the use of antibiotics. And leave it to tech guys to want to grow 'bio-engineered meat!' Can't we have tech with naturally produced food?? Please?? Small scale organic farming sounds more appealing with fewer things to break... and I like the idea that my cow or chicken lived as good and humane and happy a life as is possible when you are a food animal.
What about the waste stream from one of these units? How would this be better than the current factory farm feed lots which generate tons of bio-waste? Organic family farms on the other hand naturally spread out their bio-burden over many acres of land as nature intended.
nitrogen laden water produced by fish farming is great fertilizer for the organic hydroponics. The challenge is finding organic food source for the fish in sufficient quantities. The other problem with true organic farming is the proximity in this model. A pest (bug or disease) could wipe out the entire facility very quickly.
There's a pretty good article on vertical farms in a recent Scientific American. Sorry, I'm too lazy to go thru a lot of back issues to find it, but probably SciAm.com has a reference. As I recollect, your issues are addressed in detail. For instance, the produce can be organically grown, and the farm waste is recycled as compost and energy.
These are great ideas, but ... oh wait, they're not great ideas. They're just untested hypothetical wishlists.
These students pay $25K to spend 10 weeks dreaming up a few technological wishlists without actually working out the details of implementation and effectiveness. Nowadays, real breakthroughs are not made by a handful of non-experts after 10 weeks of brainstorming. They are made by large teams of experts through a long process of baby steps and trial-and-error.
And Ray Kurzweil's whole technological singularity idea is a bunch of hogwash. Just because a process looks kinda' linear on a linear-log plot doesn't mean it's growing exponentially fast, and _certainly— doesn't mean that it will grow exponentially fast in the future. I guess Ray's never heard of a sigmoid. This is the same guy who sold millions of books predicting that cars would drive themselves by 2010 (amongst other things). Now he's charging people $25K to attend some hokey school. A smart guy indeed.
Nuclear, while not ideal, is far more environmental than fossil fuels. France is supplying 90% of it's power in this fashion. The US has large open areas for safe plant builds and lots of room for supplemental solar, steam (the forgotten source) and wind generation.We could easily shift our entire economy away from Fossil fuels in 30 years, the public would just have to sacrifice automobile range and accept more rail for long trips.
I would love to see these energetic young people work on something that is already readily possible and just needs their effort to get it launched - a worker owned franchise to produce organic tempeh burgers in small shops everywhere. Too down to earth? (www.makethebesttempeh.org)
Another segway into the future...
My goodness, what a bunch af skeptics. As for the idiot who says it's too late we should have done this 30 years ago, That's about the worst idea I've ever heard. Why don't you go stick your head in the sand since you don't have anything constructive to contribute. All of these ideas hold promise or are at least are the results of people who care. Our nation and hi tech in general would never get any where without forward thinking people. Since we don't have a cure for AIDS, Cancer and a host of other social ills is hardly an excuse not to be looking for them. As for all the other skeptics, all kinds iof good things started out as an unheard of idea most of which required lots of experiments, failures and the occasional success. If mankind was populated by only people with your negative view of things unknown, we would all be still living in caves.
Exactly right. Thank you. These ideas might turn out to be wrong or useless, in fact it's almost certain that some or most of them will. But if just one works on a large scale, it could be a huge benefit for humanity. I guess some people just hate humanity. There's alot of humans I don't like but I kind of have a soft spot for humanity since I'm part of it.
Well being the idiot - as you so eloquently put it, who stated that we should've been working on this 30 years ago, allow me to retort.
Another blogger on the post mentioned France's energy model. 30 years ago the United States was just beginning to recover from the energy price shocks from the peaking of our own domestic oil production. The same peak that then president, Jimmie Carter tried to warn the nation about. France saw what happened to us, and their political leaders actually started listening to the scientists instead of cutting their funding. As a result the French embarked on a decades long quest to free their society from greenhouse gas emitting fossil fuel. They chose nuclear to get them started. Wouldn't have been my first choice, due to the radioactive waste issues, but its what they did.
Meanwhile we all but mothballed our nuclear industry, Reagan tore down the solar panels that Carter had installed on the White House roof, the oil, gas, and coal industries had their oversights stripped away and so we built more coal fired power plants, more fuel thirsty cars instead of more fuel efficient ones, and all but guaranteed the next great depression. A funny thing happened though in 2008. Since the worlds economy is globalized now, 2008's price shocks at the pump that caused the collapse of the housing market here in the US, were felt globally. In short, it was a domino effect.
Despite all of the evidence, the worlds leaders following the US lead, never saw it coming.
Now fast forward back to the present. The planet's gotten a whole lot smaller, with an estimated 7 billion people by the year 2012. Now all of these people, in particular in India, Pakistan, China, etc, want the western lifestyle, condo's, big houses, airplanes, airports, roads, bridges, high rises, megacity's. Show me the solar power tractor, or solar powered crane, or the wind powered delivery truck, or the nuclear powered tanker, or the geothermally powered steel or glass works that'll produce all of the raw materials needed to built up their infrastructures.
You can't, because it doesn't exist, and there-in lies the problem. The population is continuing to grow due to the availability of cheap, energy dense fossil fuels, not because we're deploying renewable energy worldwide. The other side of this coin is that while the worlds populations continue to explode, the non-renewable, energy dense fossil fuels fueling that growth, namely oil, has peaked and is now in decline.
That's not my opinion, thats a verifiable scientific fact.
Now what do you think these kids from this think tank were thinking when they created these models? That cheap energy will continue to be abundant, which already it isn't and it won't be, as currently being demonstrated by the ever increasing rise in the price of fuel. What kinds of construction equipment will be creating these model structures of such great efficiency? More to the point, what will be powering the manufacturing and construction equipment it'll take to build these things?
Tell what it won't be. Wind, Solar, Geothermal, Nuclear.
Raw materials mined and shipped by diesel powered vehicles, boats, rail, semi tractor trucks, to manufacturing factory's powered by coal fired power plants, finished products shipped again by dieseled power trains, trucks, and kerosene burning airplanes, to construction sites cleared with more diesel powered equipment, lifted, hoisted, assembled by workers using equipment that is either powered by fossil fuels, or that derive their power from a fossil fuel powered electric grid.
Did you see a renewable energy source anywhere in that process? The only thing sustainable in the entire process was the imaginations of the students who dreamed it up. How many tons of carbon fuel would it take to build just one of these so called "sustainable" structures? How many millions of btu's of carbon based energy would it take?
Rising carbon based energy costs + energy hungry manufacturing and building methods = An increase in already unsustainable demand
The very thing that they propose as a solution to a global problem would've been one 50 years ago, but in today's developing world is anything but, and is now the complete opposite. Look at any oil and gas company's prospectus over the past two decades. Tell me when you see the increase in funding for building additional refineries. The hand writings on the wall, and you're either too ignorant, been there and done that too, or unwilling to see it for what it is and what it means, or... Whatever.
Be a cornicopian all you like, but don't call me an idiot.
I'd like to see bioengineered microbes that can cheaply remove phosphorus and nitrogen from wastewater. However, this probably requires much more basic science work than these projects are geared for.
The Living Tower is urban bliss and an answer to innumerable social and economic problems in the inner city. Fresh food, jobs, living quarters and corporate offices within the structure, less trucking of goods long distances...
This is no pipe dream. It is being built in France.
We need more men and women of vision in this country working with the skilled unemployed.
Americans need a "New Deal" type leader willing to apply the nation's collective energy to restructuring the country for life in the 22 century and beyond. Without that kind of leadership...the nation will founder economically and ultimately.
Americans are deep into World War III...economic warfare...and they are losing ground every day.
Nations do not gain strength via service industry employment. Manufacture, manufacture, manufacture...without 19th century, black sludge greasing the wheels.
Detroit should throw a scare into every citizen and investor hoping to leave a legacy. As a model city, It may become the rule...rather than the exception.
I am all for forward thinking and looking for ways to improve on issues we currently face. But after reading through the article I could do the same thing from the comfort of my couch without the need to pay someone $25k for what amounts to wishful thinking.
We need energy solutions now not 10 years from now and I agree with Unconvinced these are things as a nation we should have been working on 50-30 years ago been we didn't and its not going to be long before we are sucked under by rising energy costs due to their lack of sustainability. Solar is only going to be a small fraction of renewable energy as it has already been noted that current technologies cannot create enough energy density and efficiency to be viable as a mainstream method for replacing oil and natural gas. Not to mention that there is a finite level of elements and materials on this planet and only a few have photovoltaic properties.
If I were a venture capitalist I wouldn't bother with any of the above. I would be focusing on materials research for materials that would have increased energy density and efficiencies for yes solar, methane and biogas conversion to electricity, wind, and ways to convert huge amounts of garbage into usable energy sources, recycling and sustainable GE free hydroponics and sustainable GE free protein sources like Soy and farm raised but cage free, ethically treated livestock. Farm raised fish ok but as long as we aren't pumping them full of antibiotics and foods they wouldn't normally eat.
How about someone come up with a viable idea for large scale carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide scrubbers that can break CO2 and CO into its elemental parts. How about a material that attracts methane molecules to it like an unpowered vacuum tube that can be placed in dumps, marshes, bottoms of lakes and ponds or out in the siberian tundra and collect methane found naturally in these places. Oh see I just did what those kids did and I didn't have to pay $25k to come up with ideas for technology that doesn't exist and probably won't for another 100 years. Hope is one thing wishful thinking is another. The global energy marker will probably crash well before its close to even being fixed.
Researchers *have* been working ont hese thigns for decades; fossil fuels are just still too cheap and readily avaialbvale for them to compete.
Well, I'm glad that some people are thinking about ideas for down the road, even if they are fanciful or seem impossible now. Wasn't that long ago that space transportation was considered "too hard" and "too expensive" too.
A lot of people are thinking about ideas for down the road, a whole lot of people. Billions of dollars are invested every day in ideas for down the road.
The difference is that most of these dollars go into actual research into the feasibility of the ideas. The issue is not that these student's ideas are "too expensive" or "too hard." The issue is that these students paid $25K without actually contributing to understanding how their ideas might be realized.
All that tuition money would have been better invested by donating it to the true experts who are getting their hands dirty actually trying to implement ideas that will help humanity, instead of just daydreaming about it.
"Skeptic" - one who sees the glass as perpetually half empty. You're doing well, sir. Keep that negative attitude, and you won't invent or help anything.
Other people who have ideas and are creative, on the other hand, will help us move forward. You know, we don't ever get to the point of getting money to the "true experts who are getting their hands dirty" without someone FIRST coming up with a "crazy idea." The "personal computer" was considered a "crazy idea" a mere 3 decades ago, until some crazy young guys with the last names of Jobs and Gates spent some time FIRST daydreaming, then DOING.
Stop being so darn skeptical, and remember that "implementing ideas that will help humanity" STARTS with a daydream before it can ever become reality in the first place.
I had a simple idea decades ago to grow hydroponics in ascending/descending raingutters on chain drives where the water is pumped into the top tier which rains down on the next tier etc till the water/ponics is collected at the basin forcing the whole thing to ferris wheel around with the water that is continually pumped back up to keep driving the whole contraption...turns out this has been used to grow asperagus for decades...you do gain a little bit of square acreage but vs. the cost the machinary (ceap) plus the cost of operation (energy not really cheap) the real payoff appears to be in the ease of crop maintenance and harvesting...maybe there really is 10,000 times more solar energy than we use but at the current efficiency rates, total tonnage of scarce raw materials for solar panels AND high production costs (even the thin film stuff is high TCO vs. lifetime efficiency) let alone the premiums installers get for simple dc installations, the grand plus network interconnects, the 3k$+ lightning prone inverters and the gwady+expensive batteries...naw...get a methane powered generator...kurzwiel is tring to grow his investment dollars with yours, not help you keep yours in your pockets...personally I proposed the 3d solar cell a decade ago, but not to increase surface area per se, more so because all EM waves are three dimensional (not that is a BIG clue)...still, solar cells are very INEFFICIENT and besides even kurzwiel is bright enough to know that all but a few researchers even suposited the idea of harvesting more than a narrow wave band of solar energy..this really limits the portion of that 10000 imaginary number....of course everyone that can should put solar roof on, just diy...myself, I think organic dyes on a titanium dye is the way to go..(last hint)..by golly I wonder what it will cost for a gallon of blueberry juice so I can run it through my solar concentrator and then sieve it through a fuel cell at the bottom to harvest the protons out so I can pump it back to the top again ad infintim, err...rather for about a month, then the UV rays break down the organic dye. But heck by then maybe another gallon or two of blueberry juice is ready for the system!!....thats right, you heard it here first!!...only I doubt it will be actaul BLUEBERRY JUICE!!!...that just sounds epa ok......vertical farmers out of neccesity may very well succeed, though not as the artists concieve it...vertical farmers out of pure profit motive....hahahahahaha....bring rube goldberg back! at least he was sincere....10000 times the energy needed???...maybe he ougta blow that smoke up a fuel cell, at least that hot air oughta have some hydrogen in it...we can't even see the energy he is referring too...need infrared glasses for that....(that clue was just extra)
I quit reading at "lab-grown meat" ...disgusting.
After 3 days with no food, the body no longer has cravings with real meditation.
If it comes down to it, fasting unto death I would as soon choose, than eat "lab- grown" meat.
Hey folks,
So I was one of the students at SU this summer and actually presented the Water project (video above with a better version here: bit.ly/br8k19
For everyone's reference there is a tremendous amount of added detail and context that you don't see in these 5 minute presentations including how these future businesses start today to evolve into a future in which these solutions can affect 1 billion people. There simply wasn't enough time to walk through all the logic, rationale and science but it was not based on technology wishes but on today's reality and the technological progression.
The University is a future focused institution that is aimed at leveraging exponentially advancing technologies to solve the world's biggest problems. We had access to a plethora of leading thinkers across a ton of different disciplines along with a group of multidisciplinary students from around the world (35 different countries) all charged with this ambitious task. For 10 weeks we were immersed in looking into the future and how we may be able to help using the intersection of these technologies . . . I can't help but think that isn't a bad thing.
The SU program has been a life changing experience which has tremendous application not only for the future but also how to deal with matters today. I would encourage anyone who has ambitions and curiosity beyond today to give it a shot
Sasha
This may sound unreasonably cruel, but I, personally, resist any measure that will unnaturally increase the food supply. History has proven that when that happens the population increases more than even the increase can address. Our first priority should be to curb population, every other consideration is secondary.
Colleagues, good afternoon. I agree that large corporations, various government and equity funds to finance the billions of different design - results in many of them are very vague. Meanwhile, no big research teams (who do not have huge overhead costs) are ready if there is no large investments produce real results. Moreover large companies often deliberately slow down the introduction of new technologies. Since they have spent huge money to build plants with outdated technology, and they need to make a profit. And the emergence of a new technology that allows production of cheaper and qualitatively similar to the product they were not advantageous.
Therefore, no large companies still seek direct contact with the real stakeholders in the development of green investors.
Dear Sirs\ Mis, our company is interested in quickly attracting venture
funding(program GRANT) to finish work on the technology of production of
solar
modules with high efficiency. Nizhi request for funding and in the
annex to the letter the results of our work in the form of a report
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Inventor of.
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REQUIRED AMOUNT OF VENTURE FINANCING - $ 3000 000.
The additional informationFinancing term - 14 months. Return of the
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PROPOSAL FOR COOPERATION for venture investors
After production of the industrial design and an independent test, we
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% Of revenue from the sale of technology.
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Our technology has a wide range of potential buyers.
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right to the technology will be limited to use by the buyer on the
Territories
and obemu release.
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
At present the main trends in development by improving the efficiency of
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So a few days ago, the Japanese company Sharp after 9 years of work
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Our company has gone a different way:
1. We left a substrate of mono silicon.
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* Main layer of nano-size mono atomic amorphous silicon, is a very active
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meter
photovoltaic plates.
* extreme layer is an anti-reflecting the carbon coating.
Total efficiencies achieved over 35%.
If you compare the cost of Sell-based mono silicon efficiency 16%
Cell produced by our technology with efficiency over 35%, our Sell more
10-15% while the efficiency of our Sell more than 2 times better.
While improving the technology and equipment we can achieve efficiency of
50% and above.
In addition to the use of solar energy nanoscale mono atomic amorphous
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respect
VLADIMIR KARASEV
Email: vladimirkarasev1@gmail.com