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: Gravitational Waves and Your 200th Year of Birth we look at the trends that we should be aware of today, February 12th, 2016.

LIGO and the Search for Gravitational Waves

Physicists have announced the discovery of gravitational waves, ripples in spacetime first anticipated by Albert Einstein a century ago.
“We have detected gravitational waves. We did it,” said David Reitze, executive director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), at a press conference in Washington.
The announcement comes after a century of assumption and speculation, 50 years of trial and error, and 25 years perfecting a set of instruments so sensitive they could identify a distortion in spacetime a thousandth the diameter of one atomic nucleus across a 4km strip of laserbeam and mirror. (which I think is very cool tech).

Here’s the full recording from the live stream from the National Science Foundation:

Paris in the Future

Sou Fujimoto, David Chipperfield and Manuelle Gautrand are among the winning architects in a competition seeking innovative design proposals for 23 sites across the French capital (+ slideshow).
Spearheaded by Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo, the Reinventer Paris competition called for architects and developers to team up and develop plans for numerous key sites around the city, from old railway stations to historic mansions.

Via Dezeen

Dr. Brad Perkins – Celebrate Your 200th Birthday!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgGTwExbi20

Canada sells off large chunks of its gold reserves

The government of Canada sold off large chunks of its gold reserves in recent weeks, continuing a pattern of moving away from the precious metal as a government asset.
According to the International Monetary Fund’s International Financial Statistics, Canada held three tonnes of gold reserves as of late 2015. The latest data, published last week by the Department of Finance, show the total Canadian gold reserves have now dropped to 0.62 tonnes. That’s less than 0.1 per cent of the country’s total reserves, which also include foreign currency deposits and bonds. In comparison, the U.S. holds 8,133 tonnes of gold, while the United Kingdom weighs in at 310 tonnes.

Via Global News

Should Governments Pay A Basic Income?

As income inequality rises, economists are debating the benefits of basic income. So what would it mean to institute a basic income?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dmhx7hjTTYM
Via TestTube News
See the last 4 week’s Future Trends articles here:

• Future Trends: Brainprints, AR on Eyes, and the Death of Golf

• Future Trends: Drone Racing, Minecraft, Go, and Holacracy

• Future Trends: Skills in 2020 and Sneaky Drones

• Future Trends: Global Risks, Spying, and Branded Dreams

***

Nikolas Badminton is a world-respected futurist speaker that researches, speaks, and writes about the future of work, how technology is affecting the workplace, how workers are adapting, the sharing economy, and how the world is evolving. He appears at conferences in Canada, USA, UK, and Europe. Email him to book him for your radio, TV show, or conference.