How to change the world! The bold and challenging title of a conference held recently in London, organized by the How to: Academy in collaboration with the University of Oxford’s Oxford Martin School. This was a conference that left little time for breathing – more than seven hours of presentations about fusion energy, broken hearts, ageing, dark matter, psychedelic drugs and much more. This was really about how to change the world!
With the climate summit in Paris on the horizon (and now safely and successfully concluded) it is not surprising that future energy sources and their sustainability were high on the agenda. It seems that basically humankind has three options: fusion, fission and solar energy. But is there the perfect energy source and what is it if it exists? Well, perfect energy needs only limited space, is virtually inexhaustible and safe, and importantly does not pump carbon emissions into our atmosphere. According to Steven Cowley, the director of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, fusion ticks all of these boxes. There is, however one very big BUT – it’s not easy. We may know more about the future of this energy source once the first reactor opens in 2025 in southern France.
There are clearly still lots of questions, but at least we are moving forward.
And talking about moving, the era of fully-automated vehicles is just around the corner – well 15 years from now. These vehicles will make driving much safer. Currently, around 1,200,000 deaths annually are caused by car accidents, which are caused by human error in 93% of cases. Another and perhaps more important benefit is that such vehicles will result in a cleaner environment.
Next on the conference agenda was water. According to the WEF’s Global Risk Report, 2015, (access to) water is potentially the greatest global risk of the next decade The water sector is becoming more energy intensive while the energy sector is becoming more water intensive. Professor Arjen Hoekstra talked specifically about our water footprint. Put simply, the water footprint measures the amount of water used to produce each of the goods and services we use. We use on average 3450 litres/day but most of this we don’t really see because it’s invisible water. When you think about it, everything is pretty much water. If we stop showering, we would save 80 litres/day. If we stop eating meat, we would save 800 litres/day. If you are feeling brave, calculate your personal water footprint here!
While we ask ourselves where all water is coming from and going to, Professor Patrick Decowski was asking how we can identify the missing 85% of the Universe. We know that the Universe comprises 1% of stars, 7% of gas and 7% of diffuse gas, and then we have the rest – 85% of dark matter. More than 1 billion dark particles go through us every second and we have spent that last 30 years hunting this dark matter. The next generation of dark matter detector will be 100 times more sensitive so perhaps that will help us identify and understand this last 85% of the Universe.
And who would have thought that psychedelic drugs would be a world changer? It turns out that psychedelic drugs have a huge therapeutic impact: depression scores decrease for 6 months (Grob et al. 11); smoking: 80% abstinence at 6 months (Johnson et al. 14); drinking decreases at 9 months (Bogenschutz et al. 15); anxiety decreases after 12 months (Gasser et al. 14); suicidal behaviour and psychological distress decrease (Hendricks et al. 15). We already know that LSD helps people with cluster headaches, let’s hope that it will help with treating depression as well.
Brain on placebo and psilocybin
But not just magic mushrooms can make us delusional. In actual fact, we are delusional all the time according to Beau Lotto, director of Lottolab. When we imagine something, it activates the part of our brain which is activated if we actually see it. So the imagined perception is the same as the real perception. Where then does that leave creativity? Creativity is the ability to see things differently. Perception is fundamental to everything – to what we see, what we think, what we believe, what we know, what clothes we wear, the people we fall in love in. Our perception finds patterns in the world around us. We don’t actually see this information, we just give meaning to the information based on previous experience. That means, we only see what we have already seen in the past. If this is the case, how are we able to see things differently if everything we see is based on a history that we’ve seen before? The answer is that creativity is about asking questions. But this is problematic because we hate uncertainty. It stresses our brain tremendously. Evolution’s solution to uncertainty is play, and play with intention is science. The process is quite simple: ask questions – step into uncertainty – use metaphors to explore this new space – and, most fundamentally, challenge what we think to be true already.
While energy, driverless vehicles, water, psychedelic drugs, black matter and creativity all excited me, I was most inspired by the topic of ageing. Professor Sarah Harper took us all on a journey into a world of ever-increasing life expectancy. As she explained, longevity is nothing new, we have always had old people and extremely old people. What is new is that in this century almost all of will grow old and a large proportion of us will grow extremely old, and this is happening across the globe. For instance, in 1850 half of the population of England was dead by 45, but now half of the population of England survives to age 85. How did this happen? The important lesson we have learned in 20th century is that we are able to push death back by confronting and conquering diseases. The science and genetics of the 21st century will enable us to face modern infections. Respiratory diseases have more or less disappeared as a cause of death. Cancer is an interesting case, because while the incidence of cancer is not declining, death from cancer is declining as we are able to delay people dying from cancer. Today, much is said about obesity and the impact it will have on the life expectancy, but in fact obesity will only have a very small impact on life expectancy – what it will do is have a more pronounced impact on disability. So the future may well be one of an increasingly disabled older population with increasing life expectancy. By the end of this century, there will be approximately 1.5 million centenarians in the United Kingdom. The quality of life of this long-lived population will be influenced by nanotechnology, genetics and stem-cells all providing the potential for a long healthy life.
The Eyes as Big as Plates- Project
So we face large and numerous challenges as we move into the mid-21st century. The future looks both exciting and daunting, but if we can unite, connect and think globally it may well be the best time to be alive.
About the Author:
Daria Belostotskaya is a James Martin Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing and a PhD candidate in Vienna University, the faculty of psychology.
Opinions of the blogger is their own and not endorsed by the Institute
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