The World In 2050 [The Real Future Of Earth] - Full Documentary HD

we are in a race the race is against time we have to build cities we need them but we have to do them in a different way we need a wave of innovation not only for our way of life but also for the planet the consequences would be huge if we lose this battle i am thomas goetz executive editor of wired magazine on wired we'll look at the innovators and innovations that are changing our

world

in the next hour we'll look at three stories from acclaimed filmmakers on the

future

of energy let's Explore cutting-edge innovations in how we drive, how we live in, and in our first story, how we power our cars, are all ideas that promise to shape the path to the

world

of

2050

.

Right now, the world has close to a billion cars, and we could double the number of cars in the planet by

2050

. So if we double the number of vehicles, we

real

ly increase the amount of fuel they consume and that's going to have a big footprint in terms of our resource demand to move all those vehicles. we are extracting the carbon that has been stored underground and burning it in our cars and putting all that carbon dioxide into the atmosphere if we don't reduce that we could have changes in the climate that we could never recover from there are a number of forecasts for what kind from transport economics we could move to a vision is that we will use more and more liquid fuels other owners will use more and more electricity and at the moment a greater part of the industrial activity is focused on liquid biofuels what happens with a fuel is that it is truly unmatched in terms of weight, how much power is in a gallon of fuel and even if batteries develop as some proponents hope they do, we're not going to see batteries powering big trucks and we're certainly not going to see an electrified truck airplane we are going to need transportation fuels for those that will directly replace the petroleum-based fuels we are using today this has caused people to look for a wide range of other alternatives to petroleum in their tank commercial production of ethanol as a fuel Started in Brazil in 1975.

When we started the ethanol program, nobody was talking about reducing emissions, this was not a problem at the time, first and foremost, we no longer had money to buy oil. After the first oil shock, we were oil importers and today more than 50 percent of all cars use ethanol instead of gasoline Brazil made a very conscious decision to try to find a way to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels and They didn't have to look far because Brazil's climate is ideal for growing sugarcane so you have a sugarcane plantation you only have two things to make sugar and ethanol my family has been in the sugarcane business since 1955 and about 30 years ago I thought there was an opportunity to make more ethanol and now we are producing 120,000 cubic meters of ethanol brazil today has very close to 400 sugar meals total sales are 30 billion US dollars and this number is increasing if you look at how they make ethanol and how efficient the process is it's

real

ly a model for all of us they grind the extract from the plant the sugar from the cane the sugar goes into these big fermentation tanks which combine the sugars with the yeast which produces ethanol they naturally use the rest of the plant to generate heat to distill the ethanol and turn it into fuel they also use that heat to generate electricity in a renewable way by not putting excess carbon dioxide into the atmosphere brazil has reached a point where that they are using about 40 percent less oil than they would otherwise, but Brazil can't supply ethanol to the whole world because they would have to greatly reduce food production and in critical natural areas like the Amazon for that to happen and this really comes down to the fact that there is only so much arable land and the growing fuel for our gas tanks is yet another demand on that landscape that we can't help but think that we found a blanket solution to the world's problems I think we will have. to face the world in this way today we no longer have oil in very large quantities we do not have coal transformed in a clean way meanwhile we have to do the best we can and the best thing right now is that we can make biofuels from sugar cane to ethanol is an incredibly efficient process you get seven times the energy you put into growing sugarcane in the united states when we make ethanol from corn for every unit of energy input we get about the same amount of energy so really we're not gaining anything, we need a better process, we don't have to take what nature has given us, we can engineer plants and yeast to be more efficient and that's the basis for a lot of the work we're doing now, what we have What to see is which of the paths that come out of this are not only good financially, but also those that are also good sustainability-wise, and this equation is wide open, right? now we are in a race to develop fuels the race is not with other countries the race is against time to meet immediate and

future

demands we made the energy solution sprout from the

earth

brazil is the most efficient ethanol producing country in the world sugar cane alcohol of brazil can reduce the total carbon footprint by up to 70 percent compared to gasoline the biggest challenge for fuel suppliers and car manufacturers is to reduce co2 emissions in the next 20 years the demand for mobility will continue to grow we believe that biofuels are very important because they help immediately all forms of fuel will be necessary hydrocarbons natural gas biofuels all of them will be part of the energy for the future of transportation brazil has been very successful in taking a resource that they had and find the process to convert that into ethanol and people call those first generation biofuels.

We have a lot of lab work around the world looking at second generation that usually converts cellulosic material from, for example, weeds into biofuels and the United States is very much at the forefront of innovation part of the equation for centuries we've been using yeast to consume glucose and make wine and beer we're trying to do something very similar only we're engineering yeast to consume that glucose and turn it into a fuel or a drug or a chemical that we call synthetic biology and when I started in this area a lot of my colleagues said oh jay this is great work but where is the app what are you going to do with these tools who cares malaria is a huge problem in any year one million people die from the disease and most are children under the age of five so we thought this was a great opportunity to engineer yeast to make a malaria drug called artemisinin this drug is derived from plants right now but it is too expensive for people in the world under development so my lab engineered yeast to make small amounts of artemisinin now that the process is scaling up and we'll have this drug on the market soon but at substantially reduced cost it turns out that anti-malaria drug is a hydrocarbon and is very similar in many ways to diesel fuel. it's going to be our new oil we need a source for that glucose so the crops we're looking at are crops like switchgrass this is a native grass that grows without a lot of water and on marginal land but we could turn it into farms energy.

The challenge though is that unlike sugarcane, it's very difficult to extract the sugar from that biomass, so we use what we call a pre-treatment process to extract the glucose from the plant and then feed that glucose into a yeast that we have engineered to produce hydrocarbons and that yeast absorbs the sugar and changes its composition and gives us this high energy molecule that floats to the top you remove them you put them in your tank but it takes a lot of work to get them out of that little test tube all the way to the million gallon tank, so we have to give it time, but I think some of the discoveries that are happening could apply to the end of the decade in terms of a sustainable equation for the planet.

The role of biofuels is quite complicated, there are a variety of crops that don't compete directly with food and finding ways to use those types of crops first is very attractive, so figuring out the science is part of the story, but then evaluating all these new fuels in terms of the

earth

using the impacts they could have that's an even harder story than doing the good science imagine you could have a 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 synthetic biologists are trying to take plants and make them do things they normally wouldn't do, on the other hand materials chemists like me want to do artificial photosynthesis to improve on the process nature does in the actual photosynthesis we need to be modeled after plants convert 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 hydrogen coming out of a photoactive material, that's an example of a semiconductor breaking chemical bonds in water to produce hydrogen and oxygen, ultimately our parts will be contained in something that its easy to roll out like a bubble wrap or in sunlight and water you would vent the oxygen into the air but the bottom would remove your liquid or gaseous fuel which you could then collect and use for our cars and planes and storage our goal is two years from now having the first artificial photosynthesis a solar fuel generator we can get our hands on and then scaling beyond that time, we're certainly not good at predicting the future, but electric vehicles seem like a sustainable option to me.

We've heard proposals for things as crazy as nuclear-powered planes and even some proposals to transport cargo with lighter-than-air vehicles. and so if the future in 2050 includes a fair amount of oil, which means we haven't implemented as many of these clean technologies as we already know are possible if you think about how long it takes us to build the oil industry we can't hope to reverse that overnight it's a big change in our infrastructure yes we should have been working on it 30 years ago we didn't we are trying to make up for that and that means basic research needs to be done now and by as many people as possible , we have a long way to go but I am confident that we will make it in the future 3D maps will help people get to places more efficiently as we have just seen the race to produce cleaner energy go on in the meantime Demand for cars continues to rise By 2050 there are projected to be two billion cars on the planet and fuel consumption will have tripled to keep up we will have to radically change the way we drive this is our next story driven by design the car came about in many ways it was the future we thought of it as one of the most positive changes that had ever happened to society suddenly our ability to get a job changed we can live further away with bigger pieces of land with a better quality of life everything is it looked pretty good but there are limitations to swear by the car if it gets congested your quality of life drops immediately from spending so much time in the car it's very inefficient use of fuel consumption things start to make sense all of a sudden it doesn't get you anywhere you want getting there actually sometimes takes you farther the average american spends nearly 300 hours a year in their car 38 of them stuck in traffic annually congestion consumes over a billion worth of gasoline in the usa alone inefficiency caused by traffic both financial and personal it's huge the story of dirk sheen and carmen white is not that unusual today dirk works an hour and a half away in warrenville illinois he usually didn't get off work until 6 or 6 30 and i would say a regular time for him to get home it's around 8. usually when i wake up i'm the only one waking up sometimes the kids wake up with my routine most of the time i don't see them in the morning i think about my trip to the work when I wake up, check the traffic report, see if there are any delays, worst case scenario it takes me two hours to get to work, we are already very limited in the amount of time you can spend with the kids and our expenses are incredibly tall.

Spending $400 a month on gas takes away ourfood budget and we've never paid for that gasoline before. There is 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 in favor of that the cost of traffic is people's time it's wasted fuel it's an emotional cost it's a frustration using the roads smarter is a much more efficient approach to the inability to keep up with the supply day with traffic demand if you take a satellite image of the road you can see that there is actually a lot of open space and if we had the technology to make cars drive closer but safely then network utilization could be increased of roads, which means that to be more efficient you have 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 will be able to help people get there to places safer or more efficiently today it just helps you get from point a to point b, but what if I want to get somewhere and use as little fuel as possible or if I have a hybrid vehicle and i want to make sure i have enough charge to not only get there but also to get back home? therefore, the information that is going to help people achieve the most efficient or safest route is more detailed information about the road than many people believe is possible to gather today here in chicago nokia's location and commerce unit is developing the next generation of lidar mapping sonar 360 degree video all are components of what nokia calls digital mapping we use 64 lasers that rotate and collect data in a 3d shape about the world creating what we call a point cloud of information that point cloud allows us to measure distances between points that we collect that system combined with cameras with higher precision location sensing through inertial measurement units that complete data system allows us to collect 1.3 million data points per second , probably two or three years from now you will see 3D maps that will integrate traffic information into your route to help you understand if I have five different routes to take, which one is the most efficient today given the way traffic lights work given the The way the traffic works, all of those factors will be taken into account to make sure I have the best route, but better mapping that can integrate infrastructure topography and density is only part of the answer another the key to improving efficiency of transportation is building self-driving cars autonomous vehicle technology has tremendous potential to improve the efficiency of our road infrastructure by taking humans out of the equation we remove all the things we do wrong behind the wheel speeding up changing lanes too much often join randomly and By combining autonomous vehicles with sophisticated 3D mapping, we can make driving safer and more energy efficient.

Swedish truck company Scania is currently building a next-generation vehicle. The solution is to see that vehicles can use smart maps. three-dimensional maps. With traffic information, vehicles will be intelligent and communicate with each other, talk to each other, talk to the infrastructure, and we'll see

full

y autonomous driving vehicles. The goal was to have several robots and see if they could go 60 miles

full

y autonomously. my name is helen taylor my husband john and i are very passionate about fuel economy yes its great to break world records but thats not the only end now its more important to educate people together we are showing the drivers around the world simple techniques to improve your fuel efficiency we run these educational programs we take people on the road with us and ultimately fine-tune their driving techniques, things like just checking tire pressure before getting in their car car for every psi your tires are inflated you are wasting three percent of your fuel efficiency and the difference between 65 and 75 miles per hour there is a 23 percent savings when you talk to the general public they are very surprised that an energy company like Shell is trying to educate people on how to save money how to reduce CO2 emissions and here we have Shell sending us around the world to do that, you always hope when you are on this planet that you can make a real difference in people's lives when you get emails from people saying I've saved this amount. of money this year now I can put food on the table so you know you are really making a difference by showing traffic density on urban infrastructure in a revolutionary way Digital 3D maps will help create a more fuel efficient future but these technologies are limited by the drivers behind the wheel some believe that for cars and trucks to be truly energy efficient they will have to drive themselves technology is coming into play through sensors and capabilities for cars to drive autonomously in 2007 the united states department of defense held a competition to see if a fully autonomous autonomous vehicle was possible darpa represents the defense advanced research projects agency they have a competition to develop autonomous robots that could drive themselves in traffic the goal was to have several robots drop them a course and see if they could go 60 miles in six hours driving fully autonomously can be one of the most complex things we do every day drivers make dozens of decisions at any given time a study found that drivers were exposed to more than 1,300 pieces of information per minute we make so many decisions when we're driving without even thinking about it, so when creating our vehicle, a big component of the company was developing software to handle many sensors that fed many data and generated a bunch of potential paths that the vehicle could follow and even though the robot doesn't have the ability to predict the future using this fast random route generation, the robot could anticipate a potential accident and choose a route to avoid it Because you're always thinking about what things the car could do next. one expects millions of cars to be driving themselves anytime soon but there is one place where auto navigation technologies are being optimized to create the vehicle of the future beyond let's go to their test track outside stockholm where we have basically looks at the motorway but it is a separate test track where we carry out our own experiments scania, the swedish trucking company, recently began testing its next generation of long-haul trucks using radar sonar and smart mapping.

They have been able to drastically reduce fuel consumption. We have this example with squads where you make use of the reduction in air resistance or air resistance you get from driving close to each other with heavy vehicles and to control this you need to know where the other vehicles are where your position your speed your actions nearby future and being very close to the vehicle in front of you requires you to have very precise control if you look at robotics in general there is a wonderful body of research out there on people looking at schools of fish and trying to develop the ability of robots to work together so they are wonderful examples from nature of how cooperation can lead to more efficient use of resources, you can see it when people compete in tourists, form squads to reduce air resistance, they're not riding their bikes behind each other that close but because it's fun or because they're racing it's because they're reducing the air resistance sitting behind the man driving a truck traveling at 55 miles per hour spends half his energy just to moving the air around you at 65 miles per hour that number jumps to almost two-thirds.

Even if the peloton can reduce the energy used by 10 percent, the savings would be substantial if a vehicle in front of another vehicle wants to break it. Immediately send the brake message to the other vehicles so they actually brake at the same time the way we do. This is because we have an automated system, so now, for example, if I take my foot off the accelerator pedal and turn the system on, the speed is automatically governed by getting information from the vehicle ahead through its wireless system, we want these vehicles to keep a relatively short distance, so through this system we can reduce fuel consumption by using the reduction in aerodynamic drag by 10 percent and 10 would mean that you will be able to save approximately 8,000 euros per HGV per anus.

It may be some time before it is self-contained. Vehicles make up the majority of cars on America's roads, however some of these technologies are already making their way into our lives, now this polar baby wants to sleep, can you pick up books every day or is it just something new what can you choose? books are sometimes ok when we look to the future systems will absolutely make it safer and more efficient and less expensive for you and it will also make your life easier because you will spend less time on the roads the city starts talking starts telling you where it is its congestion what is happening in different areas of the city suddenly the car becomes part of a much bigger ecosystem we can see how cars interact with other cars how the car interacts with the infrastructure and we drivers can start to make smart decisions about how to get around suddenly mobility becomes something else no matter how much money you have no matter how much oil you have everyone has to go in a different direction we have seen that changing the way we drive can improve the efficiency of transportation, but what if we change? the way we build and live in our cities that is the subject of our next story in search of utopia we will travel to the united arab emirates and discover a city rising from the desert let's take a look from the beginning we have dreamed of utopia a place where we could live in harmony with each other and in balance with nature many have imagined he tried to design it but the dream always faded then i heard they were building a new city called mazdar near abu dhabi in the arabian desert it sounded like an unlikely place for utopia and wanted to see it the last half century it's been a pretty bad time for city building mostly the natural tendency has been to adapt to the car more than anything else try to walk around abu dhabi it's impossible you have to take a car everywhere dubai the same they are among the least pedestrian friendly places in the world they are also not eco friendly by any other measure and these are not easy things to fix mazdar is still under construction and doesn't look like much of the highway but they claim that will redefine the way cities are designed, built and driven.

Mazda City in Abu Dhabi will be the city of the future and the role model for the world once it sees what they have envisioned for this utopian city. It's very impressive, it's carbon neutral, pedestrian friendly and runs on renewable energy, but I realize we're going to have to change our relationship with cars. eerie to see this for the first time and where are we going the first big move foster architects and partners made was to put all transport under the city leaving the streets of masdar totally free of cars the place reminded me of a medieval city and in fact, many design elements are adapted from ancient Arab cities and towns.

It is about looking back in history to move forward. There are some very, very simple ideas that have a huge impact. This is a pedestrian zone. There are no cars here. This has allowed us to push our streets together to take advantage of the shade it channels the cooling breezes through the whole scale here it's human based it's not car based as soon as you lift the pedestrian plane seven meters all of a sudden you catch this breeze what you can see here on the balcony is that we have a modern interpretation of an ancient arabic screen what we need to avoid is direct sunlight hitting any piece of glass as soon as the sun hits the glass the heat is transferred to the building and we i have to use more power to cool it down, can this really make a big difference? yes, absolutely, for example, the center of abu dhabi, 60 meter wide street, black asphalt, reflected reflective buildings, no relief from the sun, holidays in september, the air temperature in both places was 39 degrees in abu dhabi la temperature measured on the asphalt was 57 degrees at masdar the temperature measured on the ground 33 degrees so we actually havelowered the air temperature we're trying to do as little as possible with as little as possible these simple design moves reduced air conditioning needs by 60 percent, but this place is also very technically sophisticated.

Roof panels not only provide shade, but also generate electricity. Energy Efficiency Nasdar represents a completely different value system. It represents a recognition that eventually everyone has to go in a different direction, no matter how much money they have, no matter how much oil they have, no matter what. Every city here in this part of the world has come out of nowhere. There was nothing here not long ago except little desert settlements and then all this oil and all this money and all of a sudden, you know? These cities began to appear but they arose in a false love of an already outdated western model the motto of the car based energy hoarding city of the late 20th century for most of the world energy is very expensive but the emirates united arabs have 10% of the world's oil and energy it's cheap sochi you can run a ski slope in a mall and build the world's tallest skyscraper but even here cheap energy won't last forever and the people behind masdar they are determined to find alternatives one of the most crucial aspects of our energy modeling and scenario quantification is how much total energy the world will use in 2050 the scenario team is a very imaginative group of people i would say we have political scientists economists experts in geopolitics we really try to simplify the complexity that surrounds us in the The scenario team is currently paying a lot of attention to cities and city development.

Many megacities are going to be built in the coming decades. We are talking about the equivalent of a new city of a million people every week. It is an incredible demand. most of the world's resources are consumed by cities, what if we could offer a plan for a better city? public transport information energy we understand that demand will increase we understand that current supplies will struggle to keep up so of course we have to find ways to bridge the gap between supply and demand the decisions we make now are going to have a big impact in the next decades there is enough oil under these sands to last 150 years, but fundamental to the ideal of mazda is to obtain energy from geothermal and wind renewable sources and above all from a source that they have in abundance in the desert the eastern sun solar panel field produces more than enough electricity to run master and excess power is sent to the abu dhabi grid but silicon panels are expensive and the price of solar needs to come down if it is to be competitive from africa to asia and Arizona In the future Mazdar hopes to get power from this prototype called the Downward Sunbeam Using highly reflective mirrors, the Downward Sunbeam can generate power more economically and greener than silicon panels.

The mirrors bounce the sun's rays off the tower and then back down to a point that reaches a temperature of 600 degrees. there's just one problem none of these solar technologies work at night so mazda needs to pull power from the grid when the sun goes down and that power comes from natural gas the reality is it's still not possible to power mass star fully no fossil fuels The big challenge with Masdar will be how to make it a place that is not just this ideal city that no other place could aspire to because it doesn't seem real.

What Mazdar has to be is a lab that develops things that can then be applied in existing cities around the world because that's where it will pay off there is no payoff if it's just about itself the payoff is how it can import everything what it is trying to do in the rest of the world at the moment there is only one shop two restaurants a bank and a few hundred students living here it is too early to tell if masdar will function as a city when it is finished but a lot has been achieved are Carbon neutral and largely powered by renewable energy, the solutions here won't work everywhere, even though many cities are in cold climates and refrigeration is not their energy problem.

They need to let the sunlight in so as not to let it out. Cities like Los Angeles or Houston are built around cars. Can Masdar's 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 a country that doesn't need to take it I met a guy who said they actually needed to take it He took me to the desert to explain that god says god talks about man's place in the universe what is this world a trust and uh god offered this trust to the mountains to the heavens to uh to the earth to the earth and each and everyone refused refused to accept this trust but man being you knows adventurous a little vain maybe too ambitious being banned accepted it now accepting if there is a responsibility, taking responsibility is not always easy, utopia may be unattainable but we must reach it and mazdar gives us a hint of what cities will be like in the future future, they may not look much like mastar, but they will be shaped by the same concern for energy, where it comes from and how it is used, the way we have been building cities lately is unsustainable, we can't keep building them that way, but saying we can't build cities like we've been having them built 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 do them but we have to do it in a different way than we do it.

Given that the world of 2050 will not look drastically different from today's world, but the challenges of a growing population and increased energy use demand real solutions, it is innovations like the ones we have just seen that will be fundamental to charting our path towards the world of 2050. you