Insights March 10th, 2017

Each week Nikolas Badminton, Futurist Speaker, summarizes the top-5 future looking developments and news items that I find to be inspiring, interesting, concerning, or downright strange. Each day he reads through dozens of blogs and news websites to find those things that we should be aware of.
In Future Trends – Artificial Power Islands we look at how 3 European countries want to change fuel production, 3D printing houses in 24 hours, quantum and chemistry, and a reminder of the prophecies of Marshall McLuhan.

Denmark, Germany, Netherlands want to create ‘artificial power island’

Three western European countries have revealed plans to build a giant artificial island in the middle of the North Sea where wind farms would create power for 80 million people.

The sandbank Dogger Bank, 100 kilometres off the east coast of England, is the mooted location for the groundbreaking ‘power island’ which would have its own runway and harbour.
The North Sea area has a relatively low altitude and receives a high amount of wind, making it the ideal location for the green power hub, according to transmission system operators Energinet.dk in Denmark and TenneT in Germany and the Netherlands.
The power transmission companies are expected to sign a contract on the 23^rd of March to enter a mutual feasibility study of the project.
Another advantage of creating the island will be a reduction in transport costs of materials for building the wind power plants in comparison with other offshore wind farms.
The island would be around six square kilometres in size and surrounded by thousands of windmills.

Meet The House That Was 3D Printed In 24 Hours

It was printed whole, rather than assembled from pre-printed parts.

Quantum and Chemistry

IBM Q systems will be designed to tackle problems in business and science that are too complex and exponential in nature for classical computing systems to handle. One of the first and most promising applications will be in the area of chemistry. Even for simple molecules like caffeine, the number of quantum states in the molecule can be astoundingly large — so large that all the conventional computing memory and processing power that could ever be built could not model it. Jerry Chow, manager of experimental quantum computing for IBM Research, explains that modeling a molecule is the key to understanding its properties — and could lead to the discovery of new materials and medicines.